Tag: the kitchen at collinwood

Episode 53: You can move almost anything by water

Well-meaning governess Vicki and troubled rich boy David Collins are having breakfast in the kitchen at Collinwood. David had heard Vicki and his cousin Carolyn screaming outside the night before, and saw them running back to the house. He keeps badgering Vicki for an explanation of these events, which Vicki refuses to give. In his frustration, he accuses Vicki of trying to replace his mother, and tells her that when she dies, he won’t even go to her funeral.

David and Vicki at breakfast
Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

Later in the episode, after David has overheard Vicki telling hardworking young fisherman Joe that she and Carolyn thought they saw a dead man on the beach, he has another scene with Vicki, this time in his room. She’s trying to teach him about the importance of rivers in the economic development of the USA. He continues to demand information about what happened last night. He resists answering her questions about North America’s rivers, she resists answering his questions about what she saw on the beach.

David and Vicki in his room
Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

These scenes are full of repetitious dialogue, conversational dead-ends, and descriptions of the Mississippi-Missouri river system. They could have been quite dull. Thanks to the actors, they are engrossing. As David Collins, child actor David Henesy uses an utterly flat voice and affect, to which Alexandra Moltke Isles as Vicki responds with a nuanced slow burn. When David makes common-sense observations (e.g., “Was something chasing you?… Then why were you running?”) his flatness seems to be a sign of sober intelligence. When he says terrible things (“When you’re dead, I won’t even come to your funeral,”) the same flatness is far more disquieting than a display of anger would be. As Vicki very gradually loses patience with David, her eyes never leave his face for more than a second- we can see her searching for something she can empathize with, some opening hinting at a relatable emotion, and not finding it. The two of them are irresistible together.

Director John Sedwick deserves a lot of credit as well. We see Vicki and David in the kitchen and in David’s room, the two most intimate spaces on the show. In each of these spaces, David is sitting still while Vicki moves about. David’s stillness allows him to keep his voice perfectly level, while Vicki’s movements give her opportunities to show signs of the emotional reaction she’s trying to keep in check as she tries to be nothing but a conscientious teacher. The camera catches David’s crystal ball to emphasize the boy’s baleful preoccupations.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

Reclusive matriarch Liz meets with dour handyman Matthew in the drawing room. Liz revisits the question of the dead man on the beach. She says that she doesn’t believe Matthew has ever lied to her; he vows he never will. Liz points out that Matthew chose his words carefully last night when he came back from searching the beach, and asks if there was in fact a dead body there. He admits that there was, that it was the body of missing plant manager Bill Malloy, and that he put Malloy’s body in the water and watched as the tide carried it out to sea Horrified, Liz asks what Matthew was thinking. All he will say is that he thought it was for the best. Liz calls the police.

In his scene with Liz, Matthew mentions that before he came to Collinwood to be the handyman he worked for Liz’ father on the fishing boats. I’ve seen several websites claiming this is an inconsistency, since in episode 6 Matthew had said that he was sweeping the floors in the Collins cannery when he was called up to the big house. Those could both be true, though. He might have been a fisherman who had to leave the boats for some reason and then took the job at the cannery.

Maybe the reason was Matthew’s personality. As Liz told Vicki in episode 13, Matthew is a “strange, violent man”- it’s easy to imagine him alienating the rest of the crew of a small boat to the point where they would refuse to set out with him on board. A history like that would go a long way towards explaining Matthew’s extreme gratitude to Liz for giving him a job, especially a job where he’s alone almost all the time.

Episode 21: “Carolyn’s mother is a witch.”

In the teaser, Carolyn asks Vicki what’s on her mind. “The meaning of life?” “No, just the opposite- death.” Exchanges like that go a long way towards explaining the appeal the show has to depressives. Casting makes a difference, too- actresses Nancy Barrett and Alexandra Moltke Isles seem to be far from death-obsessed, so they can deliver the most preposterously gloomy lines without boring the audience.

After the first break, Vicki and Carolyn are having breakfast in the kitchen. As it always does, that set creates an intimate atmosphere which makes it seem natural that the characters should share confidences. Carolyn confesses her feelings of guilt at having brought Burke to the house; Vicki confesses that she doesn’t believe Burke tampered with Roger’s brakes. For some reason, Vicki tells Carolyn that when she was six years old, an attendant at the foundling home played a prank and told her that her birth parents would be coming for her. All of Vicki’s stories about her childhood are like that, it’s no wonder she feels at home in Collinwood.

There’s a scene between Bill Malloy and Burke in Burke’s room. It’s always interesting to see actors as talented as Mitch Ryan and Frank Schofield playing off each other. It is puzzling that a Collins family retainer as loyal and intelligent as Bill would go to Burke before the police have a chance to question him or search his room and tell him everything he knows and suspects about the crime. But Roger has already tipped his hand to Burke, so another indiscretion isn’t going to damage the prospects of the prosecution by much. This scene, in which Burke is eating breakfast while Bill is confronting him with his suspicions, is intercut with the scene in which Vicki and Carolyn are eating breakfast and consoling each other. So, opposite extremes- former friends in a hostile setting, new friends in a nurturing setting.

Carolyn tells Liz that Vicki doesn’t think Burke is guilty. Liz responds that she doesn’t “care what Miss Winters thinks.” Liz then collapses into pity for Carolyn and guilt about herself as a mother. She remembers that when Carolyn was a child, she would come home from school crying because the other children taunted her, saying that “Carolyn’s mother is a witch.”

That’s an interesting story, because it implies that Carolyn went to the school in town. How did she get there? It’s much too far to walk. Did a school bus come up the hill to Collinwood to pick her up and drop her off? That’s a bit hard to imagine. Liz doesn’t want anyone around the place. Sooner or later, some adventurous child would slip off the bus with Carolyn and go exploring the grounds, no doubt finding a way into the house itself. Roger didn’t live there until recently, and Liz has never set foot outside the grounds since Carolyn’s birth. The only servant on the estate is Matthew, and he and Carolyn are not at all close, not as they would be if he’d taken her to and from school every day in her childhood.

That leaves Bill Malloy. He comes to the house more or less daily to go over business with Liz- perhaps he used to combine those visits with picking Carolyn up for school and dropping her off afterward. He is very close to her, calling her “Princess.” He’d have to pick her up very early in the morning, since his responsibilities involve supervision of the fishing boats. She might still have been in her pajamas. She’d have needed to get dressed and have breakfast at Bill’s house. We learn later that he has a housekeeper who has been with him many years; much, much later, that housekeeper will reminisce with Carolyn about brushing her hair for her when she was a little girl. So maybe that was it…

Vicki talks with Liz and Carolyn about the private investigator Burke has hired to look into her background. Liz doesn’t want to talk about anything that touches on how she heard about Vicki and what she knows about her, but by a skillful line of Socratic questioning, Vicki leads Liz to the conclusion that something about her origins might be embarrassing to someone associated with Collinwood. Liz walks out of the room, as Euthyphro walks out when Plato’s Socrates springs a similar trap for him, and we can see how smart and determined Vicki is.

Scenes that focus on the question of Vicki’s origins tend not to get much attention from fandom, perhaps because the whole story-line ultimately fizzled out with no resolution. But watching it forward, not thinking about what comes later, we can see some strong scenes devoted to it.

Episode 16: This is no place for young people

Dark Shadows begins its first mystery story as the characters try to figure out who tampered with Roger’s brakes, sending his car off the road but causing him only minor injuries. It is an inverted mystery, of the type that would a few years later be stamped with the name of Columbo. The audience knows who committed the crime, the suspense comes from wondering how and when the perpetrator will be caught.

In this case the would-be killer is the victim’s nine year old son David, a boy whose father openly tells him that he hates him and who is frantic with terror that he will be “sent away,” which to him brings up something frightening and unexplained about his mother. David removed the distributor valve from the brake system of his father’s car so that the brakes would fail at the moment when the car approached a particularly dangerous turn on the side of the steep hill leading down from the house.

David has kept the valve, intending to use it to frame someone else for his crime. His first choice of patsy is his governess, the point of view character for this part of the series, Victoria Winters. That plan was foiled when Vicki caught him trying to plant the valve in her underwear drawer. Later, David will try to plant the valve on someone else, but for now he is stuck keeping it in his possession.

I made some remarks about this episode on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

A few disconnected thoughts:

1. The dancers at the Blue Whale are so bizarre in this one it really feels like watching footage from an alien world. Considering that so many members of the cast came from Broadway or were on their way to Broadway, it is baffling that the extras defined “dancing” as something you do by violently jerking your shoulders from side to side while wearing a huge grin. A few years before, aspiring Broadway players might have assumed teenagers dancing to rock ‘n’ roll in a Maine fishing village would look like that, but by 1966 there were enough people in the New York theater world taking pop music seriously that it’s hard to explain what we see in the background of these scenes as anything but sincere ineptitude.

2. Carolyn’s fantasy about being hit over the head and dragged out of Collinwood goes a long way towards explaining the men she gets involved with later in the series…

3. This is only the second appearance of the kitchen/ dining area that was introduced in episode 5. I think we see more of it in this episode than in any other. Between Mrs Stoddard’s comings and goings, Vicki’s business with the tea things, and the scenes with Matthew, it’s established as a substantial space.

Episode 5: Good morning, you lovely people

This episode features the first appearance of one of my favorite sets, the kitchen at Collinwood. There’s an intimacy to hanging out in the kitchen, whether you’re actually sharing a meal or not, that makes it a natural place for people to exchange information.

Vicki and Carolyn do share a great deal of information with each other during their breakfast. By the end of it, we know everything Vicki knows about her origins, and enough about what was happening at Collinwood during her infancy to see the possible resolutions to the mystery about her.

David Henesy also has a heavy load of acting to do in this one as David Collins packs Vicki’s bags and calls for his mother. The script doesn’t give him much help in making these actions compelling, but Henesy’s face projects such intense emotions that his scenes move the audience powerfully.