Tag: scrying

Episode 82: Gift from the sea

Last week’s episodes established that high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and dashing action hero Burke Devlin are both unpredictable men capable of real cruelty, and that our point of view character, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters, is about to find herself in the middle of a conflict between them. Today, we see that Roger and Burke’s conflict will take the form of a lot of prattling about a fountain pen.

As we open, Vicki is starting a math lesson with her charge, “strange and troubled boy” David Collins. David, son of Roger, has been studying his crystal ball, hoping to find evidence implicating his hated father in murder. Unknown to either of them, Vicki may have stumbled upon just such evidence. While taking a walk on the beach at Lookout Point, she found a fountain pen that Roger may have left there during a homicide. All Vicki knows is that the pen looks nice. She is in a happy mood, and teases David with jokes about the pen. As usual, David refuses to laugh or to cheer up in any way, but he is impressed that the pen looks to be very pricey.

Vicki reclaiming the pen from David

In the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn, Burke invites himself to sit at the sheriff’s table. Perhaps Burke has a crystal ball of his own- he has somehow developed a theory that Roger left the pen on the beach at Lookout Point while killing beloved local man Bill Malloy. The sheriff is unimpressed with Burke’s theory and bored with the whole topic of the pen. In this, he is the voice of the audience. On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn lists 21 episodes that are largely or entirely dedicated to talking about the pen. I believe it is uncontroversial among Dark Shadows fans to say that 21 episodes was too many for this theme.

Knowing that Vicki has the pen, Roger is close to panic. He succeeds in his second attempt to steal it from David’s room. Between the two attempts, he has offered Vicki thousands of dollars in cash if she will go away and take a job with friends of his in Florida. He has also complied with Burke’s telephoned demand that he go to town and participate in a confrontation about the pen. During this confrontation, the sheriff happens by and earns a cheer from all of us by telling Burke to find another topic.

As the Saga of the Pen begins, the idea that Roger will be exposed as a murderer generates a measure of excitement. Our desire to see justice triumph is in conflict with the fact that Roger is so much fun to watch that we don’t want him to face any consequences that will remove him from the core cast. That is the sort of conflict an audience experiences as suspense.

Today, though, the suspense is blunted. The coroner has ruled Bill Malloy’s death an accident, so the sheriff doesn’t have a case to investigate. Even if there were still a homicide case pending, there is no way of proving that the pen was left on the beach that night. Bill died many days before Vicki found the pen. In that interval, a person, an animal, or the tides could have moved the pen a great distance.

Roger’s conflict with Burke is similarly unconvincing. Burke has searched Lookout Point and knows the pen isn’t there now, and he has no reason to think that it ever was there. He had no reason to summon Roger to town, nor did Roger have any reason to come.

At times, the writing seems to be deliberately tedious. Both the word “pen” and images of the pen are repeated countless times. The sheriff’s exasperation with the topic gets a great deal of screen time, and Roger’s labeling of it as an “endless conversation” is the only memorable phrase in his whole scene with Burke.

The pen was first introduced in episode #42, the second episode written by Francis Swann. Episodes 1-40 were all credited to Art Wallace, who also wrote the original series bible, Shadows on the Wall. Neither the death of Bill Malloy nor the pen is in Shadows on the Wall; those may have been among Swann’s contributions. This is Wallace’s last week on the show. Swann will stick around for another month, leaving after episode #113. I wonder if the tedious parts of today’s script are Wallace’s refusal to try to make Swann’s inspiration interesting, or if they are a positive warning to Swann and the writers who are about to come on board that the Saga of the Pen is going to bore the audience silly unless they rethink it radically.

Episode 48: Tell us all where we’re going

In yesterday’s episode, Vicki the governess had come downstairs with a sketch of the great house of Collinwood that her charge David made. She showed the sketch to David’s father, Roger. Vicki tells Roger that she had taken the sketch from David’s room without David’s knowledge. Vicki spent the third week of the show trying to make it clear to David that by taking a letter from her room without her permission, he was stealing from her. Viewers who remember those episodes can’t help but wonder why Vicki is being so hypocritical.

Today, Vicki returns the drawing to David. He is surprised that she took the drawing, but pleased when she tells him how good she thinks it is. He’s starting to warm up to her, until she tells him she showed the drawing to Roger and that Roger liked it. At that reference to his hated father, David tears the drawing to pieces. David then brings up her lectures about his taking the letter and tells her she has one standard for children and another for grownups. She apologizes and agrees that she ought not to have touched the drawing. He refuses her apology and tells her he hates her. It goes on like that for a moment, until David’s aunt Liz walks in. At first Vicki tells Liz that what she’s hearing is an argument about the American Revolution, but she then says that David “had every right to be angry” because she took a drawing of his without his permission. David is involved with something else at that moment, but he does glance back at Vicki when she says “he had every right to be angry.”

Later in the series, Vicki will seem to lose quite a few IQ points. While it was foolish of her to take the drawing from David’s room without his permission and almost as foolish to tell him that Roger liked it, I don’t think this is quite a Dumb Vicki moment yet. Even the smartest adults do occasionally forget to respect children’s rights to privacy and to property, and it isn’t easy for anyone to really absorb the fact that a ten year old boy hates his father as intensely as David hates Roger. The most important thing about the scene is that Vicki admits to David that she’s wrong, apologizes to him, and tells Liz that David was in the right. The growth of a friendship between Vicki and David is going to be the most successful story-line of the first 42 weeks, and we can see the seeds of it right here.

Liz has come to David’s room to deliver a package. The package is a gift with a bow on it, brought by a messenger from the village and addressed to David. It’s a crystal ball, sent by David’s idol Burke Devlin. David loves it. Liz points out that Burke is the Collins family’s arch-nemesis, and says that it would be a good idea to send the present back. David pleads to be allowed to keep it, and she relents.

The crystal ball allows David to make all sorts of cryptic pronouncements, and gives the cameramen opportunities to take some ambitious shots. This still is featured on just about every webpage anyone has ever posted about the episode:

Screenshot from Dark Shadows from the Beginning

In a couple of years, we will see similar images, some of them giving great prominence to reflections of characters who aren’t supposed to cast reflections. For now, it is so unlike any other image in the show that I think we have to regard it as a message to the viewer. Just as David was the first character to look directly into the camera- he did it twice, in episodes 17 and 23, and no other character would do so until Sam did it day before yesterday, in #46- so he is the first one to look into a glass that will present us with a distorted image of his eye. The show seems to be laboring to get us to think about David’s viewpoint, about David as an observer.

The other plot also comes back to David as observer. Joe comes to the house and tells Liz that Bill Malloy didn’t come to work and isn’t at home. That gets everyone worried about Bill. Vicki tells Liz that Bill came to the house the night before, revealing to Liz that Roger lied to her. That gets Liz upset with Roger. David ties this together when he tells Vicki that he looked into the crystal ball and saw that Bill is dead, that his death was violent, and that Roger is responsible.

David is absent from the show for long stretches- today is the first we’ve seen him since #36. So it’s easy to regard him as a secondary character. But, we followed Vicki to Collinwood, and she came there because she had been hired to be David’s governess. The name “Collins” is something everyone on the show regards as terribly important, and David is the only candidate to carry that name into the next generation. They build a lot of story points around Burke, and at times Burke seems to be David’s fantasy come to life. David’s actions precipitated the saga of the bleeder valve, which was after all the first story-line on the show to be resolved. And David will be the fulcrum on which several story arcs will turn in the years to come. So perhaps we should see him as the central figure of the whole series.