Episode 73: The Backstairs of Main Street

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With a population of around three thousand, Collinsport is one of those places that could aptly be described as a small town.

 

If somebody among their number should happen to meet with sudden death under mysterious or suspicious circumstances, the locals will surely be talking about it with each new development that arises, on street corners, while waiting in line at the bank or department store, or even while stopping in for breakfast or lunch at the Collinwood Inn restaurant, where such talk can be overheard by the waitress who will then pass the information along to her father, for decades one of the local established artists who apart from the occasional ad agency commission works most of the time getting his canvases ready for the influx of the lucrative summer tourist season.

 

Today though the coroner’s decision on how Bill Malloy actually died is expected to be handed over to Sheriff George Patterson, whose office Sam Evans had that afternoon just happened to visit on purpose while supposedly on his way into town to purchase art supplies. According to Maggie, talk among the restaurant patrons hinted that the coroner would in fact be returning a verdict of wrongful death by homicide, which as the sheriff had told Sam would automatically make him a suspect in an ongoing and highly public murder investigation, a prospect which thoroughly ruins his appetite for the free ice cream sundae his daughter had just placed on the restaurant counter before him.

 

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Episode 72: Great Moments in Mayonnaise: Cooking in Collinsport

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“Ooh, this mayonnaise doesn’t smell fresh to me. I think you better complain to the firm that made it.”

Beats complaining to the team who wrote it – the episode scripts for Dark Shadows.

In those days the major companies that made all the brand-name products were still thought of by some folks as firms rather than corporations, because at least you could still complain to a firm about something and even expect a human response as well as a solution.

Then again no public relations department of any firm would have known what to do with “Mrs.” Sarah Johnson, the first and only housekeeper on television you could think of offhand who regards her menial job with the devotion of a loving wife that never was, except that today she is a bereaved widow who has nowhere left to go in life since the only man she prepared homemade mayonnaise for has gone away forever. One could only hope she carried the same torch for her actual real-life late husband from some years ago, at least throughout that first day or two of mourning.

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Episode 71: School’s Out for Roger

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Victoria Winters has a brand new best friend.

Witness the new though not yet improved Roger Collins.

It’s going off the series outline, allowing the character to virtually groom the young governess with charm and deceit, but it beats the alternative of having Roger eventually killed off as planned thus consigning the talents of Louis Edmonds to the elusive realm of those famous Collinwood ghosts and legends that get spoken of so often yet never actually seen and realized in full.

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