Things That Go Bump

If you’ve been keeping up with what time it is on this newest contender for The Longest Day (tying the previous one at 16 episodes), be reassured that we’ve finally reached the next one, insofar as Victoria Winters begins the episode by saying…

So we’ve finally reached the fourth on-screen day since we began, or third if you don’t count the first night, which took up most of the show’s first week. Vicky also says it’s been about four hours since she decided to remain at Collinwood yet again, placing the beginning of last episode at around 10:00, which still doesn’t jive with Carolyn hearing the clock strike 8:00 the episode before that, which couldn’t possibly have covered two hours, so whatever.

Vicky, however, is having trouble sleeping, and she isn’t the only one.

It’s been a rough day for Roger Collins. He began it believing his spurned ex had tried to kill him by removing the suppository from his brake cylinder and ended it knowing that it was his son who tried to kill him by removing the suppository from his brake cylinder, and also his son and ex are friends now, and his son may not even be his son, but the son of his ex, and also his sister has gone to great pains to protect his son from the consequences of trying to kill him by removing the suppository from his brake cylinder, and also that the town drunk is going to be painting his ex’s portrait which is just insult on injury at this point.

The restless Roger makes a predawn phone call to our man Hot Girl Sam Evans, clocking his third straight appearance since Dave Ford debuted in the role and further proving that this show really couldn’t have gone on without him.

Sam isn’t asleep and immediately prepares to tell Roger to fuck off.

And Roger, almost desperately pleads with him not to hang up. Sam wonders what he wants now and, in a voice that’s almost tremulous, Roger tells him…

Same.

You’ll recall Roger’s ultimatum of last episode, telling Sam to cut off the commission from Burke before morning. Naturally, Sam hasn’t done that because it would be weird to bother the guy at an ungodly hour of the night, especially since he’s already suspicious.

I mean…he’s right.

Roger is always so reticent about his threats. David just comes right out and says it, but he’s got to mince around the point, you know, like a gentleman.

The music cue plays ahead of time, and then cuts off, and then plays from the beginning, which almost, but doesn’t quite undercut the impact of…

She did say she couldn’t sleep.

This is what is called “keeping it cool, fool”.

Vicky claims she came downstairs to find something to read, because as we’ve seen, there are very many books in this room. You just can’t see them because of the dignity of the paneled walls.

Rather than immediately assume Vicky has heard nothing and play it lowkey so she doesn’t think twice about anything she may have overheard, the Grand Master of Subtlety over here ensures that Vicky will definitely remember every detail of this, up to and including how he practically shat himself on seeing her.

Because it’s been too long since he’s said anything sexually questionable.

Literally every night since she’s come here, Roger has done something rapey to Victoria Winters. From trying to break into her room, to carrying her off into town to stand uncomfortably as he yells at his ex, to now manhandling her roughly and commenting on her dressing gown, having by now had at least half a dozen brandies.

Roger proceeds to grill Vicky on how much she did or didn’t hear before.

The fact of the matter is, Vicky is bad at lying and so she probably hasn’t heard a thing so this, like David stealing Vicky’s letter, was an entirely avoidable foible that positions Vicky as the one able to take down Roger, all through next-to-no effort on her part.

Writing.

We must have been watching different shows. It would’ve been nice if Vicky had been “snooping and prying”, but the most she’s really done was have the same conversation with Elizabeth and, to a lesser extent Roger and that one time she spoke to Matthew before he dropped off the face of the Earth 21 episodes ago.

Little does he know she was this close to going back where she came from anyway. Another thing he can hang on Liz’s door. Vicky informs him of this and you can practically see Roger die inside.

But he (badly) swallows his rage and tells Vicky that, if she did hear anything, to forget it, which is exactly what you do if you don’t want somebody to remember something.

 “I always enjoy our conversations.”

Roger isn’t the only one getting plastered at an ungodly hour of the night.

It’s been too long since we’ve seen Dark Shadows’s sleeper heroine Maggie Evans. She’s, in fact, the last series regular to appear in the post-suppository era of the show, exempting Matthew because, well, he stopped being a regular a while back, didn’t he?

So far, Dave Ford has cast a magic spell on this show, energizing his castmates and bringing a sort of special zeal to all his scenes which have made otherwise mostly uneventful episodes entertaining in the way any good stage play is entertaining.

In many ways, his style is the opposite of his on-screen daughter’s more natural, homegrown talent. Kathryn Leigh Scott forced the change of Maggie Evans from Art Wallace’s “brassy dame” through sheer force of charisma, in a shift that can really only happen on a soap, where over time actors have indelible marks on their characters, rather than the other way around.

And yet the two styles share charm, warmth and a relentless adaptability that makes for a healthy complement.

Contrast to the blustery, argumentative dynamic on display in father and daughter’s last late night interaction, back in Episode 20. Sam doesn’t rail at Maggie, rather he is tired and perhaps a little exasperated, but he doesn’t raise his voice with Maggie, doesn’t swat at her questioning or belittle her for worrying.

He still doesn’t tell her the truth about his mysterious late night telephone call, but he maintains a healthy sense of humor, with the vague suggestion that he knows nothing he says will be believed, and he’s at peace with it.

He’s even got Dad jokes.

There is no condescension in his manner when Maggie admits she worries about him. We get the understanding he may even appreciate it, something that was never present in Old Sam Evans.

And, thanks to the efforts of Dave Ford, I can honestly believe Maggie isn’t just blowing smoke up our asses.

Sam assures Maggie he will go to sleep soon. Once he takes care of one thing…

Yet another reference to the end of the world, but this time somebody’s interested in preventing it rather than forlornly commenting that it’s happening. Yet another example, however minor, of just how quick the turnaround has been for Sam Evans. How he has now, in a wink, become a dynamic character rather than a plot device.

Sam tells Maggie not to worry…

Alone, Sam sits himself down at the table, gets out some paper and…

People in media never write letters unless something bad is going to happen. Letters are redundant when phone calls exist and when the script can contrive to have any two characters meet at any given time to talk about things. The only reason anybody on a soap opera has for writing a letter is to prolong the revelation of whatever is disclosed in it. Might it be a declaration? A confession? A last will and testament?

Rest assured, for once it won’t be a month before we find out.

Sam and Roger are alike in many ways, but one of them is that they don’t know how to diffuse a crisis. Just as Roger could’ve easily played his phone call cool to Vicky so she wouldn’t get suspicious, so too Sam could claim he was just writing a grocery list, or a poem, or a dirty sketch. Instead, he with a swooping motion, hides the thing behind his back. A gesture that will come very much in handy later.

Maggie should know more than anybody that her father has no friends with whom he might correspond by letter, so that doesn’t work.

Maggie goes off to make tea and Sam bundles up that letter, addresses it…

Maggie returns and Sam, presumably not trusting himself to keep this a secret, makes the perhaps even more dunderheaded decision to show Maggie who he’s addressed it to…

Get the idea, yet?

Sam tells Maggie to keep the letter safe and never show it to anybody. It must be kept unopened until such time as…

I dunno, something happens.

Now, in television, when a character has a secret and is repeatedly threatened by another character about the possible revelation of that secret and then is so rattled that he writes a letter entrusted to his only relative with express instructions not to be opened until the time is right, you get the impression that this character isn’t very long for this world.

Aw shit.

Maggie is obviously concerned about this but, as ever, Sam tells her no more and, aided by the horrendous screeching of the tea kettle from offstage, Maggie shuttles off. On her return, Sam reminds her to never open the letter…

None of these people have ever heard of reverse psychology, I guess. As if Maggie has shown the slightest indication she’d passively go about knowing her father is in trouble. Her every action with regard to him has been the opposite.

It would seem that way.

Maggie ruefully exclaims she wishes the great house would just burn to the ground, but the pragmatic Sam has another monologue in him…

Which is very profound and deep and Says a Lot About Society, but Maggie isn’t buying it.

Sam says nothing to that, but he doesn’t have to.

Elsewhere, it’s 2:00 AM. Do you know where your ghosts are?

Obviously, I can’t screencap or GIF this, but here we are, approximately 33 episodes since we last heard the Weeping Woman, and she’s crying again, again at 2:00 AM. Perhaps the reason we didn’t hear any on Night 2 was Vicky and Roger had gone down into town to take part in the Suppository Spat.

But with the suppository saga well behind us, the ghosts of Collinwood can return to the fore, sounding through an old, dark house, rousing a girl from a fitful sleep, luring her into the dark shadows of the very past Sam warned his daughter cannot be buried.

Naturally, Vicky gets no answer. As before, she heads into the drawing room…

Where, in the first iteration of this sequence, she had her first fateful encounter with David. But we’ve since bested that boss and cleared the level. And, with no third party to startle Vicky out of her search, the weeping continues.

The basement! Remember that thing? We’ve seen it approximately one time, on Vicky’s first morning at Collinwood, when she was interrupted in her search for David by the zealously protective Matthew Morgan.

We also remember the Mystery Door.

Not to be confused with the upstairs mystery door, to the sealed-off east wing of the house, which we actually saw Liz walk out of during the suppository saga, only to hastily assure us there was nothing of any interest back there, quite similar to what she told Vicky about the locked supposed “storeroom” in the basement.

And, if this episode has taught us anything, when somebody tells you not to wonder about something, you only wonder all the more.

This time, the show seems to suggest the weeping has its source in the locked basement room. Vicky descends into the basement and, seeing this, approaches the door…

I appreciate her pluck, but I don’t think the mysterious crying lady who only makes her presence known at 2:00 AM every night is going to answer you.

But somebody does…

Yeah. You, bitch.

This episode is just so great. The whole thing takes place in the ditchweed hours of the night. There are arguments about phone calls and letters that are somehow more dramatically compelling than any similar phone call and letter related arguments from earlier episodes (and there were several) and then all of a sudden the show remembers it’s about ghosts again and we have a haunting and then they remember the basement and we have the basement, and now we have Vicky and Roger just standing in the basement and talking and you will not guess where this conversation ends up, I promise you.

It’s unclear why Roger is so pissed about Vicky “snooping” in the basement. This is one of the few things about the show’s mythos that has nothing to do with him. One gets the impression he just wants an excuse to yell at her.

Vicky explains she followed the mysterious crying to the mysterious door.

He’s so matter-of-fact about it too. Which…yeah, it is, and yes that would be rational evidence for there not being an actual weeping woman on the other side, but he presents it in the dry, tired voice of an exhausted grade school teacher describing that, no, the moon is not made of cheese.

Alexandra Moltke gets to embrace the role of “harried gothic heroine” at last, looking at Roger with wide, bright eyes as she beseeches…

As we’ve discussed before, Victoria Winters is “the skeptic”, disinclined to believe any of the ghost stories surrounding the place in which she has come to reside. This has, for the most part, been easy since not much in the way of ghostliness has occurred as she dealt primarily with suppositories and the advances of older men, but now, mere hours after she decided, yet again, to remain at Collinwood, she has been confronted with the unpleasant reality that perhaps ghost stories of the kind Sam told her in their first meeting are more than stories after all.

And, as the Skeptic, Vicky will either have to come around to the truth, or remain blinded…at her peril which, for female variants of this trope, is usually literal peril.

Nice advice. I’m sure he’ll never try to weaponize that against her to hilarious effect.

Okay, man. Jesus.

…Collinwood has an attic?

And then the fucking phone starts ringing at two in the morning and, because there were no cell phones, this was not considered a criminal offense.

Vicky and Roger troop upstairs and, like it as not, the moment they’re gone, that fickle bitch starts crying again, but it must be a special kind of crying that they can’t hear, despite only being one flight of stairs up.

Look, it’s ghost stuff. I shouldn’t have to explain.

The phone call has nothing to do with Roger or Sam for that matter. Someone’s returning Liz’s call…

It’s Ned. The mystery man Liz called out of nowhere at the end of last episode for…reasons. Liz, you recall, told the operator to keep trying to get in touch with Ned, regardless of the lateness of the hour, but she couldn’t be bothered to stay awake by the phone for the eventuality they would get in touch with him. Being a shut-in with no schedule is very demanding.

Roger tells Ned he has no intention to wake Liz to let her know about the call, which we can assume is less a gesture of respect and more one of fear. Vicky, you might recall, overheard Liz calling for Ned earlier and we now see the only reason that was is so she can tell Roger that Liz wants to be disturbed because she was the one who called for Ned in the first place.

Not that it matters, because Roger hangs up the phone and that’s the end of that.

I love this episode so much.

He sounds actually heartbroken at the idea, in fact.

If Vicky were actually from New York, she would’ve knocked his teeth out by now.

Oh, that’s easy, Rog. Rule 1: Don’t be a little bitch about it.

Vicky shows some hint of a spine, telling Roger he has no business speaking to her like this.

Is that a fact?

Girl, I think that was a challenge.

And Vicky accepts it. She goes right up those stairs…

The magic of Roger Collins is that he’s such an asshole you can’t help but love him.

Roger practically begs her, perhaps knowing that Liz has every intention of throwing him out of the house for a single misstep.

Vicky, naturally, doesn’t, at which point Roger pulls her aside for a conversation.

There’s a word.

Roger proceeds to describe his behavior as “boorish, rude and completely unfriendly” which I guess is like describing Pol Pot as not the very best statesman.

This is what I’m talking about when I discuss the humanity an actor lends to a character. Just as Maggie was never meant to be soft-around-the-edges, so too was Roger never meant to be anything more than a mustache-twirling villain. But the strengths of their respective actors made Art Wallace’s original characterizations impossible.

KLS was too warm to be reduced to a “brassy dame” waitress and Louis Edmonds was too charming to be just a villain. But he still does villainous things, says wretched things all the time…it’s just that he’s able to play them as the words and actions of a man who, while no saint, really doesn’t know how to commit to doing “bad” things. He keeps getting tripped up! He can never back up his threats! He stammers and stumbles and only ever seems to have any bite when he’s drunk.

You hate him, but you love to hate him, and that’s the secret of any good soap villain. Believe me, you don’t want to endure the average peak TV “bad guys” in regular daytime drama helpings. You’d get sick.

Roger then blames pressures, Harry. Pressures.

Like is any of this for real…or not?

I guess if he’s talking about being almost killed by his own son and not being able to do anything about it, that is justifiable, but we all know that’s not the pressure he’s really worried about at present, not that he can tell Vicky that.

This is disingenuous and pathetic and all that, but it’s also the first time a man has offered to apologize to Victoria for anything. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Burke to do it.

Vicky, naturally, wonders if Roger didn’t really mean what he said, what does he think about her?

Roger proceeds to give her a bio blurb to be used on the Dark Shadows official Geocities page:

“Why that you are a bright and charming young girl living in a house of madness and understandably troubled by the things around her!”

Don’t push it, guy.

Roger writes off the traumas of the evening as, and I quote…

I might as well point out that holocaust simply means “trial by fire” and, indeed, was still a word commonly used separately from the Nazi genocides of the second World War in the ‘60s. Comics legend Stan Lee often used the word to describe the great blazes started by puckish young hero Johnny Storm.

Still, it’s one thing to see the word in lurid print in a comic book, and another to hear it out of the mouth of a genteel southerner on a daytime drama. He also pronounces it “Holly Cost” which is…er…interesting.

Vicky agrees to accept Roger’s many flowery apologies…if he answers a question.

And here we have one of my favorite Roger moments. He looks away from her, gets to his feet, takes several steps away…

!!!

Vicky jumps to her feet, wonders what the sobbing is, where it comes from, and the sleek, oily, answer-for-everything Roger Collins can only tell her…

In the same voice you or I might use if someone asked us to count the stars or to explain whether life goes on after death.

I now direct you to a stunning example of extreme foreshadowing. Back in Episode 5, Vicky’s first morning at Collinwood, when she describes to Carolyn how she heard the sobbing in the night. Carolyn claims she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and Roger does too…

But first…

He looks away. He has a doubt, a flicker of uncertainty. But he’d never betray that fear to the governess. He doesn’t even want her around! Why should he tell her of the great uncertainty that has haunted his dreams for years, that has kept him up on sleepless nights? For Roger Collins, a man desperate to have some control over his life, he cannot confess that there are things he does not know, that he can’t explain. Better to have the outsider think she’s crazy.

But now, forced in a corner, penned in by pressures and an ever-tightening noose around his neck, he has nothing to lose by admitting, yes, that there are ghosts in Collinwood and he cannot explain them.

Because he’s only human. And Roger Collins’s humanity will be what saves him in the end.

This Day in History- Tuesday, August 16, 1966

The House Unamerican Activities Committee begins investigating Vietnam War protestors for evidence they were funded by George Soros, I mean communists. Just another day in America.

The leaders of Colombia, Chile and Venezuela, with representatives of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian governments sign the Declaration of Bogota, the precursor to the joint economic policy now known as the Andean Community.

An Iraqi Air Force pilot defects to Israel citing persecution for his Christian faith as the reason. He brings with him a Soviet MiG-21 supersonic jet fighter, the newest aircraft in the Soviet arsenal, allowing it to be studied by Western officials who would eventually use the information in one of the West’s and USSR’s countless proxy wars.

Behind the Scenes Shenanigans

Episodes 37 and 38 are the first Dark Shadows episodes to have been filmed out of sequence, with 38 being filmed the day before 37, presumably to accommodate the Broadway schedule of Mitch Ryan, who was throughout the first few months of the show starring in Wait Until Dark, which ran until the end of the year.

We chortle a lot about him, but the guy was booked and busy, which shows what I know, right?