Love at First Spank

Another day. Another phone call.

At least Bill Malloy’s basso rumble lends a certain gravitas to even the most innocuous of dialog: “I’d like Mr. Devlin’s room please” suddenly sounds like Welsh poetry.

So Malloy wants to speak to Burke, but I guess the genteel decorum that governs life in Collinsport keeps him from just going up to his room, so we have to do this song-and-dance with the phone and…

Oh well, then.

But Malloy is a tough guy! He’s fierce and indominatable and nobody’s fool. Just look at that beard! Surely, he’ll storm right up those stairs and confront that smug square-jawed son-of-a…

And now, Liz with the coffee tray.

Someone’s at the door and…

Though, if you squint, you can kinda see they’ve put a tree there, or maybe some sort of hedge.

So Malloy came running all the way up to Collinwood to tell Liz about this Burke Devlin business. You’ll note that this is the same afternoon as last episode, when Liz already heard from Joe about his Burke Devlin business, and since she’s only just carrying away the tea things now, that couldn’t have been very long ago, so we can forgive her if she’s tired of talking about Burke Devlin.

Not that we get right down to that. There’s this whole song and dance when Malloy gives Liz some contracts to sign and makes this big show of calling his secretary in the same manner of a wall street broker pacing on the platform at Grand Central.

That’s an actual thing I heard some guy say on a train platform once. I can only assume he and his skittish colleague were talking about foreclosing homes.

Liz cuts right to the quick, telling Malloy to drop the pretense. There’s only one thing anybody wants to talk about, and his penis is named Burke Devlin.

Alternatively spelled “Hey-up”, “Ah-yeah”, or “Ayeeargh”, this is apparently some Down East appellation common to the region Collinsport is located in. Malloy is the only guy bothering with a Down East accent and, therefore, is the only one who uses the phrase with any regularity, though Matthew Morgan’s whispery grunts sometimes sound like they might be this.

You know how this goes: person who has spoken to Burke Devlin tells person who has not spoken to Burke Devlin about their encounter with Burke Devlin.

So, as it happens, Malloy and Carolyn get along nicely. He calls her ‘Princess’, which is nice and endearing and would probably be more so if her uncle didn’t have his own squishy pet-name for her.

Carolyn, as you might recall, is just about the only person in town who has not met Burke Devlin and does not know who Burke Devlin is and, considering the pageantry the mention of his name brings up around here, her intrigue is perhaps understandable. But little does Carolyn know that she has met Burke Devlin…

And when Malloy points out to her that that spank-happy stranger was the very man they’re speaking of…

So there ends up being a lot of controversy about this, which to us comes across as nothing more than a painstaking recap of things we saw happen on screen already.

Liz is alarmed that Carolyn has already had relations with Burke Devlin, Malloy is cagey about the kind of man Burke Devlin is, Carolyn would like everybody to know that Burke Devlin gets her juices flowing.

Elizabeth is allowed to indulge in being a square parent this time. Or at least go for an antacid.

So, if it wasn’t obvious when Burke threatened to spank Carolyn in front of her date, Dark Shadows is building a love story with these two. As mentioned before, Joe is the safe option, Burke is the rugged, handsome stranger who, for bonus points, is an enemy of Carolyn’s family.

He’s also an age contemporary of Roger’s and, while we don’t quite know Roger’s age, we know he’s older. He’s not as old as he acts, but he’s still got about 20 years on Kitten who is, again, 17.

Everyone wants in on it.

Once Carolyn is gone, Liz and Malloy keep building on the meat of last episode, discussing how Carolyn should leave Collinwood while the gettings’s good. Malloy employs some urgency here, suggesting his encounter with Burke has alarmed him sufficiently.

Ghosts again. You’ll notice the word increasingly means whatever Art Wallace wants it to mean.

Like, it makes sense when Burke is comparing secrets to ghosts, or when Roger is being himself, but Malloy sounds so unconvinced by his own employment of the word that Frank Schofield stumbles on his line.

Unless “dreams, ghosts” was in the script, in which case, refer to Point 1.

Malloy points out Burke’s very real threats of vengeance. He knows Burke is plotting because Burke basically told him this. He’s not very subtle about it, you know.

Liz points out that Burke went to prison because he committed a crime.

If even Liz’s best stooge isn’t fully convinced, just how transparent is this whole thing? Again, don’t expect to find out anytime soon.

Listen, when you’re the man on a bag of frozen shrimp, subtlety isn’t a strong suit.

They’re not coy about Malloy having a massive boner for his boss. He’s complimentary to her, clearly respects her as an equal (I know that’s the Bare Minimum these days, but need I remind you about the spanking?), and his concern for her is less patrician and more adult. Malloy knows Elizabeth will be slow to deal with Burke simply because he knows her very well.

It’s an on the whole fairly healthy relationship for this show. You might expect a B-story where Liz and Malloy explore their feelings for each other while working together to stave of Burke’s plotting.

“Didn’t Vicky write a letter back home last night?” you ask. Yes, she did. But so much has happened between then and now. Like her thrilling adventure to the phone booth where she called the very place she is now writing to.

Carolyn drops by to visit, and points out her new best friend is very boring.

Maybe we’re supposed to think Vicky’s boring? But such evolved levels of meta-text wouldn’t be invented for at least another twenty years.

It’s lore time! Even more than usual, prepare for this scrap of Collinwood history to be revised more than a high school senior’s English paper, but the essence always remains the same: people like to kill themselves in the backyard.

We already heard about Josette Collins’s plunge from Widow’s Hill from Sam. Carolyn adds two others also killed themselves, and they were governesses, just like Vicky.

It’s possible Carolyn was just embellishing about the governesses to frighten Vicky. But the general conceit that some local legend has it that another person will eventually go flying off that cliff is something that remains in the mythos, so store it away there with Josette and the price of sardines.

But Carolyn didn’t come up here to trade ghost stories. No, she was thoroughly convinced Liz would be so PO’d about Vicky’s trip to the phone both (WHICH CAROLYN TOLD HER MOTHER ABOUT IN THE FIRST PLACE, I MIGHT ADD) that Liz would send her away.

Seriously, Liz would never have known that Vicky “checked up on her” if Carolyn hadn’t ‘suggested’ that was going down last episode.

But again…

Also, Carolyn thinks this is scary.

More character contrasts: Vicky is (allegedly) the brave one and Carolyn is (allegedly) a coward whose brazenness is all a facade. Or, at least, that’s what Carolyn thinks.

She tells Vicky about her lunch with Joe, tastefully omitting her mother playing matchmaker, of course.

You’d think so, right? Is Vicky’s sensible comment here supposed to be a clue to us that we’re supposed to find this insistence on teen bride Carolyn off-putting? Is this meant to suggest that Vicky has a passing knowledge of Second (or at least 1 1/2) Wave Feminism?

Or is it a way to remind us of the only other alternative to marriage: Ol’ Spanky?

Who knows what the fuck that’s supposed to mean. Really, it’s just an excuse for Carolyn to ask The Most Important Question.

Carolyn’s attitude to Burke before this episode was largely indifferent. She shrugged him off when Vicky first mentioned him to her, expressed concern and even some fear when she overheard Roger worrying about him, and then promptly dropped him from her mind for all of two episodes, which is 1,000 years in Soap Land.

We also don’t really know what she thought of the stranger who threatened to spank her in the Blue Whale. She seems quite peeved with his presumption at the time, but Carolyn never even references him again, not even to her mother during an otherwise point-by-point recap of events.

But now that the Spanking Stranger has been identified to her, Carolyn can’t get enough.

Is it that he’s so different from Joe? Older, dangerous, take-charge. Carolyn, who admits to projecting her own confidence as a cover, must secretly want to be ordered around, dominated…

Spanked.

There’s lots of uncomfortable gender-politics here far beyond the scope of Burke and Carolyn’s age difference.

Without even going into sub/dom dynamics in the past and in the present, or acknowledging that such dynamics aren’t inherently bad (and may even be fun, depending…), I should point out that most of my personal creep factor comes from how Carolyn is written here: as a giddy, over-excited child.

Art Wallace really leans into how young and naive she is, and Nancy Barrett plays that to a T.

Who needs ghost stories when you have the threat of Innocence Lost?

Meanwhile, Malloy is analyzing the text more efficiently than I am…

Indeed, Malloy deduces that Burke’s vengeance won’t stop until he owns the Collins businesses…and the Collins house. This was alluded to briefly in Episode 7, when Maggie intimated that you couldn’t get her to stay in Collinwood, and Burke said…

So it seems Malloy is pretty on the money there. That he got this from one conversation with Burke might be impressive but Burke is as hobbled in the subtlety department as Malloy himself.

We interrupt this program for some Spooks. There’s a strange knock at the door and it’s clear they both assume it’s Burke. Malloy asks if Liz wants him to accompany her to the door, whereupon Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard proves she is a boss bitch.

But it turns out there’s nobody there. Except a broken teacup.

Liz returns to the drawing room, where Malloy is again harassing his secretary on the phone, asking after Roger, who we know resents Malloy for not including him in “family business affairs”, by which we can only assume he means the sexual tension his sister shares with the manager.

Liz writes off the tea cup and the mysterious knock as being the work of…

The poltergeist, she elaborates, is actually David. Not that she seems concerned that her nephew is running around the house playing Ding Dong Ditch and destroying the heirloom china.

I should add that the Creepy Child from aforementioned short-lived horror series Harper’s Island also got involved in some foolery with breaking tea-cups. Like David, she was fond of blaming such odd occurrences on ghosts.

Not that Harper’s Island ever had anything to do with the supernatural outside of one weird episode where the show kept implying it might. But that’s Harper’s Island for you.

Liz is oddly galvanized by this whole thing. She points out that both she and Malloy thought the knock was Burke, and admits that she was terrified…much like her daughter, hiding her fear under a confident air.

Unlike Carolyn, Liz resolves to use this as a Teaching Moment.

Atta girl.

Really, this isn’t much of a change from her attitude toward Burke before, but now it’s less “head in the sand”, as Roger suggested it was, and more “this bitch ain’t worth my time”, and I think that’s very special.

Malloy isn’t as inspired.

#violated

Upstairs, Vicky is telling Carolyn about her encounter with Burke at the coffee shop.

Vicky tells Carolyn that Burke is “a little frightening”, and asked all manner of questions about Collinwood and the people who live there. Carolyn’s response?

Honey.

This girl went from worrying Burke Devlin would kill her uncle to being miffed she isn’t also on his hit list.

Since Burke’s arrived in Collinsport, you see, it’s like a “bomb” has been thrown into their midst.

Liz calls Carolyn to speak to Malloy before he goes. Carolyn prepares to leave, but she has enough time to share the Gospel with Vicky.

Vicky’s sole response is a deadpan: “That’s hardly a recommendation”, which is one of those moments I feel there might be hope for our girl yet.

Carolyn offers to mail Vicky’s letter in town, which serves the dual function of preventing Vicky from making the same trip twice in one day, and also allowing Carolyn an excuse to meet the Man of Her Dreams, something which is lost on neither of the girls.

Vicky does try to talk Carolyn out of doing anything stupid, but in the short time she’s known her, she’s already learned it’s a pointless endeavor, so she doesn’t waste her breath.

Speaking of wasting breath…

Malloy has cooked up a kooky scheme to get Carolyn out of town while Burke Devlins. He’s offering her an all-expense-paid trip across the country with his niece and her daughter Jenny.

Yeah, his niece, and her daughter. Earlier, he spoke on the phone to this niece, and it’s clear she’s his sister’s daughter. Liz is in her 50s, so we must assume Malloy is around the same age. How old is his sister, to have already begotten two generations, including a granddaughter who is presumably an age contemporary of Carolyn’s?

Not that that’s the biggest age-related question on this show, or even this episode.

Regardless of the intent behind it, this is a free vacation in the Summer of ’66. These people don’t know it, but in some decades, that’ll be the premise of countless movies, miniseries, books and concept albums.

Carolyn, however, isn’t sold.

Malloy tries, very badly, to lie and claim this was all some honking coincidence, but Carolyn shuts that down pretty quickly, then offering a new perspective on this whole thing.

Maybe she can help?

Might it be that Carolyn’s fascination with Burke Devlin is practical rather than passionate? That she’s more concerned about the danger he poses her family than whether or not he sits on her face?

Ah, the well-meaning patrician who tells the heroine this job is too big for her to handle, that she should step aside whole the grown-ups handle it. Trope as old as time. Is there any woman, anywhere, who cannot relate to this experience?

But it’s cool, because Carolyn thinks it’s pretty funny and I guess she expects and is cool with people not taking her seriously.

Carolyn reminds her mother that she was raised in Collinwood, and so knows how to handle ‘goblins’. Goblins, which, while a refreshing break from the usual ghosts are…well…

So Carolyn gets a lift from Malloy to town (But she has her own car! How will she get back? Unless…), mails Vicky’s letter, and…

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This Day in History- Thursday, July 7, 1966

The Warsaw Pact, the communist answer to NATO, agreed to send troops to North Vietnam to assist in the war if needed.

Labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, today most known for his mysterious and never quite solved disappearance in 1975, was elected, in an uncontested race, to a third term as President of the Teamsters Union, despite a conviction for jury tampering and mail fraud.