Cardboard Houses

My name is Victoria Winters.

So, let’s start at the beginning. Of the episode, that is. Not the beginning of all this mess. We’d be here for hours, and for your information, I’m not keen to revisit most of this ever again.

We just crossed Dark Shadows’ 100^th episode threshold. Accordingly, the heroine is, for the first time, finding herself at the center of a potentially violent conflict. I guess the first 100 were still in the training wheels stage, huh?

Not that this week of episodes is much better. It’s the last full week (but, sadly, does not contain the last scripts) Francis Swann has on this show. I don’t know why they dropped the concept of having both him and Ron Sproat write half a week like they’ve been doing. Maybe this was a way to pad out his contract before they kicked his ass out. Anyway, the whole week feels like Swann knew the end was near and had decided to rage against the dying of the light, and he had to take us down with him.

This episode is likewise directed by John Sedwick. He and Lela Swift are the only directors on Dark Shadows at this point, and while Sedwick is mostly competent, Swift has proven herself to be the ‘creative’ one. I don’t usually mention who directs which episode because it usually isn’t distinct enough to make a difference.

Today, it is.

Saintly blocking aside, we rejoin the Kooks of Collinwood where we left them at the end of Friday’s episode: with Carolyn getting ready for a date with her uncle’s ex, all while her ex attempts not to spontaneously combust from learning she told Vicky about the missing silver filigreed fountain pen.

This is the second time in two episodes that Carolyn has been quizzed very intensely about that pen. You’d think she’d start putting two and two together but, as we’ve already gone over, nothing matters to her unless it somehow directly relates to her

See, Roger is so bad at this. He is so terrible that the only reason we, as an audience, can accept for nobody figuring him out and hauling his ass to jail, is if everybody around him is irreparably stupid. This is bad writing, of course, but on a good day, it’s also funny.

This isn’t a good day.

Besides the oddly sobering indication that, yes, the Cold War does exist in the Dark Shadows universe (which, de facto, means the Vietnam War exists, which, de facto, means Joe should start preparing an exit strategy), this surprisingly cutesy reference to spy fiction may just be a reference, not to 007 (as the average viewer then and now) might assume, but to Louis Edmonds’s last pre-Shadows gig.

While it was released in January 1967, principal photography would already have been a wrap by the time of these scenes we’re watching now on Come Spy With Me, a slap-happy comedy romp about, well, spies. It was produced via a partnership between 20^th Century Fox and various ABC-owned television stations, which explains Edmonds’s casting. He played a villain of some kind, presumably a Soviet, though it’s hard to know because the film has never been released on home video and, if it isn’t exactly lost media, it’s pretty damn close.

What I’m saying is, this might’ve been an in-joke for a post-production genre film that would not be released for two months after this episode aired. As you do.

I wonder if Louis Edmonds played the villain in Come Spy with Me with the same lovable incompetence he does Roger Collins. I guess the world may never know.

Also, Carolyn has a cute plush tiger on the bed that definitely wasn’t there before, but does serve as a nice accent to demonstrate this is a teenage girl’s room and not the chambers of a decaying dowager duchess.

See, the goal of television is to keep you occupied enough that you don’t notice weird things or minutia. We’re barely three minutes into this, and I feel like a prisoner. I can’t even begin to imagine what manner of tired grotesquerie they’re going to trot out for my inspection ne…

When in doubt, just fall back on the classics, I guess.

I think it’s clear Carolyn gets off on playing Burke and Roger against each other. She’s parading around in her updo and her smock while Roger stews in his own inadequacies.

That would be a nice development, but if you recall, that was also the stated motive behind Carolyn’s very first visit to Burke back in Episode 10, and we all know how that ended up, so it’s safe to say she just finds the guy super hot and likes reminding everybody about that.

Wow. Roger’s right about something. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s Roger and he’s pointing out Burke is an unpleasant person, so nobody’s gonna give him the time of day on this.

This devolves into Swann’s favorite method for having other characters learn plot-sensitive information: drawing room farce. Roger starts quizzing Carolyn as to where Vicky is right now. Carolyn doesn’t know where Vicky is. We know Vicky went to see Burke to tell him about the pen stuff, at which point they teamed up for the first time in all 100 episodes, before subsequently agreeing that there was nothing they could do.

But Roger clearly fears Vicky has already gone to the police with what she knows about the pen. Likewise, he may also fear her confiding in Burke, who wants to see him destroyed and has suspected him in Malloy’s death from the beginning.

Carolyn, for her part, knows nothing, except it sure it nice to sit so close to an elder’s shapely thigh.

Farce is great. And I’m not just saying that because I’m gay. It blows silly misunderstandings out of proportion and turns them into a witty song and dance. Dark Shadows is stocked with talented theater types. We’re watching two of them now.

If only the writer knew what the hell he was doing. I’m sure Swann wasn’t setting out to do a send-up of Marx Brothers routine, but that’s what he’s doing. And he’s doing it badly.

And, no, it doesn’t end when the scene does. Roger goes downstairs where he finds his son doing one of his doodles.

See, that…that’s a stock farce gag. The shtick is that David has seen her, but before she left. He doesn’t know where she is. This is the kind of thing that put the Victorian working class in stitches, but it’s not translating to my decadent 21^st century sensibilities. Or, dare I say, the sensibilities of its mid-20^th century audience.

This is a ‘Who’s on First?’ bit. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so painful.

And I should point out that, as always, Louis Edmonds and David Henesy are selling it. Nancy Barrett was too. I can only assume Edmonds may even have realized the comedic underpinnings of what was supposed to be a dramatic suspenseful script leading up to the climax of the thriller/mystery arc he’s been playing for almost four months. But it’s highly doubtful Henesy had any idea, at nine-years-old, who the Marx Brothers were, which makes his choice to play this scene this way very inspired.

Before Roger takes off into town, presumably to hunt Vicky down himself, David shows him the picture he was drawing which, he claims, depicts “what will happen to the man who killed Mr. Malloy”.

First of all, that’s pretty fucking explicit. I don’t know if there was anything in the Hayes Code (which was already waning in influence anyway) about illustrated depictions of executions, but holy shit. This is a soap opera. General Hospital aired before this, and frigging Where the Action Is right after.

Yeah, that’s what’s wrong with that picture, it’s lack of historical accuracy.

But that comment about “not in this state anyway” got me thinking. Did we in the United States of America continue to execute people by hanging into the 20^th century? I mean, the French used the guillotine fairly extensively into the inter-war period, so…

Okay, so it turns out that execution by hanging was technically legal on the federal level in the 1960s. It had last been practiced in Maine in the late 19^th century, and had not been done publicly anywhere since the 1930s, when the hanging of a convicted rapist drew a significant audience and, thanks to the presence of new media, controversy.

The death penalty was de facto suspended in the late 1960s, but America is America, and so restored it in 1976, ten years after this episode aired, and just in time for America’s Bicentennial. Only two men have been executed by hanging since then, both in the ‘90s.

But you still can be hanged. Like, in New Hampshire, it’s an available method if you were convicted before 2019.

So, yeah…I don’t feel glad to know that, but at least I’ve learned something today. Back to this garbage episode…

Oh.

Regrettably, the brief thrill I got after realizing Vicky had enlisted her former nemesis David as an ally against his father dissipated immediately upon the start of Act II, when we learn that David doesn’t know what Vicky knows and she just gave him a shitty excuse about having places to be and not wanting to waste time dealing with Roger.

And I mean…I get why she wouldn’t trust David with this information. Still, it would’ve livened things up somewhat.

The ‘I hate him and I hope he dies’ is only implied for once.

This segues into David saying Vicky could pay him back by going to the Old House with him to meet Malloy’s ghost.

You remember. The Old House? That thing we saw that one time? There was a ghost there and everything.

This is somewhat disappointing, given Vicky’s fervent belief in the substance of what she saw immediately after the fact. Then again, it’s been a few days and nobody has been able to substantiate her claims…except for that time when two people did find evidence to substantiate her claims and just, for some reason, never got around to telling her. And, by now, the fears of the ghost she may or may not have seen have been supplanted by the very real fears of ending up in a murderer’s cross-hairs, so I guess it makes sense for the practical Vicky to tentatively begin reverting to Skeptic form.

For now.

Vicky likewise points out that she didn’t seen Malloy’s ghost at the Old House anyway, making David’s suggested exercise rather pointless.

That’s cute. His attempt to starve her to death in a moldering prison cell is now a private joke between them.

David is insistent, however, that those were special circumstances, and Malloy would ordinarily be with his “friends” at the Old House, which apparently is where the Collinwood ghosts hang out normally.

I mean, I guess Malloy would be into that. Think about it: the only other ghosts we know of are Josette and the Widows. Malloy’s the only dude, and considering he spent half his life pining for his boss while being oblivious to his housekeeper’s carnal fondness for him, it’s safe to assume he died a virgin.

But let’s not think about that any longer than we have to. It’s not like there won’t be chances to ponder the implications of ghost sex on this show later down the line.

Yeah, it’s what happens when the show is so boring I can’t bring myself to pay attention for more than one minute at a time.

Vicky promises David to go to the Old House with him sometime after all, which shows that there may be hope for these two yet, that little hiccup with the attempted murder notwithstanding, and then she goes to visit Carolyn, who is choosing between two more unfortunate frocks for her date tonight.

Vicky gets roped into helping Carolyn pick a dress, as if she hasn’t already put one of the two on.

Good, she’s learning how to lie. Other than that, we’re treated to more farce dialogue as Vicky gradually realizes that Carolyn has majorly screwed up by telling Roger about the pen.

Yes, we’re really going to have the entire conversation again, but with Roger swapped out for Vicky, and the parts of the last one he was involved with added as DLC.

Vicky claims she went to the “drug store” to buy some “lipstick”, which allows Swann to indulge us with another of his favorite devices: trying to guess how women talk.

We then switch to David listening in at the door for some reason. Unlike most of the times he does it, it doesn’t come back in any meaningful way. I’m more interested in the lipstick talk, mainly because, weird and hokey as its construction is, it’s almost nice to hear these two talk about girl things, you know? I mean, it involves Vicky saying “the darker ones are coming back in”, which can’t possibly be how people actually spoke about things like that outside magazine columns, but it is cool seeing them at least pretend to care about things people their age would be expected to care about and not, well…

What these girls are usually caring about.

So, yeah, the farce culminates in Carolyn’s casual admission, yet again, that she flipped her lips about the pen to the wrong person.

Ah God.

Carolyn, again, is unable to filter any of her experiences in a way that doesn’t involve her, so her sole concentration is how Roger got upset with her for joking about the pen being a secret weapon or something.

Well, that’s surprisingly callous given Carolyn’s shockingly heartfelt eulogy for Malloy in Episode 56. But that was written by the guy who came up with this character and was also capable of mimicking some version of emotional depth.

An increasingly worried Vicky learns that Elizabeth is currently out with Mrs. Johnson visiting Matthew. We’ll never find out what’s going on there, but I’d like to imagine Liz is playing mediator and/or matchmaker in an attempt to resolve the simmering sexual tension going on with the help.

The real reason Liz isn’t around is, naturally, because she’d have been the ideal ally for Vicky to confide in about this. She can’t exactly trust David, and Carolyn’s notoriously fickle. For all intents and purposes, Vicky is alone in Collinwood.

Which should be really spooky. And yet.

Act III begins with some location footage of Roger entering a rare full-view of the Blue Whale.

Roger makes a call to Sam to ask if he’s seen Vicky yet, because it’s very necessary we witness him come to the conclusion of his own accord. You’re probably wondering why he’s having this clandestine phone call here rather than from the privacy of his own office at the plant where he happens to have a job he never does? Well, the Doylist answer is they’ve already destroyed the set for Roger’s office. The Watsonian answer, if it even needs to be said at this point, is Roger is very bad at this.

Back at Collinwood, Vicky also tries to make a call to someone who isn’t in the episode.

Sadly, they can’t, and so Vicky is kept from confiding this new and alarming development of pen-lore (or, rather, the distribution of knowledge about the pen lore; nothing new has actually happened to the pen itself) with him.

We’re saved from more pacing and dialogue inertia by the timely arrival of Collinsport’s It Girl.

Thank God.

It’s been more than a week since we last Maggie back in Episode 94. Given the slight hike in pacing since then, it’s even been a few days in their world too. Here, she makes her second visit to Collinwood and, like the first, it’s for the benefit of someone other than herself, because this show hasn’t yet committed to the fact that she’s the most interesting thing on canvas.

It turns out that Vicky, in her anxiousness, left her bag at the Collinsport Restaurant, either before or after her meeting with Burke upstairs. Maggie has left her station at the counter (or maybe she’s on break) to return the purse, because she’s a good friend.

She’s also a good character, and by virtue of her presence, this episode finally becomes a modicum of relevant. For Maggie’s entry into the pen drama breaks the charmed circle which has become Victoria’s prison. She is currently without confidants in the great house, aware that Roger knows she knows material that gravely implicates him in a murder, and has no concrete evidence with which to stymy Roger before he closes in. And she knows he’ll be back any minute.

So it isn’t just the audience that breathes a sigh of relief when Maggie shows up in the eleventh hour of this ditchweed episode.

Maggie wonders what was bothering Vicky so much at the coffee shop that she left her bag behind as she did.

We stan.

Now, talking like that is the best way to ensure whoever you’re talking to is going to keep trying to get at that kind of knowledge. This is, of course, a side effect of Swann’s lazy, cliché-ridden dialogue of the sort we’ve seen oodles of times before.

But we can also be charitable and see some humanity in this portrayal. After all, Vicky doesn’t want to have to keep all this a secret. She feels unsafe and burdened. She’d love to have a friend to confide in. Maybe that’s also why Alexandra Moltke decides to look down as if embarrassed or ashamed as she says it, finally admitting the secret she knows is connected to Malloy’s death.

Poor Vicky tells Maggie she’s found evidence suggesting Malloy may have been murdered after all. Naturally, in this moment, she gets an audience.

I honestly don’t understand why they had David eavesdropping on Vicky and Carolyn before too, except to foreshadow this, as if David eavesdropping is a new thing we haven’t seen before this episode. I mean…I guess he may have heard Vicky and Carolyn talking about the pen. That would be cool, if he began to realize the pen was taken by his father and he trapped Vicky for no reason.

Well, he already trapped Vicky for no reason, but…you know. Maybe he’d be ashamed of it.

Not that Vicky feels comfortable telling her. Poor Maggie is getting the CliffNotes version of what it’s been like for us to suffer through this crap for all these weeks.

Vicky points out she doesn’t have enough evidence to do anything with these suspicions, which is itself a religitation of what she and Burke decided last episode. Swann didn’t write it, but he’s gonna keep reminding us of it this week, to the point where it’ll start making less sense than it was by all rights intended to.

I mean…she’s right. You don’t just say ‘Oh, yeah, I think I know who the killer is, but it would be totes uncool for me to say it, you know, in case I’m wrong…’.

And I don’t understand any of this, but I’m sure if Vicky is given a full 20 minute block to explain, maybe it’ll start making the specter of sense.

Maggie seems to have lost her temper with Vicky. She points out that Vicky attempts to be friendly with everybody she encounters, only to stir things up like this. She even, somewhat sourly, notes that all this trouble in Collinsport only started after Vicky arrived, though she does admit that’s only because Burke returned at the same time.

It’s nice to see Vicky’s many inadequacies as a heroine called out by the character who really should be the heroine, but oop, we haven’t been talking about Carolyn enough, so…

Carolyn catches David spying before Vicky commits the grievous crime of telling Maggie anything useful, and now we’ve got a whole domestic dispute in front of company.

Maggie’s debating whether or not she should call social services, or it’s 1966 equivalent: the Franciscan monks.

David runs off because…because why not, I guess. His only real utility in this episode was to show his dad the picture he drew of him hanging from a noose. Everything else is just puffery.

Because Carolyn is our favorite sociopath, she immediately pivots to asking Maggie how she is as if nothing has happened, before showing off the “garment” she’s wearing on her date.

I guess Maggie must be gratified about all this. Carolyn isn’t even trying to stake her claim to Joe. His name isn’t mentioned once in this whole episode, which either highlights that Carolyn is moving on, or that Swann doesn’t care anymore.

Before she leaves, Vicky asks Carolyn to ask Burke to call her later. And, this time, I really can’t fault Carolyn for getting snippy.

I mean, what is she supposed to think that’s about? Vicky really shouldn’t be working so hard to alienate the closest thing to a friend she has in the place.

Act IV begins with still more heretofore unseen location footage, this time of Roger entering Collinwood through a side door at a time of day that is almost certainly too bright to match what’s going on in the rest of the episode.

This comes from someone mostly in favor of the location footage simply because of its uniqueness, but this week is over-stuffed with it, some new, some (very noticeably) old. In cases like this one, it really feels like they were trying to run out the clock.

Which is entirely fair, really. Maggie’s been grappling with fear about her father’s safety since before Malloy was even dead. Prior to her blossoming romance with Joe, that fear was quite literally the only thing her character even had to do.

Here, demanding Vicky cut the bullshit and tell her what’s up, she comes into her own, not only as a compelling candidate for Girl Detective Heroine (which, in case you didn’t know, was what Vicky was supposed to be), but as the audience surrogate as well.

Early on, that job was primarily Vicky’s, because she was as new to Collinsport as we were, and as she learned things, so did we. It’s gotten to the point, however, that we’ve learned a great more things than she has, so her utility is less unique. There are still many other mysteries on Dark Shadows, however, and it follows we should be allowed more than one vessel to solve them, especially if Vicky is too belligerent, for whatever reason, to cooperate.

Vicky attempts to warn Maggie that she’d be in danger if she knew what was going on, which is true. Indeed, the sensible consumer of this kind of fiction would immediately begin fearing for Maggie’s life, now that she’s stumbled her way into the web of intrigue surrounding Collinwood. After all, she’s a harried domestic, and they exist in this subgenre primarily to be murdered as an example to the well-heeled suspects and the investigator class. Sometimes they get to blackmail the killer before being killed themselves, but it all comes to the same in the end.

Of course, it would be a perilous mistake if Dark Shadows killed Maggie off for…several reasons, not least of which being that she’s the most likable member of the cast, short of the guy they’re selling to us as the murderer.

Maggie continues proving her pleasantness by offering Vicky safe harbor at her place, though she stops when she worries if Vicky is talking about suspecting her father, Sam, a notion Vicky quickly dismisses, before saying she’s keeping this under wraps because she promised someone: Burke.

Maggie continues to be the most Burke-proof member of the female cohort, short of Liz, I guess. Even Mrs. Johnson is cutting him more slack than he deserves.

In any case, Vicky tells her she did have to promise Burke, because he’s mixed up in it, indeed that the death of Malloy is connected to manslaughter case from 10 years ago. And so, by clearing both Sam and Burke to Maggie, she really is left with just one other suspect for who it is Vicky thinks did Malloy in.

Maggie remembers that Burke implicated her father in the manslaughter case when he crashed Vicky’s dinner at the Evanses some nights ago. This brings home how personal this can be to Maggie too, if they only committed to it. Vicky’s only caught up in this case, as she is with everything else, by circumstance. But for Maggie, her father’s freedom is potentially at risk. She has a vested interest in the case being solved, and for Sam’s name to be cleared.

Oh, yeah, and while I was talking about how Maggie would be a better protagonist in this story, Vicky told her about the pen, but that wasn’t really for Maggie’s benefit, but so Roger could get more confirmation than he already has that she Knows Too Much.

She is being far too nice about this. Vicky insists, however, that that’s alright, and she can manage on her own, which is pretty questionable, but fine, whatever makes her feel better. I am consoled only by the fact that there’s a minute and a half left and there really isn’t time for Swann or Sedwick or anybody to drop anything significant enough to warrant my com…

There, in the back, like one of those robots from Star Wars. That’s…that’s a camera. There is an entire camera just there in the back of the shot, oh my God…

It’s the edge of the set! The camera moved right to avoid the other camera and now we see the edge of the set. You can even seen they wrote ‘Foyer’ on it so they knew what it was. This is incredible…

THERE IS A MAN. A CREW GUY WENT INTO THE DRAWING ROOM TO MOVE THE CAMERA AND NOW HE’S IN THE SHOT, HE’S JUST THERE, AND THEY FILMED TOO MUCH OF THE EPISODE FOR A SECOND TAKE SO THIS JUST MADE IT ONTO TELEVISION SCREENS AND PEOPLE PROBABLY SAW IT WHEN IT AIRED THIS IS REMARKABLE CAN YOU BELIEVE IT I LOVE THIS SHOW AND I HATE THIS SHOW AND THIS IS SO CRAZY…

I don’t know if I can properly articulate what’s incredible about this. Everything is so polished today. I mean, even before the Internet, but with the rise of streaming and the mainstreaming of nerd culture, you couldn’t even get away with a change in the key lighting between shots without a bunch of redditors descending on it. Frozen was the most ambitious animated film ever made and it became a meme because, for a fraction of a second in its most complicated sequence, the heroine’s braid phases through her arm.

There’s no room for error anymore. Every genre is analyzed to within an inch of its life. Soap operas aren’t exempt either. Couples have fanbases that obsessively archive old clips to the point they can (and will) tell you why something said in December 2020 contradicts something shown on screen in April 2005.

But before the Internet, before video even, there was this understanding that things that aired on television were just one and done. Especially daytime television which, as I’ve said before, makes it so much more miraculous that Dark Shadows is almost completely preserved, with no episodes entirely considered “loss”. But, originally, bloopers were seen as a fact of the business. Easier to flub a line or show a boom mic, or even something as disastrous as a 10 second span in which the show practically looks you in the face and screams at you that you are watching a television show and everything is fake, when the alternative was the spend precious money on a second take.

Aw, that’s cute, I like that throwback.

But, yeah, I find myself wondering what went through the minds of some viewers who saw the crewman enter the shot. Surely, there were many who noticed that, compounded with the impossible to miss glimpse of the edge of the set, and realized what it was.

But TV picture quality was pretty bad in the mid-60s, don’t ya know. It’s entirely possible some old spinster only saw the white-shirted crewman and, maybe in a flurry of excitement, discounting everything else, leaned forward in anticipation, as the thought raced through her mind:

‘There! It’s one of the ghosts of Collinwood!’

And there would be nobody, no message board, no YouTube video, no fan convention to tell her otherwise.

Isn’t that just gra…

Oh yeah. Almost forgot about that.

Behind the Scenes Shenanigans

Francis Swann wrote the entirety of Dark Shadows’ 21^st week, comprising episodes 101 – 105. After this, he will write only two more episodes before we’re rid of him entirely and a new writer joins Ron Sproat on the team.

This Day in History- Monday, November 14, 1966

World heavyweight champ Cassius Clay, who would achieve immortality as Muhammad Ali, fought Cleveland Williams, who hadn’t boxed in more than a year following being shot by a policeman, at the Houston Astrodome. Williams holds his own for three rounds before Clay’s shocking comeback.

A U.S. Air Force plane becomes the first jet aircraft to land in Antarctica, having completed a 2,200 mile roundtrip flight to and from Christchurch, New Zealand.

Former star baseball player and current reactionary right-wing bigot Curt Schilling is born in Anchorage, Alaska.