Chekov’s Pen

In this, Dark Shadows‘ 75th episode, Victoria Winters realizes she belongs now.

And that’s the Monkey’s Paw sadism of it all, isn’t it? Victoria came to Collinsport looking for answers about her family…and she has found a family, even if answers are in pretty short supply.

Vicky belongs in Collinwood now. She is “Vicky” to everybody but the spiteful child who wants her dead, she is on friendly terms with Roger Collins, Elizabeth Stoddard appears to have begun developing a motherly rapport with her (occasional attempts to fire her for bullshit and hearsay notwithstanding), and even her fights with Carolyn seem to bring a heretofore unknown girlish joy in the young heiress.

But the downside of that connection is Vicky has also inherited the Collinses dramas. Her own quest has been waylaid and waylaid again by the tension (ahem) between Burke and Roger and the intrigue of Bill Malloy’s death.

But this episode isn’t about Vicky. She’s in it, but she’s not the point. She even closes off this week by doing something very significant, but it isn’t significant because of her. That’s just where we are with the character at this point.

We begin with her first trip to Widows’ Hill since the night Vicky and Carolyn first spotted the Dead Man at the Foot of Widows’ Hill (copyright trademark), three days, and more than 30 episodes ago.

Matthew discovers Roger looking out over the sea.

Matthew isn’t inclined to agree and, considering his recent experiences of the place, who can blame him, but Roger is currently feeling vindicated, which means the spot where a dude’s body was found no longer has any ill portent because it doesn’t mean any harm will come to him specifically.

Harsh, but fair, given the evidence.

Matthew, it turns out, simply isn’t a very romantic type of man. Where Roger sees the delicate play of sun and cloud, Matthew sees the threat of rain. Matthew, of course, isn’t the kind of person to be happy for any reason, unless Mrsh. Shttodahd pats him on the head and gives him a Milk Bone. He is a resolutely cynical, self-serious, and unimaginative man, and the only emotion he seems humanly capable of is a kind of bestial loyalty towards one singular woman and the house she lives in.

But Roger has plenty of room in him to feel positive, for indeed…

Oh, he is so screwed.

After the titles, we join Victoria as she plans for an afternoon constitutional of her own, being intercepted by Carolyn in the process.

If this seems odd to you, congratulations. Carolyn sees nothing strange with being all warm and friendly around Vicky despite practically calling her a slut and trying to get her fired just three episodes ago.

When Vicky points this out, Carolyn acts like nothing ever happened. So either Carolyn is at least as…er…out of it as her cousin, or she’s just stupid and totally lacking in self-awareness. Could be both.

They ain’t seen nothing yet.

So Carolyn thoroughly seems to forget that she was trying to railroad Vicky out of town for consorting with Burke. I at least think this is supposed to be funny.

Vicky tries to guess what Carolyn’s good news is.

To which Carolyn laughs like its a grand joke (poor Joe) and tells her, no, silly, she’s glad because now her uncle won’t be investigated for murder.

Perhaps demonstrating her comparative sanity, Vicky isn’t skipping and clapping with glee at this news and, indeed, dryly points out this doesn’t necessarily mean everything is finished.

Oh, Art. Never change.

Matthew sensibly (!!!) points out Burke can still make trouble, regardless of the coroner’s verdict. Which is very true and quite literally what Burke is now planning to do. But Roger isn’t concerned.

Roger may as well be steepling his fingers together all throughout this very on the nose scene. Matthew doesn’t seem to like being reminded of his attack on Burke a couple of nights ago which, indeed, Burke believed Roger had put him up to, despite the truth of the matter being Matthew deciding to do it for himself.

Er…

It’s like Roger can no longer give a fuck. He’s basically alluding to the exact way Malloy was murdered (not that he was, of course, certainly not), turning it all into a light joke.

Matthew, at any rate, is unamused.

Oh, that incorrigible Matthew and his little quirks!

Matthew seeks further assurances that this means the investigation is concluded and they need fear no more visits from the Sheriff at Collinwood which, as ever, is Matthew’s primary concern.

I like how that line ends up being the dramatic closer for the act. But, yeah, this was a…weird scene. Matthew warning Roger against making macabre jokes about killing people. Roger insinuating Matthew use violence to dispatch someone…

It certainly seems like there’s something fishy going on. And yet…

Back at Collinwood, Carolyn loans Vicky a scarf so she can talk a walk along the beach.

Just like that, they’re all friends again. Everybody is joking and laughing and having a good time. The anvil hanging over everything has got to be the size of Jupiter.

Carolyn points out that this happiness will be temporary, saying Burke won’t stop, as if Vicky hadn’t just made this same point to her earlier in this same episode.

Vicky notes that, for now, there doesn’t seem to be much any of them can do about what Burke may or may not have in mind and sensibly decides Carolyn just Stop. s if she can.

“Lookout Point” is, if you’ve forgotten (and considering how little it’s been brought up, why shouldn’t you have?) the place the police concluded as the likeliest spot for Malloy to have gone into the water. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything, though.

There’s a brief interlude where Matthew returns and mentions Roger is on Widows’ Hill, and Vicky tells Carolyn she’ll fetch him so they can, er, squee about the coroner together or whatever.

I guess he has some squeeing in mind too.

We get some more location footage, differentiated from earlier shots of Vicky on the Collinwood grounds, because now she has a headscarf on to keep continuity.

So much of this footage is so context-sensitive that you can imagine what’ll happen when they run out of money again and have to start recycling these things.

Vicky makes her way to Widows’ Hill, where we get a beautiful callback to her very first encounter with Roger at this same spot.

It’s so perfectly illustrative of how far Vicky has come. Not as a character, but as a fixture at Collinwood. Despite everything, there is very little the members of the Collins family can do to her that will turn her away or frighten her. Victoria Winters has arrived.

I just wish this one had been allowed to stay.

Roger puts his dope-ass hat back on and sits on a nearby rock to tell Victoria how his problems are as like stones to be tossed into the sea.

But, on second thought, Roger decides the stone…

Roger would know of course.

Then, with a flourish that I can only describe as “homosexual”, Roger bids “Mr. Devlin” farewell and hurls him off into oblivion.

I find Roger relatable for many reasons, and one of them is we have Gay Noodle Arms.

Anyway, now let’s talk about Heavy Stuff.

Neither of them are sure if they do. But let’s talk about the concept of predestined fate and what it means in the world of Dark Shadows.

From a certain point of view, Victoria may indeed have been destined from the moment of her birth to be standing on Widows’ Hill and looking out across the sea, as generations of Collinses have before her. If, indeed, her roots are on Widws’ Hill, it would be the most natural place.

Fate and destiny will end up playing big metaphysical roles on Dark Shadows as it continues its descent into the paranormal. As with the recurring theme of revenge, Dan Curtis and crew will put a great, epic spin on these age-old themes that will set Dark Shadows apart from its daytime contemporaries, then and for more than 50 years into the future.

Anyway, Vicky decides to continue her walk to Lookout Point. Roger gives a surprised start and notes that that this is the place Malloy is believed to have last been alive. Vicky doesn’t let this dissuade her, because she wants to pick up some seashells, dammit, and that’s that.

Back at Collinwood, Carolyn is telling Joe about the good news.

There’s a moment where Joe presumably makes a comment similar to Vicky’s about how Burke likely isn’t going to take this lying down and Carolyn rebukes him and that’s what passes for Joe’s role this week.

I miss Joe. Nevertheless.

Very much uncle/niece thing to do. Nothing strange here. I still think it’s odd that ABC Standards and Practices wouldn’t let them say “damn”, but they had no trouble with one of the female leads having a paper-thin crush on her uncle. I guess plausible deniability is where it’s at.

Roger assures Carolyn there was never anything worry about, no sir. This is gotten out of the way very quickly, because the point isn’t the coroner’s verdict, but the Next Thing.

Welcome to Pen Island.

Just some more hyper-specific location footage, this time of Vicky strolling the beach at Lookout Point.

But we’ll get back to that.

They called it the pen of dreams. And it was!

Ignoring Roger complimenting pen-craftsmanship (Penmanship? Remember that?), let’s talk for a moment about how he had trouble remembering the pen, because that’s more than certainly the same thing the audience was experiencing.

Russian playwright Anton Chekov famously wrote “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

In short, the sensible writer removes elements not relevant to the story they are telling. The Chekov’s Gun isn’t explicitly a type of foreshadowing, but the presence of a significant item that occurs early in a narrative and returns in a major way later does align with that dramatic principle.

Mystery writers must be especially careful about planting guns that never go off. To refer, again, to my girl Dame Agatha Christie, let’s look at her seminal work The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the greatest mystery stories of all time. In Roger Ackroyd, many elements are introduced that seem to have some bearing on the case: the narrator character overhears a conversation, a supporting character with a relationship to the victim dies at the story’s start, a housekeeper asks strange questions about drugs, a woman has a dramatic fainting spell…

All these things (including the clue that eventually reveals the murderer) are introduced in the first few chapters, and all pay off in the end of the novel. There is not a single irrelevant piece of information in the story.

Rules are made to be broken, of course. There are times when a writer may introduce a concept of some kind into a story and not ride with it 100% to the end. But, as a guideline, it is always important to establish significant elements early in the story so they can come back in a natural way and, on the other end of this, to be sparing in what you include in a narrative, making sure the majority of elements in the story contribute to it in some way.

The sterling silver filigreed fountain pen is a conventional example of a Chekov’s Gun. Introduced in Episode 42 as a gift Burke gives to Carolyn, it was confiscated shortly afterward by Roger, who objected to Carolyn taking gifts from a strange older man that wasn’t him. Roger promised to return the pen to Burke but, when he did see him at the meeting Malloy notably never showed up for, Roger discovered to his surprise that he had lost it.

As we learned last episode, Burke had quite forgotten about the pen, and only remembered the interaction with Roger when Carolyn brought it up to him. The canny consumer of mystery fiction may have understood at once way back in Episode 47 just what the absence of the pen meant. Now, in Episode 75, it becomes abundantly clear.

The pen is the key. The way, the truth, the life. The answer to everything lies within Chekov’s Silver Filigreed Fountain Pen.

It took some prodding, though. Which is a poor Chekov’s Gun…use, thing. In the daytime soap format, when episodes are aired every weekday, it can be very easy to forget things. That’s why characters frequently have redundant conversations, to fill in blanks for viewers who missed an episode, or simply forgot what happened many months ago.

And, obviously, if they kept talking about the silver pen all this time, you’d have seen it coming back a mile away, which would’ve killed the effect. And yet…it was indicated very strongly the moment Roger realized he didn’t have it at as office, which is another part of the problem.

The pen is significant by its absence. It being missing is the equivalent of the gun going off. Because, as Carolyn suggests (accidentally, as always) to Roger…

Which means he could’ve. And he did. And, as evidenced by this ‘Oh, shit’ face.

He gets it now. Because, as Roger has been very bad at hiding for all this time, it’s clear there was something off about his attitude the night Malloy died. How his tension and fear before he left Collinwood turned so quickly to flippant snark when he arrived at the meeting, well after the time it has now been agreed that Malloy would have died. How his fear and irritation returned in full force when Vicky and Carolyn first saw Malloy’s body at the foot of Widows’ Hill. And how he has only loosened up now, with the coroner’s verdict seeming to prove that all questions into Malloy’s death are now answered.

Except, as the pen proves, they haven’t been. And all that is needed now is for it to just turn up somewhere, in the hands of someone who does not yet understand the calamitous powers it possesses…

Kind of sad that we’ve reached the point where the best way to keep the central character significant is to have her, by happenstance, stumble upon a pen.

Back at Collinwood, Roger is literally searching under cushions like the pen is a piece of loose change.

In the next room, Carolyn asks Matthew to keep an eye out for the pen, as if he knows what writing is. Roger, for his part, is doing very little to conceal why finding this pen is suddenly a Very Serious Matter.

He proceeds to get pissy when he learns Carolyn got Matthew involved. I guess the Charmed Circle can’t be widened. Matthew shortly after prevents Roger from taking off by warning him…

There’s a tense silence before a knock comes to the door. Roger somberly sends Matthew off to get Liz while he dourly tells Carolyn:

Here we go again…

This Day in History- Friday, October 7, 1966

The Soviet government announces the expulsion of all Chinese students in the country, in retaliation to China doing the same to Soviet students in September.

18 teens and a bus driver are killed when their bus is struck by a freight train at a railroad crossing in Quebec. To make matters more depressing, the 42 total student passengers were on their way to a dance to celebrate winning student elections. Christ.

Indigenous-American writer Sherman Alexie is born in Spokane, Washington.

Johnny Kidd, lead singer for British rock band Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, is killed in a car crash. He was 30 years old.