Art Appreciation

There is a realignment of great powers occurring.

I mean in Dark Shadows, obviously. Long held truths are being challenged. Age-old ties of love, animosity, and trust are fraying, to be linked elsewhere, sometimes in thoroughly unexpected places.

Take, for example, the friendship between Victoria Winters and Roger Collins.

Fraught since the beginning, Roger objected down-pat to the introduction of a new person at Collinwood. The very first scene of the show had Roger protesting to his sister Elizabeth that his son David didn’t need a governess and they should send her away the moment she arrived.

Things didn’t get much easier after Vicky arrived and Roger learned of her chance association with his nemesis Burke Devlin. No matter how many times Vicky insisted she and Burke weren’t in cahoots, he would not be swayed.

Things began shifting with the mysterious death of Bill Malloy, a death Burke immediately assumed Roger had a part in. It was Vicky who was able to save Roger’s skin, providing an alibi for the night of Malloy’s death, though she has never been 100% sure of it herself.

However, this event inspired Roger’s niece and Vicky’s friend Carolyn to convince Roger to befriend Victoria, to show he was truly grateful for her and had no ill-will toward her. Roger seized to the plan with gusto, taking Vicky out for breakfast and seeming to genuinely enjoy the time he spent with the little governess.

But sinister overtones returned when Roger realized Vicky’s chance discovery of the silver filigreed fountain pen that unbeknownst to her could connect him directly to the scene of Malloy’s death. Roger sought drastic measures, stealing the pen and letting Victoria blame David, an act for which David tried to kill her in revenge.

It was Roger who realized what David had done and Roger who then saved Vicky from her prison in the closed off East Wing of the house, though not before pretending to be a ghost and warning her through the door to leave Collinwood, believing that her departure would be the only way the matter of the pen was settled forever.

But Vicky didn’t leave Collinwood, instead only vacationing in Bangor for a day, where she finally realized the significance of the pen (albeit in the wrong direction) and, not knowing who else to turn to, called to Roger for help.

And help her he did, even as he still isn’t sure what to do with her.

Roger is a fascinating character, and we have Louis Edmonds’s performance to thank for that.

What was originally outlined as a venal villain with no redeemable qualities has rapidly become the most complicated character on Dark Shadows. Roger is equal parts arrogant, cruel, cowardly, romantic, bombastic, hapless, calculating, and clueless, a perfect storm of contrasts that shouldn’t make any sense but does. Every time the narrative needs him to do something heinous, be it strike his son, bully Sam, or torment Victoria, he somehow manages to come out weirdly lovable on the other side.

It’s impossible to really hate Roger Collins. They’ve spent almost 50 episodes strongly implying he’s a murderer and, at the same time, it feels like they want him to get romantic with the heroine.

This doesn’t mean I’m okay with this, by the way. This is as gross as all of Burke’s sniffing after younger women. It just feels less threatening because it’s Roger and, also, I’m simply in awe of the fact that it’s happening.

It also isn’t lost on me that all this Roger/Vicky shiptease occurs in Francis Swann episodes. Which means if they hadn’t gotten Ron Sproat, things would have gotten very weird a few weeks out.

So, yeah, we begin. It’s the morning after Roger and Vicky were discovered by the police cuddling in a shack, and everybody has questions, but none of them are very good or interesting.

Liz and Carolyn are still very cross about Vicky’s trip to Bangor, for different reasons, and Liz in particular wants to do one of her cross-examinations.

Roger is now actively simping for Vicky in front of the household. Because he’s still Roger, however, this doesn’t work and Liz sends him and Carolyn out of the room.

So, the most important thing about this round of “Let’s nail Vicky to the cross” is how she immediately puts a stop to it.

Right out the gate, Vicky shatters half of Liz’s argument by telling her about her encountering Burke in the restaurant and Burke offering to give her a lift, shattering Carolyn’s version of events, which made it sound like they had all-but eloped.

Vicky will have more difficulty getting out of the second half of this inquiry, however, when Liz moves on to her visit at the firm of Garner & Garner. It’s a good thing, then, that Vicky actually wants to talk about this, because she has nothing to hide and has every reason to believe Liz does…

Which is why Liz doesn’t want to talk about it.

Vicky tells her all about the ledger sheet and “B.” and Betty Hanscom.

This is at least half a lie. When Carolyn told Liz about Vicky’s Betty hunch last week, Liz wasn’t even sure if Betty was Hanscom the butler’s daughter or niece, so she certainly couldn’t remember her “quite well” at all.

Elizabeth then continues winning first place in the Collins Audacity Olympics by wondering why Vicky didn’t ask her to her face.

Liz makes the by now routine claim that she knows nothing at all about Vicky’s past and then has the Audacity squared to ask if anything happened between her and Burke in Bangor. Liz seems to realize how this sounds and hastily amends her statement.

Besides being a run-on sentence, this really is something Elizabeth should press. I mean, it’s actually pretty grim stuff that something happened between them that freaked Vicky out so much she refused to go back with Burke. There are a dozen nightmare scenarios and none of them have the least to do with the pen panic.

But whatever, I was getting sick of this conversation anyway.

Carolyn is still in Bitch mode over Vicky being with Burke. This, again, despite being that Vicky only went with Burke because of Carolyn, so I think it’s safe to say she’s deluding herself here, because Roger certainly couldn’t care less.

Roger claims Vicky didn’t explain to him why she needed him to come get her, claiming he concluded Burke was just drunk.

Yes, such as that time he took her up to his hotel room and made out with her to smooth jazz.

Carolyn wonders further why Vicky didn’t just spend another night at the hotel and leave in the morning, to which Roger makes the subtext text:

Girl.

Girl.

And then Vicky comes in and Roger and Carolyn share this look.

This is insane. It’s totally nuts. I don’t know how, on a show that has made sexual tension between young women and considerably older men part of its DNA since the beginning, this is somehow where I break. It’s so patently ridiculous. It feels like Dark Shadows is parodying itself.

I feel like my ability to give witty commentary is hampered. How do I describe how this is funny without just transcribing everything they say?

Carolyn is honestly stoked at the notion of her friend hooking up with her uncle. And, again, the only surprise I’m feeling is that Carolyn is somehow not jealous about this. It feels like the entire Dark Shadows mythos has been building up to this, the moment when Carolyn Stoddard gives the heroine her blessing to shack up with her uncle.

What Carolyn is doing is called ‘agenda shipping’. It’s when someone supports a romantic pairing for reasons secondary to their full investment. For example, someone might ship Finn and Rose to free Rey up for Kylo, their preferred ship. I can make those analogies now; 2017 was three years ago.

The point is, the agenda shipper generally gets something out of the ship that isn’t…the ship. For Carolyn, agenda shipping Vicky with Roger simply means she gets Burke to herself. And if you had any delusions this wasn’t somehow about Burke, observe the change in her manner the second he comes up in conversation.

Victoria, exasperated, resists the urge to tell Carolyn to fuck herself and adds:

Dammit, I was hoping he was a fever dream.

Carolyn, who last saw Frank a long time ago, declares he’s only a kid.

Well, in Carolyn’s defense, 27 is pretty young by her standards. Also, it’s funny that Frank is older than her and yet Carolyn felt comfortable calling him a kid. Exactly how old was she when she saw him last and what unfortunate occurrence was it that forever marked him as a juvenile in her mind? Because I think we’ve finally touched on her origin story here.

I don’t know. Have you seen the line of suitors? It’s not like she’s attracting princes here. But, yeah, it seems most of Carolyn’s bitchy attitude is down to jealousy, but I think we already knew that. I’m just mystified that she finds this worth getting jealous over.

I like the accusatory accent there, like she feels the need to remind her as she tells Carolyn she now knows from Burke that she was the one who called him down to the restaurant yesterday in the first place, meaning all this melodrama (and Vicky ending up alone in a strange city with a man she believes is a murderer) was Carolyn’s fault.

Honestly, I’m shocked Victoria isn’t snatching at Carolyn’s bob even as we speak.

Back in the drawing room, it’s Roger on the hotseat as he essentially has the same conversation with Elizabeth as he had with Carolyn, lying about why Vicky called him and then ultimately deciding it doesn’t matter at all though, as usual, Liz isn’t as tractable. She wonders, if it really was no more than Burke being too drunk to drive, Vicky didn’t just tell her.

This isn’t the kind of comment one argues against, so Elizabeth doesn’t.

Victoria grabs her coat and scarf to step out. Carolyn asks if Burke was drunk in Bangor and Victoria, maybe feeling bad about lambasting Burke’s name, says that’s not the case, but advises Carolyn to just lay off this Devlin business, maybe take up needlepoint or something.

This is the first time Vicky has warned Carolyn off Burke for reasons of safety. Usually, it’s because Vicky supports Joe’s efforts to marry her, or because she’s aware Burke is an enemy of the family. Now, however, Vicky is outright calling Burke dangerous.

As if that’s made any difference in the past.

Roger breaks up the two girls, leading to the money image of the episode:

He might as well tell them there’s enough of him to go around. That’s basically where we are anyway.

Anyway, Carolyn makes some bullshit claim about how everything Vicky does reflects on the family. Vicky points out the same rule applies to Carolyn and Carolyn runs away. This frees Vicky up to head into town for a new adventure that has nothing to do with the first 10 minutes of this episode and, therefore, is very welcome.

Act III opens with Sam Evans singing, so we’re already in elevated territory here.

Dave Ford’s rousting performance of ‘What D’Ya Do With a Drunken Sailor?’ some weeks back appears to have convinced the Powers That Be that Sam should sing more, leading to this delightful baritone performance.

It goes without saying, but this is the most fuckable Dave Ford has yet been. The sweater, the singing voice, the beard, the sewing…

The moment passes, goddammit it, with the arrival of Vicky.

It’s rare when you actually see where the floor of the “outside” portion of the set connects to the wall. Somebody sure as hell got yelled at for this.

How is he the only man on this show not with a much younger love interest? What are these people thinking?

Vicky tells him she isn’t here to see him or Maggie.

Does Sam actually own a cat? Even if he’s just being cute, the fact that he just said ‘puss’ all those times while turning his bum to the camera is more than enough.

Victoria explains she’s here to see one of Sam’s paintings.

She isn’t, though you’d think she’d cut the guy some slack and buy the damn painting, since it matters so much to her. Then again, she probably racked up quite a tab spending an entire day in a hotel restaurant, so…

I don’t doubt it. Vicky tells him she wants to make sure that she didn’t just imagine the likeness.

This is presumably meant as an FU to the various postmodern art styles of the period, ranging from cubism to pop art. It’s kind of funny that Dark Shadows started so deeply mired in a weird midcentury arch conservatism given where it ended up.

But that’s a spiel for another day.

Vicky tells Sam about her quest for B. Hanscom and her hope that he may be able to tell her “what happened to Betty”, which seems to neglect the fact that Sam told her Betty died a year after he painted her.

The fact that he doesn’t remind her of that here further reinforces the theory they just retconned it. It wouldn’t be a hard thing to retcon. Betty wasn’t mentioned once between Episodes 60 and 91, and her being dead was a point confined only to the former. Swann may have decided he’d have an easier time actually keeping Betty alive to bring on canvas at a later date, whatever Art Wallace originally intended.

Not that Betty will be mentioned very much at all going forward. But even so.

Vicky’s hopes are disappointed (what else is new) when Sam tells her he had no idea Betty had any relatives, much less working at Collinwood.

Don’t worry, everyone. Sam isn’t being racist. That’s a job reserved for Burke’s flirting and David’s occasional Civil War partisanship. “Native”, he explains, is a somewhat uncreative term for the oldest Collinsport families, the ones who have been in town 200 years or more.

So the ones who, uh, ‘took care’ of the real natives, then.

Sam explains that he is from Connecticut.

And that makes total sense.

The Southern drawl he puts on there was no doubt perfected in Dave Ford’s role as Big Daddy in the Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which is how Dark Shadows discovered him in the first place.

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Sam gets to rifling through the paintings,,,

Well, that’s better than nothing I guess.

Which is all Sam needs to hear.

King Sam Evans. It’s a shame we are where we are with all this, so I can’t entirely shake off the fear this is an attempt to set up a Vicky and Sam pairing, but you know what, I don’t even mind. This is aces. It’ll be 150 episodes and change before Vicky ends up this coveted by the male sex, and those suitors won’t have very good taste in gifts.

She’ll treasure it so well that we’ll never see it again after the next four minutes. I’m not even kidding. I don’t even think Betty or Hanscom get name-dropped once after this episode. It’s insane. So much so that I may even do a special feature-length post to discuss the whole thing, given it by nature doesn’t fit anywhere in a given episode.

We’ll see. I’m still shocked we made it this close to 100.

We return to Collinwood for the last act. Here, Roger demonstrates how human beings hold newspapers.

Elizabeth summons him to her window-side perch to tell him something that he already knows.

I was taken aback, not gonna lie. “Dick” as a nickname for “Richard” died out considerably after Dick Nixon’s second presidential term. Also, we never hear anybody call Richard Garner “Dick” again, which makes this even weirder. Like, it’s odd to call your attorney by a nickname.

Also, Roger knows this. He was in the room when “Dick Garner” called Liz last week. Francis Swann wrote that episode. I can’t expend too much energy to get made at this transparent effort to waste time, though, because that is all it is.

When Liz explains the nature of Vicky’s Bangor quest to Roger, he apparently doesn’t know who Betty Hanscom even is. This is bordering on absurd now.

I like how she gets all stuffy, lecturing him about he should remember these things, and then it turns out she can’t figure out if the girl was the guy’s daughter or niece, as if those are two things the average person wouldn’t be able to tell apart.

Depending on what is meant by “school”, I think this is supposed to tell us Roger is around 36 years old, around the same age as Burke, which we’ve been led to believe since the beginning. The difference is Louis Edmonds was in his 40s at the time.

But given that he is Roger, it’d only make sense he’s aged this way.

Liz insists that her evasion and general bitchiness toward Vicky’s search are done with her best interests at heart. She seems to believe this, indicating there’s some dark underbelly to all this that Liz honestly thinks Vicky is better off not knowing.

It’d be easier to get invested in this if I knew they were at maximum one month from dropping it like a hot potato forever.

Vicky arrives to show off her new painting.

I can’t tell whether this group gaslighting session is sad or funny. Roger gets pressured into agreeing with Liz that, no, Betty Hanscom looks nothing like her.

And then Carolyn walks in…

Okay, yeah, it’s funny. That settles it.

This Day in History- Tuesday, November 8, 1966

In the United States midterm elections, Republicans benefit from an anti LBJ bounce at the polls,  though not enough to erode the Democrats’ majorities in both chambers of Congress. Republican Edward Brooke becomes the first African-American elected to the Senate since the post-Civil War Reconstruction a century earlier. In more ominous tidings, some movie star jackanape named Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California, and some Texan oil guy named George H.W. Bush attains elected office in the Texas House.

Scottish chef and television personality Gordon Ramsay is born. Finally, some good fucking food.