the west wing – Page 2 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 539: Child’s play

The wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra is standing in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, thinking evil thoughts. The camera zooms out and we see that her stepson, strange and troubled boy David Collins, is standing next to her. She starts to speak her thoughts out loud, saying “You will pay!” David asks “Who will pay?” Angelique/ Cassandra is startled to discover that David is there, and is flustered when she tries to change the subject. She so often delivers incriminating soliloquys while standing out in the open that the comic effect of this scene must be intentional.

Angelique/ Cassandra oblivious to David’s presence.

David asks Angelique/ Cassandra to help him figure out the correct operation of a tape recorder he received some time ago as a present from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. After Angelique/ Cassandra refuses to help, he goes upstairs and finds his cousin, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, emerging from the long-deserted west wing of the house. He asks Carolyn what she was doing in the west wing. She asks him why he thinks she was in the west wing. When he says he saw her coming out of it, she drops her attempt to evade his question and tells him she was looking for some old family photos to show well-meaning governess Vicki. She has enough trouble remembering this story that it must be obvious to David that it is a lie, but he isn’t interested enough to follow it up. He just wants someone to help him figure out which buttons to push on the tape recorder.

On their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri speak for longtime viewers of the show when they say that it is surprising David needs help with the tape recorder. When the show started, David was two years younger and had the mechanical skill to sabotage his father’s car in a very creditable attempt at patricide. All Carolyn has to do to get the tape going is read the label that identifies the play button. This apparent loss of cognitive function is of a piece with David’s massive loss of narrative function. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, David was the fulcrum on which every story turned, and actor David Henesy had abundant opportunities to show a level of professional skill that would be remarkable in a performer of any age. But he has been receding into the background for a long time now, and his extraordinary dim-wittedness today marks a low point for him.

Once the tape starts playing, Carolyn makes a hasty exit. David listens to a minute or so of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, hoping it will end and he will hear “something spooky.” His wish is granted when the music abruptly stops, giving way to a voice addressing itself to Julia. The voice rambles about David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, saying that if both he and “my creation” live, Barnabas will be all right, but that if “Adam” dies, “Barnabas will be as he was before.” The name “Adam” should mean something to David. He shared a confused and frightening moment with a mysterious man of that name in #495. That man subsequently abducted Carolyn, and is still the object of a police search.

What only Julia, Barnabas, and Barnabas’ servant Willie know is that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment that freed Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse that Angelique/ Cassandra placed on him in the 1790s. The voice on the tape is that of Eric Lang, the mad scientist who began the experiment. Minutes before he died of the effects of one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells, Lang recorded this message for Julia. The audience has heard this message approximately a gazillion bajillion times, but until now, the only character to have heard it was Adam, and he could make no sense of it.

Angelique/ Cassandra recently made an unsuccessful attempt to renew Barnabas’ curse, and is desperately searching for the obstacle that prevented it from working. Carolyn’s actual task in the west wing was showing Adam to a hiding place there. So Angelique/ Cassandra is now under the same roof with both the information she needs to identify her obstacle and the person she can remove that obstacle by killing. Things are looking bad for Barnabas and for Adam.

While David is upstairs with the tape recorder, Vicki is sobbing in the drawing room. Suave warlock Nicholas, who is staying in the house in the guise of Angelique/ Cassandra’s brother, enters and asks her what’s wrong. She says that she has just learned that Barnabas is dead. His back to her, Nicholas smiles brightly when he first hears this news, then puts on a sad face and turns to her with sympathetic words. In response, Vicki reveals that she knows all about Angelique/ Cassandra and that she has little patience for Nicholas’ pretensions. Carolyn enters and doubts Vicki’s news. Angelique/ Cassandra is the last to enter. She says that she saw Barnabas alive and well after the time when he is supposed to have been dead. Vicki and Carolyn look at each other, and do not see Nicholas’ look of disappointment. They go upstairs, and Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra go into the drawing room.

Nicholas scolds Angelique/ Cassandra for her failure. He addresses her as “dear sister.” He suggests she may not hate Barnabas sufficiently to impose a curse on him. When she denies this, he leans to her ear and teasingly asks if she loves him. He threatens to send her back where she came from if she doesn’t re-vamp Barnabas by midnight, and to focus her mind replaces her arm with a fleshless bone.

Director John Weaver was not much of a visual artist, and in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day Danny Horn analyzes the dismally inept blocking of the scene between Vicki and Nicholas. Danny also has some unkind words for writer Ron Sproat, but I think those are unfair. It’s true the opening scene between Adam and Carolyn goes on too long, David’s helplessness with the tape recorder is dismal, and Vicki and Carolyn’s reaction to Angelique/ Cassandra’s report that Barnabas is still alive doesn’t make sense. That’s a long enough list of flaws that we might fairly classify Weaver and Sproat as the B-team, not on a par with director Lela Swift and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell.

But it is genuinely funny when we first see David standing next to Angelique/ Cassandra, David’s questioning of Carolyn is intelligently written, Lang’s message is for once an actual source of suspense, Vicki’s lines to Nicholas as Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers them show the character’s strength, Nicholas’ teasing Angelique/ Cassandra with her alleged love of Barnabas raises a laugh as it makes them sound like a couple of kids, and the final gag with the arm bone is at once goofy enough to keep up the humor in the episode and startling enough to be effective as a touch of horror. All in all, it’s an enjoyable episode, if not one that fans would be tempted to use to turn their friends on to the show.

Episode 338: Suspicion itself

Dr Dave Woodard is onto vampire Barnabas Collins’ terrible secret. Woodard doesn’t think he can share his suspicions with the sheriff or a medical colleague or an expert in the supernatural or with any of his friends. Still, he has to tell someone. So he has gone to Barnabas and told him all about it. Barnabas tells him he’s crazy and orders him out of his house.

On his way out, Woodard crosses paths with his medical school classmate and onetime friend Julia Hoffman. He had introduced Julia to the case of Barnabas’ victim Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, hoping that her dual qualification as an expert in psychiatry and hematology meant that she would be the perfect person to find out what happened to Maggie. He knows now that Barnabas was the source of Maggie’s troubles, and that Julia has gone over to Barnabas’ side. The doctors engage in a brief verbal sparring match, then Julia goes into the house. Woodard pretends to leave, then crouches by the window where we have already seen several people eavesdrop on Barnabas’ conversations. Even though Julia herself is one of those people, neither she nor Barnabas thinks to look out the window before they launch into a hugely incriminating conversation.

Among the more important pieces of information Woodard learns are that Julia is performing an experiment on Barnabas, that she is keeping notes on that experiment, and that she keeps those notes in a box in her room at the great house of Collinwood. For some unaccountable reason, she thinks that no one will look for them there.

Barnabas demands that Julia find out how much Woodard knows. He butters her up a bit, telling her that while she has said that Woodard was the most brilliant student in their medical school class, he is sure he can’t have been more than the second most brilliant. He even calls her “my dear,” the first time he has addressed her as anything more affectionate than “doctor.” She is facing away from him when he says all this, and we see her brighten. By the time she exits, she looks positively blissful.

Julia thrills to Barnabas’ non-hostile talk.

Perhaps this suggests that Julia is falling in love with Barnabas. She does get carried away with sympathy for him earlier in the scene, when he is whining about his situation and she exclaims “Poor Barnabas!” Perhaps it’s just that she has been spending all her time with him for months and is relieved to get some friendly attention. Whatever the cause of it, her excitement must be considerable- she even allows herself to bring up a topic to which she has never before so much as alluded, and says that “They didn’t take me as seriously as they should have because I’m a woman.”

Julia calls on Woodard at his office. She tries to sell him on an idea he himself had in #324, that she’s hanging around because she’s fallen in love with Barnabas. He confronts her with a list of the medical supplies she has ordered recently. She ignores the list and keeps saying that she is just a woman in love. Woodard isn’t having it, and she ultimately resorts to warning him that for his own good, he must stop asking questions.

Meanwhile, there is some activity at the great house. Well-meaning governess Vicki receives a visit from her depressing fiancé Burke. The two of them had hoped to buy a “house by the sea” that turned out to be unsaleable because of provisions in an old Collins family will. Matriarch Liz eavesdrops as they talk about this, then enters the room and offers to let them live in the long-abandoned west wing of Collinwood until the house they want becomes available. Vicki loves the idea, Burke is hesitant.

This echoes a theme of the first few months of the show, when Burke wanted to take possession of Collinwood and throw the Collinses out. In response, Liz vowed that Burke would never spend a night under its roof. This offer shows viewers who have been watching from the beginning how far we have come since those days.

I wonder if that vase is full of Cheetos

Episode 84: Ten hundred years

In the great house of Collinwood, strange and troubled boy David Collins tricks his well-meaning governess, Vicki, into a room where he locks her up. Hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to the house to tell his sometime girlfriend, flighty heiress Carolyn, that he can’t spend the evening with her because he has a date with someone else.

I suppose this is one of writer Art Wallace’s diptych episodes, in which the contrast between a pair of intercut scenes tells us more about the characters than we would gather watching either scene straight through. Most such episodes are powerful and engrossing. Unfortunately, both of today’s topics are deadly dull. The pointlessness of the one multiplies the tedium of the other.

Joe and Carolyn’s relationship has never been interesting for one second. Their scenes are divided between Carolyn’s flagrant displays of contempt for Joe, quarrels that begin when Joe objects to those displays, and the occasional conversation about how the two of them don’t have a future. Today’s conversation between them is a break-up scene. An actual breakup would be welcome, but they’ve raised our hopes that way before. Since the only emotion Carolyn and Joe have managed to arouse in the audience is impatience, we don’t have any of the mixed feelings that could make the scene poignant or exciting.

The contrast at the hinge of the diptych is between, on the one hand, David taunting the suddenly brainless Vicki with the prospect that she will be in her prison for the rest of her life and, on the other, Carolyn dismissing the suddenly self-assertive Joe with the prospect that they will never see each other again. Joe’s uncharacteristic strength is more appealing, and better grounded in what we’ve seen so far, than is the uncharacteristic stupidity that led Vicki into David’s trap. But even if the breakup is the real thing this time, it’s hard to feel much relief when we know that we’re going to be locked up and miserable with Vicki.

There is some trivia in this one that will appeal to confirmed fans of Dark Shadows. It’s the first time we go inside the west wing; we get a look at a corridor and at the room where Vicki will be confined. Vicki and David talk about the long, twisting way they have taken, suggesting that it is a very large place. Much larger than reclusive matriarch Liz suggested in episode 2, when she told Vicki that the whole house, including the closed-off portions, has a total of 40 rooms.

Also, Vicki mentions that the west wing has been closed for 50 years. David picks up on “50 years” in a story he tells to frighten Vicki, ensuring that it will stick in the audience’s mind. Yet Liz, who is supposed to be in her 40s, has a conversation with her daughter Carolyn in which she remembers a time when far “fewer rooms were closed off.” That suggests that there is not only a locked-up west wing, but perhaps an east wing as well. That won’t be confirmed for four years, but it is implicit here.

Reminiscing about the way the house used to be, Liz says “There’s nothing in those rooms now but ghosts and memories.” In fact, the rooms in the west wing, like the abandoned Old House and the basement, are stuffed to bursting, not only with antique furniture, books, trunks, vases, paintings, rugs, and other things that could be sold at a high enough price to finance a considerable amount of work on the house, but also with old newspapers, tattered clothing, helpless governesses, and other unsaleable items that should not be kept in storage. For his part, David tells us that the west wing is full of mice, and we see so many cobwebs that the air quality in the occupied parts of the house must be severely affected by its dust. The Collinses really ought to empty their disused spaces and hire a couple to keep them clean.

No abandoned corridor would be complete without a full-sized metal candelabra in front of a porcelain vase resting on a dedicated stand

Apparently executive producer Dan Curtis insisted as a point of visual style that abandoned buildings be shown crammed with stuff. Today, that means that Vicki’s failure to pick up any of the blunt objects surrounding her and start beating the door down makes her look like an even bigger idiot than she already does for falling into the trap in the first place. The window is too high for her to reach, but with so much furniture and so many other objects in the room it would be no trick for her to stack something up she could climb on. After all, animal behaviorists give intelligence tests in which they get baboons to pile one thing on top of another so that they can reach a piece of fruit dangling from the ceiling. Too bad Vicki doesn’t have a baboon with her to give her some guidance.

Episode 14: We’re all pals again

We see David looking for a place to hide a small metal valve. He settles on Vicki’s underwear drawer. She catches him going through it; he runs off, and she finds nothing missing. She would apparently rather not think about what he was doing in that particular drawer. Later, he will claim that he was trying to slip a present into the drawer- a seashell, at first; then, a magazine.

Alone in the upstairs hallway, Vicki sees the locked door to the closed-off part of the house open and close, apparently by itself. At first, she thinks it’s David playing a prank on her, but he comes out of his room so soon after that there doesn’t seem to be any way he could have done it. The show has been using the idea of ghosts in episode after episode to suggest that something big is about to happen; now, for the first time, we see an event that is either a supernatural manifestation or an elaborate, Scooby Doo-esque hoax perpetrated by some unknown person for some unknown reason. So what she’s doing now- looking for David, trying to figure out what he’s been up to- is directly connected to something that is disturbing the supernatural back-world of Collinwood. It may be a while before the back-world erupts into the foreground, and even longer before it crowds out everything else and becomes the whole show. But that little valve represents the first irretrievable step on the path that will lead to what Dark Shadows became.

This is also the first episode in which Vicki gets to make someone laugh. Carolyn says that she and Joe will probably go to a movie, because “What else is there to do in this town?” To which Vicki replies “You could get into a fight in a bar.” It’s also the last episode in which Vicki is allowed to make a joke. Humorlessness one of the things that will eventually squeeze the life out of the character. Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers her one good joke well enough that it clearly could have been otherwise. Those of us who wish Vicki had stayed at the center of the show all the way through can’t help but feel sad that it wasn’t to be.