Drag Me to Heck

Victoria Winters is hearing voices.

Don’t get too excited, though. Driving women insane might be a staple of horror and soaps alike, but Dark Shadows lacks the long-term commitment to Vicky to have her actually lose her mind. She’s just antsy because of that thing with the car crash that happened.

Victoria is possessed of the same nervous energy one might have when somebody you don’t particularly know well is in the hospital. She has the least reason to be jumping over this thing with Roger (barring the fact that if she had just told him certain things about her meeting with a certain tall, dark and handsome stranger in the garage…), but she’s the protagonist and we’re supposed to feel what she feels, so of course she must be jumpy at the prospect of an actual exciting thing intruding on her world of donuts and telephone calls.

Let Vicky’s relief inform you that Mr. Malloy (who exists here as Roger’s savior because there are quite literally no other available characters who would logically be present at the crash site and give a crap) has told her that Roger will be alright because, whatever other strange decisions this show has made, they know better than to fire their top talent before the show is a month old.

This is the standard descriptor for soap opera injuries ranging from burns to clifftop falls to decades’ long prisoner of kind of Nazi scientist. Because actors are vain, and the audience may lose interest if they can’t moon over those handsome mens from their sofas.

But Liz doesn’t share Vicky’s relief. Not just because Roger would be one less mouth to feed, but because…

In her defense, events have conspired to make this conclusion seem like the most obvious thing in the world. We know it’s true. It’s just that the person responsible isn’t who Liz, or anybody else involved in this business, thinks it is.

It transpires Malloy discovered Roger’s wreck on the road and brought him to the town doctor, a delightful personage whose suffering we will get to see very soon. He confirmed somehow (probably by virtue of being a Salt of the Earth Man) that the brakes on the Rogermobile most certainly failed.

Now we get to the difficulty…why doesn’t Vicky think this? Liz points out, she was the one who saw Burke acting more obvious than the killer on Columbo at what would become the portable scene of the crime. Burke also invited Roger to town for a ‘business meeting’ the purpose of which he could barely describe in a sentence! And Burke’s motive is so built-in everybody in town seems to already understand it, even if we still have been told next-to-nothing about what really happened ten years ago.

Continuing to defy everything she earlier said, Vicky points out Carolyn thought Burke was pretty swell.

The actual word she uses is ‘child’, which isn’t much better.

Got to be the first time he’s ever heard that.

We return to Burke and Carolyn’s date.

Burke insists they all start going by first names. Joe is understandably not into this.

As we know, though, Carolyn finds smirky condescension pretty hot.

You’ll note that Joe and Carolyn have ordered sodas of some kind. Burke is drinking a scotch on the rocks, paired with a cigarette, the delightful combo enjoyed by every businessman, housewife, brain surgeon and nursing mother in the 1960s.

Carolyn doesn’t think it matters, which I think tells us a great deal about what she hopes to get out of all this.

It’s Burke that turns talk to the subject of Joe, insisting that he’s a “nice kid” and apparently a real catch, bringing the number of people who have sung Joe’s praises to Carolyn to three for three. The difference here is that Burke has some weird horn for the fair Carolyn and has treated Joe with nothing but patrician condescension in his every meeting with him.

It’s easy to suspect he’s trying some kind of reverse psychology, extolling Joe’s virtues to Carolyn to create the image in her head that he isn’t ambitiously pursuing her, just as he was (somehow) able to convince her he doesn’t mean her family any harm.

Then, anything Carolyn does with him becomes, in her mind, ‘her idea’.

Burke wonders why Roger hasn’t joined their double date. Kitten, by contrast, seems to have forgotten all about poor, precious Unca Roger, and who can blame her?

Carolyn takes a moment to extol what she believes is the greatest virtue of Burke Devlin: he’s a real he-man who doesn’t take no for an answer.

If you are reading this on public transport, kindly make sure there’s nobody next to you that may be soiled by impending vomit.

That’s what Carolyn wants. Again, we must presume the gentlemen responsible for bringing Dark Shadows to daytime didn’t share the desire of contemporary soap scribes Agnes Nixon and Bill Bell to educate their audiences with what would now be called ‘social issues’ stories…such as about the Vietnam War or getting your pap smear.

Dark Shadows is by and large the product of a single auteur’s imagination…Dan Curtis had a dream and, with no daytime experience, set to work throwing together a story pulled from Jane Austen novels and an elementary understanding of the writings of Edgar Allen Poe to support it. He roped in Art Wallace, who fleshed out supporting characters, many based on a TV film he’d written in the previous decade, and create a self-contained world where the problems and pleasures of the 60s are as distant as SnapChat and the iPhone 11.

There is no attention to social concerns on Dark Shadows which is okay. It’s fine. It’s not like Luke and Laura saving the world from being frozen is meant to be taken as a primer on the dangers of climate change. Soaps don’t have to be teaching tools, and it’s probably a good thing this show isn’t, considering we’d then eventually have vampires and witches talking about the dangers of drunk driving and missing your mammogram.

My point is, I don’t think Wallace and Curtis wanted us to think Carolyn’s strange desire to get bludgeoned and carried off by a man is meant to be something for us to emulate. That’s why Carolyn isn’t the heroine, she isn’t the narrator. She’s more interesting and charismatic than the heroine/narrator, but so is Maggie Evans, and she’s also quite different from Carolyn.

Art Wallace hasn’t written cheap or flat female characters. A strong argument can be made that he cares the most for these women (given he created them) of any of the many writers that would follow him in Dark Shadows’ run.

Carolyn’s desire to be ‘handled’ by a man, to be ‘forced’ out of her comfort may then be seen as a reflection of her indecision. She wants to leave Collinwood, but she lacks the courage (so she thinks) to do it under her own power. She admitted as much to Vicky. And we are just over three weeks into a serialized five-day a week program. Surely there is plenty of time for Carolyn to grow, maybe to realize she doesn’t need to be dragged anywhere to declare for her…

Oh well.

Burke goes to pick a new song for the juke. Since we’ve already heard two this episode, that leaves one other option. Joe asks Carolyn about what’s going on between her and “that character”.

Back at Collinwood, action has moved to the not-quite-dining room for some reason. Liz has just summoned her choke-happy caretaker Matthew to the house.

Why, yes. Vicky, and by extension, us, were told that three episodes ago. In retrospect, they really weren’t trying to make this car crash thing a surprise.

Liz mentions that ever since his near death experience, Matthew has made sure the brakes work at every car at Collinwood.

We already know that Matthew’s negligence has nothing to do with Roger’s car crash. We even know that it isn’t Burke who is responsible for it. We know, in fact, everything, right down to the motive and where the tell-tale suppository is hidden.

So this isn’t a whodunit, where the object of the story is to discover who is responsible for the crime. Nor is it a howdunit, as in the thriller procedurals of the 70s and 80s, including the aforementioned Columbo, where we learn from the onset who the criminal is and must watch along as we determine how the crime was committed.

Nor is it a whydunit. David Collins has made clear multiple times that he knows his father hates him and wants to send him away. He even gave Roger ‘one chance’ to recant this statement right before he got into his car.

What this, Dark Shadows’s first proper storyline really is, then, is a strange farce where we in the audience know everything from the beginning (a sharp contrast to the very slow spoon-feeding of information we get in the matter of Burke and Vicky’s respective pasts, which are less storylines and more like arcs), and watch as everybody very slowly blunders through point after point on a slow, agonizing march to the truth.

Riveting television.

But at least we get Joan Bennett saying things like this:

Well, Matthew tries his best.

Liz is referring, at the onset at least, to David, who Vicky claims is at least pretending to sleep, unaware of the ‘tragedy’ that has befallen his father. But she changes the subject to Carolyn, also a young person whose future she is very uncertain about.

Again, Victoria knows for a flat fact that Carolyn changed her plans with Joe for the sole purpose of meeting up with the man Elizabeth strongly suspects is an attempted murderer. The only reason, we must conclude, that she doesn’t tell Liz this is because she’s afraid of finally being yelled at for a good reason.

Matthew has answered Liz’s summons. Liz is currently upstairs getting some ‘pills’ for a ‘headache’. In the ’60s, people popped people for anything, usually pairing them with the aforementioned scotch and cigarettes.

Liz returns from her dose of horse tranquilizers and gets right to work putting the squeeze on Matthew, so if you were hoping for five minutes of car talk, God bless you.

There’s a kind of thread here where Liz suggests that Matthew might dislike Roger enough to purposefully sabotage his car, but it lacks any real steam and we move beyond it fairly quickly, which is probably for the best, considering certain behind the scenes developments we’ll have no choice but to go into later.

Matthew tells Liz that he didn’t tamper with the brakes, but somebody must have, because the car was checked out two days ago…which is actually the day before Vicky even got to Collinsport. Again, it’s been the same day for 12 episodes.

Carolyn, apparently bored with Joe’s fish-like dance moves, propositions Burke at the very same second as the angels start singing.

I won’t say anything.

Burke jokingly suggests that Joe has a habit of punching people who take Carolyn for a dance.

If you’re playing the Dark Shadows drinking game, raise a toast to Joe Haskell for sticking up for himself.

In a fairly transparent way of disarming tensions, Burke says he’s tired of waiting for Roger to show up and he doesn’t intend to hang around any longer.

Make that two toasts.

Joe storms off. Burke promptly insists he and Carolyn go after him. You might suspect Carolyn would object to this, but as we well know, she appreciates being ordered around.

And…more obnoxious phones.

It’s a meddlesome reporter looking for a meddlesome story to create meddlesome problems.

Because American soaps tend to almost exclusively revolve around the lifestyles of the rich and famous (though one wonders how famous you can get by being the Walt Disney of canned sardines), many storylines over the decades have involved tangling with story-hungry media.

Sometimes, journalists are also portrayed as heroes and heroines in their own right, such as Jack Devereaux on Days of Our Lives. Yanno, once you get over the fact that he raped another heroine. Soap operas were pretty casual about rape.

For the most part, though, the ‘media’ is a hodgepodge cloud of invisible agitators and sometimes dayplayers who exist only to harass the noble one percenters at the center of the daytime universe. Reporters are vapid, greedy, and obsessed with the bottom-line. So, just like the people they’re so desperate to cover, but without the sardine fortune.

Still, we can’t be too disparaging to the Collinsport ambulance chasers. Some rich asshole wiping out in his Batmobile is bar none the most interesting thing that’s happened in this town since that rich asshole and his boyfriend got involved in a case of vehicular manslaughter.

Once the vampires get involved, however…

Matthew went down to the side of the road to see the wreck of the Rogermobile. As you can see, he is pale and shaken and isn’t quite sure what to do with his hands, so either he’s much more traumatized about Roger’s near death experience than the script indicates, or there’s something on set terrifying George Mitchell in a way those bad eggs could never hope to aspire to.

It’s…uh…it’s the second thing.

This isn’t the same man who menaced Victoria Winters with a crowbar ten episodes ago. Nor is he the titanic force that ordered her out of his house three episodes ago. The reason for this has been lost to the dark shadows of history for more than fifty years, but the tireless Prisoner of the Night over at Dark Shadows From the Beginning, in his immensely detailed dissection of each episode down to its barest bones, has discovered that George Mitchell had more than one reason to be ill at ease this episode, and none of them have to do with Roger’s car accident.

I won’t steal my precursor’s thunder, but I invite you to read his findings and judge for yourself. As a firm believer in the Hot Mess Principle (which states that mess is matter’s natural state), I accept his findings as conclusive fact.

[Word of advice for first time watchers, though, to be wary of spoilers! Though this hot mess of a show can be just as enjoyable if you know what’s coming.]

Funny, that.

Liz asks Vicky if she knows which movie Carolyn went to, though there’s only one area movie theater and it isn’t likely that a small town cinema in 1966 would show more than one picture at a time, but either way, this gives Vicky a chance to very belatedly tell Liz that Carolyn has gone to the Blue Whale for the express purpose of Burking with Devlin while her boyfriend watches.

Not that Vicky was hired to be Carolyn’s babysitter. Either way, Victoria has made just as much progress changing her heart as David’s, so it all comes to the same thing.

Victoria seems to understand the same thing, though she doesn’t believe Burke is truly dangerous. Again, it’s one of those circular failures of reasoning. Vicky is uncertain about Burke, though he has been polite to her. She knows the Collinses don’t trust him. She knows Joe loves Carolyn and doesn’t approve of Carolyn’s pining for Burke. She saw Burke standing over Roger’s car with a wrench.

And yet, somehow, this girl who will go to the ends of the earth to uncover the truth about telephone conversations, is satisfied that Burke means nobody any harm.

Vicky, later, comes in with yet another broken teacup, presumably for no other reason than for Joan Bennett to do what she does best:

The implication being that Carolyn is as breakable as that cup? I don’t know. We know that Burke dragged Carolyn off to wrangle her boyfriend, but we’re expected to play along with the assumption that Burke just tried to kill somebody and Carolyn might be his next victim, even when we’ve already been told everything about those assessments is wrong.

Drama!

It’s This Guy From That Thing!

Like many of his Dark Shadows contemporaries, George Mitchell was a product of the stage. In a Broadway career spanning almost 30 years, he portrayed roles as various as The Merry Widows’ Cascada and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce in Indians.

A noted character actor, Mitchell appeared in his share of crime and Western films in the 50s and early 60s, including 3:10 to Yuma and Fallguy.

People who actually enjoy Michael Crichton may know him from the 1971 (the same year Dark Shadows ended) adaptation of The Andromeda Strain, in which he played a local drunk who, somehow, was one of two survivors of the titular plague.

My personal favorite detail in Mitchell’s filmography is his impressive catalog of B-movie appearances, in which he was often typecast as an academic, believe it or not.

B-movie credits for Mitchell begin with 1959’s Space Invasion from Lapland (he played a psychiatrist) and also include the American remakes of Mexican schlock classics Face of the Screaming Werewolf and Attack of the Mayan Mummy, both released in 1964. Beloved for its trashiness, Mayan Mummy has been charitably called a “tedious effort”, but if watching Mitchell soldier on around Collinwood has taught me anything, it’s that he surely did his best to make it less so.

Mitchell also co-stared in Twilight of Honor, a legal drama which was also the acting debut of future Dynasty star Linda Evans.

On television, Mitchell had credits in many a western, most notably the Western T.V series Bonanza, as well as Gunsmoke, Tales of Well Fargo, and Have Gun, Will Travel.

You know those police procedurals that play at 2:00 AM on nostalgia stations? Mitchell’s craggy face and naturally brusque manner made him as suited for mobsters and private eyes as sheriffs and outlaws. Crime dramas that featured Mitchell include such notables as Perry Mason, Peter Gunn, The Untouchables and the titillatingly titled Naked City.

Later in his career, Mitchell also tried comedy roles on such shows as Bewitched, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Hazel, which in my opinion, is a darker blight than any Aztec mummy could ever hope to be.

Mitchell did not long outlive the show he left so unceremoniously. Passing away in January 1972, he is one of the first (not the first) Dark Shadows actors to die.

This Day in History- Monday, July 18, 1966

The International Court of Justice, the judicial arm of the United Nations, dismisses a petition from Liberia and Ethiopia to revoke South Africa’s administration of South West Africa, on the basis of South Africa’s apartheid policy. Concluding a lengthy deliberation that began in 1960, the decision has been called the most controversial in the court’s history.

Gemini 10 is launched from Cape Kennedy. Astronauts John Young and Michael Collins (who’s still alive and really pretty badass) reach an unprecedented altitude of 474 miles above Earth, breaking an earlier Soviet record by 163 miles.

The Hough Race Riots break out in the midst of a historic Cleveland heat wave. 300 police end up involved in the violence.

Bobby Fuller, singer of classic Ear Worm, “I Fought the Law (And the Law Won)” is found dead in his car in Los Angeles. he was 23. Official ruling suggests he died from hemorrhaging due to the combination of the heat and the vapors of his car, though this has been contested. Conspiracy theories have linked Fuller’s death to that of Sam Cooke, drawn conclusions to Charles Manson (unlikely, given Manson would be in prison until 1967), and an LAPD/Mafia plot.