Victoria Winters has been in Collinsport for two days and three nights and has finally learned the fastest way to the secrets of your dark and shadowy past is, like so many things, through strange men at bars.
Like it or not, Victoria Winters and Burke Devlin are the leads of Dark Shadows and will be for the foreseeable future. Queerly, this status hasn’t meant much for Vicky who, as we have discussed, has been almost comically waylaid by the events of the just-wrapped suppository adventure.
Burke’s story hasn’t gotten much traction either, which is weird because his name has quite literally been on everyone’s lips since we started. It doesn’t help that all the advancements he has made have been dull and uninspired (he’s having his portrait painted; sacre!).
Either way, she’s our main girl and he’s our main guy and they’ve been sort of positioned as dual pieces since the very beginning. Both have come to Collinsport to attain personal ends…vengeance and self-discovery, respectively. Burke is full of secrets, Vicky has no secrets to tell. Burke sows discord and distrust everywhere he goes; Vicky seeks only to make friends and find her place in a new world.
We can dither about the age thing. Lord knows, I’ve let Burke/Carolyn have the hell of it. But it seems that this is what we’re going to get. One of many things that Dark Shadows seems to be accelerating after the disaster that was the suppository saga is the Burke/Vicky relationship. How else to explain Burke obliquely and not-at-all-subtly asking Victoria out for dinner moments after they watched a patricidal child be dragged away by the father he tried to kill?
And so here they are, back at the Blue Whale.
Vicky proceeds to set the stage for the encounter by informing Burke she doesn’t like being stared at.
In case you were wondering whether Burke would be any different with one girl than the other. He asks her what convinced her to show up at all.
She’s talking about how far she’s come, though, and how stupid it would be for her to have come all this way and not come see him if he really can help her.
Boy, is she in for a surprise.
Yep, nothing self-serving about this at all.
Clearly delighted to be on a date with a woman legally allowed to drink, Burke remarks with pleasant surprise that Vicky drinks sherry, but she’s emotionally 60-years-old, so it can’t be that shocking.
Burke proceeds to give us the 1966 version of rating women at the club.
Hm, they both like sherry. Maybe that’s a clue to some sort of potentially familial connection between…
Oh? What’s that, Art? Ah. Never mind. Yes, yes, I’m sorry I keep bringing it up. Hey, when do the ghosts show…
Bastard hung up on me.
That’s not what you said when you mixed her ginger ale in your hotel room, bud.
And Vicky…?
Even now, Burke can’t help but wish she were just a little younger.
Vicky overrides Burke’s repeated attempts to talk her into dinner (lobsters and clams because Maine), wanting to get right to business.
Vicky tells Burke about the letter she received describing Strake’s prying at the foundling home which is something she not only knows Burke knows, but that Burke should also know she knows he knows because that was the premise of this entire dinner, so really this is just so we at home know what’s going on.
Burke says he does, in fact, have Strake’s report…
Naturally. I hope Vicky told the ladies at Collinwood where she was going, but we know she didn’t.
This is beating a dead horse, but we’re supposed to believe this woman is New York made.
He really thought this would be harder.
And he’ll be glad to tell it to the arresting officer.
Meanwhile, Carolyn Stoddard will be pleased to know that she is not the most pathetic woman in the episode.
Art really has to stop with the cutesy dialog connectors. There isn’t even an excuse for that one.
So Joe comes to on the sofa an uncertain amount of time after he passed out on it to find Carolyn nursing him, which is really quite nice of her given he went all incel on her last episode.
Good idea, man. Plausible deniability.
It’s apparently been an hour and a half. I guess they never sat down to dinner.
In his defense, Joe is immediately regretful for drinking and conscience of the fact that he has no doubt said some really unfortunate shit, which is a level of self-awareness unprecedented among the male characters of this program.
Atta girl.
Joel Crothers is really quite a talent. Among the most consistent of Dark Shadows’s original cast, his line flubs are few and far between and he has a natural and easygoing charisma with all his scene partners. This is especially evident here, as Carolyn eases into a playful, light banter with him as she regales him with what a thorough ass he made of himself.
Another actor might come off as insufferable, smug, or disingenuous in his regret, but with Joe you immediately feel for him.
You know, maybe if people were allowed to have sex on this show, these two would be able to work things out. Alas.
Poor Joe is all over apologizing, claiming he didn’t mean what he said, though Carolyn is canny enough to know he wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t mean it. After all, she’s said herself she can understand how Joe feels about the whole marrying thing.
He tells her about the whole boat thing, which must be kind of surreal for Carolyn, since the last she spoke to him this thing was all set to go and now all of a sudden it just isn’t because in the intervening hours some woman is pregnant.
Joe also describes his encounter with Burke, noting he doesn’t mind telling him off.
Not nearly as much of a night as the Devlin is planning on making.
Oh God, they graduated to nicknames.
Burke is entirely determined to have dinner with Vicky and, for her part, Vicky does shut him down, though with increasingly less vehemence.
It’s the smile, like she knows very well what this is about to be, that really tips it.
If this does anything to kill Burke’s buzz, he doesn’t show it. He claims he had the report made out of curiosity, which is both true and enormously fucked up.
You see, Vicky is an employee of the Collinses and…
Thanks, Mitch.
Vicky, prompted, explains her interest in the dossier and, on that, her search for her past, which reminds us all that we live in a world where everybody on the show knows Burke’s deal and somehow not everybody knows Vicky’s.
Burke seems sufficiently impressed.
Wow! Is this going somewhere? Might Strake have actually learned something? Will Vicky finally get a clue?
It’s been a nice long while since we got any Collins family lore. This is the first reference to Collinwood’s founder Jeremiah being an alcoholic. We assume Roger has been nobly carrying his ancestor’s tradition.
And so he does, until…
What’s the big, ugly, scary thing Joe just remembered?
He forgot to pay for his drinks.
Carolyn cautions him not to be out too long.
This whole thing is going really well for everybody involved, all told, at least until Carolyn brings up the Devlin.
Carolyn then insists that Burke is a “really nice person”, but…how? Just because he didn’t try to kill Roger? She already knows he lied to her about the Venezuela job, trotted her in front of the Consteriff to cover his ass, and lest we forget how he threatened to paddle her during their first meeting.
And why shouldn’t he be? The guy’s made an active hobby out of stepping on his dick since he showed up.
Oh, and because Joe hasn’t heard the news yet, Carolyn tells Joe all about how Burke is, in fact, an innocent man.
I like that she at least uses language that paints the whole thing as the cover-up it truly is. She also repeats the new party line that nobody caused the car to crash and it was all an accident so let’s never talk about suppositories again.
But this, at least, doesn’t stop them from getting hot.
With one condition…
Carolyn insists Burke doesn’t care about her and maybe she believes it, but that does leave a giant question mark on the matter of her bringing him up in every conversation.
He could do well for his case by telling her how Burke tried, again, to make a hired thug out of him, knowingly taking advantage of his drunkenness, but he doesn’t because we can’t ever do anything too out there.
It’s a good thing he threw in a salad or else this would’ve been Compensating for Something: Room Service Edition.
Vicky is sitting on the sofa, reading Strake’s report and, rather than string us along any further, she glumly points out that the report told her nothing she didn’t know already.
Consider, if you will, how interesting it would have been if the intrepid Wilbur Strake had found something out for once in his miserable, abbreviated professional career. What if Burke did know something about Vicky’s past? It needn’t even be the whole thing, maybe just a valuable clue.
Think of the possibilities! Does he tell her flat out, offer to cooperate with her, earn her confidence? Does he decide to shore it away for his personal use, intending to weaponize whatever lies at the end of the trail in his search for the Collinses? Does the secret divide them, does it bring them closer? Really, it’s Soap Opera 101. Secrets exist to be discovered, not dangling over everyone’s heads indefinitely. That’s cheap and does nothing but disenchant and disinterest people with the secret entirely.
Burke does offer to help Vicky in her search in what I am terrified to report is likely a sincere and altruistic gesture.
Not that Burke has nothing to gain out of helping Vicky investigate. Certainly, if it includes dirt on the Collinses, he stands to benefit, but I think we’re honestly supposed to believe he’s only in this for Vicky’s betterment because Vicky is just that swell, I guess.
How philosophical. Vicky is as convinced as you are.
Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of.
The gravity of this Profound Statement is such that Vicky immediately endeavors to put as much space as she can between her and Burke.
My God, that’s a bow on her dress. Mama Cass realness with a bow on top. I regret ever making fun of Carolyn’s Puritan frocks.
Regardless, Vicky makes a sensible stand that she really doesn’t want to get anymore involved than she already is in whatever weird shit he’s got with Roger. You can only be paraded about as a captive witness so many times.
If a man ever backs you into a corner and asks you this, scream, scream so loudly they can hear you in hell.
Vicky, however, must not want to alarm anybody, so she just says she isn’t sure, which is what you do say when the guy is simply being weird on the subway and there are witnesses and a clear avenue to escape.
Nevertheless, she agrees to tell him the long, sordid story of her origins, warning him as she does that this story is long and unfulfilling.
He must be, to have waited ten years before putting his nefarious real estate revenge in motion.
Again, it’s CAN NOT. CANNOT. Not CAN’T. Did Art Wallace himself forget? Is there even anything written on that piece of paper? Did they lose the original and write up a new one with the word changed? Why do I even care?
East Lynne is an 1861 novel by Ellen Wood about a woman named Isabel who abandons her husband and children for a sugar daddy, has a kid with the sugar daddy, learns the sugar daddy doesn’t want to marry her, and then gets fucked up in a train accident which also conveniently kills her infant child.
But then she becomes a governess, for her ex-husband and kids who don’t recognize her because her face got fucked up.
But it’s about a governess, so it’s really just like Dark Shadows.
It’s kind of odd that a nearly century old sensation novel would be referenced on this daytime soap opera. It isn’t a Gothic work like The Fall of the House of Usher, nor is it much like Jane Eyre, the work that primarily influenced Victoria Winters. Certainly, the book has much less name recognition.
There were a few film adaptations, including a televised play adaptation in the ‘70s, but at the time of this episode’s airing, the most recent film was from 1931 which, if nothing else, tells us where Art Wallace drew his material from.
This would be easier if he didn’t insist on calling his potential love interest a kid.
Has…has all this been a PSA for orphan awareness?
I mean…I guess?
So now that Burke has been given the whole skinny on Victoria’s childhood, her job search, the significance of Bangor, and the story Liz and Roger told her (an ordeal which, with interruptions, takes about four minutes), Burke surprises us all by not falling asleep or screaming in rage when Vicky muses that…
Which is just so. That’s how life is, right? Sometimes things just happen. People die, things go missing, freak weather occurrences, mysterious disappearances, lucky accidents… Not everything has an explanation and we just have to accept that.
But we have a different expectation from fiction. We expect things to have some kind of structure, some sort of payoff and, unless you’re David Lynch, you better be damn ready to give it.
Burke sensibly points out that, instead of fucking around Collinsport, it might do her good to check the actual city the checks came from: Bangor (drink!).
You tell me, chief, she’s only been telling you about it for 15 minutes.
Burke alludes to his wicked machinations by warning her that there are “things” that will be happening at Collinwood soon.
Someone might try messing with enemas next.
Burke would sooner see Vicky leave before his plan goes into motion, before his super nefarious real estate scheme (because as far as we know that’s literally all his plan is) can progress, but…
Well, don’t try too hard.
A knock comes to the door. Burke assumes it’s room service and Vicky excuses herself to wash her hands. But, naturally, it isn’t old Mr. Wells with steak and salad…
Says you.
Joe learned from our old friend the Blue Whale bartender that Burke paid his tab after he went tripping up to Collinwood (Also, did he drive drunk up to the house or walk? Both are sad, but only the second one is funny) and, like the Nice Guy that he is, wants to pay Burke back, despite hating his guts.
As he enters, Joe’s eye catches a little something…
So if you’ve ever seen a soap before you know where this is going. Joe immediately figures Burke is entertaining a lady friend. Not wanting to stick around any longer than he has to, he overrides Burke’s protests…
And then lady friend herself shows up.
So naturally Joe gets the Wrong Idea, or maybe the right idea depending on how you’re looking at it. I’ve just suffered through the whole thing and I’m not sure if I just watched a date or a transaction.
All told, he should probably be relieved about this. Actually, who am I kidding? Even if Burke and Vicky were an item, that would only get Carolyn excited.
I regret to inform you that, yes, this bit of romantic misunderstanding is definitely about to be something this program is going to play out. And, yes, it was just as tired in 1966 as it is now.
Over the act break, Vicky decides she’d better be going before Joe broadcasts her infidelity with Collinsport’s favorite Most Despised Man.
That jaw’s gotta be good for something.
As she leaves, to prove things haven’t ended badly between them, Vicky gives Burke a sweet smile and a…
At which point Burke admits an “ulterior motive” for wanting to help Vicky in her quest.
If nothing else, she held out longer than Carolyn. Not that that’s much to write home about.
And that’s the episode. Two couples, one make-up conversation, a tender kiss, a backstory monologue, a tender warning, a just as tender extension of aid, and a comical misunderstanding.
I…I think we may be watching a soap opera.
This Day in History- Thursday, August 11, 1966
The “Konfrontasi”, a war between Indonesia and Malaysia fought in Borneo, ends with a peace agreement, successfully tying up one contemporary protracted Southeast Asian war.
At a press conference in Chicago, John Lennon is made to apologize for the “more popular than Jesus” thing, even though he was probably right.
Behind the Scenes Shenanigans
This episode marks the return of director Lela Swift after a five episode absence wherein she was supplanted by her considerably less-skilled contemporary, associate director John Sedwick. In the future, Swift and Sedwick will begin alternating episodes, each directing a proportionate number a week.
One mark of Lela’s return is the shot of Joe and Carolyn kissing which is done in the same mold as their first onscreen kiss back in Episode 8, also directed, like all episodes before the 29th, by Swift.
Kooks of Collinwood 
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