World’s Best (Terrorized) Teacher

Dark Shadows’ 90^th episode is about decisions, and the meandering roads on which we travel to get to them.

Victoria Winters, however, has put this philosophy aside, leaving this latest pivotal decision in the hands of a small boy who tried to kill her last night, because…reasons.

If you’re worried about yet another endless diatribe about whether or not Vicky should leave Collinwood, be somewhat soothed. This episode isn’t all about that. Fairly quickly, Vicky makes it known to David (again wearing that weird boarding school getup he just has on sometimes for no reason) that she is packing her suitcase (apparently restored following David beating it to a pulp in the first week) to leave…just like she wanted.

But did he?

Poor Vicky has been bamboozled, swindled and conned by this kid an embarrassing number of times, but it’s comforting that she hasn’t been reduced enough to buy this crap.

Imagining some rousting instrumental playing over that trip down memory lane. It’s impressive Francis Swann recalled all those moments, especially that one that happened last week, because he’s gonna drop the ball on that same area a little later.

David claims he didn’t mean all of what he said, saying that he would go to Victoria’s funeral if it came to that.

90 episodes in and that’s about as Addams Family as we’ve gotten. Can’t tell if that’s good or bad.

David has a little speech (which he delivers perfectly, unlike some leading men I could mention) about how he used to pretend to be all these various roles as a funeral, as kids do, of course. Vicky wonders who the dead person was in these games.

It’s a testament to how far we’ve come that this comment gets nothing more than a “that’s morbid” from Victoria before they just move in. The fact of David having a pathological, and perhaps rational terror and hatred of his father (to the point that he’s tried to kill him) is now just the stuff of casual conversation.

It’s a moot point, but at the onset of the suppository storyline, David made a case for children executing their enemies via firing squad, going so far as to pick up one of the two toy guns on his table to demonstrate. This is one of Swann’s more forgivable lapses, because if you told somebody that scene had been written, acted, filmed and aired on daytime television, they almost certainly wouldn’t believe you.

Huh. Maybe she remembers.

David claims he didn’t mean to lock Victoria in the East Wing, which is such a transparent lie that you just have to give it up for the kid’s audacity.

Also, I don’t usually point out the appearance of boom mic shadows, given they occur in some form in every episode, but check out this banger on Vicky’s wall.

You know. Ghosts. Those things that can die.

David mentions two ghosts in particular: Josette Collins (who we’ve met), and another girl, whose name he doesn’t know. It’s possible she’s meant to be the governess who also lost her life plummeting from Widow’s Hill as the second of the three women fated to die that way. We never do hear very much about her. David doesn’t mention the collective “Widows” we are to understand occasionally “tell” him things and I have to imagine that’s because he’s only talking about ghosts he interacts with in the East Wing, because Swann couldn’t possibly have forgotten them too, could he?

Vicky tells David about her encounter with the undead Mr. Malloy and the kid totally flips.

This is a fascinating moment. Vicky, previously the perennial skeptic, admits to David she was wrong to disbelieve him about “his” ghosts, and tells him she “believes” now. It takes a certain type of person to admit you were wrong, especially to a kid. Especially if he’s tried to kill you. But bygones.

Naturally, this suddenly promotes Vicky to the coveted position of David’s favorite person. When she tells him Malloy told her to leave Collinwood, he vehemently insists she do no such thing, which seems to answer her question about what he would think neatly enough.

The little ghost anthropologist has never met a woman in the field before, and Vicky isn’t about to be mansplained, politely informing him that Malloy’s ghost told her to do exactly the opposite.

Here’s that major error I mentioned. You see, when Malloy appeared to Vicky in Episode 85, he told her to “leave Collinwood before you’re killed”. That’s it. Never in that very short interaction does he tell her that he was killed. That never happened. This is the most grievous continuity error Francis Swann ever makes though, at the same time, I can’t get too upset, because it would make more sense for Malloy to also tell Victoria that he’d been murdered, on a practical and dramatic level.

So let’s make this the first time a continuity error has helped make the story better. There’s a lot more where that came from.

He does sound genuinely relieved and excited at this prospect. It’s quite cute. He then throws some more ghost anthropology that he picked up God knows where.

 This is the second time it’s been suggested that Josette didn’t kill herself but, in fact, was murdered, an alternative scenario that seems to have been concocted solely to draw a link between her tragic death and Malloy’s…despite Malloy explicitly being pushed into the sea somewhere other than Widows’ Hill, which is just where Vicky and Carolyn found his body. The “Josette was murdered” conspiracy theory is floated (heh) without any connecting evidence or clues and is left to hang for so long you eventually forget it even exists.

Still, it’s another gothic trope: the ghost that can’t leave the old dark house until the mystery of its tragic death is solved. It would explain the presence of Josette’s restless, sorrowful spirit, to the extent that one needs to explain ghosts in stories like this, and provides a necessary impetus in the ongoing story of Malloy’s death: solving his murder would put his restless spirit at ease.

This shocking pivot is heard by Carolyn, who enters the room just in time to make herself the center of attention, as usual.

Carolyn, as established two episodes ago, has her own shallow, selfish reasons for wanting Vicky to stay at Collinwood. She knows full well David tried to kill her last night, so her acting like he’s found God or something is more than a little much.

Carolyn, of course, isn’t so depraved as to beat David black and blue. She thinks that kind of thing is hot anyway.

David shuffles off and now we get to see Vicky tell Carolyn what she just told David, because this is how Francis Swann decided to close off his first week as the only writer on the show.

Carolyn remains skeptical about Vicky’s private haunting, but Victoria remains steadfast in her believe that she saw what she saw.

We’ll get plenty of chances in coming storylines to discuss just what “supernatural” meant in the context of the 1960s, and the various fads and studies that had been done into the paranormal around that time. Those are perhaps best saved for more explicit instances than this relatively low-key episode, however.

For now, content yourself by musing just how strange it was for a daytime soap opera in 1966, three days off from Halloween or not, to even be using the word supernatural in a serious, dramatic context. This was entirely untrodden ground for the medium, and virtually nobody was aware of it as it was happening.

We cut to right outside the room, as David indulges his favorite habit of eavesdropping in overt fashion, not even bothering to hide this time.

The pile of wet seaweed was discovered by Elizabeth and Roger on their trip to the East Wing in Episode 88. For unfathomable reasons, they didn’t tell Vicky about the discovery when they saw her, and then spent all of last episode talking about how Burke Devlin Will Definitely Never Do a Business Treachery to Us, only to learn that, in fact, he was doing just that.

It turns out that Vicky, intrepid journalist that she is, documented her adventure in her journal, which she gives to Carolyn to read:

It’s…it’s ‘What do you do with a drunken sailor?’. But whatever. The point is this detail of Malloy’s favorite song, something Vicky couldn’t have known otherwise, is enough to give Carolyn pause that something happened in that room last night.

Anyway, here’s Matthew for his union-mandated weekly appearance.

Yet again, we must watch decorated theater actor Thayer David play straight man to this nine-year-old’s wise guy.

Matthew is changing the lock on the door to the East Wing because Liz told him to, explaining that Vicky got locked inside, at the same time neglecting to tell him anything about how she got locked inside, because David could ritualistically murder everybody else in the house and Liz would shake her head disapprovingly before walking away. She’s the Susan Collins of Collinsport, which is fitting because they’re both from Maine and why didn’t I make that joke the first time I compared Liz to a politician?

David strolls off all super casual-like and then Matthew drops the lock and says “Rats”, which is the kind of time-wasting nonsense I want to see on this program, in direct contrast to Carolyn poking her out of the door to wonder what’s been going on.

Nothing interesting.

I’m not sure the reason for this little interlude at all, except maybe to draw Carolyn’s attention to the East Wing, as if she wasn’t already thinking of it. She goes back to Vicky’s room and resumes convincing her to stay as if nothing’s happened, however, so you know this was very important.

Vicky reminds her she’s learned nothing about her past since she came her, which is the same thing she told her this morning, which was two episodes ago, the last time either of these characters appeared on screen. This is just riveting stuff.

Just this morning, Vicky practically called her an airheaded slut, but this sort of windmilling is expected of her.

Well, don’t stop there.

Precious airtime is now spent on David telling Matthew about the loose rug on the stairs.

‘Stairs going downstairs’. Regrettably, this isn’t the kind of house that has one staircase for going up and one for going down.

This is, of course, a coordinated attempt to get Matthew out of the way, possibly because David wants a chance to sneak into the East Wing himself and look for the physical evidence he overheard Victoria describing.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the ghost said literally none of that. Again, however, it doesn’t matter too much, because it makes more sense that he did.

Vicky decides the best way to convince Carolyn will be to show her the seaweed in the disused room. Carolyn seizes on this opportunity to sneak into the East Wing.

There is nothing stopping him from putting it on while they’re in there, but if anybody present had a cogent fear of being locked in an abandoned labyrinth where nobody could hear you scream, this conversation wouldn’t be happening in the first place.

So the girls vanish into the East Wing, all while the sinister little monster watches from the shadows like the puppet master he is.

Act III opens with David reading Victoria’s diary for no reason that I can see. All we get from this is Vicky’s diary entries are nowhere near as eloquent as her daily monologues.

‘In which I had last seen him’. Sometimes the phrase that sounds stupider is the correct one.

David returns to Matthew for the latest round of farce and shenanigans.

It would be too much effort, of course, for David to tell Matthew that two people are in there right now, but this does demonstrate a gentle shifting of David’s allegiances. He is not doing anything to hijack, impede, or sabotage Vicky and Carolyn’s little adventure, because for the first time, he has a vested interest in Vicky’s future. It’s very subtle, but it’s present and noticeable, especially as a chaser to David’s heinous actions of the past week.

David, possibly stalling for time before the lock is put back on, asks Matthew if he believes in ghosts.

They waffle on this point. When Thayer David debuted his version of Matthew (which might as well be a totally different character from that played by the unfortunate George Mitchell), his very first scene had him reacting with fear and alarm when Vicky told him how she’d heard ghostly crying last night, which he put down to Josette Collins.

However, more recently, in Episode 70, Matthew dismissed David’s talk about Josette’s ghost still haunting the Old House and its environs. Here, Matthew nervously saying he doesn’t know what he believes is, I guess, the compromise verdict.

You know. Ghosts. Those things notoriously stopped by locked doors.

David tells Matthew how Vicky saw Malloy’s ghost last night and Matthew reverts to his customary position of Weird and Scary About It.

He starts flipping out, insisting Malloy wasn’t murdered at all and generally saying all sorts of incriminating things with a heretofore unearned and unexpected level of distress. As a character beat, it’s out of nowhere, underdone, and quite clearly half-baked, but Thayer David makes it work like he does with every other asinine thing they’ve had him do.

He waddles off, no doubt leaving a trail of piss in his wake, but not before David delivers our program’s latest tagline:

Except lining up the camera so it shows somebody’s whole face when they’re talking. Some things are too much, I guess.

Now that that hot mess of a scene is over, let’s go to the East Wing, where they’re making Alexandra Moltke discuss the girthiness of keys.

They head into the room Vicky spent so many hours in last night and find, to nobody’s surprise but their own…

So the seaweed’s gone and we aren’t sure whether there’s a rational explanation for it. We saw Liz and Roger discover the pile when they came along in Episode 88. For whatever reason, they haven’t yet told Vicky about this, despite Liz at least seeming to believe there’s something in it all. Now it’s unclear whether they cleaned the pile out or if the gross, smelly clump just vanished after a certain time, upon reaching its ectoplasmic expiration date.

Nothing says ‘scary story’ quite like a woman being gaslit by the undead.

For reasons not entirely clear, Vicky begins reenacting that gambit she did with the key and the piece of paper from the end of Monday’s episode. I don’t know why she’s doing this, really, because that escape attempt didn’t happen until after she saw Malloy’s ghost, so the odds of it having been a dream are very slight.

Oh, it doesn’t matter honey, it makes no sense however you say it.

The point of this nonsense is that, when Vicky tries dragging the key under the door on a piece of paper this time…it works, whereas the first time she tried it in the night, the key wouldn’t pass through the door and remained on the floor outside until Roger came along.

Carolyn’s suggestion doesn’t make any sense because, again, the “ghosts” had no reason to keep Vicky trapped in that room by that point. She’s already had her ghostly visit, so there was no reason for the spirits to make the key dummy thicc or whatever kind of occult terror we’re to believe was done here.

None of that is important, really, though, because it soon transpires that the real reason for this final trip to this room has nothing to do with ghosts, seaweed, or even locksmithing of any kind. It’s an attempt by Francis Swann to introduce a plot device from Art Wallace’s series bible into the script in a hackneyed and abrupt manner.

On the piece of paper Victoria used for her experiment, she notices something strange:

Victoria has found a ledger sheet of some kind, on which is a name weirdly familiar to her for reasons she can’t place:

And just like that, the secret of Vicky’s past has some juice in it again. It only took 30 episodes.

Exactly 30, in fact, as it was in Episode 60 when we were first introduced to a “B. Hanscombe”, via the portrait of a woman who looked just like Victoria Winters in Sam’s studio. Sam identified her as a woman named Betty Hanscombe, who had died at some point many years ago, at such a time that it seemed impossible she could be the parental connection Vicky had to Collinsport. Following this latest disappointment, Vicky’s quest was waylaid to make way for the continued meandering of the Malloy story, the Carolyn/Joe/Maggie conflict, and all this ghost stuff that’s been happening lately.

It’s even likely the average daytime viewer would be just as clueless about “B. Hanscombe” as Vicky is here. That episode aired over a month before this one, and the name Betty Hanscombe hasn’t been mentioned in any of the intervening episodes. While for Vicky, that dinner at the Evanses happened four days ago, it was much longer for even the most dedicated viewer who, watching this episode, might even have assumed they weren’t supposed to have any idea what this meant.

We’ll talk in greater length about this expanded piece from Art Wallace’s bible, what Wallace originally intended, and the general efficacy of it being introduced to the narrative in this way (Hint: it’s clumsier than Matthew at an exorcism) in a few episodes’ time. For now, though, let’s bask in the comfort of knowing that the show hasn’t yet abandoned its original driving question.

‘Yet’ being the imperative word.

The girls return to Vicky’s room, where they find little Don David waiting for them.

David claims he was waiting for them to come back out of worry. Carolyn is skeptical.

Welcome to America.

David, however, insists he wasn’t worried about Carolyn, but about Miss Winters, because…

Well, between that and those moldy bank notices, I guess she has to stay now. And, as funny as it would be if the Friday cliffhanger was David declaring he loves his babysitter out of nowhere, Carolyn gives us a tidbit that I’m sure Francis Swann thought was very ominous indeed.

It’s not funny. But it kinda is. And that’s Dark Shadows.

This Day in History- Friday, October 28, 1966

China claims sovereignty over territory within the independent Kingdom of Bhutan, a Buddhist country in the Eastern Himalayas. China claimed, specifically, fertile grasslands at the base of the mountains, insisting Bhutanese farmers would have to pay taxes to China.

Andy Richter is born. He’s a comedian of some kind. Occasionally he makes political jokes on Twitter. I had no idea he was somebody famous.