Victoria Winters is no longer the shiny new object. I mean, she hasn’t been for a while, but this time that applies in-universe as well as out.
That crackerjack housekeeper-turned-sleuth Mrs. Johnson has only been working at Collinwood one day and she’s already been warned by Mrs. Stoddard, frightened by David, threatened by Matthew, and been terrified by a crying ghost.
Vicky Winters herself was put through all those motions and more back in her first 24 hours at the great house, 20 weeks and so, so close to 100 episodes ago.
But Mrs. Johnson does have some things Vicky never had.
She also has somewhat less pure (depending on your definition of purity) motivations for coming to Collinwood, and a powerful ally in whom she can confide.
Mrs. Johnson is as good an informant as Burke could’ve asked for, though, wasting no time at this early hour of the morning to call Burke to let him know what’s up.
Breathlessly, Mrs. Johnson arranges to get away from Collinwood as soon as she can to meet with him, and tells Burke simply that:
I had been wondering about that.
However, Mrs. Johnson is prevented from explaining by the timely arrival of a Woman in Pants.
Smooth save.
And, yeah, it turns out I was wrong back in the post for Episode 8 when, during my treatise on the “out of time” nature of Dark Shadows, I mentioned it wouldn’t be until 1967 that women started wearing pants on this show. I neglected that in all her appearances for “Day 14”, Nancy Barrett-as-Carolyn wears these bitching white (or, at least, light colored) slacks with a sweater in what immediately surpasses all her dowdy frocks as the best outfit she has had to date.
After explaining to Carolyn that she intends to visit town for a “doctor’s visit” later in the day, Mrs. Johnson directs Carolyn’s attention to the tray of hot coffee she’s just brought in.
Yeah, I doubt they let Matthew around the food.
Victoria enters, conservatively but stylishly dressed in a snazzy blazer and skirt combo. There are no introductions between Vicky and Mrs. Johnson because we’re to assume she just met everybody yesterday in between being menaced by Matthew and creeping into the basement with a flashlight like Nancy Drew.
So, despite an entire day passing from when we last saw her, Carolyn is still irrationally bitchy about Victoria because she went to Burke with Bangor. I mean Bangor in Burke. I mean…
Vicky wonders where Carolyn went last night, and Carolyn says she went to the movies alone. I wonder what she could’ve seen.
Let’s find out!
Dates are difficult at this point on Dark Shadows, but let’s assume it’s early November 1966, and the films playing at the Logansport cinema were all released within the last month. Carolyn may have seen…
- The adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
- Billy Wilder black comedy The Fortune Cookie
- British comedy Georgy Girl, now most remembered for the theme song performed by Australian folk group The Seekers.
- Or, my personal favorite, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
Just imagining Carolyn going to a Sondheim movie musical and picturing Burke Devlin’s head on Michael Crawford’s body.
Mrs. Johnson resumes her dusting while these girls have one of their famous stupid arguments about a man not worth either of their trouble.
This neglects what Vicky made sure Carolyn knew last time they had this argument: it wasn’t a coincidence because Carolyn is the reason Burke was there to begin with. But every time I relitigate that, an angel dies, so I’ll rest the point for now.
You have to wonder what Mrs. Johnson thinks of her accomplice hearing these two go on about him. It’s quite easy to conclude he’s been playing them off each other, and it seems a sensible, God-fearing woman like Sarah Johnson would have scruples.
The only reason for this stupid discussion is, in fact, so Mrs. Johnson can overhear Vicky tell Carolyn again how Burke alarmed her so much (for reasons she doesn’t explain) that she didn’t go back with him.
Carolyn doesn’t even try to look displeased with this development.
We return to Burke’s hotel room, where he’s engaged in another of his shouty phone calls.
Joy. More of this shit. ‘Hearne’, you may remember, (or, not, because I took pains not to mention him in that episode because there was no reason to) is one of the Collins fishermen Burke met with in the catastrophic Episode 89. He tried to entice them all into leaving their jobs with the Collinses to come work with him at the Logansport cannery which he had not yet acquired but was quite sure he would.
He still has not yet acquired the cannery, but that isn’t going to stop Burke from acting like people are being unfair to him by not quitting their jobs for him.
Speaking of being a dick to the people who actually do all the work for him:
Maybe he should just check the incredulity and the ‘Are you deficient?’ face, huh?
Mrs. Johnson describes to him her night of terror, the weeping she heard behind the locked door in the basement.
You’d think, after hearing about ghosts, not just from David, but from Vicky and Mrs. Johnson, who he both respects in different ways, Burke might start treating this stuff with some credence. But no, instead he starts mansplaining air vents to her.
His conclusion, then, is that Mrs. Johnson should stop her silly womanly worrying because the unexplained, mournful sobbing she heard in the dead of night wasn’t from a ghost but a real person somewhere in the house.
As if that’s supposed to comfort her. Mrs. Johnson even wonders what it could be that would make one of the women of Collinwood cry like that, but Burke tells her he can’t begin to understand “sobbing women and females”.
I like that he draws a distinction between “women” and “females”. Presumably, he feels Vicky and Carolyn belong to the former category, but Liz and Mrs. Johnson go in the latter.
The…the bogey man. As in, man made of bogeys? Someone call John Carpenter, I have an idea for the next Halloween!
Anyway, Mrs. Johnson resolves that her cause…finding Malloy’s murderer…is too important to back out of now.
I’m sure Burke credits himself with restoring her faith, but this feels like one of those things that happen despite opposing forces.
The two co-conspirators move on to discussing the plan ahead of them, with Mrs. Johnson confessing that David is already onto them, though she decides it’s not that big a deal because David is totally cool with them scheming to destroy and discredit his father.
Naturally, Burke isn’t surprised by any of this. What he is surprised by, however, is that one of the young ladies at the great house thinks he may not be an upstanding gentleman.
Mrs. Johnson tells him how she heard Victoria expressing her fears of Burke to Carolyn this morning.
I’m actually surprised Mrs. Johnson is extending so much benefit of the doubt here. Does she really believe in Burke so much that she doesn’t assume he’s some sort of violent predator? Because I’m having trouble discerning what in their interactions may have told against that assumption.
At which point, Mrs. Johnson enlightens him, saying that Vicky didn’t stay overnight, but was collected by Roger.
And now the pieces begin coming together. Sproat has a real skill for lining pieces up as we get to the end of the week. There is an effortless grace with which Burke begins realizing something is going on here, and a delectable air of suspense as we, the audience, lean forward in anticipation for the other shoe to drop.
Before it can, however, Burke gets another visitor. After (yet again) making poor Mrs. J hide in the other room, Burke admits the latest venerable character actor presented for Mitch Ryan’s appetizers.
Ezra Hearne has been recast now that he is a character with lines. This is Dolph Sweet who, like Barnard Hughes, would be most famous for roles taken in the ‘80s, like John Baragrey, got into television after the war, and, like George Mathews, frequently played in police procedurals, thereby rounding the trifecta of Burke Devlin Talk-tos for the first time.
Hearne’s appearance here is strange, given his role in the narrative two weeks ago was essentially fulfilled by George Mathews’s Amos Fitch, the only man at the meeting who immediately denounced Burke’s plotting and subsequently went to Collinwood to inform to Liz and Roger. It seemed like Fitch would end up playing a significant role in the unfurling cannery wars, but I guess Mathews was so disgusted that he didn’t want to return, so now we have Hearne, who had previously (we were told) been totally cool with Burke’s plans.
I love Hearne, by the way. He’s got the same coarse ‘50s gangster speaking habits as Fitch, but he’s also kind of handsome and doesn’t have mysterious white specks on his coat. It also helps that, instead of being a tattletale bitch, he looks Burke in the eye and all but steps on his balls as he tells him that, no, neither he nor any of the other men are cool with his stupid cannery coup.
Tell him.
Ha! Wow. Can we keep this guy? I think Malloy’s job is still open, which is crazy because he’s been dead for more than a week by now.
It’s just amazing watching this random walk-on character reduce Burke to a puddle of stammering neuroses…this time, entirely scripted! He blusters that he’ll just get other men to run his cannery.
He’s in full on tantrum mode. It’s beautiful. And Hearne just swaggers out easy as anything, the most impressive in a long line of one-scene wonders before him.
Don’t be, girl, he deserves it.
The offscreen fishermen mutiny (though, I guess it isn’t really a mutiny because they never went to work for him to begin with) is the first major setback to Burke’s Logansport plan. Without experienced men, it won’t matter if he’s able to successfully acquire the plant. One wonders how he’ll get out of this one, or even if he’s supposed to.
It’s not lost on me that Ron Sproat tied up this scene in the third act of a Thursday episode. Part of a new writer’s job is to tidy up the last one’s messes, and something tells me that after the nightmare of Episode 89, Dan Curtis wanted to cut his losses and bench the cannery stuff for a while or…possibly forever.
The one immediate effect this scene has on the rest of the episode is Burke declaring he has a contingency:
I’d be snide to Mitch Ryan for stumbling on that line, but it’s a pretty bad line.
Anyway, Burke snatches up the phone and poor Mrs. Johnson has to watch as he plays ‘Said the spider to the fly’ with one of his young admirers.
A kewpie doll is type of retro toy they used to give away at county fairs and things like that. They’re also frigging terrifying, which makes it perfectly fitting Burke would joke about giving Carolyn one.
Though it would be a significant downgrade as a gift, comparatively.
Burke asks Carolyn (who, we will recall, tried to make up with Joe a few days ago, only to fall apart once Joe realized she was only going out with him because Burke wasn’t around) if she’d like to have dinner with him tonight.
Someone has to teach this girl how to love herself. It’s getting very sad.
You ever feel like the same thing keeps happening over and over again, and you’re the only one who notices?
How many times has Carolyn run into Vicky in this exact same room and told her she was sorry for something she’d just done, like, ten minutes ago?
Victoria quickly concludes Carolyn has a date.
At least she remembered who Joe was.
Vicky loses her cool somewhat when she learns Carolyn’s going out with Burke. She repeats her warnings about Burke being dangerous, reaffirming that she is, in fact, a good friend, despite Carolyn never doing a damn thing for her besides make her question her sanity.
Time for a checklist!
- Burke is trying to put Collins Enterprises out of business.
That must be why Elizabeth nearly stroked out when she learned her sardine monopoly was in danger of being broken up.
2. Burke actively hates Uncle Roger.
Is…is Carolyn admitting Burke may be right about Roger setting him up for the manslaughter charge? Because…
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.
3. Burke presents a physical danger to the Collinses.
Can’t argue with that reasoning. Carolyn goes on to say that she knows Burke likes her because, get this, he gets her presents.
I’m not even going to touch that one, but ooh… See where this is going?
Sproat just deftly drops this on us, having Carolyn tell Vicky, casually as anything, about the pen Burke gave her. A pen that, until now, Vicky believes was to have been on Burke’s person the night Malloy died, thereby linking him to the scene of that tragedy.
But, as Carolyn informs her, completely ignorant of the true and sinister implications of her words, it wasn’t Burke, nor was it her, who had the pen at the time.
But he never did, Carolyn remembers ruefully, having lost it. She even remembers the date.
It’s all coming together.
It only took about 100 episodes.
It’s This Guy from That Thing!
Born and raised in New York City, Dolph Sweet’s ambitions for a football career were waylaid by the outbreak of World War II, where he served in the Eighth Air Force, spending two years as a prisoner of war.
It was while in a POW camp in Nazi-occupied Romania that Sweet honed a talent for acting, putting on plays with other prisoners.
Following that helluva an origin story, Sweet went on to teach at Barnard College, eventually heading the drama department.
A professional acting career began in 1961 when Sweet debuted on Broadway in Ionesco’s anti-fascist absurdist play Rhinoceros. In that same year, he landed his first film role in The Young Doctors.
Throughout the ‘60s, he was a regular on multiple television series including The Defenders, as well as other soaps like The Edge of Night and Another World.
Also in 1966, Sweet would appear in You’re a Big Boy Now, directed by an up-and-comer named Francis Ford Coppola.
Sweet’s most prolific period was the 1970s, when he appeared in films such as The Out-of-Towners, Cops and Robbers, Sisters, and even The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. Within this time, he also clocked roles on Little House on the Prairie, and as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1978 miniseries King.
He is perhaps best known for his role as Carl Kanisky on the sitcom Gimme a Break, which he starred in from 1981 through to his death in 1985.
This Day in History- Thursday, November 10, 1966
Sean Lemass retires as Prime Minister of Ireland for health reasons. Parliament elects Finance minister Jack Lynch to succeed him.
Kooks of Collinwood 