We’re keeping it short and sexy this week with one of the all-time great Dark Shadows openers:
It reads like Art Wallace just got sick of tooling around with these things every episode so, in a moment of desperation, he decided to be lazy and ended up realizing that sometimes simplicity is a plus.
In point of fact, I’m giving him too much credit. Vicky’s monologue in this episode is weirdly staggered, including vague commentary on David and the nature of the house interspersed so it plays throughout the teaser segment. None of it is interesting, so I’ll just pretend Wallace maintained restraint and we got the better end of the deal for it.
Vicky is trying to get to sleep, but as we know from last episode, Roger was
And is hankering for some answers, meaning we get another round of a terrified girl being quizzed in her pajamas.
That chest on the side table is, like the lamp that is (for now) on the desk at the Collinsport Inn, a favorite prop among Dark Shadows fans. It reminds me of the puzzle boxes from the PC Nancy Drew adventure games, each of which were able to deliver compelling mysteries free of suppositories.
Vicky wakes up to the sound of an almost ghostly echo repeating “Miss Winters” in the darkness. If it were me, I’d suspect an oddly timed erotic dream, but after last night, she must have been expecting this.
She says while wearing the most sexless nightclothes since John Calvin wrote his treatise. Carolyn’s doily smock seems raunchy by comparison.
Perhaps learning a thing or two about the power of Ps and Qs, Roger gives her time to dress and indulges in a bit of a strut.
David is still hiding in the shadow of the stairs, a surreptitious corner that really shouldn’t hide him as well as it does every single time.
But David doesn’t intend to remain hidden for long. He creeps into the drawing room after his father, presumably for no other reason than to see if he can get Daddy to soil himself.
David wants to say he’s sorry.
It’s really a shame they’re inclined to be mortal enemies. They have so much in common. Also, note how Roger casually suggests David would be pleased if he were dead. You might think this would get him to start thinking things about what happened to him tonight and how it relates to his son but, no, we’re on a schedule, and the Art Wallace Express moves about as swiftly as the B train during peak hours.
A marvelous detail in this scene is how, after Roger sheepishly apologizes for maybe being too cruel to David, he sinks on the sofa and assumes a position of genuine defeat, while David sits across from him like a therapist.
It comes out that David’s reasons for seeking out his father are far from altruistic: he wants to know what Roger suspects and what he hopes to find out from Miss Winters.
Barring the fact that people were still casually referring to cars as automobiles in 1966 (I’m too homosexual to aver whether this is substantiated or just more random antiquated flair), David here attempts something both very risky and very clever: he reveals that he knows certain things about what happened, but masks it as a kind of childlike curiosity, forcing people to fill in the blanks for him.
Roger, obviously, isn’t keen to oblige.
Yeah, young man. For Chrissakes, young man. Jesus effing Christ, young man. God.
Okay, so David and his father are different in at least one key way: Roger can never even hope to aspire to this level of ballsy.
Upstairs, Vicky is going to absurd lengths to make herself presentable to Roger.
David stops by her room, because there are only three actors in this episode for reasons I cannot begin to understand.
Carolyn and Burke are still looking for Joe after that business at the Blue Whale, Sam has made no further attempts to contact Collinwood since learning Burke was up there, Malloy hasn’t found Carolyn as Liz asked him yet, and I’m sure Maggie Evans is having a novel time wiping her father’s puke out of the carpet, but instead we’re going to get twenty minutes of talking about Victoria talking to Roger and then Victoria actually talking to Roger. It’s remarkable stuff.
The 60s really were a golden age for dressing gown enthusiasts. Nowadays, you lounge about in a bathrobe and you’re either a shut-in or a pervert.
David tells Vicky about what an absolute asshole his father is, not appreciating that David was sorry he almost died.
You might recall that David gave Victoria a copy of Tonka Truck Weekly, so she’s inexplicably convinced they’re friends now and her work as governess is already half complete. This delusion appears to extend to an inexplicable faith in her ability as a child counselor.
On the one hand, it’s probably sensible advice to teach children not to take the suffering of their parents on their own shoulders, but in this case, David should be doing more than apologizing because he’s actually responsible for everything that happened.
Seriously, Vicky is so close to getting it.
Soap operas frequently produce audience frustration, the feeling that we know what the deal is, and we’re all just waiting for everybody else to figure it out. When Marlena discovers lipstick on John’s collar, we all know it’s because he’s been fucking around with that Romanov whore Princess Gina, but Marlena must pace her investigation out over several episodes. Ideally, this all builds up to a satisfying climax where Marlena confronts John and Gina and the story pays for itself.
Here, however, the feeling of gratification is stunted, perhaps in no small part because of how obvious the truth of the situation is and (worse) how determined everybody seems to be on ignoring the truth. It comes off as insulting, as if somebody behind the scenes thought that maybe we wouldn’t get what was going on, despite everything, and decided to cater to this imaginary lowest of the lowest common denominator.
See? He’s just as convincing as Roger is when he claims no involvement in the manslaughter thing! But, the thing is, people do seem to treat that whole business as worthy of scrutiny. There’s even a giant ballyhooed story arc about it!
We should all be thankful David Henesy is as skilled a performer as he is, because some rando child actor stuttering and flat-lining his way through this already unconvincing dialog would do nothing less than make a case for every adult around him to be committed to Assisted Living.
THAT’S BECAUSE HE’S SMARTER THAN THE REST OF YOU.
Being as small-scale as this episode is, there’s a lot of time to waste. Act 2 opens up with Roger pacing the drawing room and looking at his watch for no discernible reason.
Vicky suggests David go to bed, but David finally cuts to the chase and asks her what she plans to tell Roger about what happened.
Ain’t that the whole sad truth. Though she is leaving the Burke stuff out, presumably because she at least knows enough about her job to keep from spilling sensitive tea to a ten-year-old.
It is quaintly childlike of David not to have anticipated the police getting involved in this. They can try to blame it on his age, but this kid was smart enough to research and execute the precise method of cleanly sabotaging the car. Yet somehow, the concept of ‘police investigating crimes’ hasn’t yet registered. David worries…er…wonders if the criminal will be put in a jail.
Stupid, silly Victoria Winters, blindly supporting the American penal institution.
If this has all felt too subtle for you, David then wonders if Vicky would name the culprit to Roger if she knew who it was. Vicky says of course because murder is bad. David responds…
HE JUST DESCRIBED HIS MOTIVE TO HER, EXPLICITLY FRAMING IT AS EQUAL TO WHAT HAPPENED TO ROGER.
David storming off at the end of the scene can’t be too shocking, really. There’s only so much obliviousness a kid can take before he starts to feel insulted.
We then segue to Vicky’s meeting with Roger, jumping in after what must have been a recap of her interaction with David:
Roger is so determined to hang all this on his stallion ex-consort that he sweeps away the towering heaps of evidence against his son. His hatred for Burke explains that almost neatly enough.
Vicky is prompted to describe her meeting with Burke at the garage, including the admittedly flimsy excuse that Burke was admiring the Rogermobile because he wanted to buy one like it.
Yes, it is in the nature of a murderer not to tell random passerby about the murder they’re planning, yes.
Something beautiful about Louis Edmonds’s face, compounded with the magic of black and white T.V, means we get shots like this:
You know what that means… Recap city!
And I mean everything. The station wagon, the time tables, there’s some dithering about whether Vicky heard Burke slamming the door of the car or the hood, which prompts Roger to show Vicky Malloy’s suppository doodles:
It’s hard to say why Alexandra Moltke is smiling. Maybe something funny happened off screen? Possibly Louis Edmonds got so frustrated having to say ‘master brake cylinder’ in quick cadence that he made a funny face? He seems like the kind of guy that would do that if he knew the camera wasn’t on him.
Possibly she’s just aware of how crazy it is that the Powers That Be expected a solid daytime viewing audience to watch a five minute scene discussing whether or not somebody opened a car door.
Recalling something useful, Vicky asks if a special tool might’ve been needed to extract the suppository from the Rogermobile.
…
I just…
It’s one thing to invite your audience to laugh and giggle along with you, to share some winks and nudges. Dark Shadows has so far remained largely free of such self-awareness, outside of the surprising humanity the actors bring to their roles, so I remain unconvinced all this ‘hinting’ is any more than base condescension. I wish I could tell you this whole charade would be wrapped by Friday’s episode, but I would be lying. It won’t even be wrapped by next Friday’s episode or, in fact, by the one after that.
So Vicky realizes that the wrench she saw Burke handling at the garage might’ve been the very tool used to remove the suppository.
To further this episode’s insane amount of padding, here’s David doing junior serial killer stuff.
Roger is waiting for his cue.
And then he fucking EXPLODES
The wildest thing is, Vicky has no coherent explanation for why she didn’t, and we’re all just gonna have to be okay with that because this is a soap opera and, obsessed with realism as Dan Curtis may be, sometimes you have to have people keep things from each other to sustain plot twists.
Eventually, very eventually, they’ll figure out how to do it so that it mostly makes sense.
Not now, but…eventually.
Roger really is having a field day with this:
To her credit, Victoria is suitably chastened and convinced now of the severity of Roger’s plight and the accusations against Burke. She’s even willing to help! And Roger is determined that she will, in a way that makes as little sense as possible and that any lawyer, detective, police officer and person of moderate intelligence would assess as unhelpful.
That would at least be watchable. What we get instead is one grand finale of a recap, in which every last painstaking detail of that garage scene is recalled, repeated, and accompanied with color commentary.
Vicky recalls that the wrench was tossed on a work bench. Roger unnessecarily points out Burke probably got the wrench from there in the first place, which is pretty sloppy for a criminal. He should’ve brought a wrench of his own and then discarded it so it couldn’t be traced back to him, and no fingerprints could be found.
We can reasonably infer the wrench was the tool used in the crime, but by David, and he left it on the driver’s seat to be found because…carelessness?
Again, we’re supposed to attribute certain levels of childlike amateurism to David, despite the advanced nature of the scheme he set out to perpetrate and the fact that it very nearly worked. Not thinking about the police getting involved is one thing, but this kid forgot to move the nearest thing to a murder weapon this case has away from the scene? He took great pains to hide the suppository! Why forget the wrench?
The Doylist answer: So that we can have Burke Devlin as a red herring for much longer than we need to.
The Watsonian answer: Fuck if I know. Ghosts?
These facts having been established to death and back, Roger goes to the phone.
But of course not! Roger’s ingenious plan leaves no room for such things.
Leave it to our girl Roger to choose the method most naturally suited for a Real Housewives episode. He’s probably wondering how well he can throw a wine glass one-handed.
Vicky wonders if maybe it would be better if they called the police. But Roger intends to do that, yanno, later.
I’m not gonna say this sounds like a sex thing, but it sounds like a sex thing. Roger even intends to drag Vicky along to watch….er testify about the wrench. And stuff. Sure.
It feels like this whole episode could’ve been five minutes.
As Vicky gets dressed, indeed in the same outfit she had on for most of this very, very, very long day, she opens the door and…
It transpires the little scamp was hoping to hide a certain tiny, tube shaped instrument in Vicky’s room. We recall he tried this earlier and was only able to save face via free Reader’s Digest. Will he be as lucky this time?
Our New York City heroine, ladies and gents.
David wonders if Roger will call the police. Vicky wonders why he should care. We wonder how much longer this can possibly sustain itself, and how anybody could be expected to watch this on a regular basis.
Vicky seems to get the hint and starts to leave, at which point David throws one last test:
David quickly clarifies he’s talking about the model car he crushed and threw out the window. Vicky, who seemed very close to getting a hint there, immediately accepts this as fact and points out it was silly.
These people deserve this kid and this kid deserves better than these people.
Roger ushers Victoria out, at the same time reserving harsh words for his son.
We know.
Vicky meets Roger downstairs and wonders why he can’t muster some more concern for his son or, in fact, for his lines.
A line that inelegant couldn’t possibly have been in the script. Right? Right?
Vicky is appalled at Roger’s callousness, but tonight Roger is only interested in the car.
MOTHER FUCKING LOVE OF
Wednesday, July 20, 1966
Lieutenant Dieter Dengler, U.S. Navy, becomes the first American to escape from a Vietnamese POW camp as the thin veneer ‘protecting’ the American public from the true horrors of the war continued to crack.
Enrique Peña Nieto, the studly former president of Mexico, is born. Apparently, he wasn’t much loved by the people, but my needs are less complex.
On the other end of the spectrum, French actor Julien Carette dies in his sleep after smoking in bed, which has to be in the top 5 most French ways to die.
Kooks of Collinwood 