Tag: Where the Action Is

Episode 75: On a Clear Day, You Can See Murder

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“Roger’s tension is increased. Learning about Burke’s meetings with Vicki, he…once again…probes, endlessly wanting to know every word that was spoken between them…feeling, more and more, that Vicki and Burke are united to harm him” (Shadows on the Wall, p. 50)

That was supposed to have been the aftermath of the brake valve caper which led to Roger’s accident back at the end of the third week.

It is now Friday October 7, 1966, and Dark Shadows is airing an episode that concludes its fifteenth week on the air. Roger spends the first half of today’s episode admiring the view from atop Widow’s Hill, when Vicki, herself out for a walk with a view, happens upon Roger there: “Not planning to jump, are you?” She reiterates the line Roger startled her with back in episode 2, and here today Roger offers a belated but good-natured apology.

That’s Art Wallace for you, always reprising an earlier situation but with none of the story resolve such repetition might bring about. In yesterday’s episode, David was sneaking into Burke’s hotel room just like in episode 29. In episode 73, David stole away from Collinwood into town and Collinsport Inn to visit Burke but stopped in at the restaurant downstairs for a sundae, just like in episode 28.

Two weeks from now will have the run of episodes 81 to 85 where David locks Vicki away in a secret room in the closed off wing of the house, on the pretext of having something important to show her – not a filigreed fountain pen, which is a prop and product of the TV series itself along with the indeterminate side avenue into mystery and suspense with the death of Bill Malloy. These will be the final week of episodes written by Art Wallace. What should be happening right around now with today’s episode between Roger and Vicki according to the series bible is more tension:

“Roger’s pressure on Vicki is heightened. Playing on her unsureness, on her growing tension, he tries to get her to leave. Roger and David….almost seem to be working as a unit in their constant harassment of Vicki. They make the legends of the old house seem alive as they surround her with constant reference to the horrors that live with them” (Shadows on the Wall, p. 55).

Instead we have a dead plant manager, a silver filigreed fountain pen found on a beach, and up until this afternoon a prime murder suspect who on this fine day tosses pebbles instead of governesses over the edge of Widow’s Hill, all because too many ABC affiliates across the country thought it would be a great idea to fit Dark Shadows in at 10:30 am instead of 4 pm where it belongs.

TV Guide_Dark Shadows listing Monday 3 October 1966_10.30 am_page A24_ep71

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Episode 74: Celebration Day: Death Has Come at Last

Celebration_Roger is delighted by the coroner's decision_ep74

“Accidental death due to drowning. I think I’ll have it cast in bronze.”

The main thing to be taken from today’s episode is how each of the interested parties have reacted to the news of the coroner’s decision, that Bill Malloy’s death was the result of accidental drowning.

 

You would expect that Burke should be outraged, because this would leave him hanging with no hope now of clearing his name which is what Bill Malloy had promised would come of the meeting he had arranged that night in Roger’s office.

 

Generally though most of those involved would be relieved, especially Mrs. Stoddard and Carolyn who considered Bill near and dear, that no violent act on the part of person or persons unknown had befallen the man and that at last the matter could be brought to rest.

 

It’s Roger’s overreaction that stands out as suspicious; all that expansive euphoria, celebrating with drinks and a carefree stroll along the cliffs – where Bill’s body had washed up just a couple nights earlier – as though Roger were a terminal patient who had just been handed a clean bill of health and the renewed lease on life that would naturally go with such news. There’s just too much of a joyous plateau for comfort.

 

Either the producers and writers of Dark Shadows have suddenly decided to just make a red herring out of the entire Bill Malloy mystery story or someone has decided that Louis Edmonds is too good of an actor to let go, considering that Roger’s character is, or was, scheduled to be killed off at some point, after Victoria Winters makes one too many visits over to the Evans cottage while hearing Sam’s tongue getting loosened over liquor to reveal details of what really happened ten years ago with the Burke Devlin manslaughter story.

 

Most likely it’s the latter point, because things in life tend to happen for a reason.

 

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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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Episode 66: A Killer Alibi

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Set only in Collinwood, Monday’s episode, number sixty-six in the series, is a study in minimalism with four actors in the cast and only two sets in use. It’s just as well that they save a little in the budget to start the week, given how Dan Curtis is planning something big for Friday.

 

You’d figure David and Carolyn would be downstairs with all the raising of voices this evening in both the Collinwood foyer and drawing room over Burke’s unwanted presence there, but as noted above the week’s budget also calls for a slight cutback in realism. We’ll check in with the little monster and the belle of the ball as the week moves on. Today is for voicing suspicions in the death and disappearance, and subsequent washing ashore and pushing away, of Bill Malloy – specifically, on whether it’s reasonable to consider whether both Roger Collins and Matthew Morgan have been working as a team.

 

There is also ample room in today’s episode to explore the lonely plight of Victoria Winters’ upbringing in the foundling home in New York, with Mrs. Stoddard’s obvious pangs of guilt on full display but who is nonetheless unable to reveal the maternal truth the viewer by now is certain she has been keeping from the young governess. Sadly, today’s episode thus represents yet another lost opportunity in the story of Victoria Winters.

 

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Episode 57: The Ripple Effect

Sheriff Patterson knows when Bill Malloy died (2)_Act IV_ep57

As the news of Bill Malloy’s death ripples across Collinsport, it seems a cruel hand of fate that Burke Devlin is the last to find out, the one who had been counting on him the most and therefore whose lingering hope had held out the longest.

Different people have been affected by Malloy’s death in different ways, and this week of episodes presents a series of character defining moments for those most centrally involved. For Elizabeth Stoddard, after the initial shock of caretaker Matthew Morgan’s questionable deed in trying to cover up that Malloy’s body had washed ashore near Collinwood by pushing the body back out to sea, there is in keeping with a matriarch of her stature the necessity of maintaining the dignity of not only herself, but also of Collinwood by seeing to it that all members of the household are allowed to function normally while still maintaining a certain tone of mourning, especially with Carolyn having felt the loss more profoundly than most in having lost a key paternal figure which she has previously cited as the closest thing she has ever known to a real father.

Burke Devlin’s reaction is the most curious, in the way that he seems to view Malloy’s death as a fundamental flaw in human nature, as if fate had intervened specifically to prevent him from clearing his name. Unlike those who mourn the passing of Bill Malloy for the life he lived, Burke takes this grim occasion to eulogize on the death of honesty, in mourning for himself.

It’s a soap opera after all, a show about people and the troubled unsatisfied lives they lead, and no one is perfect, not even the man who seemingly has everything in the palm of his hand.

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Episode 52: Something Uninvited

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Today Dark Shadows crosses over to the supernatural. In so doing, a new chapter in the story of Victoria Winters is presented; more about this below, in the main body of the post.

Dark Shadows fans have wondered why the original story of Victoria Winters, as outlined in the series bible Shadows on the Wall by story creator and developer Art Wallace, was dropped. It wasn’t; rather, it was revised.

Episode 60, also written by Wallace, strongly hints for the family background of Victoria Winters a maternal rather than paternal link to Collinwood, which is implied further in episode 127.

For now, today’s episode provides the first ever Dark Shadows mashup:

Alfred Hitchcock Presents + The Uninvited = Dark Shadows episode 52

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Episode 50: What The Tide Brought In

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It almost feels like the supernatural era of Dark Shadows starts right here in episode 50.

 

Aside from the fact that a man Elizabeth Stoddard has known for twenty-five years is still missing, these late evening scenes in and around the Collinwood estate carry a decidedly ominous tone throughout.

 

There’s talk of ghosts and tragic family legends, the Wailing Widows, and premonitions of death courtesy of a nine-year-old boy with a crystal ball who seems to know for certain what grim and deathly portents this night will bring forth and for whom.

 

Lately daytime television’s first gothic serial drama has been branching into mystery and suspense, and here in this episode story creator and developer Art Wallace is reaching back for the supernatural and noirish mid-1940s inspirations of Dark Shadows to bring a kind of otherworldly atmosphere to the current story, enough so that the viewer would possibly be wondering whether Bill Malloy’s disappearance may be the result of darker, more paranormal forces at work.

 

Episode 50 is about as close to the supernatural as Dark Shadows has gotten thus far without actually crossing over; it will be in one of next week’s episodes when the lines between the physical and spirit worlds really begin to blur.

 

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Episode 49: The Case of the Vanishing Man: Part 2, Questions and Concerns

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Today the talk of Collinsport is Bill Malloy.

Not that he was particularly popular; matter of fact, most folks just seemed to take him for granted, that is, when he was around.

It’s a seeming disappearance that has everyone talking about a man many around town wouldn’t have otherwise given a second thought to.

Even more than this, there exists in the minds of some the possibility of foul play, causing even friends of long-standing to begin turning against one another.

That’s what happens when you bring Alfred Hitchcock to a town like Collinsport; the smaller the populace, the larger the mystery, the more persistent the questions, the greater the concerns.

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