trivia – Acilius on Dark Shadows

Episode 129: Woman in flames

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is worried about her father, drunken artist Sam. Maggie’s boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, is with Maggie at the Evans Cottage, waiting for Sam to come back from his current binge.

Maggie is particularly worried about Sam’s attitude towards a mysterious woman who has recently returned to town. Maggie doesn’t know who the woman is, but yesterday, Sam and the audience found out. She is Laura Collins, estranged wife of high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Laura is the other witness to an incident ten years ago that Roger paid Sam not to tell the police about. It was his guilt about that bribe that started Sam drinking in the first place, and he is terrified that his secret will come out. As Maggie and Joe talk about Sam, Sam is in the tavern with Roger, trying to figure out why Laura has come back to town.

Roger goes home to the great house of Collinwood and tells his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, that Laura has come back to town. Liz wonders why Roger is afraid of Laura. Roger denies being afraid of her, and Liz loses interest in the question. She wonders what Laura wants. At the thought that Laura might want to see strange and troubled boy David, the son she shares with Roger, Liz expresses emphatic opposition. Liz thinks of Laura as a severely disturbed woman, and is convinced that seeing his mother would only harm David.

Sam returns to the Evans Cottage. Joe sees that he is massively drunk, and whispers an offer to Maggie to help her take care of him. She declines, saying that she has plenty of experience. Sam insists on starting a painting. Maggie can’t stop him, and goes to bed.

Sam lights a cigarette and stares raptly into the flame, as we saw Laura do yesterday. He then goes to the canvas and makes painterly motions with great rapidity.

Drawn to the flame. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

The following morning, Maggie wakes Sam up. He lies passed out on the couch, a liquor bottle that had been mostly full the night before empty on the floor beside him. In response to his protests, she refuses to leave for work with him unconscious. On her way to make coffee for him, she sees the painting he did the night before. She remarks that it is not in any style she’s ever seen him use before, and he doesn’t remember a thing about it. It depicts a woman in flames. He reacts to the painting with horror.

A woman in flames. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Dark Shadows has already shown us portraits as powerful objects, even as a locus for the natural and supernatural. Just on Monday, the ghost of Josette Collins (which, like Maggie Evans, is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott) emerged from the portrait of Josette in the Old House and brought about the climax of a story arc that began in episode 38. Now we see where these eerie portraits come from.

We will see more portraits created by possessed artists in the years to come. Something else happens in this episode for the first time, but not the last. The bartender at The Blue Whale, who has been addressed variously as “Bill,” “Joe,” “Mike,” “Andy,” and “Punchy,” today answers to “Bob.” That’s the name they settle on, perhaps because the actor’s name is Bob O’Connell.

Episode 92: It’s hard to believe there was ever any gaiety at Collinwood

The only episode of the series to take place entirely outside of the town of Collinsport and the great house of Collinwood, this one is set in Bangor, Maine.

Well-meaning governess Vicki has gone to that town in search of information about herself. When she asks her employer, reclusive matriarch Liz, even the most basic questions about why she decided to hire her and how she knew she existed, Liz becomes evasive, then flatly and transparently lies to her. Vicki has found an old document in the house that may shed light not only on the matters Liz has already refused to discuss, but even on her questions about her birth family. Sure that Liz won’t give her any information about the document, she decides to take it to Liz’ lawyers, the firm of Garner and Garner.

Vicki meets Garner and Garner. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Lawyers on soap operas don’t always follow the rules that bind their counterparts in our universe, but at least in this episode Garner and Garner are not going to tell Vicki anything their client does not want her to know. Indeed, the Garners are realistic enough to present a problem. One of them is Frank Garner, a young lawyer who is going to date Vicki for a few months. As played by Conard Fowkes, Frank is very much the sort of fellow you would expect to meet in a law office in Bangor, Maine. In this phase Dark Shadows still has some room for low-key stories and naturalistic acting, but no TV series this side of C-SPAN would be able to accommodate a character like Frank.

It’s a shame Frank isn’t more suited to Dark Shadows. The show urgently needs more young men in the cast. At this point, the only male actors between the ages of 11 and 40 they have who have appeared more than once are Joel Crothers as hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, Mitch Ryan as dashing action hero Burke Devlin, and Dana Elcar as Sheriff Patterson. Sheriff Patterson is supposed to be older than the 39 year old Elcar, and is coded as an authority figure who is unavailable for dating. So Joe and Burke have to provide the male points on all of the love triangles.

I think Frank could have been saved had he been played by a different actor. However dull the dialogue the writers might give him, he is on screen enough that a sufficiently charismatic performer could have grabbed our attention. And maybe stimulated the imagination of the writers, so that he would have had interesting things to say and do. Harvey Keitel had danced in the background at The Blue Whale in episode 33, and so must have been available for a speaking part on the show. Keitel’s quiet, brooding intensity always convinces an audience that a character who is saying very little is thinking deeply and feeling strongly and planning mighty things. Keitel would have been quite powerful as Frank.

Fowkes brought a light tone to his performance, and that is welcome. Dark Shadows always struggled to maintain a bit of sparkle against the background of a setting so gloomy that in this episode Vicki finds it “hard to believe there was ever any real gaiety at Collinwood.” If that line is meant to raise our hopes that a Vicki-Frank relationship will create a bright new mood, it sets us up for instant disappointment. Frank is cheerful and pleasant enough, but he doesn’t project enough personality to change the feeling even of the shots he is in, let alone of the entire series.

Keitel has never been known for lightness. If you wanted that, you could have turned to another Blue Whale dancer- Frederic Forrest, whom we will see in episode 137. Thinking of the goofy charm that Forrest’s character maintained throughout a movie as heavy as Apocalypse Now it’s easy to imagine a breeze of fresh air running through Dark Shadows. Not only would Forrest himself have been fun to watch as Frank, but he might well have brought out some of the most under-utilized aspects of Vicki’s character. A handful of times in these early months, Vicki is allowed to make jokes, usually in her scenes with strange and troubled boy David. David will not be amused, but the audience can see that Alexandra Moltke Isles is capable of being extremely funny. A relationship between a character played by Forrest and one played by Mrs Isles might have given the writers abundant opportunities to showcase that side of her. A pairing with the earnest, cheerful, but entirely humorless Frank represents a death sentence for Funny Vicki.

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 71: The place where they cut the heads off the fish

Friday’s episode ended, not with a cliffhanger, but with a visitation from the supernatural, as we saw the ghost of Josette Collins descend from her portrait and pirouette around the columns of the mansion she haunts. Today, Roger and Vicki sit in the diner, where he gives her a lecture about the sardine-packing business.

The apparition of Josette was the climax of an episode featuring more exterior footage than we have seen thus far. Today, we have several more location inserts, as we see Roger and Vicki walking around the village of Collinsport. As that one came to a climax with a new set- the Old House- this one also ends with our first look at a new set- the outside of the front doors of the great house of Collinwood.

Screen captures by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

First look at the front door of Collinwood from the outside — Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

These attention-getting moves prompt us to look for something big. The makers of the show tell us in so many words that the business story isn’t it.

After Roger has told Vicki a few facts about the sardine industry, she asks how the fishermen know where to look for sardines. He makes it clear that he has reached the limit of his willingness to discuss the topic with a dismissive, “Oh… luck. And experience.” Only when his enemy Burke comes in and he wants to look busy does Roger return to the subject with gusto. After Vicki has toured the cannery, Burke asks if Roger showed her “the place where they cut the heads off the fish.” Neither of those characters would watch a show about the sardine industry, or expect anyone else to do so. When they tell us that the business Burke is scheming to seize from Roger’s family doesn’t seem like exciting narrative fodder even to the two of them, the makers of Dark Shadows are telling us to forget about the business stories and focus on the sort of thing we saw at the end of Friday’s installment.

There is one bit of trivia that I hold onto from this episode. Vicki mentions to Roger that she finds it amusing that the family’s wealth began with the whaling industry and now comes from sardines- from the greatest giants of the sea to some of the tiniest fish in the ocean. An origin as whalers fits with the idea they have at this period of the show, that the Collins family first became wealthy in the 1830s.

Later, they will push them back in time, and present them as having already been rich long before then. That would rule out whaling as the first source of the Collinses’ riches. The New England whaling industry was a creation of the nineteenth century. The region’s wealth prior to that time was founded on cod fishing.

One of the major themes of the show in this period is that the Collinses are much less rich and operate on a much smaller scale than they did in the past. The transition from whales to sardines is an obvious metaphor for that decline. So obvious, in fact, that Vicki’s remark is rather a tactless one.

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 47: Three calls for the ghosts of Collinwood, and none for me

Carolyn finds her mother playing the piano in the drawing room. They have a very sweet conversation about the good times they had when Carolyn was growing up. Liz laughs when her daughter calls her a “bit of a kook.”

Carolyn wants to talk about Roger and Bill Malloy; Liz doesn’t, but can’t help listening when Carolyn tells her that Roger had declared that he wouldn’t be anyone’s sacrificial lamb. Liz is troubled by what Bill had told her about Roger and the manslaughter charge that sent Burke Devlin to prison ten years before, and wonders if the sacrificial lamb has been led to the altar.

In this scene between Liz and Carolyn, we see a relationship we can care about. In the concern the two women have for Roger, we can see their wish that he would just be part of the good times, not a source of heartache.

Roger is in his office, where Bill had told him, Sam Evans, and Burke he wanted to meet them at 11 PM sharp. It’s 11:30 when we first see the three of them sitting around wondering where Bill is. Burke wants to keep waiting, the others decide to leave. Roger tells Burke that he wants to give him his pen back, feels for it in his pocket, and says he must have left it at home.

The three men in the office don’t have anything interesting to do today. They mention that they’ve spent their time talking about the weather and the price of sardines; it’s a wonder that three New England men with nothing in particular to say to each other on an August evening wouldn’t talk about the Red Sox, but I suppose the club had a bad enough season in 1966 that it would just have added to the gloom.

Roger comes home, apparently quite happy that Bill never showed up and the meeting ended without any new information for Burke. Liz confronts him in the drawing room. She tells him that Bill had told her he thought Roger, not Burke, was responsible for the manslaughter ten years ago, and demands Roger tell her the truth. He emphatically denies Bill’s charges. For good measure, he adds more lies, denying that Bill had said the same thing to him. Liz leaves him alone in the drawing room. Out of her sight, he looks stricken.

In yesterday’s episode, the clock in the foyer at Collinwood chimed at 10:10 and again at 10:30 pm. In today’s, it chimes at 11:10 and 11:30. We saw the hands on the clock each time, and today Carolyn even says that it is 11:10 immediately before it chimes. So it isn’t a blooper- they really want us to think that the clock chimes at 10 minutes and 30 minutes after the hour. That’s just a weird thing to set your clock to do, is what I’m saying. Staying home for 18 years isn’t the only kooky thing about Liz.

Episode 42: The anticipation of doing it

In these early months of the show, the Collinses are in danger of running out of money and losing their position. In yesterday’s episode, we learned that Roger blew his half of the inheritance and Liz drew heavily on hers to keep the business in the family; in this one, we learn that the house is a moldering ruin and the rest of the family’s assets are leveraged to the hilt. Burke plans to take his revenge in part by buying up their debts and making himself their master, which it appears he is in a position to do.

Burke and his investigator are at a table in a restaurant in Bangor when they discuss these matters. Carolyn has followed Burke to the restaurant. Burke spots her, invites her to his table, and sends the investigator away. Burke flirts with Carolyn as he makes sure she didn’t overhear any important information. He makes a show of his elaborately filigreed pen. When she admires it, he makes a gift of it to her.

The last time Carolyn made her way to Burke’s luncheon table, she played with her ring, called his attention to it, and left it behind as a deliberate stratagem to prompt him to call her. She seemed altogether unconcerned with the fact that the ring was a gift from Burke’s sworn enemy, her Uncle Roger, even after Burke indicated that he found it significant; and went ahead to keep an appointment to get the ring back from Burke even after Burke had given it to Roger and Roger had returned it to her. This strange obliviousness in all things having to do with Roger recalls the equally strange blitheness with which Carolyn told Vicki about her crush on her Uncle Roger when they first met “he sends me, he really does!”)

This time the object that passes from one to the other is another distinctive bit of metal associated with some important relationships. Burke tells Carolyn how few pens there are like it in the world, that he had them made to distinguish their bearers as key people in his life. When he makes the pen a gift to Carolyn, he implies that what he is giving her is not just a thing, but a new connection between them.

I made some remarks about these scenes in a comment on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

Carolyn comes to Burke’s table at one restaurant and leaves a special ring with him; she comes to his table at another restaurant and he gives a special pen to her. Even if the mid-60s weren’t the Age of Freud among intellectually ambitious people in the USA, the flirty tone of the two encounters would make it difficult not to see these tokens as body part symbols.

…As for the pen, it is going to become a more and more unmistakable phallic symbol over the next several weeks, leading us to wonder what the show is trying to tell us about the relationship between Burke and Roger and what was really going on between them before that accident ten years ago.

There’s also a scene between Sam and Liz. Yesterday’s episode ended with a big cliffhanger when Liz opened the doors and saw Sam waiting outside, suggesting that he is going to unburden himself of the secret he and Roger share. In true soap opera fashion, once the cliffhanger has brought the audience back to watch the next episode it has served its purpose. It is then to be got out of the way as quickly and anticlimactically as possible.

Today’s anticlimax sheds an unexpected light on Sam’s position. Sam’s extreme reluctance to tell his secret grew out of his assumption that whenever and wherever he started talking, he would find a hyper-attentive audience who would listen to his his every word and lose no time putting them into far-reaching and disastrous action. What he actually meets in Liz is personal dislike for him and impatience with anything he might want to say. Once Sam starts to talk about Roger, she assumes he has come to blackmail her with some sordid information about her no-good brother, and she makes it clear she will not be having it. Joe comes to the house, Liz mentions Bill, and Sam crumbles, his secret untold and unwanted. If the audience is expecting Sam to murdered, this result will add an extra touch of bathos to his plight- a man carrying a secret that spells his doom, but that does not attract the attention of a suitable listener.

Ray Stewart, later to gain a place in history as part of the gay couple on Barney Miller, appears in this episode as a featured extra. He’s the head-waiter in the restaurant in Bangor. Both the Dark Shadows wiki and his imdb page list his role as “Customer,” but here you see him telling the server which table to go to first:

And here you see him greeting Carolyn when she arrives at the restaurant:

Ray Stewart is still alive, maybe he should complain about his role being mislabeled. In all seriousness, I’d like to see him and other onetime background players on one of those panel discussions they used to have at Dark Shadows cons and now have on Zoom. I’d like to know what it was like being an extra on the show. And of course some of them went on to become big names.

Tag: trivia