Dark Shadows fans like to make jokes about the inefficiency of law enforcement in the fictional town of Collinsport, but in this episode we see that the sheriff and his men really never had a chance. The ancient and esteemed Collins family controls everything in the area, and they will go to any lengths to keep the police from obtaining the information they need to do their job effectively.
Stuffy Edward Collins invokes the police when he demands that broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi vacate the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Magda laughs and says that if the police show up, she will tell them that Edward’s distant cousin Barnabas is a vampire. Horrified at the damage it would do to the Collins family name were word of Barnabas’ condition to get out, Edward backs down. Barnabas is at large and has been responsible for at least six homicides since traveling through time to the year 1897, including the murder of Edward’s brother Carl in the drawing room of their home just the other day. But evidently that is a small matter to Edward compared to the danger that the sheriff might be indiscreet.
Barnabas materializes at the police station, where a werewolf is being held in custody. A deputy is startled to see Barnabas in front of him all of a sudden. For only the third time in the series, Barnabas says “Look into my eyes!” and induces an hypnotic trance in someone not his blood thrall. It is the first time he has exercised this power on someone other than Edward’s nine year old daughter Nora. Barnabas tells the deputy that once he has completed his task, he will remember nothing. So he is following the family policy with regard to keeping the police in total ignorance.
Edward shows up and sees Barnabas. Edward is wearing a cross and holding a revolver loaded with six silver bullets, which on Dark Shadows are as effective against vampires as they are against werewolves. Barnabas hides behind the deputy and tells Edward that he is acting in the interests of the future of the Collins family. Edward says that he belongs to the past, not the future. Barnabas doesn’t explain anything; he vanishes.
Not exactly an heroic look for ol’ Barney. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas’ post-hypnotic suggestion has its effect, and the deputy is bewildered to find himself face to face with Edward. Edward tells him that they must watch the werewolf. The deputy starts to say something about the sheriff, and Edward replies “The sheriff doesn’t realize what this animal is!” Of course he doesn’t, no one will tell him anything about it.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas and Magda lament their failures. He could not take the werewolf from the cell in the police station to the cell in the basement of the house; she could not persuade lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley to return a severed hand he stole from them. They wanted to do these things because the werewolf is Edward’s brother Quentin, whom Magda is trying to free from his curse by means of the hand’s magical powers. Barnabas knows that if they do not succeed, terrible consequences will ensue in 1969.
Closing Miscellany
It is a serious mistake to show the werewolf when he is not in the act of committing a spectacular homicide. They didn’t have the budget to put him in full-body makeup, so he wears a tidy little suit, complete with a watch fob. He is so well put together that it is difficult to imagine him inspiring any fear other than the fear that one will not meet his apparently rather exacting standards of attire.
There is a noteworthy blooper in this one. Magda confronts Evan, declaring “The book, I know you took it from the Old House!” Usually actors roll with each other’s bobbled lines, but this is far enough out that Humbert Allen Astredo obviously has no idea where Grayson Hall is in the script. All he can do is ask “The book?” “The hand!” she corrects.
They also make a goof in the closing credits. This is one of three consecutive days when Louis Edmonds is billed not as Edward, but as Roger Collins, the role he plays in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. He’s been identified correctly throughout the first seventeen weeks of the 1897 segment and everyone else is identified correctly in these episodes, so it is not clear what happened.
Danny Horn’s posts at Dark Shadows Every Day are often laugh-out-loud funny, and the one for this episode is especially so. His description of the scene between Magda and Evan has some big laughs, and when he imagines the sheriff’s deputies trying to catch the werewolf by “putting on their alluring lady-werewolf disguises a la the Warner Brothers cartoons,” well that’s just super how could anyone improve on it.
The opening voiceover, delivered by Kay Frye, tells us that a vampire named Dirk Wilkins has been destroyed. We hear that Dirk was the pawn of someone called Barnabas Collins, who hoped to use him to conceal a secret of his own. The narrator also says that “certain things cannot be forgotten, as Judith Collins will learn this day.” This implies that the day’s action will center on challenges in information management.
Returning viewers may not recognize Miss Frye’s voice. We have seen her as Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl, improbable fiancée of prankster Carl Collins, and victim of Dirk’s first murder. As narrator, Miss Frye forgoes Pansy’s rather uncertain East London accent. She also takes a different approach to the role of narrator than she had to that of Pansy. When we first saw her, Pansy was putting on an act for Carl’s benefit, and Pansy is a terrible actress. When Carl left, Pansy dropped her act and we could see that Miss Frye is as capable a performer as the character is a poor one. Today’s voiceover gives Miss Frye a still better role. The crass and cynical Pansy did not call for much nuance. But as narrator, Miss Frye speaks with a quiet urgency and subtle modulation of the voice that leaves us wondering what might have been had she been cast in a bigger part.
We cut to what regular viewers recognize as the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in the year 1897, where a man in a cassock is talking tenderly with a woman in a colorful dress. The man is very affectionate, even stroking the woman’s neck with two fingers.
The woman is the Judith Collins mentioned in the opening voiceover; the man is the Rev’d Gregory Trask. It is not mentioned in the episode, but Trask is the keeper of a boarding school called Worthington Hall. Also unmentioned is that Trask conspired with a Satanist named Evan Hanley to brainwash a young man named Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at Worthington Hall, and that once he was under their control they used Tim to murder Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask wanted Minerva out of the way, evidently because he plans to marry Judith and take control of her vast fortune.
Judith is disconsolate at the thought that she was under Dirk’s control. While Trask is talking sweetly to Judith, Tim enters. Trask pulls a gun on him and instructs Judith to call the police and report that Minerva’s murderer has been captured.
Tim, who has up to this point ranged from mousy to timid to utterly defeated, is suddenly assertive. He tells Judith that she won’t want to telephone the sheriff. He says that there are two murderers at Collinwood, and she is one of them.
Tim says that he came upon Judith in the act of shooting neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death. Returning viewers know that this is true; Tim, Judith, and Rachel were all under Dirk’s power at the time, and for reasons that made sense only to the dim-witted Dirk he ordered Judith to kill Rachel. A vague memory comes back to Judith and prompts her to confess; when Trask realizes that Tim will not back down from his accusation and Judith will not participate in a cover-up, he tells Tim he will make a deal with him.
Trask calls the sheriff. He addresses himself to “Sheriff Furman,” a name we have not heard before. It quickly becomes clear that we are not likely to hear it again. He tells the sheriff that Tim was out of town the night Minerva was poisoned and that, in his grief, he had forgotten this fact. Returning viewers know that Evan has told the sheriff that he saw Tim with Minerva while she was dying. One might assume that Trask would at least have to call Evan first to ensure that he gave the sheriff a story to account for this discrepancy, but Trask doesn’t bother to contact Evan at all. Evidently the sheriff is such an abysmal moron that Trask can safely assume he won’t think of any questions.
Sheriff Furman’s manifest incompetence prompts one of Danny Horn’s funniest posts at Dark Shadows Every Day, in which he writes a series of hypothetical police reports about the killings we have seen so far in the 1897 segment. One of Danny’s recurring themes is that law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows serve only to delay the plot. There is so much story in 1897 that the producers saw no need to slow things down, so it shouldn’t be surprising that neither Sheriff Furman nor any of his deputies appear on-screen.
For my part, I wish they had stayed in 1897 considerably longer, so I would have liked to spend one day a week or so without much forward narrative movement. That might have included some episodes when the police show up and you do a lot of recapping, some built around character studies of the type Joe Caldwell wrote so well in 1967, some in which we reconnect with Collinwood as it is on the night in 1969 when Barnabas left for the past, and so on. Not only would that have extended the show’s strongest period and helped new viewers catch up to what is going on, it would also have enabled them to make more use of the many fine actors whom we go weeks on end without seeing. Even David Selby, whose handsome rake Quentin Collins is breaking out as a pop culture sensation at this point, hasn’t been on the show since #768. Other fan favorites are in the midst of even longer unexplained absences; for example, Lara Parker’s wicked witch Angelique has not been seen since #760.
Tim, who was out of the room while Trask was on the phone, returns. He “gladly!” agrees to leave Trask’s employ, and at first says that he will “gladly” leave the village of Collinsport. But then it dawns on him that he needs a job, and he blackmails Judith into assuring him that she will find a place for him in her business.
This will remind longtime viewers of the spring and early summer of 1967. At that time, Dark Shadows took place in a contemporary setting, and there were two major storylines. One was the introduction of the vampire Barnabas Collins. The other was the blackmail of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Like Judith, Liz owns all of the Collins family’s assets; also like her, she is played by Joan Bennett. Threatening to expose the terrible secret that she was a murderer, Jason forced Liz to take him into her home, pay his debts, give him a job, and agree to marry him. When she finally balked rather than go through with the marriage, it turned out Liz wasn’t a murderer after all, the whole thing was a scam Jason cooked up.
Jason was a short-term character brought on to tie up the last non-supernatural narrative loose ends and fill time while Barnabas found his footing, as witness the casting of Dennis Patrick, who refused to sign a contract for the role since he wanted to be free to move to Los Angeles without giving more than 24 hours notice. But in those days, before the internet or soap opera magazines, the audience had no way of knowing that. They may well have thought that Barnabas would be destroyed and Jason’s oppression of Liz would become the show’s backbone.
In yesterday’s episode, a vampire was in fact destroyed. In May and June 1967, Barnabas’ chief victim was Maggie Evans, who like Rachel was played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. It was possible then that he would kill Maggie and that she would rise as a vampire, as Lucy Westenra did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, compelling the good guys to stake her. Rachel doesn’t become a vampire, but Trask does tell the sheriff that it was the men hunting Dirk who shot her, accidentally. So when the final appearances of Dirk and Rachel lead to Judith both submitting to blackmail because of her mistaken belief that she is a murderer and taking steps towards marrying an overwhelmingly evil man, longtime viewers will remember a resolution that seemed to be on the horizon back in 1967.
Carl enters. Judith has no patience for her childish brother, and dismisses his concerns about Pansy. She tells Carl to go with Tim to the Old House on the estate. Tim took Rachel to the Old House when she was dying. Barnabas, who has traveled back in time to 1897, is staying there, and he had befriended Rachel. Tim had hoped Barnabas would help them, but it was daylight and he was not available. Rachel died in the Old House, and Tim left her corpse there when he came to the great house.
When Carl and Tim leave, Trask warns Judith that she almost gave herself away. “You must be more cautious, Judith! Even Carl was suspicious.” Judith agrees, showing that Trask is luring her into his world of lies.
We see Tim and Carl at the Old House. Rachel’s body is no longer there. Who took it, and why didn’t Tim and Carl leave with them? We are not told. Carl goes on about how wonderful Pansy is, and says he is going to the police because he thinks someone at Collinwood has done her harm. Evidently Carl’s suspicions are more highly developed than Trask realizes. Trask underestimates Carl because he is focused exclusively on Rachel and Tim. He never met Pansy, and knows nothing about her.
Carl leaves the house, and Pansy’s ghost appears to Tim. Tim is bewildered, and asks Pansy if she is looking for Barnabas. That is a natural assumption- after all, it is Barnabas’ house and Tim has no idea who Pansy is. When she vanishes into thin air, he shouts for Carl. He finds Carl not far outside the door, and describes the woman he saw. Carl jumps to the conclusion that she is Pansy, and starts calling for her. He sends Tim along to the great house, and continues searching for Pansy.
Evidently Carl’s search did not take long, because we see him standing next to Tim in the drawing room at the great house in the next shot. It is Rachel’s funeral.
Trask delivers a eulogy in which he says of Rachel that “The littlest angels have a new teacher.” Even first-time viewers are likely to laugh out loud at this ridiculous turn of phrase, and those who have been with the show for a while will see more in it than that. From childhood on, Rachel was Trask’s prisoner, first as one of the pupils imprisoned in his horrible school, then when he extorted her into staying on as a teacher with threats that he would have her prosecuted on false charges of theft and murder if she tried to leave. He made flagrant sexual advances to her as well, all the more hideous because he has been responsible for her since she was a small girl. In Rachel and Tim’s helpless personalities, we saw what can happen when a criminal like Trask is given an opportunity to turn a person into filet of human being, and an ominous sign of what might lie in store for Judith’s nephew and niece Jamison and Nora, who are currently among the inmates at Worthington Hall.
Tim and Carl bury Rachel themselves. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked “Isn’t this usually handled by professionals?” Presumably whoever took Rachel’s body from the Old House would have been a better choice for the work than are Tim and Carl, but that isn’t the Collins way.
Tim announces his intention to get drunk. Carl brings up other things they might do, and Tim says that those will have to wait until after he gets drunk. After Tim leaves to pursue his eminently sound plan, Carl hears Pansy singing. He wonders if she is dead. He realizes that her voice is coming from the mausoleum which we know to have been Barnabas’ longtime home. Carl is played by John Karlen, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who inadvertently released Barnabas from the mausoleum, so longtime viewers who see this actor on this set will expect something important to happen in the story.
One of the duller storylines in the first several months of Dark Shadows was the relationship between hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell and flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Carolyn and Joe were thoroughly bored with each other before we ever saw them, and we were treated to scene after scene of them having nothing to say while they were out on dates. They only kept going out to humor reclusive matriarch Liz, who was both Carolyn’s mother and Joe’s employer.
Eventually Joe and Carolyn went their separate ways, and Joe struck up a much happier romance with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. There were too few obstacles between Joe and Maggie to make for exciting drama. There were long stretches when the show had established that they wanted to get married and couldn’t give us a single reason why they didn’t. Occasionally one of them would be caught up in the strange goings-on, and then we would see the other being all anguished and determined to get to the bottom of all this. As Dark Shadows‘ principal representatives of the working class of the village of Collinsport, Maggie and Joe were appealing when they went into that mode, suggesting a whole community of people who struggle to make sense of the inexplicable disasters that continually emanate from the big house on the hill.
Joe is on his way out of the show now. Actor Joel Crothers has taken a part on another soap, and will be leaving any day. In recent months, supernatural beings have cast spells on Joe and Maggie that have caused each to think the other had fallen out of love. Yesterday they met at her house. He told her he would be leaving town soon, probably never to return. They agreed to part as friends.
This scene of parting was cut short when a telephone call came summoning Maggie to the great house of Collinwood. Joe drove her there, and was downstairs when Liz offered Maggie a job as governess to the two children living there, strange and troubled boy David Collins and Joe’s orphaned cousin Amy Jennings. Maggie accepted the job, which Liz stipulated would start immediately. Joe drove back to her house to get the things she would need to stay the night.
Joe had only been in the Evans cottage a moment when a window burst open and a werewolf entered in a shower of broken glass. We open today with Joe fighting the werewolf. He manages to stab the werewolf with a pair of scissors. The werewolf does not appear to be gravely wounded, but he does run away.
Back at Collinwood, Maggie is worried that it is taking Joe so long to get her things. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins suggests that Joe might be having trouble finding the items on the list she made; she rules that out, saying that it was a very short list. She calls home. Joe picks up the telephone and immediately passes out. This alarms Maggie. She stays at Collinwood while Barnabas goes to the cottage to investigate.
Barnabas finds an unconscious, bloodied Joe in the midst of the wreckage strewn throughout the Evans cottage. Joe comes to, and resists Barnabas’ offer to call a doctor.
Shortly after, Barnabas enters Collinwood, Joe leaning heavily on his shoulder. Barnabas went to the Evans cottage alone, and he cannot possibly have carried Joe all the way back. Later, it will come up that Joe’s car is still at the cottage. So Barnabas must have learned to drive and acquired a car at some point in the last several months.
In the drawing room, Joe receives medical attention from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. When Julia asks if he is ready to talk to the police, she is surprised to find that he hasn’t called them, isn’t going to call them, and doesn’t want anyone else to call them. She and Barnabas try to reason with him. When Julia points out that the werewolf might attack someone else tonight, Joe asks if it did any good when Liz saw the werewolf and called the sheriff. Julia looks down and, sounding like a chastened child, says “No.” Regular viewers know that calling the sheriff’s office never does any good in Collinsport, and Julia’s reaction is so much that of a person who is aware of this fact that I suspect the humor is intentional.
Barnabas and Julia reluctantly agree not to call the sheriff. They leave Joe alone with Maggie, who says she feels guilty that this terrible thing happened to him while he was doing her a favor. He says he’s just glad it didn’t happen to her. She says “We keep on hurting each other, and it just isn’t right!,” apparently expecting to finish the parting-of-the-ways scene that was interrupted yesterday. He is not interested. She notices that he is clutching a strip of fabric, and asks him what it is. He says that it is “nothing at all.”
The next day, we see mysterious drifter Chris Jennings in his apartment. We hear his thoughts in voiceover as he worries that he may have killed his cousin Joe the night before, when he was the werewolf. This does not imply that Chris remembers what he did in his lupine form; he knew that a pentagram had been seen on Joe’s face, and that this marks the werewolf’s next victim.
Chris goes to Collinwood to see Julia. He had hoped she would give him a sedative powerful enough to make him sleep through his time as the werewolf. Had he told her his real problem, she would likely have been very helpful, since she specializes in treating patients who are based on monsters from Universal Studios movies of the 1930s, but all she knew when he came to her was that he was a hobo demanding narcotics. It’s against Julia’s nature to deny anyone sedatives, so she did give him a few pills, but they didn’t help.
Chris sees Maggie. She tells Chris that she just left his sister Amy playing at Barnabas’ house. She explains that she is the governess now, a fact in which Chris feigns interest for almost five seconds. “Oh, that’s… that’s really great, that’ll be great for her” he says. He then tells Maggie he has been looking for Joe. When she indicates that Joe was attacked the night before, he grabs her by the arms so hard he hurts her and shouts his questions in her face.
As it happens, Joe is also looking for Chris. At nightfall, Chris returns home to find Joe waiting for him. Joe had brought the strip of fabric that Maggie had seen him holding at Collinwood and matched it to a gap torn in Chris’ shirt. He confronts Chris, who tries desperately to get him to leave. When he realizes he cannot get rid of Joe, he tells Joe where he keeps his gun, and tells him to use it “when it happens.” Joe sees Chris turn into the werewolf and does empty the revolver into his chest, but it only slows him down. As the episode ends, the werewolf is closing in on Joe.
In his posts about this episode and the preceding one, Danny Horn remarks on Maggie and Joe’s inability to have an extended breakup scene as a sign that Dark Shadows is very different from other soap operas, and on Maggie’s inability to get anyone interested in her new job as a sign that Dark Shadows has changed- “This is not that kind of show anymore,” her writes. I would go further, and say that they amount to a programmatic statement. The first 38 weeks of the show were all about the well-meaning Victoria Winters’ attempt to find her place as a governess; Maggie can’t get us to pay attention to her thoughts about the position for 38 seconds. Carolyn and Joe’s months-long relationship amounted to about one-fifth of a breakup scene, the part where the former lovers realize they’ve said everything they had to say but neither wants to be the first to leave the room. But Joe and Maggie no sooner start talking about the end of their far more substantial relationship than it is time to rush off and do battle with a werewolf. That’s what Dark Shadows is about now, and they want us to know it.
Maggie’s brief remark to Chris that she left Amy playing at Barnabas’ house will also strike longtime viewers as a programmatic statement. That house, the Old House on the estate, was introduced in #70 as a haunted ruin. David’s habit of sneaking into it caused the adults no end of concern, especially after Barnabas moved into it in #220. Barnabas was a vampire then. That was a secret, but everyone could understand that he did not want to look up and find David in his house. In those days, the governess would never have dreamed of leaving her charge to play in Barnabas’ house.
That Maggie is now the governess adds an extra charge to this moment. In May and June of 1967, Maggie was Barnabas’ victim and he held her prisoner in the Old House. Julia used her preternatural powers of hypnosis to erase Maggie’s recollection of that ordeal, but several times since the show has teased the idea that her memory might come back. When Maggie so blithely mentions that she left Amy at Barnabas’ house, it is clear to use that Dark Shadows has no further plans for its previous storylines about the place.
I was puzzled as to why Joe suspected that the strip he tore from the werewolf’s shirt would match Chris’. There is nothing at all distinctive about Chris’ clothing even in the full light of day, and in a few moments of pitched battle in a dimly lit room there is no way anyone would have recognized the werewolf’s clothes as the ones Joe had seen Chris wearing earlier that evening. I think it would have been better if, when Joe saw Chris in his room in yesterday’s episode, Chris had spilled some brightly colored fluid or powder on his shirt. He could easily have done that, it is a small room and the two of them were both very upset. Joe could then have recognized the smudge during the fight, and that would have explained why he thought that it was his cousin under the fur.
Dr Julia Hoffman is in the front parlor of the house of her fellow mad scientist, Eric Lang. She is on the telephone, asking the operator to connect her with the police. Even though she has lived in the Collinsport area for months now, she is still surprised that the sheriff’s office doesn’t have an emergency number.
Julia locked the door to the parlor; Lang is outside it with a gun, and recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is knocking and calling her name. They want to stop her reporting to the police that Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster with body parts retrieved from the cemetery, and that he was planning to cut a living man’s head off to use as the last piece of the creature. Lang plans to bring the body to life by draining Barnabas’ “life-force” into it. Barnabas hopes this will free him of the vampire curse once and for all, and is desperate to complete the experiment.
Barnabas shouts that Julia should remember “someone.” When he can’t come up with the name, Lang prompts him with a yell of “Dave Woodard!” Barnabas and Julia killed local physician Dave Woodard in #341; Julia hangs up the phone, realizing that if the operator ever does manage to find a police officer any investigation of Lang would likely expose her as a murderer.
Barnabas has told Lang a great deal about himself. For example, in #467, Lang was the first person Barnabas told that his vampirism was the result of a curse placed on him by wicked witch Angelique. So returning viewers can believe that Barnabas might have confided in Lang about the murder of Dr Woodard. But it would be strange for him to have done so off-screen. And just Friday, Barnabas explained to Lang that the reason he thinks Julia can be trusted with the secret of the experiment is that she has a crush on him.* He hasn’t had much time to share more information with Lang since then, and if Lang had already known that Julia couldn’t call the cops without exposing herself to a murder charge Barnabas wouldn’t have needed to mention her crush on him. The likeliest explanation is that the loud and clear exclamation of “Dave Woodard!” is not Lang prompting Barnabas at all; rather, it was Addison Powell prompting Jonathan Frid. The result is a blooper that seriously confuses the relationships among Lang, Barnabas, and Julia. It’s early enough in the episode that it really is odd they didn’t stop tape and start over.
At any rate, they never mention Woodard again. He was introduced early in the vampire storyline. He was the counterpart to Dr John Seward, the physician in Dracula who realizes that all the patients who are suddenly showing up with puncture wounds on their necks and massive blood loss need care he is not trained to provide, and calls in his old med professor, Dr Van Helsing. Julia was the Van Helsing analogue, but she wound up siding with the vampire and killing her onetime friend. It is appropriate that the last reference to Woodard comes in this, the second episode of Dark Shadows with no cast members introduced before Barnabas. From now on, the daylight world Woodard represented and tried to restore is no longer present even as a memory.
Julia lets Barnabas and Lang into the parlor, and asks Lang to promise that he won’t kill anyone. He gives such a promise. She is unconvinced, but agrees not to call the police. She also tells Lang she will continue to oppose the experiment.
On the terrace of the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas and Julia talk about Lang’s experiment. Angelique, wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, lives in the house as the wife of sarcastic dandy Roger, and the terrace is surrounded by trees, fences, and other prime screens for eavesdroppers. Barnabas and Julia know this well, as each of them has eavesdropped on important conversations here themselves.
Of course Angelique/ Cassandra comes by and hears everything. Barnabas does catch her, grab her, call her by her right name, and vow that she won’t stop him. After he lets her go, he moans to Julia that it was foolish of them to discuss their plans there. That underlines the foolishness of an idea key to the plan, that after Lang’s creature has been animated Angelique will never realize that Barnabas is dwelling within it and place a fresh curse on it. Barnabas assumes that Angelique, who has transcended time itself to pursue him, will just give up and go away once she sees that his original body is dead, and won’t have any questions about the new guy living at his doctor’s house.
Angelique summons her new cat’s paw, lawyer Tony Peterson. Jerry Lacy plays Tony. From #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that phase of the show, Mr Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who inadvertently gave Angelique a great deal of assistance in her campaign to destroy the Collins family and those close to them. Most of the characters in the 1790s segment represent a commentary of some kind on the characters the same actors play in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. Tony and Trask have seemed to be an exception. In 1967, Tony was introduced through his profession and served mainly as an instance of Mr Lacy’s famous Humphrey Bogart imitation. Trask did end up functioning as a lawyer in a witchcraft trial, and his lunatic shouting about “THE ALMIGHTY!!” and “THE DE-VILLLL!!!!” were occasionally suggestive of what Bogart might have ended up doing if Captain Queeg’s testimony before the court-martial in The Caine Mutiny had gone on for nineteen weeks. Otherwise, there didn’t seem to be any fruitful points of comparison between the two.
Angelique tells Tony that the reason she chose him as her servant was that he reminded her of Trask. She orders him to go to Lang’s and steal a talisman that can guard against witches. At that, Tony shouts “Against you!,” and he sounds very much like Trask. Perhaps we are to think that a secular education and a steady diet of Hollywood movies could have turned the farcically warped Trask into a basically reasonable fellow like Tony, but that there is no strength in those things to stand up to a force like Angelique.
The talisman was a gift to Lang from Barnabas. Lang refuses to keep it on his person, even though it saved his life to clutch it when Angelique was making his heart beat so fast it was about to burst. Lang shows up at Barnabas’ house, under the false impression he received a telephone call from Barnabas. Barnabas, who has no telephone in his house, explains to Lang that Angelique has lured him away. When he learns that Lang has left the talisman in his desk drawer at home, he insists on accompanying him back there.
It is too late. Tony has already stolen the talisman and delivered it to Angelique. She looks at it and says that Lang will not be able to save either Barnabas or himself. Presumably, not even by reminding him of his lines.
Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, matriarch of the ancient and esteemed Collins family of Collinsport, Maine, receives a telephone call. Her daughter Carolyn is in jail. Driving drunk, Carolyn barely missed a pedestrian, smashing instead into a tree. The almost-victim rescued Carolyn from the car moments before the fuel tank exploded, and Carolyn rewarded her with some nasty remarks. Liz is upset that her brother Roger isn’t available to pick Carolyn up from the police station.
Well-meaning governess Vicki suggests that Liz go to the police station herself. Liz hasn’t left home under her own power for eighteen years, and so reacts to this idea with dread. Vicki talks her into it, giving Alexandra Moltke Isles a chance to show that there is some substance to her character. Looking in through the front door, we see Liz taking a series of halting, forced steps to Vicki’s car.*
Seen in isolation from the rest of the series, Liz’ march is a poignant evocation of agoraphobia. But the Liz-is-a-recluse story is a dead end. They never showed us anyplace Liz would want to go, and the reason for her staying in the house was exposed in #249 as nonsensical. Still, they’ve been presenting Liz as a recluse from the beginning, so sending her into town feels like a promise that something big will happen.
In the police station, we see that Sheriff Patterson has grown a mustache. He didn’t have one when last we saw him, in #248, and he won’t have one when next we see him, in #272. So this is our only chance to appreciate it.
Carolyn is doing a “teen rebel” bit. This would have been one thing earlier in the series, when she was supposed to be fresh out of high school and wildly capricious. But she took charge of the family business for a month early in the spring of 1967, and has been relatively level-headed since. When she makes sassy remarks to the sheriff, they are just throwing all that character development out the window.
Liz shows up, to the sheriff’s amazement and Carolyn’s. Carolyn recovers from the shock, and claims she is not impressed by Liz’ leaving the house. Liz supposedly stayed there for eighteen years waiting for Carolyn’s father, Paul Stoddard, to come back. Now she is divorcing Stoddard and marrying seagoing con man Jason McGuire. If Stoddard means nothing to Liz anymore, what’s the big deal about going into town? Carolyn then makes some superheated remarks about Liz’ disloyalty to Stoddard. Finally, she refuses to leave with Liz. She insists on spending the night in a cell.
In #244, Liz tried to tell Carolyn that her father was a terrible man who never loved anyone. Carolyn became upset and wouldn’t listen to her, then jumped to believe Jason’s stories that Stoddard was a fine fellow who doted on her. That was understandable as a first reaction to dismal news, but we’ve never seen any other indication that Carolyn is especially hung up on the father who disappeared from the house when she was an infant. All the shouting about “my father!” comes out of nowhere. The scene amounts to nothing.
Back in the drawing room, Liz has a conversation with Jason. She has agreed to marry him because he has threatened that if she does not he will reveal to the police that she killed Stoddard and he buried him in the basement. The blackmail plot has been dragging on for months, and we have yet to see anything happen between Liz and Jason that didn’t happen in the first five minutes they were on camera. At this point, scenes like this are just a test of the audience’s endurance.
Upstairs in Collinwood, Vicki hears sobbing in Liz’ bedroom. She calls to her, and lets herself in. She apologizes for urging her to see Carolyn. She suspects that Liz has something she wants to say, and gently presses her to say it. Liz finally confesses that she killed Stoddard. The whole scene is very effective, a strong conclusion to a weak outing.
*It became clear in #232 and #233 that Vicki has a car. How and when she came into possession of this vehicle has not been explained.
We reprise the final scene of Friday’s episode, in which vampire Barnabas Collins catches his prisoner Maggie Evans trying to stab him. He flashes his fangs at her.
Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem
The first time around, this had been the climax of a number of powerfully realized scenes, so it still carried a punch despite the silliness of the fangs. From a standing start, though, the result is a bad laugh.
In the 45 seconds following the first commercial, ABC staff announcer Bill Rice* summarizes the action of the previous week’s episodes.** This recap comes so close to exhausting every event we saw in those 110 minutes of scripted drama that regular viewers will have another unintended laugh.
The recap was inserted because many ABC stations preempted Dark Shadows to cover a United Nations debate about the Vietnam War. The show was about as resolutely disengaged from contemporary politics as it was possible to be, but conjoining US policy in Vietnam with a character like Barnabas, who combines a vast capacity for killing with a desperate need to be loved, does bring certain thoughts to mind.
Barnabas and Maggie have a conversation about his inclination to kill her. Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood-thrall Willie Loomis joins in, saying that Barnabas will have to kill him first. This would not seem to present Barnabas with any difficulty at all. Willie wouldn’t be missed- everyone else on the show remembers Willie from the days before he met Barnabas, when he was dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, and has been urging Barnabas to get rid of him. Nor would it be especially difficult for Barnabas to replace Willie- he just has to bite someone else, and that other person will become his new slave. But Barnabas stands around arguing with Willie and Maggie. When someone knocks on the front door, he scolds Willie for failing to keep it locked, such a humdrum complaint under the circumstances as to bring another bad laugh. Barnabas leaves Willie and Maggie in the basement while he answers the door. Before he goes, he sticks out his lower lip, a facial expression known as “pouting.”
Barnabas pouts
The visitor is well-meaning governess Vicki, who tells Barnabas that the sheriff has ordered that no woman go out alone at night. Some think it strange to send a woman out alone at night to carry this message to a man who is indoors, but considering what we’ve seen of the sheriff, doing the exact opposite of what he commands would seem always to be the wisest course.
Vicki notices an antique music box on a table in Barnabas’ front parlor. Vicki admires its tune and makes a few not-very-coherent remarks about “the past” while it is playing. Barnabas has been using this music box as a tool to hypnotize Maggie into believing that she is his long-lost love Josette. After Vicki leaves, he opens it again, then looks at the door through which she left. He turns his head and smiles, looking very much like someone who has just had an exciting new idea.
Lightbulb moment
Meanwhile, Maggie and Willie talk to each other in the basement. The two of them had one of the most electrifying scenes of the entire series down there Friday. The last traces of that energy have been piddled away by the time Barnabas comes back downstairs and resumes his conversation with them.
Willie urges Barnabas to look at Maggie and see how beautiful she is. Barnabas says “No” and looks away. Coming at a moment of high dramatic tension, this might have been powerful. When we sit down as an audience, we enter into a sort of agreement that if the show includes something worth seeing, we will look at it. So when we see a character refusing to look at a sight as well worth contemplating as was the young Kathryn Leigh Scott,*** we might be shocked. But there has been too much idle chatter, and the memory of Barnabas’ pout is so fresh, that all we can think of is a petulant child saying “I don’t wanna look at her!”
Barnabas announces that he will not kill Maggie right away. He tells her that he will make her suffer torments worse than anyone has ever known so that death will finally come as a blessed relief, then locks her up in the prison cell in the basement of the house. What, your house doesn’t have a prison cell in its basement? It’s a standard feature of homes in Collinsport, as we will come to see in future episodes.
Barnabas goes to the great house of Collinwood and talks to Vicki. He brings a handkerchief that, legend has it, was a gift from the queen of France to Josette. They babble about “the past” and Barnabas invites her to drop in at his house “some day.” He says “day,” even though he’s busy being dead every day until sunset. And doesn’t specify when- any old time, if she hears screams coming from the basement she’ll probably just ignore them.
Evidently Barnabas is thinking of Vicki as a backup Josette in case Maggie doesn’t come around. This marks a retreat from #240 and #241, when strange and troubled boy David Collins, who has seen Josette’s ghost many times, saw Maggie in the gown Barnabas gave her and said that she must have been Josette because she looked “exactly the same” as he had seen her before. That suggested, not only that Barnabas chose Maggie because of her looks, but also that he might be right in thinking that she is Josette’s reincarnation. This storyline is modeled on the 1932 Universal film The Mummy, in which Imhotep’s idea that Helen Grosvenor is the reincarnation of his lost love Princess Ankh-esen-amun is substantiated when Zita Johann plays both roles. If Vicki and Maggie are interchangeable, then all of that goes by the boards.
*Presumably no relation to the main character of Gene Roddenberry’s 1963-4 CBS TV series The Lieutenant, one episode of which was written by Art Wallace.
For those who have missed the last few episodes of Dark Shadows: Elizabeth Collins [Stoddard,] at Jason McGuire’s insistence, has taken Vicki, Carolyn, and Roger into the basement room and convinces them that it holds no mystery. They don’t realize that beneath the flagstones on the floor is concealed the room’s secret—the body of Elizabeth’s husband, Paul. Elizabeth, now realizing that the secret can never be told, announces to the family that she and Jason will be married. Maggie Evans escaped from Barnabas and attempted to get to her father, but was recaptured and told by Barnabas that unless she assumes the identity of Josette Collins, she will die. Realizing that she can never escape, Maggie attempts to destroy Barnabas.
The title card shown during the recap
***Or for that matter as is the not-so-young Miss Scott of today, she’s one of the best looking octogenarians around.
At the end of yesterday’s installment, artist Sam Evans looked out the window of his house and saw his daughter, missing local girl Maggie. Today, the sheriff shows up and reports that he and his men couldn’t find anything to substantiate Sam’s report. The sheriff then tries to convince Sam that he didn’t really see Maggie at all. When last we see Sam, he is telling himself that it was only his imagination.
Maggie had escaped from the custody of vampire Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. Today, Barnabas meets Maggie in the graveyard, chokes her, and takes her into the tomb where he spent a century or two. He declares that he will punish her for trying to leave him.
As Barnabas talks, Maggie seems inclined to go along with his plan to annihilate her personality and replace it with that of his long-dead love, Josette. He wonders aloud if the punishment he was planning is necessary after all. But then she remembers that she is holding her father’s pipe, and she calls out “Pop!” Barnabas then takes her to the hidden room in the back of the tomb and shuts her up in his old coffin.
Director Lela Swift was uncharacteristically sloppy with the framing yesterday, but today she makes up for it with one of the most remembered shots of the entire series. When Barnabas shuts Maggie up in the coffin, we see him from her point of view. Claustrophobic viewers beware!
Barnabas closing the lid
The next morning, Willie releases Maggie from the coffin, takes her back to Barnabas’ house, and urges her to convince herself that she is Josette. For a while, she tries it. We start to wonder if Willie will have as much success with Maggie as the sheriff had with her father. But then she looks in the mirror and shouts “I’m Maggie Evans!”
That may not sound like much story for 22 minutes, but it never feels slow. Swift and the actors are all in fine form today.
On the other hand, there are a couple of script problems. The sheriff is written as such a fool that we can’t help but be distracted, and the scene between Maggie and Barnabas in the outer section of the tomb goes on too long. But even at its lowest points the actors just about save it. Dana Elcar always makes it seem that Sheriff Patterson knows more than he’s letting on, so it isn’t until he starts trying to talk Sam into believing he didn’t really see Maggie that we get the sinking feeling that he is absolutely useless. And Jonathan Frid and Kathryn Leigh Scott are electric as Barnabas and Maggie, so much so that we could forgive the scene between them even if it had been twice as repetitious as it fact is. With two consecutive episodes including as much good stuff as was in yesterday’s and today’s, it’s starting to seem like they are due to land one in the ranks of the Genuinely Good Episodes any day now.
Dark Shadows has been a supernatural thriller ever since the ghosts of Josette and the Widows scared Matthew Morgan to death in December 1966. But today’s episode is the first one that is structured like a horror movie.
Horror movies tend to focus on the visible damage done to the bodies of the female victims of the monster. The current victim is Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and the monster is vampire Barnabas Collins. We open with Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, looking helplessly around the house. Sam doesn’t know it, but Maggie was compelled to leave by the power that Barnabas has gained over her by drinking her blood.
What Sam does know is that Maggie was in extremely poor health. He cannot understand how she could have gone anywhere under her own power. We then see Maggie looking awful and wandering around the graveyard. Later, a closeup of a professional headshot of actress Kathryn Leigh Scott will dissolve into an image of Maggie among the tombstones, contrasting her usual fresh-faced beauty with her present ghastly haggardness.
Maggie’s professional headshotThe dissolveBride of the monster
The monster who has reduced her to this sorry state, vampire Barnabas Collins, emerges from the fog. Barnabas has been on the show for four full weeks now, but this is the first time we see his face not in the pleasant disguise of a wealthy gentleman visiting from across the sea. He is wearing a more extreme version of the makeup Maggie has on, and his fangs feature prominently. This is the introduction of the monster, a key element on any horror film, and it suggests that Barnabas is now what Maggie will become.
When Barnabas hears Maggie’s friends approaching before he can complete his evil plan, he drops her on the ground and steps over her, again treating her body as a thing.
Barnabas steps over Maggie
After she is carried home, Maggie moans about her pain but can say nothing about what has happened to her, who is responsible for it, or what she is thinking. Again, we can connect only with her physical being, not her social relations or her inner life or the events that have involved her. At the end, the handkerchief tied around her neck is removed without her permission or objection, as if she were inanimate. The camera zooms in on open wounds on her neck, isolating that area and leaving us with the image of the wounds as things available to us to examine apart from Maggie’s personality or the rest of her body.
The Source of the Evil
The episode is an adaptation of elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Early in that novel, the vampire’s victim Lucy rose from her sickbed and wandered off to a graveyard. As Lucy is found by her friend Mina, so Maggie will be found by her friend, well-meaning governess Vicki. As Mina would spend the second half of the novel as the only female member of a group of stalwart and dynamic men doing battle with the evil Count, so Vicki is working with an otherwise all-male search party led by dashing action hero Burke Devlin. As Mina’s colleagues exclude her from their activities and thereby come close to total failure, so the men leave Vicki behind in the Evans cottage to wait by the phone, only to find that she is the one who will have the most to offer when she joins them in the field.
After Lucy dies and her undead form is destroyed, Mina becomes Dracula’s victim. Mina ends up as the precursor of the “Final Girl” in the mad slasher movie, playing a key part in Dracula’s final defeat, though unlike those movies Dracula ends with a successful team effort.
Since Vicki has been our point of view character from the beginning, was an effective protagonist in the “Phoenix” storyline, and is as relentlessly wholesome as the Final Girl typically is, we might expect that she will be Barnabas’ last victim. That expectation in turn suggests that Maggie, like Lucy, will die, rise as a vampire, and be destroyed by those who love her most. Maggie is one of every viewer’s favorite characters, so the prospect that she might turn into a monster and then leave the show altogether brings keen suspense.
Barnabas Beats His Willie
Vicki does have two important conversations with sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis while she is in the Evans cottage. The first occurs when Willie comes to the door to bring a message that his master Barnabas will not be available at the usual time to sit for the portrait Maggie’s father is painting of him. Vicki tells Willie that Sam is out searching for Maggie, and Willie becomes very upset to learn that Maggie is missing.
The second conversation comes a few minutes later, when Willie, not disguising his voice in any way, telephones the Evans cottage and tells Vicki that Maggie is in the cemetery and that she is in extreme danger. Somehow Vicki doesn’t recognize his voice. I suppose there were lots of people it might have been- maybe it was Detective Mary Beth Lacey’s husband Harvey from Cagney and Lacey, or Stefan from Daughters of Darkness, or Jock Porter from Love is a Many Splendored Thing, or Geoffrey Fitton from the original Broadway cast of All in Good Time, or any of dozens of policemen and criminals who were in single episodes of cop shows in the 1970s and 1980s.
Willie’s call to Vicki made me wonder about the extent of Barnabas’ powers. When we first saw Barnabas with Willie, his power over him was so extreme that it cost Willie a great effort even to ask Barnabas an unwelcome question, and a look was enough to drive Willie to scurry off and perform the most hateful of tasks. An act of defiance like this was out of the question. Perhaps Barnabas can only keep one blood thrall under total control at a time, and by adding Maggie to his diet he has weakened his hold over Willie.
Willie intrudes on Barnabas’ encounter with Maggie in the cemetery to warn him that Maggie’s friends are on their way. Barnabas instantly suspects that Willie told them where to look for her. When Vicki’s party arrives in the cemetery, Barnabas and Willie run away and hide in the back room of the Collins family tomb where Barnabas was trapped for about 170 years until Willie accidentally released him. This is a departure from Dracula– the Count would have attacked whoever interrupted him, no matter how many of them there were, and fled only if they were armed with crucifixes or consecrated communion wafers or other objects he couldn’t tolerate. But, as my wife Mrs Acilius pointed out, Barnabas has gone a long time without using his vampire powers, so he’s probably rusty.
Barnabas and Willie listen as Burke looks around the outer room of the mausoleum. Once they are sure he is gone, Barnabas confronts Willie with his suspicions. Willie’s lies do not satisfy him, and he lifts his heavy cane and starts beating Willie with it. All we see of this beating is Jonathan Frid’s face and the cane in his hand, but those images, coupled with sound of John Karlen’s cries, imply a violence that shocks us.
Burke picks Maggie up off the ground, grunting audibly as he does so. He carries her into her house, again with a lot of grunting. If I had been Kathryn Leigh Scott’s agent, the production staff would have received a very hot letter about that grunting. The good-looking young women on a soap opera aren’t supposed to weigh anything at all, certainly not enough to cause a dashing action hero to grunt like that even if he carried her all the way from the cemetery.*
In his post about this episode, Danny Horn has some lines about the ineffectiveness of the Collinsport police that I can’t resist quoting:
Sam tells the Scooby gang that he’s alerted the police — the sheriff and his deputies are out looking for Maggie. But, as everyone knows, the police department in Collinsport is 100% useless, so by now the deputies have probably arrested each other, and the sheriff’s all tangled up in a clothesline somewhere…
Vicki tries to call the sheriff, but there’s no answer; apparently every single person associated with the police department is out searching for Maggie, or falling down wells, or buying magic beans, or whatever the hell it is that Collinsport police officers do in a crisis.
When I first read about “the sheriff all tangled up in a clothesline somewhere” a few years ago, I laughed for about five minutes and knew I would be reading Danny’s blog to the end. I’m glad I did, it’s so much fun it inspired me to start this one.
*Mrs Acilius and I remembered a story Miss Scott tells nowadays. Early in the production of the show, Joan Bennett saw her eating a cheese Danish and said “The figure you have now can be your career for the rest of your life.” She put the cheese Danish down immediately, and hasn’t eaten another since. Our response to the story has been to eat cheese Danish on Miss Scott’s behalf at regular intervals.
The entire episode is set in the Collinsport Inn- the lobby, the restaurant, and Burke’s room.
In episode 21, Vicki took Liz in hand as if she were Plato’s Socrates and Liz were some pompous Athenian aristocrat, leading her through a series of simple, seemingly innocent questions to a most uncomfortable conclusion. That took place in the drawing room at Collinwood, while Carolyn watched. In episode 24, Carolyn joins Burke and the sheriff in Burke’s room. It’s Burke’s turn to play Socrates, Carolyn’s to answer the questions, and the sheriff’s to be an audience. Burke’s questioning is not only effective at raising doubts in the sheriff’s mind, but also prompts regular viewers to bracket Vicki and Burke together and see them as a likely, indeed inevitable, romantic pair.
The scenes in Burke’s room also highlight Roger’s bizarre folly in telling Burke his evidence against him before going to the police. We saw Vicki try to talk Roger out of this in two episodes, and the sheriff commented on it later. Watching the well-prepared Burke cross-examine Carolyn as effectively as any defense attorney, it is all the clearer that Roger’s behavior was driven not by any rational calculation, but by some wild impulse he cannot entirely control.
The scenes in the lobby and the restaurant show us a quiet rewriting of some characterizations laid out in episode 1. In that episode, Burke stood in the lobby and refused to admit that he so much as knew the name of Mr Wells, the hotel clerk, simply because Wells was from the town from which he was sent to prison ten years before. Now he stands on the same set, warmly greets one of the policemen who made the case against him, and repeatedly tries to persuade him to join him for lunch. Also in episode 1, Maggie stood behind the counter of the restaurant and told Vicki that she considers her, as a member of the staff of Collinwood, to be a “jerk” practically as bad as the family that owns the house. In this one, Carolyn herself comes into the restaurant and she and Maggie have a warm, cozy chat, like old friends.
I suppose it was inevitable that they would retcon Burke into a hail-fellow-well-met and Maggie into a friend of at least some of the Collinses. After all, soap operas consist mostly of conversation, so characters who aren’t on speaking terms with each other are dead weight. Placing these scenes on the same sets used in episode 1 is an emphatic way to make it clear to viewers who remember that episode that the change is intentional and permanent.
The videography is also as ambitious as we ever see it in this show. The camera tracks fluidly through the lobby, showing us more of that set than we see in any other episode, ending in a low angle shot of the sheriff that makes him look ominous. Some of those tracking shots are too much for Michael Currie, the actor playing the sheriff- during his scene alone with Burke, he bumps into one camera, stumbles into a piece of furniture, and then the other camera hits him in the back of the head. After that, he stands with his back to Burke and his elbows bent in front of him, looking for all the world like he is urinating on the floor:
Currie is so physically awkward that when Burke asks the sheriff the rhetorical question “Have you ever sat on a wrench?,” it seems to be a pretty near certainty that the answer is yes.
Currie has a rough time in this episode with his lines as well as with his movement. Perhaps the single funniest blooper comes when he declares that a good memory “is what I’m paid for,” then forgets his next line. It’s also interesting when he calls Burke “Burt.” Bloopers are after all one of the things Dark Shadows is known for, so we can’t be too annoyed with him for those. Worse is what happens when he does remember his lines. He intones them all as if he were leading the Pledge of Allegiance.
In the months after Mark Allen left the show, the standard of acting on it was remarkably high. Every actor other than Currie consistently turns in performances so strong that watching an episode feels like a fine evening at the theater. And bad as he is, even Currie doesn’t keep his scene partners from delivering good performances. He just wasn’t ready for professional acting. So I don’t have the same need to complain about him as about Allen, but he does deliver the series’ first laugh-out-loud moments of incompetence, and it is a relief when he is replaced.
Roger has finally deigned to notify the police of his suspicion that Burke Devlin tampered with his brakes in an attempt to kill him. In story time, that was twelve hours ago. In the interim, both Roger and Bill Malloy have gone to Burke’s room and told him everything they know and think they know. Roger presented Burke with Vicki and her testimony. The newspaper has run a front-page story about it.
The sheriff is peeved that Roger is bringing him into it only now. Roger explains that his goal in giving Burke all the evidence in advance of any investigation was to persuade him to leave town, but that he never had the opportunity to present that idea to Burke.
Upstairs, Vicki is trying to teach David a lesson about the history of Maine. Considering that we learned in episode 13 that Vicki has never heard of Augusta, the capital of the state, it’s difficult to be optimistic about that instruction. But every scene between David and Vicki in his room is worth watching. No matter what lines they may be required to say, David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles always use body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and spatial position to convey the emotions appropriate to their characters. As episode follows episode, those emotions shift from wild hostility on David’s part and patient solicitude on Vicki’s to genuine affection and trust. It’s the one story-line that really works in the first 42 weeks of the show.
David made some incriminating remarks to Vicki and his aunt the night of his father’s wreck; they both thought he was simply expressing his guilt over his hostility to his father. In this one, he asks Vicki if she ever tried to kill anyone. She tells a story of some fist-fighting she did at the Hammond Foundling Home, and says that’s as close as she got. She looks happy telling David that story, not because it’s a happy story, but because it’s a chance to make a connection.
She isn’t happy at the end of the episode- when David grabs at the bleeder valve and the other adults ignore his action, we see it dawn on her that he is the culprit.
I don’t agree that Constable Carter seems intelligent. He greets David by asking his name. If a cop has been on the job for over ten years in Collinsport, a town under the shadow of a big house called Collinwood, home of the the Collins Cannery and the Collins Fishing Fleet, and he still doesn’t know the four members of the Collins family, he’s an idiot.
Of course, he is sensible when he’s demanding to know why Roger waited twelve hours before coming to him and expressing incredulity at Roger’s visit to Devlin. Characters in soaps and suchlike productions are always declaring they have to do their own investigations before they can go to the police, and often this is treated in the story as if it were a reasonable thing to do. But every step of the way they’ve lampshaded the preposterousness of it. Vicki kept telling him it was a bad idea before he did it, last episode Sam reacted scornfully when he told him what he repeats to the constable here, that he wanted to give Devlin a chance to leave town and never come back. And the constable shows the same scorn for the idea today.
Those scenes make Vicki, Sam, and the constable look smarter than Roger, but we’ve seen enough of Roger to know that he isn’t a fool. Something is clouding his judgment, something more complicated and slipperier than the stories that have been suggested to us so far. Roger is hiding more than one thing, and he doesn’t trust himself with his own secrets.
David looks at the camera again today, when he’s eavesdropping on the conversation with the constable. An effective tactic- we the audience know what he knows, and he seems to be pleading with us to keep quiet.
Another meaningful look at the end of the episode. When the constable, who is an idiot, says cheerfully that now we’ll know how David’s fingerprints got on the wrench, Vicki gives David a grim little glance. Just for a second- but not only is it the last moment of the episode and therefore emphatic, it is also the second time we’ve seen her give David that look. The first time was in his room, when he was betraying himself with some remarks about how terrible it would be to go to prison. We can see a terrible idea starting to form in the back of Vicki’s mind.
Dark Shadows Commentary 