Road Rage

I’m conflicted.

On the one hand, Dark Shadows, like most television shows, is at its best when things are happening. However, I’m not sure ‘what’s happening’ and I travel in the same social circle.

So, last night, the main character was nearly assailed in her room by an unseen figure. Moments later, Roger, who she suspects (and he knows she suspects) is the man who killed Bill Malloy, showed up to investigate. This, like many moments since Vicky began zeroing on the truth, was a moment of mixed tension and absurdity.

And that’s why I’m not so sure about this. Between the odd circumstances of this incident and the absolute balls-to-the-wall audacity of the story Roger told her shortly before, in which he described finding Malloy dead the night he died and just, I guess, happening to drop his silver filigreed fountain pen while he was there, it feels like we’re reaching a point where the people behind this program realize they have to make things happen at the same time as they’ve noticed all the pieces they already had are woefully insufficient.

But enough about that for now. Let’s rejoin Vicky as she visits her boss to tell her she was almost violated in her sleep.

There has to have been a better way to say “Someone tried breaking into my room last night,” and Vicky demonstrates this by following up by saying essentially that very thing but, again, Francis Swann only has so many episodes left, and he has to fill them up somehow.

Somehow, Liz got no wind of this when it happened, despite living in the same house and almost certainly being in the house when it happened.

But, yanno, you can only have so many characters in one episode. That’s not as important. What is important is how lowkey (er, no pun intended) Liz’s reaction is. I mean, I know we’re used to her brushing off things as extreme as her nephew trying to kill his dad, but she just starts on about how she’ll have Matthew put a new lock on the door, which is all good and well until you remember someone tried to get into her room. Also, it was almost certainly Elizabeth’s brother.

Liz briefly suggests it may have been a prowler.

She’s being too hard on herself. She at least owns wearable clothes, unlike a certain age contemporary with a suspiciously similar bedroom.

Act I begins with Liz returning from consulting David, who claims to know nothing about Vicky’s late night visitor.

We know Liz has cut David more slack for worse things in the past, so her “believing” him doesn’t count for jack all. But I think we can safely rule David out anyway, given he’s temporarily decided Vicky is Cool because she’s aware of the fact that his father is a lunatic.

Matthew enters like the ghoul he is so that Liz can explain to him this predicament of the locks.

Could it be so hard to at least pretend she earnestly believes Victoria? Why this ‘Miss Winters thinks’ stuff? You can’t even try to show some solidarity in front of the help?

Matthew is skeptical that any prowler could have found his way into Collinwood, given he keeps things locked up tight and all that.

His job is a lot of things. It doesn’t seem to be a job for which he is paid anything. But he is very busy, this much is true.

Vicky either doesn’t want to tell Liz she suspects her brother was the culprit or she honestly doesn’t think it herself. I mean, I want her to be clever enough to realize the odd coincidence that Roger was the only one to respond to her scream and he happened to show up not ten seconds after the door closed, but she’s been pretty hit and miss lately.

One of Matthew’s jobs seems to be locksmithing. He declares Vicky needs an inside bolt affixed to the door and says he’ll get right on it.

Add that to the increasing list of things I’d rather see play out onscreen. Imagine Matthew and Mrs. Johnson going grocery shopping together! The simmering sexual tension as Mrs. Johnson selects meat at the butcher while Matthew salivates at the thought of sinking his teeth into a live lamb.

After Matthew leaves, Liz has the pretty decent idea that the prowler may have hidden in the East Wing last night, which is why Roger never found anyone. It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t matter how good it is because the better answer is much more obvious and nobody’s acknowledged it yet.

The real reason Liz brings it up is so she can go investigate, leaving Vicky to her devices, whereupon she places a call to Burke…

Well, actually, he said he was going to Bangor last night to enact his “crazy plan that just might work”. He didn’t say it’d be an overnighter. What the hell is he doing, putting dog poop in Frank Garner’s shoes?

Because she’s already at the phone, I guess, Vicky next contacts her buddy Sam Evans, looking for Maggie.

Before they actually cut to Sam on his end of the call, all you can hear is this really garbled mutation of Dave Ford’s voice. At first I thought Sam wouldn’t even be in the episode and they were testing some new Peanuts-esque mechanism to add realism for one-sided phone calls.

So Maggie is at work, but that doesn’t mean this call is in vain. Sam has a lot to gain from talking to Vicky. Or, well, he doesn’t, but that’s never stopped him before. Ever since Maggie told him that Vicky has (or had) evidence proving Malloy was killed and Roger was the killer, he’s been back to his old ‘mole in a ‘50s gangster movie’ ways, sweating and twitching and generally losing his shit. I don’t know what he hopes to learn by calling Vicky, given Maggie told him just about everything relevant to the case, with the exception of the pen business which means nothing to Sam one way or the other. But, again, Sam is an alcoholic, which means he can do stupid, erratic nonsense and we can be expected to just nod along with it.

Sam can’t come right out and tell Vicky about his ulterior motives for wanting to see her, of course, so he claims he has new information about the painting of Betty Hanscom. Mind you, Vicky lied to Roger that Maggie had new information about the painting last night, which makes this being used as an excuse by another character in the very next episode incredibly egregious.

But that’s just Swann.

Of course he can’t, because “telephones have extensions”. I like that this ruse requires that the painting has some hypothetical sinister undertone to it that simply can’t be discussed willy-nilly.

Vicky agrees to meet with Sam this evening at the Blue Whale.

He’s cute even when he’s being scummy. Cursed!Sam could never.

By way of parting, Vicky asks Sam to tell Maggie she discovered something more about “what they were talking about last night”, indicating she’s open to cooperating with Maggie in this little investigation which I love. I love it. It’s great. Long time coming, seeing two of this show’s female leads cooperating in a major story. I wish I could tell you to get used to it, but don’t.

 Vicky hangs up as Elizabeth returns, finding the East Wing remains locked, therefore dashing that theory to bits just as soon as it served out its purpose.

Victoria goes upstairs to resume her lessons with David, because that’s still a job she’s expected to do in between all this. Elizabeth returns to her usual spot by the phone and tries contacting Roger at the cannery.

He isn’t. As much as some things have changed, it seems Roger still doesn’t go out of his way to do his job. Thank God for consistency.

The good thing about this is it indicates Liz, at least, is onto Roger. I want to believe Vicky is too, considering. They’re all just too dainty to say one thing or another about it.

Act II fast tracks it to evening as another token of this show finally learning how to pace itself as needed. We also get another bit of location footage of Roger in his new, considerably less snazzy, car pulling up to the house.

Roger returns to find Liz waiting up for him.

There are other reasons for them speeding up the day so that it’s suddenly nighttime: that’s when Vicky’s meeting with Sam is supposed to be. The side effect of this is Roger looks pretty bad for having unaccountable movements all day. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine what he could’ve been doing in the way of suspicious stuff. The wisest thing would be going to where he buried the pen and actually chucking it into a garbage incinerator, but other than that I can’t conceive of anything productive he could’ve been doing short of driving around the countryside and weeping.

I mean…I guess that’s what facetious means. It isn’t how I would describe this behavior, but I’m glad Francis Swann is showing off his knowledge of SAT words.

Liz wonders why Roger didn’t linger to discuss Vicky’s “nocturnal visitation” (Roger’s words) with her this morning, and we learn that Roger is already campaigning to add this latest horror to his ongoing attempt to get Vicky out of the house.

Gaslighting is frequently misunderstood in media and, obviously, nobody’s watching this for a mental health education, but it’s borderline parody how blatant Roger is about dismissing every single thing that he doesn’t want people paying attention to. He wants everyone in the house to believe that Victoria is some sort of emotionally disturbed hysteric who starts randomly screaming at odd intervals.

But…but that happened. David even confessed, mostly. Elizabeth knows it happened. She even knows Roger “rescued” Vicky from the locked room. Is this on purpose or did Francis Swann drop the ball?

Okay, he probably should’ve opened up with that one. Except that he and Liz went to investigate and did find wet seaweed inexplicably heaped up on the floor, which seems to prove something. Also, they still haven’t told Vicky that, so if she is going nuts, maybe they oughta analyze their own behavior for contributing factors.

Roger then suggests that this is all either a figment of Vicky’s imagination, or the result of her possessing “information that’s dangerous for her to have”. Which it is. But why is he saying that? Why go to all the trouble of saying Vicky’s clearly making all this up just to punctuate it by saying “Well, actually, it could also be that she’s right and someone wants to shut her up.” It doesn’t make any sense.

Roger’s playing this pretty coolly. He isn’t in one of his nervous states at present. He chose to bring this up. Does he think he looks less suspicious by giving the possibility some credence?

Elizabeth is considerably out of the loop these days and has to be told by Roger that Vicky believes Malloy’s death wasn’t an accident after all. Liz asks where Vicky could’ve gotten such a strange notion from and then Roger starts flubbing. Or, well, Louis Edmonds does.

I can’t ever get mad at Louis Edmonds for screwing up his lines because, for one thing, have you seen the things they make him say on this show? And for another, the experience is also heightened by him screwing up.

At which point Matthew just kinda shows up to announce he’s fixed Vicky’s lock. That’s the only reason he’s in the scene and it seems to be the only reason he’s in the episode at all.

This argument gets sillier every single time he makes it, but it’s now reached the point where Vicky leaving is tantamount to negotiating with the terrorists. Also, Roger may very well be the terrorists in this situation.

Elizabeth seems just as tired of this as I am, informing Roger he can’t have his tete-a-tete with Vicky because she’s gone into town on an uncertain errand.

It shouldn’t, of course, which is why Roger immediately leaves to go looking for her for the second night in a row. Liz wonders why he cares this much, and Roger very condescendingly informs her:

If he’s so worried, why did he dismiss Vicky’s story of someone trying to enter her room? Or is this why he decided to become slightly credulous of it halfway into this scene?

We head to the Blue Whale, where Sam is yakking it up with some regulars and some douchey looking guy who is not the bartender.

Don’t worry, the regular guy will be back. And, indeed, his temp replacement will become something of a recurring face in the series as well, so everybody wins.

Except Victoria, of course, as she arrives at the bar for her meeting with Sam and discovers with comic precision that he baited her into showing up and she fell for it like the rube she is.

Okay, that was a good one, I liked that one.

Sam is surprised to learn of the prowler that attempted to break into Vicky’s room. But he also doesn’t seem too interested in this. I mean, given he already fully believes Roger is a murderer, it’s quite likely he imagined something like this was going to happen eventually.

The Dark Shadows Wiki has a running thing in its episode recaps where it notes that Sam seems to smoke his pipe usually, and only switches to cigarettes when he’s freaking out and/or nervous. Which is most of the time regardless, but you do kinda see that this week, with him smoking the pipe when he went to sit with Maggie last episode, before she gave him the bad news about Vicky having evidence in the Malloy matter. Now he’s chomping on cigs. And it’d be really cool if this was a conscious decision on, say, Dave Ford’s part, given what a committed performer he is. It may also be that everybody just really liked smoking in 1966.

So, Sam cuts the bullshit pretty quickly, admitting he lured Vicky here under false pretenses which, let’s be honest, is still not in the top five worst things a man has done to her this week.

Like, this is the scummiest thing he’s done he was recast, but somehow Dave Ford is able to keep it cute.

A real problem with Sam in general is his concerns are usually, if not baseless, kind of directionless. It makes sense for the character, because he’s paranoid and neurotic, but it creates narrative problems where his anxieties don’t always match up. It would be different if Sam had valid reason to suspect Vicky thought he was the murderer, and he was desperate to convince her otherwise, but he knows from Maggie this isn’t the case. Indeed, the threat to Sam now is pretty indirect. His fear is that Roger is the murderer, and once he’s apprehended, he will give Sam up for his part in the manslaughter cover-up 10 years back. Which is fine, but I only know this because I’ve watched these episodes multiple times on my computer machine. Audiences in 1966 are not likely to have remembered the conversation Roger and Sam had in this bar almost 50 episodes ago wherein Roger implied he’d give Sam up if he got taken away for Malloy’s death. So the average contemporary viewer would be entirely in their rights to not have any clue why Sam is so pants-wettingly terrified this time.

Vicky lets on that she’s learned information suggesting she may have been wrong in her initial conclusion, no doubt referring to Roger’s story, but she doesn’t elaborate, allowing the song and dance to go on still further.

He has as good a point as his daughter had in Monday’s episode: at a certain point, this game Vicky is playing affects others. It isn’t productive in any way to dredge it up again unless she honestly intends to do something about it. And, you know, at this point it may even be worth it going to the police because, even without the “concrete evidence” Swann wants so badly for us to remember she doesn’t have, this shit is just that serious.

Vicky suggests she discuss this with Burke, which…what?

Yeah. He was just about to get his life back on track. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

Vicky makes a good point of her own.

Which…yeah. The entire plot could just…stop at any time, whenever Sam decides to tell the truth about whatever happened ten years ago. But, of course, it can’t stop because that very same question has been driving everything since day one and they haven’t yet come up with spicy alternatives.

They will, though. Sooner rather than later for once, so that’s something.

Sam offers to give Vicky a lift back to Collinwood, but she’d prefer to walk, presumably wary for once of getting into cars with strange men.

Left alone in the bar, Sam goes to the payphone and places a desperate call to the Collinsport Inn, only to learn Burke still isn’t back. Oh well. It doesn’t matter anyway.

You know the old saw about two roads diverging in a wood?

I love this set. I mean, it’s kind of a kitsch depiction of a lonely crossroads in the woods, but that’s why it’s so cool. Also, because they’re bothering to show Vicky journeying from one place to another, you already know something terrible is about to happen.

There’s some documentary footage from a Dark Shadows convention in around the late ‘80s or so where Dan Curtis describes the location footage they shot for the show in the pre-Barnabas era. One of the stories he tells is about how he and some crew guys nearly killed themselves driving and filming a car rocketing down a road at unsafe speeds. That footage could only refer to this scene. So, yeah, people almost died to bring you this.

And…well, it is saucy. I kinda wish they’d move away from car related plot beats, but I’ll take what I can get, I guess. Also, having Vicky nearly be struck by a speeding car is a considerable escalation from the specter of someone trying to get into her room. It increases urgency and, therefore, increases suspense.

Also, it finally suggests that our heroine might be in some danger. She’s been in danger before, of course, but it was always a sort of protracted, distanced danger. While it was bad that she was locked in a room and expected to turn to dust waiting for someone to rescue her, it wasn’t the kind of danger that gets your pulse to pounding.

A hit and run, however? Holy shit. Soaps love hit and runs. Ever since General Hospital killed poor Bobbie Spencer’s daughter and shoved her heart into that miserable bitch Maxie Jones, the genre’s been milking car crashes, car accidents, and the occasional vehicular manslaughter for all they’re worth.

This is a cool moment. It reinforces the danger of the secret Vicky is keeping, the increased urgency, the need to resolve the mystery of Malloy’s death before it’s too late. Now it is literally a matter of life and death.

 You’d expect the episode to end with this shocking moment. Somehow, however, it doesn’t and, just like the suppository crash, we segue to Elizabeth hearing all about it back at Collinwood.

This time? What does she mean this time? What’s the first time in this equation? As far as I know, the only other time someone tried to kill her, it was David locking her in the East Wing, and we’ve all agreed that wasn’t an accident.

It’s entirely possible I’m missing something here, but it’s just as likely Francis Swann was burnt the hell out and no longer gave a crap.

Elizabeth sits Vicky down and she struggles to get a story out of her.

Vicky doesn’t, sadly. Ending the episode with three minutes of screaming would almost make up for not just ending it with the natural dramatic high point of the heroine about to be hit by a car.

Vicky describes her ordeal, with a strange car barreling down the road toward her so quickly it was all she could do to get out of the way just before it struck her.

Someone without much creativity.

The brightness of the car’s headlights ensures that Vicky isn’t able to note any identifying details of the vehicle, so there goes that. Somehow, she’s still resistant to the idea of calling the sheriff, despite an attempt being made on her life. I mean, again, no ‘concrete evidence’, but there’s a slight difference in scope between the missing silver filigreed fountain pen and, well, this.

Er, thanks, way to victim blame, Liz.

Vicky learns Roger went into town to look for her and her mind immediately jumps to the most logical conclusion, not that she tells Liz as much, though it’s pretty clear what she’s thinking.

Liz departs to “get something to quiet [Vicky] down”.

Vicky calls the Inn again and, this time, Burke is there, having just returned from Bangor. She’s able to tell him about the attempt made on her life but isn’t able to elaborate because Liz arrives with the Special Stuff.

Well, that explains why she didn’t hear Vicky screaming last night.

This is the first instance of a character being administered a “sedative”, a loose term for a medication that puts the taker to sleep. These things were common as cocoa puffs in the ‘60s and for several generations before that. At least ‘60s sedatives weren’t loaded with cocaine and opium.

I think it’s more likely she’s just reluctant to take a tablespoon of Bayer’s Headache Reliever and Stain Remover just to knock herself out in a house where she is almost certain a very determined murderer lives.

This even further compounds the feeling of intense isolation for Vicky. She can’t, exactly, trust Elizabeth, can she? She knows Elizabeth prioritizes loyalty to her family above all else; she’s seen it. And she’s been shockingly offhand about the various threats to Vicky’s safety. Sure, she’s like that about everything, but that isn’t reassuring either.

Still, Vicky takes the sedative anyway, because Francis Swann is writing this show and it’s okay if things just happen, alright, nobody’s ever gonna waste their time thinking about this crap for more than a couple of minutes.

This Day in History- Thursday, November 17, 1966

Don’t Drink the Water, the first full-length play of comedian and young girl enthusiast Woody Allen, premieres at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway. Unlike much of Allen’s later work, this play is funny sometimes.

Medical student Reita Faria becomes the first Indian to win the Miss World title. The 1966 competition also marked the fist time a Communist nation was represented, with Yugoslavia’s Mikica Marinovic becoming a runner up.

The Leonids meteor shower occurs when the Earth’s orbit intersects with the debris of the Tempel-Tuttle comet. This meteor shower was the most spectacular display in 133 years and was described as the “Show of the Century”, only to be entirely blocked out in the United States thanks to overcast skies. Go figure.

America singer, songwriter, and holder of my adolescent heart Jeff Buckley is born to Tim Buckley in Anaheim. They were both massively talented and died far too soon and now I’m sad again. Rats.