What a Way to Make a Living

Victoria Winters has gotten quite an outing these last few weeks, following a very long period of character irrelevancy.

Today, however, she gets a break, appearing only to describe, in her opening monologue, a newcomer arriving at Collinwood, just as much a stranger to the great house as she herself was almost 100 episodes ago.

Yeah. A stranger.

Remember that?

The saga of Mrs. Sarah Johnson, housekeeper to the deceased Bill Malloy, has been waylaid in recent weeks. The character last appeared in Episode 81, when she arrived at Collinwood to interview for a job, secretly intending to leverage the potential post to act as spy for Burke Devlin, as part of their coordinated effort to solve Malloy’s murder.

Various events have served to forestall this subplot, most significantly the appearance of Malloy’s ghost to Victoria Winters in Episode 85, kicking off the chain of events that led to her trip to Bangor which, until now, has been the focal point of the narrative.

Now, 17 episodes and four in-universe days later, we’re picking it up again, with Mrs. Johnson’s arrival at the great house.

Oh, yeah, it’s a different day from last episode. They didn’t even bother to skip to nighttime.

Something else raised back in Episode 81 was that Matthew doesn’t like Mrs. Johnson. I think we’re supposed to believe this is because he’s a naturally suspicious person, but it feels more like he’s jealous.

You can hear his heart breaking.

We get something of a rehash of Mrs. Johnson’s job interview, complete with the two characters sitting in the same places.

Now that she’s gotten the job, there’s no more reason to hide any of her niche fanaticism.

Okay, okay, keep it in church.

Elizabeth proceeds to outline Mrs. Johnson’s daily duties, and if you thought Victoria has it going for her…

We get some more of Mrs. Johnson delicately Protesting Too Much.

This is the great thing about Mrs. Johnson. She’s bad at this whole espionage thing, but she’s gonna do it anyway. And given how oblivious most of these characters are, it might just work out for her.

Liz warns Mrs. Johnson about a certain “hostility” she may feel from Roger about the presence of a newcomer in the house, and all of a sudden we’re back 96 episodes ago and Liz is figuring out the best way to tell Victoria David is nuts.

In many ways, Mrs. Johnson’s arrival at Collinwood is a redux of Vicky’s. A domestic with a secret agenda arriving in a house of secrets where certain members of the family will be less responsive to her than she might like.

We even get Liz warning her about all the places she should stay away from!

Liz warns Mrs. Johnson away from the East Wing, and also the basement, if you remember that thing, saying she’d prefer Mrs. Johnson never goes down there.

Liz really has to work on better ways of framing this whole “do not enter” thing. Repeatedly telling somebody not to do something is essentially an invitation for them to do it. I mean, how many times has she told David that it’s a bad look to plot to murder your own fath…

Time for more David vs. Mrs. Johnson. You might recall an entire episode was spent a while back with Burke teaching David not to be an asshole to her. But the scamp just can’t help himself.

That oughta do it.

David tells his aunt that he already had a similar lecture on this subject from Burke.

I’m sure he’d be glad to hear it.

This episode really proves the extent to which Ron Sproat did his research when he joined the writing team. He even has David wonder if Mrs. Johnson is going to be his “jailer” again, which proves Sproat won’t shy away from acknowledging even the stupidest bits of incidental flotsam.

Act II begins with David sneaking up behind Matthew and causing him to soil himself.

Great stuff here.

The extremely narrow focus of this episode, especially compared to ones before and after it this week, means we get things like David posing with his crystal ball as he asks Matthew if he “likes” the new housekeeper.

Because this has been a week for absurd crack ships, I must confess I’m back on my Mattson kick again. I mean, who doesn’t love some good enemies to lovers, am I right? Matthew even defends Mrs. J to David, though only insofar as it means he simps for Elizabeth.

Can’t argue with that.

In a clear attempt at ingratiation, she brings David lunch on a tray, and even pushes the little card table closer to him.

Probably with obscene amounts of mayonnaise, but that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Clarice Blackburn and David Henesy have already proved a surprisingly delightful pair to watch, and in this episode, we get more of that.

We start with Mrs. Johnson commenting on David’s crystal ball.

Mrs. Johnson begins none-too-subtly prying for information as to the kinds of “secrets” David knows about the house and the things in it.

It’s possible she’s just making this up to get David to relate to her, but it makes perfect sense to me that Mrs. Johnson was the kind of unimaginative child who’d have a secret room and call it, simply, “my secret room”.

David tells her about the secret rooms in Collinwood, and Mrs. Johnson wonders if he’s referring to things like the basement and the East Wing.

Sidenote that the Dark Shadows Wiki entry for this episode claims Clarice Blackburn is stubbornly misnaming the closed-off wing of the house as “East” rather than “West”, but joke’s on them, the closed-off wing is the East Wing and has been since the beginning. It only becomes the West Wing much later when some other writer with absolutely no knowledge of this show’s first months starts puttering around.

You’d think David would take this as an opportunity to tell her about how he locked his babysitter in the East Wing a few nights ago, if he really is so determined to freak her right out of the house. But, no, I guess the whole household’s decided it’s better if they just never mention it again, even to the lady who’s moving in with them.

David wonders if Mrs. Johnson believes in ghosts and she tells him she doesn’t, which marks a rare early continuity error for Sproat. Mrs. Johnson was introduced as hilariously superstitious. In her second appearance, she yelled at Burke about “signs and omens” and suggested Malloy’s corpse was pointing a “finger of suspicion” at Collinwood when it washed up there.

But, considering that Matthew-post-recast was introduced as folksy superstitious only to start grousing about ghosts and hauntings as being nonsense some weeks later, maybe that’s just to be expected for every working class person they introduce on this show.

Speaking of Matthew, he ends up overhearing Mrs. Johnson’s fairly obvious baiting and, protective of the nebulous secrets of this house as always, enters and sends David off for “making a mess”.

Once David departs, Mrs. Johnson reignites the sexual tension by roasting Matthew.

Matthew, however, is resistant to these womanly charms, instead warning her yet again, only more obliquely, about prying into Collinwood’s many secrets…just as he has with Victoria, time and again.

And, considering Mrs. Johnson isn’t young and covetous, I’ve gotta confess I’m worried for her.

Act III begins in the middle of the night. I’m not kidding. They just went from morning to night in the first half of a single episode. And this day will be wrapped up by the end, marking the first time an in-universe day begins and ends in the same episode. This kind of electric pacing becomes commonplace when the Barnabas era begins, but at this point is an aberration on Dark Shadows. Mrs. Johnson’s arrival gets its own little pod in the middle of a week otherwise preoccupied elsewhere.

Matthew walks in on Liz and her housecoat to tell him he’s scared of Mrs. Johnson again or something.

Given what usually happens when he confesses things to Elizabeth, it’s a wonder she doesn’t immediately start throwing things.

However, since she and Matthew already had this exact same conversation at the beginning of the episode, she’s not exactly up for it, just writing off Mrs. Johnson’s nosy questions as the sort of curiosity about Collinwood common among the townsfolk.

I mean…he’s right. But I don’t know why he expects to be treated that way after admitting to pushing a corpse back into the ocean.

Liz goes to sleep and we get a dissolve (fancy!) to the clock showing 3:00 AM.

It’s time for one of our periodic visits to the basement.

Now that the East Wing has been explored, the locked storeroom in the basement has inherited the title of Collinwood’s oldest mystery. For something that’s been lingering since the very beginning of the series, absolutely nothing has been done with it. Most recently, Vicky was able to trace the mysterious crying occasionally heard in the wee small hours of the morning to behind the locked door, and then learned from both Roger and Carolyn that such crying has been going on for their whole lifetimes and they have no explanation for it.

Again, however, Vicky has certain things going for her that poor Mrs. Johnson doesn’t, so as much as I admire her desire to get right to work trying to expose these vultures for the corrupt monsters they really are, I must admit to a certain…

That crate is actually the exact same spot David hid from Vicky in when this set was first introduced in Episode 6. That was one whole Matthew ago.

Mrs. Johnson demands to know what David is doing down here, and this nine-year-old boy looks her in the eye with all the confidence of a king and tells her he “has his reasons”.

I love this show.

Mrs. Johnson covers her ass, claiming she only came down here investigating a noise, which was probably David himself. For his part, he tells the just as plausible story that his crystal ball prophesied that a ghost would appear in the basement tonight and he wants to see it.

Like, on what other soap opera would you see a small boy and a hawkish spinster woman arguing about the existence of ghosts in a set made up like the lobby of the Hollywood Tower of Terror?

David makes a big show of deciding not to tell his Aunt Elizabeth that Mrs. Johnson is trespassing in one of the Bad Places because, after all, she has the Blessing of Burke Devlin upon her.

David has concluded that Burke wouldn’t have gone out of his way to defend Mrs. Johnson to him back then if he didn’t have some sort of plan going with her. He even guesses exactly what’s going on between them.

Mrs. Johnson doesn’t admit to this, of course, but she’s quite clearly gobsmacked to have been discovered, and even more surprised when she learns David’s totally cool with this.

She really has just been given a crash course in what it means to live in this house. The only thing missing is a midnight drunken assault.

So David promises to keep mum about seeing Mrs. J down here, so long as she does the same. Her dignity not yet being destroyed by the great house, Mrs. Johnson doesn’t explicitly agree to this, but she doesn’t disagree either, and then David goes.

And then the ghost starts crying.

David keeps getting cheated out of these things; I feel bad.

Mrs. Johnson is able to trace the crying to behind the locked door, and Clarice Blackburn serves such face.

This is the first recurrence of the Weeping Woman (presumably the restless spirit of Josette Collins) since we actually saw the restless spirit of Josette Collins in Episode 70. Given we’ve also reached the point where characters are interacting with other ghosts, it feels for the first time that this might be going somewhere.

And it will. Eventually.

But don’t hold your breath.

This Day in History- Wednesday, November 9, 1966

John Lennon meets Yoko Ono at the Indica Gallery. Reminder that Yoko didn’t break up the band. Lennon’s big head did.

This is another significant Beatles date for another reason: proponents of the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory believed that Paul McCartney had been killed in an car accident on this day. This would be officially debunked in 1969. Paul is still alive. He’s even still making music. And even if Paul did die, I think looking at discographies, the work of the second Paul far surpasses the first, doesn’t it? I mean, have you heard Let it Be?