The Emancipation of Maggie Evans

I’m starting to think the nominal protagonist might be holding a grudge.

Aggressive, much? Whatever happened to “stay, and hope and wait”? In Victoria Winters’ defense, she has been left out of the last two episodes, but would you want to be the dupe on the end of the lamest scam ever scammed?

But it’s cool now, because Vicky’s back, howling in with the demon wind.

It’s unclear why Vicky has gone out to Widow’s Hill. It’s not like she’s had the most pleasant meet-ups ther…

And look who it is.

Here we go again.

Roger and his turtleneck desperately want to speak to Vicky, of course, and have wanted to since a week’s worth of episodes ago, when he espied her enjoying some Devlin Donuts.

There’s a very chilling (ahem) noise that keeps on blowing in with all those demons. Vicky is unnerved, but Roger explains…

He sure knows how to handle a room.

It’s unclear whether Vicky makes the connection to the ‘Widows’ David claimed wanted her gone, here or before, though she mentions Widows’s Hill every other monologue, so you’d think it might be on the brain.

As we discussed the last time Vicky was on this cliff, Vicky is The Skeptic and regards all this ghost stuff with sensible contempt. The Skeptic must learn to either embrace the sinister and supernatural truth of the world around her or be utterly destroyed in the spook story equivalent of being the one guy who didn’t do the reading last class.

But Roger seems to sincerely believe this ghost stuff. This might be because he’s grown up around here, but we’ve already seen the sense and sensibility of his sister. Maybe Roger doesn’t really buy into this stuff…

But if it spooks the splinter in his sphincter, all the better.

As with Sam, Roger gives us another ghost story…this one finally explaining why Widow’s Hill is called Widow’s Hill. You’d be forgiven for assuming it was named for Josette, but or course she killed herself when (perhaps because) she was married, so no dice.

The widows, you see, used to come out to the cliff and enact this meme:

But even this luxury was denied them by Jeremiah Collins when he began to build Collinwood. Where did the Collinses live before Collinwood, you ask, if they’d been there for over 100 years at that point?

Oh, a delightful place. But you must be patient.

Jeremiah wanted to build his house on the cliff, and that meant the cliff became private property, so the women whose husbands all worked for him and helped make his fortune were turned away.

So, naturally, these women maintain their grudges and haunt the hill to torment the Collinses with unnaturally strong winds.

Nerd culture was still fairly nascent. Star Trek wouldn’t premiere for another two months, the Marvel Age of Comics was only half a decade old, and George Lucas hadn’t suffered enough breakdowns for Star Wars to suddenly seem like a good idea, so we can perhaps forgive Vicky her lack of imagination.

It doesn’t help that she, like many of her contemporaries, doesn’t seem to belong in 1966, but rather to the Austen and Bronte novels Dan Curtis and Art Wallace were pulling from when they came up with her.

We might imagine that the ghosts possess the power to control the wind to enact their sorrows, but Victoria Winters is still astonished at the speed of the modern postal service.

Anyway, Roger didn’t really come up here to share ghost stories.

Vicky’s response to this, as with so much else, is “Beg pardon?”

It turns out she’s forgotten her meeting with Sam because “so much has happened” which, for her, was mostly letters and phone calls.

This is Maggie’s fourth series appearance, and her very first scene with “Pop” her father, the volatile alcoholic who she must support off her minimum wage job.

Sam, apparently not recovered from the shock of last episode, has decided that the next best thing to do is leave town.

Maggie isn’t stupid and, face it, has probably had uncertain thoughts about this business since…

So she guesses this has something to do with Roger.

Sam’s response is eloquent, efficient, and at this point, quite expected:

Anyway, look at this real cool trick.

Perhaps this is Roger’s way of keeping his faculties in check so he doesn’t lose his shit over Vicky…

Here we go.

Vicky is all over saying “it was an accident”, which is an odd way of phrasing one voluntarily sitting down and watching a man choke on pastry for ten minutes, but she eventually remembers her dignity.

After all the insults she suffered just for not walking alone from the train station, Roger should be lucky Victoria’s even bothering to carry on this banal conversation.

Now, on one hand, we want to see Vicky stand up to Roger because Roger is, to put it kindly, a Piece of Shit. But on the other, we know Burke has nefarious intentions, and he has kept intimating these have something to do with Roger, often to Vicky’s face.

But…what if we don’t care if Burke wants to hurt Roger?

Roger is rude and elitist, condescending and snide. He tried to force his way into Victoria’s room, he carries on pseudo-flirtation with his niece, and he treats his son like a boil on his asscheek.

But Burke is a chauvinist, even by the standards of 1966. He’s arrogant, priggish, a liar, and has been actively manipulating a 17-year-old girl to behave in precisely the way he wants her to.

Those are our rivals. These are the men who drive the story in these early days. If the actors weren’t both possessed of their own unique idiosyncrasies, this whole conflict would result in nothing more than mass audience apathy.

Soaps run into this a lot if you watch them long enough. Certain characters will always, always, always be around, no matter what happens. And, just like the characters, their conflicts have ways of manifesting over years, even decades.

The Young and the Restless‘s Jack Abbott and Victor Newman will always be business rivals. But Jabot Cosmetics and Newman Enterprises will never truly be shut down, because those businesses are the hubs for the show’s two main families. They are, instead, locked in an endless battle for supremacy and, while one may occasionally come out on top over the other, neither ever truly wins. The real story is about the families themselves, their conflicts and their alliances, the struggles waged by each individual member.

Burke and Roger are locked in a similar battle. If Burke succeeds in his plan…if he gets his revenge and acquires Collinwood and all Collins business interests, that effectively puts the Collinses out of business, in and out of universe. Liz can’t stay shut up in her house, Malloy is unlikely to keep his job, Roger will likely pay for whatever wrong Burke believes was done to him, and there won’t be much money to keep Vicky around as a governess. Without the Collinses, there is no show.

But if Roger wins…what was the point? Burke may be morally ambiguous, but he wants something. And Roger’s attitude indicates that Burke isn’t bluffing about what happened 10 years ago. Surely there must be some comeuppance for Roger, our clearest villain, or else why are we watching this show?

The real answer to that is…well, the vampires that we know will turn up in just under 200 episodes. At the time, back in July ’66…who can say what the appeal was? It’s no secret among Dark Shadows fans that these early episodes didn’t pull in mass audiences, and the guys behind the scenes had to pull out a lot of tricks before settling on ol’ B.C.

The worst thing a constantly-run serialized program can become is predictable. The second worst thing is depressing, which is what your story stands to become if you can’t decide who to root for, or you can’t believe there can be a happy ending for the ones you care about.

This Burke Devlin story seems to suggest rootable characters…or does it? Is there any happy ending in sight? Do we want any of the big players in this story to be happy?

Dark Shadows hasn’t done very much with Maggie. In her last three appearances, she has provided service with a smile, hot gossip with a side of pie, and all while suffering the weight of an absurd wig that both seems too 60s to take seriously and too 60s for the provincial world every other character exists in.

She is snappy and fast-talking. She quips and she jokes, but she always does her job. She isn’t as mopey as Victoria, not as dreamy as Carolyn. She seems the closest this show has to ‘getting’ the vivacious young woman of the late-60s, and yet she is barely a character herself.

Until now.

Shorn of her silly server’s cap, wearing a coat to cover her uniform, Maggie bursts onto the scene after her father…leaving the coffee shop and inn for the first time…and Katherine Leigh Scott comes alive in a way it feels she always could have, if only the writing had been there for her.

Sam Evans may be an incorrigible, incoherent old creep, but watching his daughter plead with him not to leave, to stay and work things out with her…we can’t help but feel for her, to want him to stay, dammit, so long as Maggie has one less thing to worry about.

KLS pulls out all the stops. The yearning, the earnestness, the bright-eyed but not-quite-teary conviction that on any other program would ensure every episode opens with “My name is Maggie Evans”.

Maggie isn’t here for the vagaries and evasions that Sam and the rest pull on Vicky Winters. When Sam tries to back out, she confronts him, when he tries to dodge her questions with broad monologues, she shuts them down.

In one three-minute scene, she goes from being a part of the scenery to a piece of the canvas we wonder how we could have got on without.

Compare to Vicky and Roger. Vicky has attempted to assert that it ought not matter that she has coffee and donuts with Burke. Roger proceeds to tell her a series of increasingly unconvincing reasons why it does, never explaining why Burke is dangerous, only that he is.

Vicky isn’t inclined to buy this bullshit either.

Disregarding that this isn’t bad advice for dealing with Burke, Roger makes it clear what he does want from Vicky: for her to leave.

But before Vicky can respond for this latest plea to oust her, the show remembers they can afford one more actor for the episode.

What the Christ is wrong with these people.

Ever the agent of chaos, Carolyn tells Roger that Liz wants to see her, but does not mention anything about Burke until after he’s gone.

But we the viewers at home are well aware that Roger and Burke can’t clash yet, not when we already have five actors in the episode. Roger must have a psychic sense of this because, before going into the drawing room where he is aware that at least his sister is waiting for him, he makes a spontaneous phone call.

There, I just saved you 90 seconds. Basically, Roger calls Sam, tells him he should also leave town (little does he know Sam was planning just this) but Sam, maybe galvanized by Maggie, or maybe just being a craven waffler like usual, hangs up.

You must appreciate that they don’t waste the energy convincing us that somebody couldn’t recognize Roger from his voice.

The phone rings again, and Sam practically murders his daughter…

And hangs up the call without answering.

He says while refusing to answer any questions and flat-out lying to her.

But Maggie isn’t easily cowed. The newly emancipated Maggie Evans is unlike any other character on this show, certainly unlike any of the other women in the cast. She stands right there and lets this self-deprecating slob know just what she thinks of him.

But her manner isn’t all anger. There is regret, sadness, touches of guilt and shame, and even the ghost of an ironic laugh. Katherine Leigh Scott, a newcomer to the business just as much as Alexandra Moltke, and without the stage chops of Nancy Barrett, nonetheless manages to prove what a formidable made-for-TV talent she has.

The garrulous, cranky Mark Allen softens as if against his will in the face of KLS’s performance.

Even the script seems to call for a thawing, albeit of a different kind. For, in 12 episodes, Maggie Evans is the first person to tell us just what this business with Burke and Roger 10 years ago was about.

Well shit.

We know that Sam and Roger are connected somehow in whatever happened a decade ago, and that Burke is not aware of Sam’s involvement, still seeing him as an old friend. Maggie here proves that, unlike Carolyn, she isn’t completely blind. She has some recollection of her past, and she isn’t afraid to confront her father about it.

And, while Carolyn gleefully stirs up trouble under the guise of “helping” her family, Maggie makes it clear that, where she and her father are concerned:

There is a long, profound, almost stage-like silence, to this point unlike anything we have seen on this show before. Could it have been scripted? Or might the gravity of this performance be, in its own way, baptizing the whole show, showing an early sign of just what it can be capable of, if only some pieces are realigned here and there?

But, in the end, the only words Sam has for the daughter who just opened her heart out to him are these:

And Maggie has no choice but to obey, silently despairing.

From her point of view, it is a grim situation. Her father refuses to tell her the whole truth, she suspects he’s in some kind of trouble with Roger and Burke, and she has no guarantee she won’t wake up in the morning and find that he’s hit the hills.

But for us, it’s quite a hopeful thing indeed: we’ve seen something spontaneous and beautiful erupt from someone we (and, we must assume, the people behind the scenes) least expected. And we can hope it’ll be only a matter of time before the Powers That Be realize just what they have on their hands…

And use her.

Well, that’s enough Inside the Actors Studio for now. Let’s return to the matter at hand.

I kid and, really, for all my praise of Maggie, this has been a fairly good episode for Victoria. She stood up to Roger as best as she could, if not totally effectively, and now she’s suggesting a fairly cogent point to solve the mystery of the sexual tension between The Devlin and Unca Roger.

Ah, yes. Our buddy, Matthew! Carolyn adds that he may even be able to help Vicky solve her own mystery which, as we know, is currently bogged down in what time certain people who may or may not exist wrote and received letters that may or may not exist.

The chemistry between Vick and Matt was off the charts last time, though. I’m not sure if daytime can sustain round two.

So Vicky goes off on this next leg of her mission, to be explored next episode. Carolyn, meanwhile, decides she doesn’t want to miss that hot Burger (Burke/Roger if you plan on using Archive of Our Own tags) action:

Roger heads down the stairs, intending to go into town, presumably to have a redundant conversation with Sam.

Carolyn is eager to keep him from running off, though. She even lets the cat out of the bag.

You can practically see whatever remains of Roger’s spirit leaving his body.

Again, it is next to impossible that Carolyn thought Roger would be happy about any of her bullshit, though it’s possible she never thought Roger could ever be displeased with his Kitten.

Either way, Carolyn takes off without a word like a scolded child, leaving Roger to perform his own bit of Theater.

And now, at last, the big showdown we’ve been waiting two and a half weeks for…

Next time.

This Day in History- Tuesday, July 12, 1966

Robert J. Quinn, Fire Commissioner of the City of Chicago, orders a shutdown of all fire hydrants that had been opened, despite the heat topping at 100 degrees, causing panic in the city’s primarily Black west side. The resulting ‘hydrant riots’ would go on for days, attracting attention from civil rights figures, most notably Dr. Martin Luther King himself before the mayor would relent, allowing the city’s Black residents to use swimming pools in white neighborhoods.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel William H. Whalen becomes the highest-ranking American military man to ever be convicted of espionage, having sold secrets to the Soviet Embassy for $3,500 which would probably be more shocking today if espionage didn’t happen on Twitter and What’s App now.

Industrialist Daniel H. Overmyer founded the Overmyer Network to compete with the “big three”: CBS, NBC, and underdog (and Dark Shadows HQ) ABC. It would be launched in May 1967 and last approximately one month.

Really.