Whole Lot of Nothing

We are told today that

Which is another of those Dark Shadows flourishes that sounds much more impressive than it has any right to be. It’s by no means some new revelation that this show is about the past and the way it impacts the lives of its characters in the present. The real challenge ends up being all the ways the writers try to make it sound novel from episode to episode.

Something that is novel: more new location footage.

Lots of this second generation of location footage doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that can be easily re-used. Vicky and Roger’s date, Matthew leading Vicky and David out of the Old House, and now Sam dithering before entering the Sheriff’s Station, are all things that depend heavily on context. One gets the impression that Dan Curtis got a little extravagant after the show as renewed for another 13 weeks.

As lovely as it is to see these two queens together, I’m afraid to tell you that this is just empty time-wasting nonsense. Sam is obviously here for an ulterior motive, Patterson even understands this, and hints he was expecting see Sam.

It’s all puffery. Patterson was only expecting Sam because Roger and Burke, the two other interested parties in the matter of Malloy’s death, had already been to see him earlier in the day, and he figured Sam would complete the trifecta.

In reality, there’s nothing to any of this. Nothing new has developed for or against Sam since these two last spoke. If anything, we now have even less evidence to implicate Sam in Malloy’s death. It’s fairly certain Sam and Patterson are only part of this scene together because they will be needed, separately, elsewhere in the episode.

Sam does eventually admit he turned up because he was curious, as Roger and Burke were, to know the status of the coroner’s report.

The emphasis on characters waiting for the coroner’s report is very odd, since, as Patterson even points out here, all relevant parties will find out its out and what it says the second that happens. These people are only making themselves look more suspicious by constantly hounding Patterson about it.

Though, of course, Roger at least had a reason, to get Vicky covering his ass in there at the last minute. Burke was being his usual vengeful self. I don’t know what the hell poor Sam’s excuse is, except that he loves to incriminate himself.

Give this man a Pulitzer.

Back at Collinwood, David returns from a day of play. I guess all attempts to find him were abandoned after five minutes.

Those little notches with the loops to close it up! Fashion icon David Collins.

So he’s upset to learn that Vicky is back after being gone all morning, having convinced himself that she’d been miraculously fired or raptured or pushed into the sea. Liz points out that he could always put some effort into getting along with his governess, as if she weren’t seriously considering firing her just moments ago based on some bullshit gossip her daughter told her.

Telegramming my high school self, this, be right back…

David tells Liz he does like some people. Two, in fact: Liz herself, and Burke Devlin.

David’s friendship with Burke has been sadly neglected since the suppository saga wrapped up. We’re still waiting on them to have a second in-person scene. Though Burke did send David that crystal ball he used a lot a while back and hasn’t been mentioned since. Remember that?

David goes on about Burke, noting he likes that Burke doesn’t treat him like a kid, and remains frank and honest with him, unlike Liz, who covers up her true intentions and desires with genteel detachment.

We’ll talk about this more next episode, but it’s really something how Liz has the same sorts of conversations warning people off Burke with Carolyn and David.

More of this episode’s manufactured conflict arises when David accuses Liz, apropos of nothing, of telling the sheriff she thinks Burke murdered Malloy. This shortly after Liz insisted to David that Malloy’s death was an accident for the 100^th time.

It comes from nowhere, but serves to underscore David’s divided loyalty, something that has been lurking since the suppository story (where it was Burke vs. Roger) and now manifests entirely as his being split between the only two people he cares about: his aunt and his friend (and…possibly…real Dad).

Anyway, back to the filler. Not that the Collinwood stuff was much better. Sam wants to know what Patterson thinks the coroner’s ruling will be. And, again, if it really is only a little while off, Sam is bound to know the answer eventually, but we have to make a fuss so the audience can still think Sam is suspicious, despite him being the only one of the three primary suspects to have been all-but vindicated by this point.

Patterson tells him that the most important thing the coroner is going to want to know from him is…

So at least we’re getting some in-universe recognition about how these interested parties have been doing nothing to help themselves here.

But Sam isn’t nervous, he laughs! What a preposterous notion! No, no, Sam is interested. And now he’d better go on his way and continue being unsuspicious and Good day officer…

Well that was a spectacular waste of time.

Anyway, here’s David perching himself precariously on the edge of a table.

David is trying to call Burke’s room, only to learn he isn’t there. And, yes, this is exactly what Carolyn was doing last episode. They keep doling out these weird parallels between the cousins’ relationship with Burke and I cannot say I’m thoroughly comfortable, but discomfort is where we live now.

Liz catches David on the phone and rebukes him trying to get in touch with Burke and…okay, I’ve gotta be honest with you.

This is such a weird, vacuous, empty episode. Not that we expect much from a Wednesday. Not as little as we would from a Tuesday, but at least that episode had Mrs. Johnson and the mayonnaise. What am I even watching? What is the point? For, indeed, this episode’s entire raison d’etre comes about in the last five minutes, and everything else is just wheel-spinning.

Indeed, it doesn’t matter that David can’t warn Burke that Liz and the Sheriff are conspiring against him, because they aren’t and David has no reason to say that. Even Joan Bennett sounds exasperated.

After David finally troops up to his room, Liz goes to the phone, as is her custom, and calls the Sheriff’s Station to ask when the coroner’s report will be coming.

Act III begins with some more location footage, this time showing Sam heading to the Collinsport Restaurant, where his lovely daughter is waiting.

Maggie now gets to indulge her natural role as arbiter of local gossip, a role she nevertheless rarely gets a chance to fill out because there’s just never any gossip.

She presumably heard this from some customers, which is something because we’ve seen the restaurant in every episode so far this week, and even when Susie was manning it, there were never more than named characters eating here. Maybe things were really hopping in the interval of time between last episode and this one.

 Sam, naturally, is sick of this subject.

Sure. I hear those travel agents that do your taxes get pretty exciting too.

Sam subtly (or not) suggests Maggie get away from the mundane nonsense of Collinsport and leave.

I guess vaudeville was still something you could reference in the ‘60s with the reasonable hope people would get it? I guess, in a lot of ways, there isn’t much difference between the vaudeville of the turn of the 20^th century and the variety shows of the ‘50s and ’60s.

Probably slightly less blackface, though.

So Sam is being fatalistic again. In a post-letter world, there is no physical item around which we can center his constant fear for his own mortality and concern for his daughter’s future. So we get moments like this.

The thing I love most about this is that it paints some world in which Sam supports his family financially and Maggie is just slinging sandwiches and getting ten cent tips for the kick of it.

Maggie, however, is far more optimistic about the coroner’s report, even while recognizing that local gossip suggests…

Even with this knowledge, she is sure her father won’t be implicated. Further evidence of her faith in him and also, presumably, an indictment of Roger because…well, who else would it be?

Back at Collinwood, Liz takes a phone call. It’s Roger.

The significant thing is LOOK BEHIND YOU

Liz does catch David, but the second she turns her back again…

I love how she totally gives up on following him, as if there are magical forcefields preventing her from going over the property line. Hope he doesn’t fall off a cliff.

This is made even better with the subsequent sound of a car pulling up. Astute contemporary soap viewers would be worried that the number one killer of daytime soap children is upon us, which…well, it’s not like car-related drama is foreign to this show. And it would be ironic, if nothing else.

But no, it’s just the Sheriff and no children were harmed.

Act IV begins with Patterson calling HARRY to tell him where he is because I guess he gets lonely waiting up at night.

Through this one-sided phone call we learn that Patterson has just come from the coroner’s office and the results were just as they suspected they would be. Which means, only halfway through the week, we’re going to get an answer to a major question that will determine the future of the show’s current primary storyline.

Patterson prefaces his explanation thus.

I guess we know what the local scuttlebutt about those two was. No wonder Mrs. Johnson is so resentful.

Patterson notes that he’s technically skirting regulations by giving Liz the news ahead of everybody else, which could be a notch in favor of him being corrupt and beholden to the Collinses, but only in an incidental kind of way. He is, after all, trying to be a gentleman.

The preface is promising.

Well, that seems to paint a very specific picture. There is, after all, only one person implicated in the case whom Liz might have reservations about seeing punished: her brother.

But Liz notes that, regardless, she would want to see the guilty party punished. And so we get to the coroner’s verdict at long last…

…and that’s why this happened on a Wednesday. We are told that Malloy wasn’t murdered, that his death was an accident, and therefore the police investigation is at an end.

But we know that can’t be, because it’s all a waste of narrative time if that’s the case. It’s a murder, and we know how it can still be that despite the coroner’s verdict because we’ve been told. The blow on Malloy’s head could as easily been sustained by impact with the rocks after hitting the water, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t pushed. We never learn what led the coroner to make this decision, but we know why Art Wallace did: because the onus is off the police.

Bill Malloy was murdered: any other explanation is cheap and hackneyed and undermines the amount of time and energy the show has spent on the storyline. By having the case “officially” be closed, the stakes are heightened for those seekers like Burke, Mrs. Johnson, and even David, ratcheting up the tensions (Vicky’s favorite word) between the Collinses and their opponents within and without the family.

Except of course it isn’t. Sam is wise to this as we enter the last scene of the episode.

Before he can elaborate (though he does have time to remark that his daughter is a bad waitress, but maybe as a joke), none other than little David enters, looking pretty fresh for someone who just got all this way on foot.

God, remember that? How David met Maggie while fleeing justice back in the Greatest Suppository Episode? This time around, Maggie seems much more comfortable with the fact of an itinerant child wandering into her establishment with no adult supervision. I guess by now she figures he’s better off here than at home.

Just like last time, David is here to seek Burke although, whereas in the suppository story, David sought to frame Burke, this time around, he wants to save him…from a problem he himself invented in his head, but whatever, just roll with it.

This brings us to this dull as dirt episode’s one redeeming quality: David meets Sam.

There was some kerfuffle about this before, with Vicky wanting to introduce David to a “real artist”, which ended up being the impetus for her dinner date at the Evanses. Since that dinner date happened, however, nothing has been said about Vicky’s original motivation, but it’s fine because now the two characters have met anyway, with no input from Vicky at all.

As usual.

I love that handshake so much. Was it improvised, or something Davids Ford and Henesy worked out in rehearsals? Doesn’t seem like something scripted in any case. You see what a darling old Dad Sam really is at heart. I love it.

These two minutes make the entire episode worth it.

Sam goes on about how he’d love to do David’s portrait and David is thrilled to learn Sam is an artist.

The magic of this moment is short-lived, however, David getting cold feet the moment he learns Sam and Roger know each other.

And off he goes, leaving father, daughter and sundae behind.

Something tells me he feels the same way.

Maggie tries to convince him to eat some ice cream, or else she will.

Is this when they try to convince me that Maggie can’t afford to have some dessert? The ‘60s was very into reviving the invisible waist as something of desirability. During the Depression and the war, having a fuller figure was considered attractive because it meant you weren’t starving to death.

You know you’ve done a good job when you have to have the characters explicitly say what the stakes are.

This Day in History- Wednesday, October 5, 1966

UNESCO establishes World Teachers’ Day. Today, the United States shows how much it demonstrates its educators by forcing them to teach during a mishandled pandemic.

The first successful Australian flag burning occurs outside the residence of the Prime Minister in Canberra as a group of students protest Australian involvement in the Vietnam War.

The 1964 murder conviction and death sentence of Jack Ruby is overturned. Ruby had been accused of shooting the accused assassin of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, on live television in November of 1963, in what is now considered the most widely witnessed murder in history. A new trial would be scheduled, but Ruby would become sick with pneumonia and succumb to a pulmonary embolism early in the new year.

North Korean leader Kim Il Sung delivers a speech to the Korean Workers’ Party, calling for a “positive struggle against U.S. imperialism”. This lead to a surge of provocations at the Korean DMZ. Also on this day…We Almost Lost Detroit. A nuclear reactor outside Detroit, Michigan has a partial meltdown. The incident would become the subject of a 1975 bestselling book.