Living My Truth: the Carolyn Stoddard Story

Victoria Winters desperately wants us to believe we are watching a show where things happen.

Sure, Roger almost dying behind the wheel is a big deal thing, but at the same time, it’s…it’s one big deal thing. What else is Victoria describing? Devlin Donuts?

Elizabeth resurfaces this episode.

Liz is restless, waiting up for news of Carolyn, whose absconding with Burke she learned of two episodes ago. Again, it feels like Episode 18 may have been less spare if we’d included bits of this thread in it instead of packing it all into this one, but this is part of a contrived strategy to ensure that Burke and Roger’s hotel room confrontation happens on Friday.

Malloy calls Liz from the Collinsport Inn, one of only two establishments in town, to tell her he has not yet had any luck.

Malloy, who ten episodes ago was determined to get Carolyn out of the state to ensure she didn’t do anything stupid with Burke, now assures Liz that Carolyn won’t do anything stupid with Burke, this after she was seen leaving a bar with him.

The Collinwood clock is an interesting specimen, in that the naturally low-resolution of even these restored episodes makes it almost impossible to see the hands. The clock chimes a lot, especially in episodes that take place at night. But, if you really look at the clock face, you’ll see it’s either 10:00 (making Victoria a real lightweight) or ten to midnight (somewhat justifying everybody’s frequent mentions of how ‘late’ it is).

The hands of the clock are almost the same length, and it doesn’t help that the chiming doesn’t coincide with hours, half hours or quarter hours, but simply play in accordance to whatever the sound department believes is dramatically sufficient.

But if you think that demonstrates incompetence, wait till you see this!

In Dan Curtis’s quest for realism, he sought out establishing shots to accompany the location footage shot of actors that we see frequently throughout these early episodes. The most pervasive of these establishing shots are the ones for Collinwood, which open every episode, with the exception of the first one. We’ve also seen the outsides of the Collinsport Inn and the Evans house.

The Blue Whale is a long, low seaside building that may certainly house our favorite nighttime hangout, and yet this beautiful illusion is shattered by the thing they added to let you know what it was. Somehow, the font on that sign, which we must assume was hand-lettered by a man making slave wages or else by Dan Curtis himself, manages to single-handedly, with one stroke of absurdly 60s lettering, destroy the illusion of Collinsport.

In sharp contrast to how it appeared during Joe and Carolyn’s ill-fated date, the Blue Whale is silent and bereft, its one inhabitant being this reputable member of society.

He is promptly joined by Malloy, the other middle-aged male townsman. You’ll note that Malloy frequently gets shoe-horned into the role of convenient talk-to. It’s the same function Mr. Wells performed, also with Sam. Sam’s only pertinent connection to the canvas, exempting the adversarial Roger and the plot-relevant Burke, is Maggie, and she already had her breakout scene with him.

So, just as Malloy ended up being the first responder to Roger’s accident, his liaison at the doctor, and the one to prove the significance of the suppository, he now inherits Mr. Well’s role as Sam’s would-be AA sponsor.

Malloy has an ulterior motive…to discover whether or not Sam saw any of the confrontation between Carolyn, Joe and Burke. We already know he didn’t, because he wasn’t at the Blue Whale during those episodes but, yet again, we must play along.

We then get a minuscule tidbit of Malloy backstory, in that he used to be a scrub-hand in the Collins fleet before, somehow, securing the job as head honcho of the business. If that sounds like something you’d like to learn more about, forget it. We have loftier concerns.

Malloy’s concerns are opposite to Wells’s. While Wells challenged Sam to get sober in exchange for Burke and Carolyn-related information, here Malloy plans to get Sam drunk so he can divulge Burke and Carolyn-related information.

Sam, of course, already knows Burke and Carolyn were together at some point. He knows Carolyn brought Burke to Collinwood, and that he was still there when he tried to send an SOS to Roger. He’s fairly obvious about knowing something (even if it isn’t something that we don’t know), so Malloy gets curious.

Watch out, Wells…a challenger appears! And this one has a contract. Sam even responds to him as though used to his cutesy aphorisms.

You’ll note this is the second time this week that Art Wallace has called attention to the American sub-strata that was once called ‘the Down East’.

Because I have nothing better to do, and I write this with the expectation that many of you read this on your way home from work, a brief history of the ‘Down East’, a colloquialism that refers, broadly, to the entire state of Maine and, sometimes, to the Maritime Provinces of Canada.

The name has nautical origins and comes from the manner sailors would’ve had to travel to get to Maine in warm months, when prevailing winds blew from the southwest, necessitating ships to sail downwind to go east.

“Down East” has been in use for the inhabitants of the region Collinsport is located in since the 1820s, which in-universe would be the time of Jeremiah Collins, who built Collinwood.

Maine humorist John Gould wryly noted that “Down East is a never-never land always east of where you are”, referring to the region’s mythic implacability.

Down East also has lent its name to a popular type of Canadian fiddling…

And now that the weaker among you have gone to sleep, we return to your irregularly scheduled daytime drama.

If it feels like you missed something, that’s because we all did. Rather than show Burke and Carolyn tracking Joe down and then returning to the inn whereupon Carolyn and Burke exchanged a fond farewell while Joe haplessly looked on, we are told all of this second hand in the form of Carolyn passive-aggressively accusing Joe of not being very nice to the man who has made a boardwalk sport out of emasculating him at every opportunity.

The logical reason for this is that they didn’t want to build a set for the Logansport movie theater, but they could just as easily have used a car or set up some padded seats in an undressed set. It’s not like you need a lot of initiative to make a semi-convincing theater. The Collinwood garage got a set, and we’ll never see it again, and poor Dr. Reeves’s medical practice is already matchsticks!

This could’ve provided a buffer, giving us three extra characters (wouldn’t be the first time an episode had six players; the most recent offender aired Tuesday) to balance the saga of Roger and Vicky’s drawing room conference, and sparing us the five minute litigation about wrenches.

Anyway, Carolyn is tops angry with Joe.

Can you blame her? It’s either a quarter past 10, or right around midnight, and either way, that doesn’t seem like hamberder time. Nancy Barrett, by the way, delivers that line with admirable seriousness, as if she were filing for divorce.

Carolyn then accuses Joe of standing her up.

Listen, I’m ordinarily inclined to side with the lady in soap opera squabbles, usually because the contemporary soaps give the lady the better writing, and her costar is 9 times out of 10 played by some variety of bigot.

But it’s almost impossible not to side with Joe. He only ‘walked out’ on Carolyn after she, time after time, ignored, dismissed, or belittled him in favor of, and for, Burke, even going so far as to invite him to tag along on her date, something even Burke seemed to think was ridiculously over-the-top.

We keep coming back to the end of the world. It’s my favorite prosaic preoccupation of Art Wallace’s. Since the very beginning, we’ve gotten the narrative cue that Collinsport sits at the end of all things and, despite the mundane nature of Carolyn and Joe’s domestic dispute, when Joel Crothers resignedly suggests the end is nigh…

You can’t help but consider that maybe he’s right. Collinsport, and Collinwood within it, is a prison for almost everybody. Liz and Carolyn we have discussed numerous times in this mold. Burke, too, is a prisoner of his vengeance. David, of his father and his threats (and, now, of his own actions which begin, albeit at glacial pace, to close in on him). Sam, like many addicts, is trapped by his vice, and also by whatever guilt led to his drinking. Maggie is a prisoner of her responsibilities, which prevent her from having the wild life that Carolyn tries so desperately to enjoy.

And Joe is Carolyn’s prisoner. Because, despite everything, he loves her and can’t imagine what he will do if she doesn’t love him back.

Without her, it may as well be the end of the world.

Back at the Blue Whale…

Sam mentions he’ll be off soon to pick up Maggie from her late shift. Not that we won’t see her this episode, not even manning the counter while Joe and Carolyn sit at their table. And, yes, if you’re keeping track, Maggie has worked the counter all day. Support your local union.

Sam continues probing.

It seems Mark Allen is only ever likable when he plays a messy bitch.

 That’s the same excuse employed by Agatha Christie’s spinster sleuth Jane Marple, only when Miss Marple does it, it’s cute and a little disarming, because she’s a tiny old lady who conceals her cleverness behind others’ assumptions of her. When Sam does it, it comes off as a blustery giant in ill-fitting pants speaking like an asshole at a men’s club.

Malloy is eventually persuaded to give up the charade and spill the tea.

Sam panics, immediately jumping to the conclusion that Burke was responsible, a conclusion we know Malloy has also reached, but he doesn’t tip his hand in this regard at all.

Either way, Sam hastily excuses himself, which doesn’t do a thing to acquit him.

As it turns out, Sam has no reason to hurry outside of changing his Depends.

She seemed well enough seven episodes ago/earlier this evening, though dealing with Sam for any length of time would turn anybody’s stomach.

As he salts his meat, Joe attempts to take some of the salt out of his relationship with Carolyn, reminding her for what must be the 100^th time in this very, very, very long day that he loves her, but boy gee willickers, does she know how to send a fella mixed signals.

Well, that’s something. It will rarely ever be referenced again, but Joe seems to imply that Burke isn’t even the first man she’s eye-fucked at the bar while he buries his face in his hands and orders iced tea.

Sure, you get a sense of this with the Swing Dance that introduced us to these characters, but here Joe explicitly says Carolyn has been leading him on with men in the vein of Burke for, presumably, as long as they’ve been involved. That’s quite a serious charge.

A real ball-buster of a soap vixen would flat-out admit that, yes, she’s been entertaining other men in front of her boyfriend and add that if Boyfriend wants to do anything, he sure as hell can try and she’d appreciate the novelty.

But Carolyn instead abides by the middle school trick of claiming she Doesn’t Know What You’re Talking About, by extension implying Joe is insecure.

Alternately, she actually didn’t think he’d get so angry about it, in which case she should be kept from Burke as an act of public safety because the poor child would never survive.

Carolyn admits this whole thing was a sham effort to run into Burke. Joe proceeds to dash my heart into itty bitty pieces.

This poor guy just admitted weakness to his girlfriend, something that’s anathema on soaps of this period and, more often than not, soaps of today.

The Sensitive Man has been derided in Western pop culture of all kinds for decades. The soap opera is no exception. Bored housewives watch these programs to escape from their mundanity, don’t they? And who wants to escape into the arms of a nice, sweet guy who loves you unconditionally?

Carolyn is equally unimpressed.

Things suddenly pivot into some kind of weird Reclaim Your Truth narrative.

Even if that means courting another man in front of your boyfriend! Because…because that’s how women stand up for themselves, I guess.

Did I mention Art Wallace is a dude? Yeah. Yeah, he…

He is.

Bet Carolyn isn’t gonna try living her life with him.

Back at Collinwood, Joan Bennett is still expected to hold up a third of the episode clutching a phone in her nightgown.

You know how I complained that we didn’t get to see what Burke, Carolyn and Joe were up to before this episode began? Well, now we’re skipping things within the episode too.

…is she?

It turns out that, during the break, Sam saw Carolyn, remembered Malloy was looking for her, called Malloy, who came to the restaurant and told Carolyn about Roger’s accident, at which point Joe took her back to Collinwood.

You might say it was fair we skipped all this, as it would’ve been nothing but recapping stuff we already knew and, anyway, the meatier scenes on this subject would be with Carolyn and Liz. Sure, that makes sense, but then you remember that we spent an honest-to-God five minutes of last episode talking about the precise location of a wrench and how much a car door slamming sounds like a car hood slamming.

What we do get to see, though, is Malloy crown Sam hero of Buttercup Forest.

Sam now unconvincingly attempts to explain why he was so concerned about Roger’s car accident, apparently realizing “I am sympathetic to the plight of human suffering” is unconvincing bullshit.

Malloy claims he was never suspicious.

It’s funny because that’s exactly what Sam thought. But I already spent a whole post yelling about that phenomenon, and anyway, this is nowhere near as…

*stentorian sigh*

He gets very, very defensive at what was obviously a cutesy joke. The worst part is, he’s drinking coffee, and if Mr. Wells is to be believed, that means he isn’t drunk and therefore has no excuse.

Sam insists he was concerned because Roger is an old friend who once purchased paintings from him. Malloy reminds Sam, and us, that Burke was once buddies with Sam back when he used to sit paintings for him.

Eh, he won’t have to worry about him much longer.

Joe and Carolyn return home to find the all-reaching hand of the boom mic waiting for them.

Carolyn apologizes for her behavior and tells Joe he’s pretty swell.

Liz swoops in, but Carolyn couldn’t give less than a shit, not when Uncle Roger is in pain. Girl flies up those stairs.

Joe, apparently figuring there is no way for him to win anymore, prepares his leave, but Liz wants to talk to him first.

Joe is, because Carolyn told him, and Liz should also know this because Vicky told her! Joe, naturally, isn’t comfortable talking about his girlfriend’s horniness to her mother.

Carolyn charges in to announce that Roger has escaped.

Well, he only endured a car accident, a mild concussion, some kind of wrist sprain and two glasses of whiskey. I’m sure he’s fine.

Liz sends Joe to the garage to check if the convertible, which I guess is the Collins family’s less sexy car, has been taken.

Carolyn wonders where Roger has gone, and Joan Bennett gives us more much-needed soapy dialog.

Liz goes after Carolyn for trusting Burke.

Carolyn, naturally, is inclined to trust Burke even now, in the face of a mountain of evidence that, even if it doesn’t prove his role in the accident, indicates he is not a Nice Man.

Joe returns long enough to confirm that the car is missing before Liz banishes him from his weekly appearance.

Here we go again…

But, wait! A flicker of hope…

But NO MORE! Finally, after almost four full weeks, it appears we might at last get an accounting of Burke’s manslaughter case, how Roger was involved, and just why Roger and, by extension, everybody else, is convinced Burke would try to kill him over it.

Off to a not-so-great start. Listen, Burke/Carolyn is fucked up enough as it is without casually tossing the word “baby” around. The case was ten years ago, so Carolyn would’ve been 7. Maggie was 13 and has a clear memory of events as she experienced them at the time. Naturally, there’s a sizable gap between 7 and 13, but for better or worse, I remember things that happened to me when I was 7.

Though, we’re still at war with Iraq, so it’d be hard to forget.

It’s odd that all this hullaballoo with the trial and everything could’ve happened with Carolyn being none the wiser. The only conclusion is that Carolyn just isn’t very smart.

Joan Bennett continues telling us the parts we already know, in short staccato bursts.

The one new detail we get from this is that, after Roger testified against him, Burke swore he would come back to Collinsport some day and destroy the entire Collins family.

She wonders why Liz never told her, possibly also privately wondering why Liz keeps staring at the teleprompter instead of her.

Even with this narrative in mind, being told that Burke explicitly swore vengeance on her entire family, Carolyn finds nothing odd. No, it’s just a coincidence that Burke has been cozying to her and acting all sweet and charming and never asking anything from her while cutely demurring any of her questions. It’s impossible he has any real bad intentions.

Will Carolyn heed her mother’s advice? Is Burke worth it? Is Joe crying himself to sleep?

In order: No, subjective…definitely yes.

This Day in History- Thursday, July 21, 1966

The United States and Soviet Union sign a treaty agreeing not to conquer space. It’s unclear what this means for the Space Force, but I’m obligated to tell you I have a bad feeling about this.