New Sheriff in Town

We’re all doomed, I tell ya. Doomed!

I get that Victoria has had a rough few days, but are we agreeing on a comprehensive definition of “doomed”, because I’m pretty sure the little kid who lives in this house, at least, is having a good time.

You know what I want to see? More location footage. It’s been a while before we’ve gotten new stuff.

That footage, which I have privily termed “Roger goes to work”, is my favorite location footage in the show. It depicts an absurdly easy-going Roger (played with such touching sincerity by Louis Edmonds), jacket slung casually over his shoulder, walking to work.

He starts out going down a quay of some kind, so maybe he was checking the Collins fishing boats, which we were told last episode was something Bill Malloy liked to do every morning. How considerate of him since he’s now the de facto man in charge.

Then he continues toward the tiny clapboard building we just assume is the plant’s headquarters (small though it is), raising his hand in salute to some random person we just assume he sees, but we can’t see at all. Does Roger wave to that guy every morning? Is he a colleague? A friend? Roger can’t possibly have friends. Who is that person? Why is Roger so happy? The amazing thing is, they will reuse this footage over and over again, and every time it’s used, there will be less reason for Roger to look happy and well-at-ease.

But he does.

It is perhaps a little more justified than it might otherwise be this first time, though. According to Matthew, at least, Roger has just had his worries (suspicions, whatever) of the Dead Man at the Foot of Widows’ Hill (copyright trademark) put to rest. He also knows that, despite his sister’s best efforts, that Son of a Bitch Ned Calder isn’t going to come back to the plant any time soon to shit on his dreams or whatever he was afraid would happen.

Everything’s coming up Roger. For now. A very brief now.

Roger arrives at his office and is greeted by his telephone ringing.

We’ve clocked almost a whole week’s worth of episodes without Burke Devlin. I guess it was too good to be true.

Burke, who we last saw interrogating Sam Evans about Bill Malloy, is now interrogating Roger Collins about Bill Malloy. Again.

Good ol’ Mitch.

These two’s rivalry has never felt more like a custody dispute. They bicker about Malloy to little avail and then they bicker about David.

Which leads to Roger lambasting Burke for sending the gift to David, questioning his judgement, noting it’s an inappropriate thing to get for a boy like David. He might as well be telling Burke he can’t take the kid to Red Robin next week.

Roger even notes Burke must’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to find the crystal ball and…yeah, it sure looks that way, doesn’t it? I’ve already gone on at (way way) length wondering where the hell one gets a thing like that, but why would Burke have even picked such a thing?

Also, recall that Burke and David talked about pet dogs when they were last together. I know it was probably beyond their budget, but imagine Burke sending David a dog in a gift box like Lady and the Trap and Roger insisting they can’t have a pet like that in the house and David saying he hates him and Roger calling Burke in tears saying he has to stop playing with the boy’s feelings like this, Burke knows he has a dander problem and now he’s the big villain.

Brb, writing Burke/Roger co-parenting AU.

So Roger hangs up in a huff to be alone with his thoughts.

Also, note the super kitschy seashell chair. Synchs neatly with the shell ashtrays at the Blue Whale, but you’d think the biggest business in town would employ nicer taste.

Anyway, the phone rings but Roger wants nothing to do with that.

It was Liz trying, again, to get through to her wastrel son of a bitch of a brother. Having no luck there, she focuses her outrage on the nearest available target:

Elizabeth is still having trouble wrapping her mind around the fact that her “good friend” Matthew could have so casually disposed of the corpse of her er, “good friend” Malloy.

Hard to tell if Matthew is being sociopathic, or is too much of a simpleton to grasp the concept of right and wrong.

Matthew informs Liz that Malloy was quite clearly drowned, because I guess that was in doubt. It’s like in Clue (the board game, not the documentary it’s based on) where you’re told Mr. Boddy died from a blow to the head, but only three of the six weapons are blunt instruments and, even though there’s a professor among you, nobody in the party can tell whether or not the guy was shot, stabbed or…fell after being throttled by a noose. Sometimes the most obvious solution is the solution.

Of course, then you get those outcomes where it was Mrs. Peacock, in the Library with the Rope and you feel very stupid for having common sense. Even so.

And feasted on their bones, I don’t doubt.

Liz notes that Malloy was “afraid of the water”.

…what? The one character on the show who may as well have walked off a bag of frozen shrimp couldn’t swim? If that sounds wholly improbable to you, that’s because it is. Francis Swann must’ve thought so too, because he has Matthew do what TV Tropes would call “hang a lampshade” on it by pointing it out.

Well, I’ll just take his word for it, then. He seems like a worldly fellow.

So, Saint Elmo (not to be confused with the Fire or the Muppet Gen X blames for ruining Sesame Street), is a Medieval saint who is venerated as the patron of sailors. Over the centuries, sailors on storm-swept seas prayed to him for deliverance.

This, I imagine, is not something the average soap opera viewer would’ve known in 1966, but Dan Curtis didn’t care about that sort of thing and I still can’t decide whether he expected his audience to just know or didn’t care if they were lost.

Matthew insists he was thinking of the legacy of Collinwood when he pushed the body back into the sea.

Well, from a distance, a drowned Matthew would very much resemble a fishing net stuffed with rotted deep sea offal, so it’s very likely Malloy would’ve pushed it back where it belonged.

Twas?

Matthew justifies his actions by pointing out the body will just turn up somewhere else on the coast, like how people in Alaska occasionally get stuff that was thrown overboard in Tokyo. And, anyway, it’s not likely Malloy was killed on Widows’ Hill because the body appeared to have been in the water at least 24 hours.

This lines up with what we know, since Malloy was last seen around 24 hours before he was found, but how does Matthew know that? Or are we to believe he’s a forensic scientist on top of his many other talents?

The truth, of course, Liz tells him, as if this should be obvious and she didn’t personally lie to the police herself a few days ago. But, again, we’re never supposed to talk about that ever again, and if you needed further proof of that, just wait for the sheriff to show up.

Matthew still wants Liz to coach him on what to say (how precious) because, you see…

There is no way in hell this would fly today, and I can’t come up with a compelling reason why it should. It’s basically canon that Matthew is some kind of simpleton. He took Liz’s order to take the rap for Roger almost dying with a smile, and now we have confirmation that he actually has done something heinous just to protect the same boss that’s used him as a shield against public scrutiny.

And Liz is supposed to be one of the good members of this family.

Matthew notes that, since Liz keeps asking if he’s sure Malloy drowned, she might think he died some other way.

Liz reminds him it won’t just be the police asking.

Liz knows Malloy was on Roger’s scent, that he was determined against all-else to deal with the Burke problem she had repeatedly told him to ignore. It isn’t surprising that she would fear Burke learning of this and weaponizing it against her family.

Which, by the way, is the same thing he could’ve done with that attempted patricide thing he learned about a few days ago, but…again.

That Never Happened.

Matthew, however, isn’t scared of No Stinkin’ Devlin.

In case you forgot, Matthew quite publicly threatened to kill Burke a little while ago. He doesn’t like him because he wants to make trouble for the Collinses. If this statement means he suspects Burke has something to do with what happened to Malloy, or that he worries Burke will weaponize what happened against them…

Who knows?

Is there any way this guy isn’t a murderer? Roger doesn’t know (or, at least, isn’t supposed to know) that Malloy is dead.

Roger is talking to a man called either Hanlon or Hanley. If Hanley, this follows through as the marketing guy Roger told some other guy to bother instead of him when we first saw him at “work” a few weeks ago and, because of this, I choose to believe it’s Hanley. God knows what, exactly, Roger is bitching about, but it can’t be understated that he probably shouldn’t be acting like this. It’s the equivalent of cashing the wife’s life insurance settlement on a yacht the second she’s in the ground.

I also would like a plaque on my desk to lend legitimacy to my telephoned tantrums.

Roger gets a buzz and has enough time to tell his long-suffering secretary that he “doesn’t want to see” his visitor before the visitor barges in regardless.

The intimacy.

Burke has come over to finish their phone conversation in person. And that conversation? The same old shit.

I draw attention to how Roger’s scar, four in-universe days after his car crash, is almost completely faded, in a testament to the talent of this show’s makeup department. Though it still doesn’t quite explain how absolutely shitty it looked the first time we saw it. Was somebody fired?

Roger threatens to “call the company guards”, who I imagine are an army of little gnomes in yellow fishing caps wielding nets and tridents.

Told you. Same old shit.

This conversation is basically a rehash of the last one Burke had, with Sam. Burke will even admit this a little later. It’s all well and good, if not for the fact that now, finally, we know what happened to Malloy. We know he’s dead, not missing. That changes all the questions immediately. I don’t object to showing the increasing tension as Burke’s search gets ever more desperate, but it’s kind of diluted when in the other half of this episode, things are actually moving forward.

To that end…

Hiya, George.

Meet the new sheriff in town: George Patterson. Not that they’ll say his last name in this episode, but there it is. At least his title remains consistent.

First mentioned by name last episode, the appearance of the new Chromedomed law enforcement officer would occasion no surprise from any viewers who had jumped onboard over the last month.

Naturally, that wasn’t an awful lot. We, who have been aboard this train since the beginning recall there was another before “George Patterson”. Well we remember the bumbling Constable Jonas Carter, who became a Sheriff about halfway into his stint and, after a whole lot of dithering about morals and justice and the importance of the truth, allowed the fact that a small boy had tried to murder his father go entirely without notice, happily being spoon-fed a fabricated truth because, it was heavily implied, he feared the loss of his position.

Dark Shadows from the Beginning has you covered on the saga of Jonas Carter and the departure from the show of his portrayer Michael Currie, necessitating this, Dark Shadows’s first “soft recast”. Soft because, unlike in the cases of Sam Evans and our very own Matthew, noted character actor Dana Elcar isn’t stepping into the shoes vacated by the last sheriff’s actor. He is instead playing a new character entirely, created to supplant Consteriff Carter as though he’d never existed.

Presumably, this was out of some sense of respect toward Currie who, after all, tried his very best and was one of very few things that made the hell of the suppository story watchable (by being unwatchable, but you know how it is).

In-universe this works by virtue of retcon (the soap opera’s best friend and the soap fan’s most contentious enemy), pretending Carter never existed and acting as though Patterson was the sheriff the whole time. Maybe this is another reason no mention is made in this episode of the last time the sheriff was at Collinwood a few days ago. Eventually, though, they will make a few references to it later that confirm it was Patterson the whole time, which does very little to convince me of his capability, mind you, but there it is.

Side note, Carter was mentioned as recently as Episode 46 by Malloy, which I guess gives us a timeframe for just how swiftly this guy was hired once they decided to go full Murder Mystery and realized you can’t have one of those without an incompetent professional investigator to make your amateur sleuth protagonist look good.

Something immediately likable about Elcar is how approachable he seems. Whereas Carter always seemed uncertain and frightened (not for no reason), Elcar is a professional with leagues of television experience to the extent of no other core actor currently on this show. He gives off the air of being in control, authoritative, and knowing what he’s doing. Much closer to Sheriff Harry Truman than Inspector Clousseau.

He even knows to speak to Matthew as if he were a child.

The rule for today is that whenever something important is going to happen at Collinwood, we cut back to Roger and Burke having The Same Conversation.

Burke is telling Roger about his fruitless visit to Collinwood yesterday, looking for him. Roger is outraged at Burke’s presumption for daring to come up there and within breathing space of his niece.

Burke begins playing with those darts Roger threatened Malloy with back when he was alive. Good times.

Roger never alludes to Joe like, at all, but it’s telling he treats his niece’s boyfriend as “one of my employees”. Can’t help but feel that’s another diss for Joe’s collection.

Roger tells Burke that he can’t be considered suspicious because he, after all, agreed to go to the meeting in the first place, and if that’s all he’s got to defend himself he’d better hope Liz can afford a good lawyer.

Continuing with the Same Conversation (Burke and Roger edition, not to be confused with Maggie and Sam, Carolyn and Joe, Victoria and Elizabeth, and Me and My Therapist), Roger insists there is nothing connecting him with Sam, and Malloy didn’t know what he was talking about and Stop it Now.

A highlight is Roger saying that, if Sam were here to corroborate evidence for Malloy, why didn’t he? As if that was a thing he would’ve looked forward to doing. You can always tell when scenes are being extended to fill time when characters are resorted to saying stupid shit like that.

Roger claims nothing…you know how this goes.

Burke comes out and tells Roger Malloy intended to clear him of the manslaughter charge. Roger already has this from the (dead) horse’s mouth, but he pretends to have never heard it and not been at all convinced.

I did figure that was their dynamic.

He throws a dart.

You know what else is being missed? The point.

We begin to see Cartersque cracks in the Retcon Sheriff’s veneer as he takes Matthew’s statement. He does demonstrate the common sense to find it odd that Matthew is so vehemently defending pushing a corpse into the sea, which is hartening. When Liz points out Matthew was doing it for a misguided good cause (well, good for her, at least), Patterson continues showing due promise by noting it’s entirely unlikely Malloy died anywhere near Collinwood

Tides. Oh sweet mercy me, tides.

Patterson quips that “most of the time, my guesses are better than my logical deduction”, which indicates that, at the very least, his incompetence will be charming.

Matthew reminds Patterson that Mrsh. Shtoddahd has nothing to do with this and it’s all his fault, so he shouldn’t punish the dear noble woman, etc.

But here’s the thing… Patterson doesn’t intend to arrest anybody. Not even Matthew.

…what?

I dunno, it seems to me that kicking a corpse back into the ocean counts as tampering with the evidence, but maybe that meant something different in 1966. Patterson’s whole attitude is that of the cool teacher at school who didn’t mind catching you smoking in the bathroom because maybe you’ll give him some free cigarettes.

“But now that you did, maybe you can get me a coupla those Camels and we’ll pretend I was never here, yeah?”

Happens to the best of us.

Patterson notes that the exact manner of Malloy’s death will be unknown until the body is found and an autopsy can be conducted. Easy stuff, right, or you’d think it is since the resident cop is acting like this is all a traffic violation.

For the love of God, when does it end?

Roger continues denying things with a poetical prettiness that’s fun but does nothing to redeem this giant waste of my time.

Oh, semantics.

Roger suggests maybe Malloy is hiding somewhere and was, after all, drunk the last day he was seen.

Snap.

And it goes on and on. Finally, Burke tells Roger the real reason of his association with Malloy: that Malloy promised to deliver him Roger if Burke promised to stop screwing around with the rest of the Collinses.

But Roger knows this. And he pretends he doesn’t and around and around and around it goes.

Back at Collinwood, much dithering is done over times and places. It turns out maybe parts of Episode 51 were already past midnight because, after a very long discussion of just how much time Matthew spent studying the body before deciding what to do with it, he and Patterson tentatively decide it all happened at 12:30.

Why is this important?

Tides are an interesting plot device in detective fiction. I’ll chew your ear about them more in a few episodes when the characters decide to start tooling with them. suffice to say, I’m sure Francis Swann thought it was a very clever way to utilize the stormy sea constantly buffeting the foot of Widow’s Hill. I mean, if you begin your show with waves every day…

Patterson asks Matthew to accompany his deputy to the foot of the cliff to retrace his steps.

Good to know HARRY didn’t get erased from existence. I wonder if he and the new guy have the same confidence he shared with the Consteriff.

With Matthew gone, Patterson confides a suspicion that indicates he may not be as hopeless as his predecessor after all:

There’s an angle, and a tantalizing new suspect. If Matthew is, after all, so obsessed with protecting the reputation of the Collins name, might it be likely he would kill a man who sought to expose its most wretched secret?

Like Matthew said…he and Malloy were a lot a like in that way. It’s just that they clearly have very different ideas about what it means to protect the family they serve.

Then again, it’s a bit of a stretch that Matthew would kill Malloy and later admit to disposing of the body. Unless Liz is just that convincing.

Liz rebukes the suggestion Matthew had anything to gain from Malloy’s death.

There’s another cheap attempt at connecting scenes via dialog here. I can’t tell which writer is more obnoxious, but Francis Swann currently can’t top Art Wallace for volume. Burke points out that Roger and Sam both stand the most to gain from Malloy’s death. As we’ve already discussed though (and before) this isn’t quite so. Liz, Matthew, even Burke himself can all be considered suspects for different reasons of varying degrees of plausibility.

Anyway, an increasingly incoherent Mitch Ryan…I mean, Burke Devlin, communicates to Roger, with much use of his hands, that…

Ah God.

Divorce is hard, guys. One parent gets the kid a crystal ball to piss the other parent off. The other parent murders the one man who can clear the other’s name. Difficult for everybody.

Burke starts talking about railroading again and thank God it’s time for a

It’s Liz, and this time Roger wants to speak to her. Liz summons him to Collinwood at once, and Roger agrees, if only to get out of the ex’s hair.

You’ll note that now there is a dart in the bullseye.

Roger supposes Burke will forget all this nonsense by the next time they see each other.

God help us.

Alone, Burke throws another goddamn dart.

What happened to the real dartboard from the last time we were in this set? This thing is a corkboard circle, it’s like they made it in the last twenty minutes before the cameras rolled. Did somebody steal the other board?

Wow, okay. Dick.

Patterson says this in response to Liz’s claim she can’t think of anybody who would want to harm Malloy, which anyway is untrue since she knows very well her brother was pissing scared of him the entire last day of Malloy’s life.

Roger arrives with the swiftness.

Oh, please.

It doesn’t look good.

This Day in History- Thursday, September 8, 1966

In other television news, today sees the American premiere of Star Trek on NBC, ushering in a new era for science fiction and for television. Nancy Barrett, in a documentary feature for Dark Shadows some decades after the show concluded, places Star Trek, Dark Shadows, and the Monkees (also from this television season) all as part of a counter culture for T.V that permeated in the late ‘60s. Regrettably for everything else Dark Shadows is, it is still a soap opera and, because of this, is rarely ever considered part of the movement by modern television scholars. Sucks.

Dark Shadows’ network, ABC, would make its own contribution to the cultural zeitgeist with That Girl, introducing the delightful Marlo Thomas as the archetypical “Go Getter” gal of the ‘60s. Victoria Winters wishes.

International Literacy Day is observed for the first time. As much as I appreciate your readership, this blog does not count as a book, so you have no excuse to not seek further reading elsewhere.