At the end of Friday’s episode, we saw reclusive matriarch Liz start to fall down the stairs, then saw her sprawled on the floor below. Today begins with a recreation of that scene, but instead of merely starting to fall, actress Joan Bennett tumbles far enough forward that she must really have gone down. It’s an impressive stunt.
Most of the episode is taken up with Liz’ demented condition and the reactions of the members of the household to it. The audience knows that Liz’ troubles are the result of a spell cast on her by blonde fire witch Laura. At moments Liz is almost able to figure that out herself, but no one else has a clue what is going on. The whole episode is full of standout moments for Liz. If there had been Daytime Emmy Awards in 1967, this would have been the episode Dan Curtis Productions would have sent to the voters to get Joan Bennett her Best Actress award.
At one point, Liz begins to recover her memory and is about to take action against Laura. Before she can reach anyone, a ghostly figure appears in her room. Afterward, she has a mad scene, indicating that she has been rendered powerless.
The ghostly sighting raises some questions about Laura. Is it Laura’s ghost she sees? Or another ghost allied with Laura? Or has her abuse of Liz’ brain led it to produce this hallucination on its own? The show is very indefinite about what exactly Laura is and how she operates, giving us the chance to have a lot of fun speculating about her.
This episode is replete with notable firsts. In addition to the first real stunt of the series, it features the first scene in which Bob O’Connell, as the bartender in The Blue Whale, has lines to deliver.
In that same scene at The Blue Whale, we hear music coming out of the jukebox that we haven’t heard before. It is a medley of Lennon-McCartney tunes rendered in “smooth jazz” style by Bud Shank.
It’s also the first time a conversation on the landing at the top of the stairs leading up from the foyer is photographed straight-on. Several times, we had seen characters talking to each other up there, but always before the camera had been angled up from the floor below. That had created the sense that the conversation was removed from the main course of the action. Today, it’s just another part of the set.
It is the first time we see Liz’ room. Two notable firsts take place there. A favorite prop of Dark Shadows fandom, the so-called “Ralston-Purina lamp,”* has been seen several times in the Collinsport Inn. In Liz’ room today, it makes the first of many appearances in the great house of Collinwood.
The ghostly figure in Liz’ room is played by Susan Sullivan, who has been acting in primetime on network television more or less continuously for the last 55 years. During the other hours, she writes plays and performs in Dark Shadows audio dramas.
A play she wrote under the title “What Friends Do” was produced by Smartphone Theater and posted on Youtube. The cast is made up of Dark Shadows alums Susan Sullivan, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Mitch Ryan, and David Selby. It’s about four friends in a retirement community during the Covid pandemic, and it’s terrific. The Q & A after includes a lot of stuff that Dark Shadows fans will find irresistible, including a little bit about today’s episode.
The voice that says “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production” at the end of the closing credits does not sound like ABC staff announcer Bob Lloyd. It’s higher-pitched and faster than his delivery, and the vowels are flatter than he articulates them. Perhaps it’s a tape fault distorting Lloyd’s voice, or perhaps he had a cold that day. If it was someone else, it’s another first. The Dark Shadows wiki doesn’t say anything about it, so I assume the surviving records and the published books that use them don’t say it was someone else.
*So-called because its red-and-white checked pattern looks like the logo of the Ralston-Purina animal food company.
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