Shacked Up

Bye, Bye, Bangor Pine/Grilled cheese was the bees’ knees/And the pen sure was fine…

A brief snippet at the beginning of Episode 96 is the last we’ll see of the Bangor Pine Hotel, that upscale establishment whose posh restaurant is apparently the only thing worth seeing of Bangor, since Victoria Winters has stodgily refused to leave it for almost a week.

Now, though, Vicky’s in a hurry to leave.

“My only hope is someone is driving from Collinwood to rescue me.”

The dramatic misunderstanding is a very lucrative device, especially in the serialized format. A character getting the wrong idea about another and proceeding to enact a deleterious agenda they believe is beneficial can be evidenced in Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, Faulkner, and every single romantic comedy ever made.

Victoria Winters currently believes Burke Devlin is a murderer. Because of this, she insisted Burke drive back to Collinsport without her and desperately called out for a Hero.

The Hero store was out of stock. Regardless, Vicky is so glad to see Roger that she nearly dies on her next line.

I think we can give the actors some slack here. This is one of the very few episodes that required a second take, at least according to the slating segment that airs at the beginning of the Pre-Barnabas DVD rips. We can only imagine what went so awfully bad that Dan Curtis was forced to waste precious film on a redo, but if I were working on the set, I’d probably be worried for my head.

Then again, this episode has a lot of moving parts. It’s one of the weirdest episodes in this whole storyline and weird in a very hyper-specific way.

Welcome to Dark Shadows Week 20. It’s been a helluva trip.

And it’s only gonna get trippier.

This is the first time the car set has been used to portray an automobile that isn’t Burke’s. also, check the cool rain effects on the windshield. It’s easy to imagine something going wrong in that department, which is one possible suspect for the second take.

Vicky proceeds to tell Roger all about the saga of Blair’s silver filigreed fountain pen and the various conclusions she drew between that and the other silver filigreed fountain pen. Again, this is more insensate recapitulation, so I’ll just tell you the most interesting thing about this scene, which is Louis Edmonds squinting at the windshield like he really wants us at home to believe he’s driving in a rainstorm but doesn’t know how else to communicate the fact.

Roger also keeps nodding at different points, as if to show he understands. He nods when Vicky namedrops Mr. Blair, which makes sense because Carolyn told him about Blair way back in the day. Then he nods when Vicky says there are only six such Infinity St…silver filigreed fountain pens…in the world, as if he somehow knew this fact which, given the pen’s sinister and arcane history, I hope he doesn’t.

So, Roger’s strategy remains largely unchanged from how he dealt with the last pen. He tells Vicky to just never mention it again. Just keep it a secret. Forever. And while this might have worked when she believed David was a pen thief, Vicky retains enough moral fortitude to have objections about potentially letting a murderer walk free.

Roger claims the pen is a “flimsy piece of evidence” and, anyway, they have no idea what happened to Pen 1 because David stole it. Allegedly.

For someone who was supposed to be the show’s main villain, Roger is very bad at…villainous stuff. Every scheme he’s ever concocted is flimsier than a house of cards, and his lies and excuses are elementary grade at best. David has proven to have a sharper mind for subterfuge than he has.

And he would. He’d love it, indeed. Burke has also publicly accused him of being Malloy’s murderer several times in the last few days. From Vicky’s POV, it would make perfect sense for him to want to clear his name. But Roger can’t do that, because that would mean the discovery that Burke just plain didn’t have the pen on him the night Malloy died, which would put Roger in the hottest water he’s been in yet. So he has to hum and haw and make grand, wordy claims how it just isn’t worth the effort and, anyway, Burke has no motive for killing Malloy in the first place.

So he is now reduced to arguing Burke’s case in an attempt to protect himself. It’s Grade A farce.

Things take a decidedly sinister turn when Vicky turns her attention back to the road.

This is kind of a cliché by now. You see it in urban legends and things like that. An ingenue hitchhiker is picked up on a desolate road, gives directions to the driver, and notices, to her disquiet, that they’ve passed the right exit. She brings this up, concern turning to panic as the driver makes clear they have no intention of going where she wants.

Roger claims that the main road is starting to flood due to the storm and he believes the back road would be safer. Vicky isn’t sure.

But Roger assures her everything is under control.

The tension left at the end of Friday’s episode, diluted by the silliness of Roger’s scrambling in this scene, begins to return. Might Roger be going out of the way now to “take care” of Vicky once and for all?

As we learn in the very next scene, he didn’t tell anybody at Collinwood he was going to be going. Why make a secret of the rescue mission, unless he had no intention of rescuing anybody at all?

Speaking of that next scene, Elizabeth is woken up by knocking at the door and finds a special and unexpected visitor.

It’s the greatly missed Sheriff Patterson, who has been inexplicably sidelined despite being the cop in the middle of a murder mystery storyline. It turns out that his car broke down on the road and he needs to use Liz’s phone, a favor Liz generously grants.

Patterson’s reason for asking was concern for the rapidly flooding roads. The writerly reason for the asking is so we know Roger left Collinwood in secret. Liz honestly believes he’s asleep, only increasing our unease at what he intends to do with Victoria now that he has her alone and knows she knows too much.

Cal? What the hell happened to HARRY? Did he drown in one of the endless round of thunderstorms? This is an outrage. Harry has been with us from the beginning. He might be the only person around who remembers what Patterson was like before he Regenerated.

Anyway, Patterson asks this Cal to see that his car is hauled out.

At least we’ve still got Sassy Sheriff Cakes.

Patterson later drops a call to a Trooper Woodard (nice name; sure we won’t be hearing it again) to tell him about the dangerous road conditions. I like this, it’s all very cozy, for lack of a better word. It reinforces that Collinsport is a nice, sleepy little community whose officials go out of their way for things like weather emergencies. And Liz’s act of kindness to Patterson is also quite nice, even if it is just an attempt to put some extra characters in an episode that would otherwise be Vicky and Roger vibing for 15 minutes.

Liz brings Patterson one of her requisite coffee trays and the two sit down to yak it up like old pals, which they may well be, given how familiar Liz is with every man over the age of 50 on this show. At least this one isn’t trying to get her to marry an employee she fired.

Is…is this a chemistry test? Are…we being invited to ship Liz and the Sheriff? Because I’m rowdy, randy, and we’ve gotten the Republicans out of the White House, so I am ready.

Patterson tells Liz about the local gossip that Burke is trying to poach Collins men in his bid to buy the Logansport Cannery. He expresses his sorrow for Liz’s plight, and says he and the whole community have the family’s back.

This is very nice. I won’t deceive you into thinking anything comes of it, really, but it is nice, this show of support divorced from the usual corruption we’ve gotten from the Collinses’ relationship with local police.

Liz casually mentions her father was disappointed that she was a girl, when he wanted a son to take charge over the business.

Daw.

Also, so you know, Liz’s father being disappointed at her gender is, in fact, out of Art Wallace’s series bible. The same bible established that Mrs. Collins perished in childbed, so Liz had to be more of a mother than a big sister to newborn Roger, also implying Mr. Collins learned firsthand how capable his daughter was because of her response to the loss, though he died when she was still quite young and, therefore, never lived to see her take a business role.

So Cal calls back to tell Patterson that the back road to Bangor is entirely flooded. Liz helpfully informs us:

The tension is again abated by the dawning realization that Roger honestly believes that the unlit, disused back road was the actual best route.

This isn’t exactly the manner of someone about to drive into the woods and snap the unwitting young woman’s neck, is it? Vicky wonders if they’re lost and he looks at her like ‘Don’t be silly…’

It turns out we may have been giving Roger too much credit. I’m sure he’d like to make sure Vicky never utters a pen-related word to anybody else forever, by hook or by crook, but Roger isn’t exactly known for getting what he wants, is he?

He means the road ahead is hopelessly flooded, but this whole thing feels like nothing more than two kids playing pretend. All the head craning and eye-squinting and performative declarations of what is definitely certainly happening just ahead of them. It’s endearing.

Roger decides he has to find out how deep the water goes. Considering he’s already described it as “the Atlantic Ocean”, I’m not sure what difference it’s going to make to whether or not they’re able to power through. It’s not like they had four wheel drive in 1966.

This would be about the time Jason Voorhees shows up. Instead, though, Roger pops right in following the act break, with a little icing of water on his hat to demonstrate that it is, in fact, raining.

It is homophobic nonsense that gay people talk a certain way. Still, Louis Edmonds is the gayest man I’ve ever heard. God bless.

Roger tells Vicky he’s “scouted around” and found a shack on the side of the road. So don’t put away the red flags yet, there’s still time for him to lure her into the woods and kill her.

Roger leaves a note on the dashboard, I guess to alert any local woods-dwelling maniacs that there are two rich idiots cowering in the Murder Hut, and the two troop off into the gloom.

Back at Collinwood, Sheriff Patterson is likewise preparing to head off into the gloom, but at least he got to have some Stella D’Oro and coffee first.

I like how he allots time for himself to get cozy with Joan Bennett, but the worker bees will have to keep on buzzing.

Either way, it’s now a new day. The previous one began in Episode 92, meaning Day 11 wrapped up in a week of episodes. This is an indicator of the crisper pacing Dark Shadows attains as it draws to the end of 1966. We’ll eventually get to the point where they’ll have multiple days in a single week!

A lot of things in episode are weird. Liz and Patterson bonding. Alexandra Moltke and Louis Edmonds having to playact driving in a storm. The cumulative two minutes of footage of Joan Bennett turning on and then turning off all the lights in the house. But something really inexplicable is that they built an entire set for the abandoned shack Roger and Vicky seek shelter in.

This feels like a writing exercise. ‘Put two characters in a car during a storm. The car breaks down and they have to seek shelter in an old shed. One of them has a deeply personal secret. No more than three pages.’

Roger succeeds in lighting the lamp and he and Vicky began gathering fuel for the wood stove.

That’s an actual wood stove by the way. Maybe Sy Tomashoff got it at an estate sale.

Wait…what?

In record time, we’ve gone from “Oh God, he’s gonna take her to the second location and snap her neck” to “Jesus Christ, they’re flirting”, which is how you know Swann is writing this one.

Yeah, I didn’t advertise it, but Swann is back for…well, half the week. More on that down below.

But, yeah, whatever was going on with Liz and Patterson, this is definitely more chem-testing between Vicky and Roger which is…

A choice.

There have been…concerns that something like this would happen. Carolyn all but invited it some weeks ago as part of her entreaty that Roger put some of his “charm” to work on Victoria, something that directly inspired the fish tube date and, by extension, Roger and Vicky even being friendly with each other to begin with.

Still, the whole undertaking was done with the direct understanding that Roger simply wanted a new technique to get Victoria out of Collinsport forever, so it’s easy to see why the average viewer wouldn’t read any romance into it. Well, that and the age thing. And the…gay thing. And the whole prime suspect in a murder thing. And the…

Has she been living in the same show? But, then, Roger did have the gumption to drive down the backwoods, unmaintained road far away from civilization right into a pool of water deeper than the sea. Which is a certain kind of confidence.

That comment, by the way, was raised as a difference between Roger and David, as if David, who literally got away with trying to kill his father, lacks confidence. Vicky assumes David gets that (whatever ‘that’ is) from his mother.

I should hope not. Laura’s got some wild talents, believe you me.

I honestly believe Francis Swann could see the writing on the wall and realized he’d be out of a job within the month, so he figured might as well start shitposting.

Aw, cute, they’re having fun together, you can see in her smile…

Here we go again.

But it’s worth noting that Roger just can’t commit to scaring Vicky away. He continues to frame this as being worried for her safety. He doesn’t want to hurt her, he can’t bring himself to even contemplate it. So he’ll just settle for asking her to leave over and over.

Roger tells Vicky that it’s best if she take off before Burke realizes she’s suspicious of him. At this point, Vicky remembers that Burke believed Malloy was going to clear him of the manslaughter charge, which further reinforces an evident lack of motive.

Besides not having anything to do with what Vicky just said, this is patently absurd. Roger claims Malloy didn’t like him because he took some of his responsibilities when he came back to Collinsport. Malloy already had inherited someone’s responsibilities: Ned Calder as manager of the cannery. He never inherited any of Roger’s jobs. We don’t even know what Roger’s job is and nobody is in any hurry to tell us.

Roger ends up giving Burke the benefit of the doubt, saying he probably didn’t mean to kill Malloy, but accidentally hurled him into the sea during a heated altercation when it became clear Malloy wasn’t going to go through with the meeting as they’d agreed.

I like this. Roger consciously positions himself as a rational person, not going guns blazing and accusing Burke of murder. It’s in line with Vicky’s current view of him as a mature, capable and reliable authority figure.

It may also tie into the aforementioned total inability to commit to things of any great consequence, but even so.

Thinking of the future, Roger wonders how Burke responded when Vicky told him she wouldn’t go back to Collinsport with him.

This is meant as a bit of light ribbing, but it’s almost certainly exactly what Burke thought and it would be extending him too much credit to assume otherwise.

Roger again reminds Vicky to never mention the pen ever again, but Vicky is still dubious because it would mean withholding potentially damning evidence. Any resolve Roger may have succeeded in building is promptly destroyed as he loses his shit.

And he was doing so well. He backtracks hastily, claiming that all Burke’s accusations against him mean that Burke has been hoping to pin Malloy’s murder on him and therefore, Vicky telling the police about the pen would…

*file not found*

But, hey, look, it’s the calvary!

You’ve got to wonder what Patterson thinks he’s walking into here.

So the Sheriff proceeds to rescue Roger and Vicky from their predicament, just in time for Vicky to start wondering if maybe there’s something fishy going on with Roger after all.

Seriously, who came up with this shack thing, though?

Behind the Scenes Shenanigans

This is the first week of episodes to be helmed by more than one writer, in what will become regular practice on Dark Shadows. Francis Swann will do Monday and Tuesday while Ron Sproat will do the remainder of the week.

This Day in History- Monday, November 7, 1966

Hindu protesters gather in New Delhi to demand a ban on the slaughter of cows in India. 10,000 demonstrators storm parliament. A 48-hour curfew is ordered and people continued eating cows.