Procedural Justice

We’re at the beginning of a peculiar week for Dark Shadows, for many reasons. The majority of these reasons descend from a scheduling issue: this is the show’s first incomplete week, featuring its first preemptions.

If you’ve been following the calendar as we’ve progressed through the series, you may have realized we’ve reached the last full week of November 1966, which means the Thanksgiving holiday, which means (the first ever) football-related preemptions, which means there’s no scripted television airing on ABC daytime on Thursday and Friday.

With the rise of streaming and same-day on demand, soaps don’t always skip airings on holidays, instead making their episodes available on their network apps (or, I guess, that Peacock thing NBC has now; I tried it once and there were so many ads I immediately felt I was breaking the law in some way), but of course in the days of three TV channels, there were no alternatives so here we are.

This presents a unique challenge for a soap opera, which relies on a sort of ‘five act play’ structure in the average week. Obviously, not all soaps, nor even every week of a specific soap opera, adhere to a single arc with rising and falling action playing out over five days, especially not with the huge casts of modern soaps. Still, narrative beats have long played out in varying intensity according to what day of the week the episode is airing on. Mondays and Tuesdays are about scene setting, Wednesdays feature the action rising to an inflection point, Thursday speeds things up, and Friday either resolves a question, or blows things up in a shocking way.

With only three days to play out a week, things become more concentrated. And you have to make sure the Wednesday cliffhanger is especially intense to sustain audience attention over a four day weekend.

The solution, then, is to structure the week around the much more familiar “three act” model of storytelling, in which Monday is the set up, Tuesday the rising action culminating in climax, and Wednesday the final explosion. A skilled writer would surely be familiar with the concept and would be able to execute it without much thought…

Oh, did I mention Francis Swann is still here? Yeah. So, um…suffice to say, we’re not about to watch a drama in three acts.

There’s a lot to yell at about this episode, but let’s start by saying Vicky certainly hasn’t been in Collinwood for “months’. She’s barely been there three weeks. In fact, if you count the onscreen days since the series began, Victoria Winters has been in Collinsport for 16 days, so just over half a month. This is a legacy of soaps operating on magical time where days and weeks are measured, not by what happens on screen, but by how much time has passed for the audience who, indeed, have been watching this show for some months now. If they’re still watching at all.

This episode seems designed to test the patience of the happy few who remain.

So, it’s the morning after Vicky Winters was almost killed by a speeding car on the road to Collinwood. Later that same night, Burke executed a “crazy plan” that led to Roger being caught pen-handed, at which point he was taken into custody for questioning in the matter of Bill Malloy’s death and, connected to that, the two mysterious attempts on Vicky’s life.

We rejoin our heroine as she arrives at the Sheriff’s Station to give testimony.

The Garners, of Garner & Garner, make their return to the screen this week, which is only one reason I’m not looking forward to this experience in the slightest. We were introduced to them three weeks ago when Vicky went to Bangor to investigate a clue she believed could provide answers to her past. Because she’s Vicky, this clue led nowhere, but she did meet Richard Garner’s tiresome son Frank, who made no secret of his unseemly attraction to her.

Thankfully, Frank isn’t in this episode. It’s just his much more charismatic and slightly sexier father Richard, here to act as Roger’s attorney in this matter, the same way he did during the manslaughter case a decade ago.

I know, it sounds exciting right? Soaps love a good trial. The courtroom provides a perfect venue for dramatic confessions, powerful monologues, and oodles of Daytime Emmy reels for the participating actors.

So, naturally, we won’t be having any trials on this show for more than a year, and when we do get a trial, it’ll be more about who saw Goodie Proctor dancing with the devil than custody arrangements and alibis.

What we do get is lots of recapping, because it’s Monday and there are only three episodes this week, and Francis Swann knows he’s out of a job and has no interest in advancing the plot.

I…um…I’m not sure it is his right. Actually, and I’m not an expert here, but it seems a little hinky to have the suspect’s attorney present while the witness testifies against said suspect. It’s not like they’re in the courtroom now, she’s just giving her evidence to the police.

But this is before Google, so who’s Patterson going to check that with? The tea leaves? We have recapping to do, and boy howdy, are they about to get to it with gusto.

This is a good question. I was hoping we’d be treated to Roger sitting in a cell and clanging a mug against the bars, but in another soap opera anomaly, this police station doesn’t have jail cells.

What it does have, is lots of time to kill.

He’s not wrong. So let’s get down to it.

We begin with a prayer before the culture’s sacral idol.

This episode marks the last onscreen appearance of the silver filigreed fountain pen, a prop which has had a fuller arc than half the characters currently on canvas, plus the guy whose murder they’re all investigating. We never learn what happens to the pen after this, if it gets returned to Carolyn or Burke, or if Patterson just pockets it for his own purposes because who the fuck is gonna stop him.

Patterson asks Vicky when she’s “known [the pen] before”, which is an odd way to describe an inanimate object, but I guess when it’s such a big deal, the deference is merited.

So, set your timers: recap begins at approximately 2 minutes, 26 seconds. Vicky tells Patterson she found the pen “two or three days” after Malloy died. I know this doesn’t matter anymore, but she found the pen four days after Malloy died.

So, we haven’t been at this a minute and Garner is already interrupting, in direct defiance of Patterson’s order he shut the fuck up if he wanted to play peanut gallery. Naturally, Patterson scolds him like a child, makes no effort to remove him from the room, and we keep going.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that bit of sass from the sheriff may be the one redeemable thing about this episode.  It’s certainly the only noteworthy thing about this recap sequence, which prattles on at extraordinary length. Vicky describes her entire journey with the pen up to the minute, including Roger seeing her with it, her seeing the duplicate in Blair’s possession, suspecting Burke of being Malloy’s killer, realizing from Carolyn that Roger had had the pen the night Malloy died, etc. etc. at which point we pivot to the various attempts on Vicky’s life. This all happens in real time. There are no act breaks, no secondary plotlines for the episode to switch to. It’s like watching a stage play written by a man who knows he’ll be shot in the head if he stops typing for more than five seconds.

And, given Dan Curtis, maybe that’s what was going on.

Recaps are, of course, necessary on soaps, where nobody is expected to watch every episode. They’re especially necessary in Monday episodes, to help even the most dedicated viewers catch up after the weekend. Police interrogations are the easiest utility for any writer in any genre, because recap becomes immediately justified. Tropes are not bad.

But they can be abused, and I think we’re looking at a PSA on that very subject right now. Dark Shadows will have many more police investigations, appended to considerably more outlandish crimes than this one, and the recapping will never stop entirely, but this may be the one instance in the entire series where Dark Shadows pretends to be a police procedural for more than 90% of the runtime.

And it’s only that low because they shove in a two minute scene in the last act which serves no purpose but to get us off this set for a little while.

Yes, this was well-established. I know Vicky doesn’t know the sheriff was told about these two attempts last episode (first in his office from Burke and later when he went up to Collinwood to question Roger and Liz), and possibly Patterson is being a good cop and is trying not to let on that he already knows other peoples’ version of the story, but it really comes off as if this is all new information for him. Which is especially baffling because Swann wrote both this episode and the last one.

And again, despite being warned, this asshole is just mouthing off. Every instance of the kindly patrician Vicky met in Bangor is gone, and all that’s left is the miserable bootlicking Collins toady who informed on Vicky’s movements to Elizabeth.

And while that does inform the true nature of the character and serves to heighten Vicky’s feelings of isolation and desperation, it’s also unpleasant to watch and doubly infuriating when Patterson just snaps at him again without actually removing him from the office.

They move on to recapping the near hit-and-run. Vicky mentions she was in town meeting with Sam Evans, gives the approximate time of the attack at 8:00, and then we get Garner perching himself on the desk so he can cross-examine the witness, even though she isn’t on the stand, they aren’t in court, and he has no business squeezing her for information. Shouldn’t he be debriefing his client? This episode might’ve been more fun if we interspersed all the recap stuff with Roger being consoled (that isn’t a typo) by his attorney in his cell.

No, I guess not. Good job, guy, you’re earning that paycheck.

The recap sequence finally ends at 8 minutes and 52 seconds.

We spent more than seven minutes describing the events of the past month. I think this is a series record. At least when they spend half the summer of ’67 recapping things that happened yesterday the vampire does us the courtesy of forgetting every other line mid-monologue. That makes it fun.

Before Vicky can leave, the attorney of the man she believes is trying to kill her pulls her aside and, you guessed it, the sheriff doesn’t notice and probably wouldn’t object even if he did.

But it’s alright, it’s not like Garner is threatening her, or anything.

He’s threatening us.

So, yeah, we’ve got some Frank action to look forward to these next few episodes. Happy Thanksgiving.

Vicky wonders if Frank’s discovered anything about Betty Hanscom. You know, that thing he promised her he’d be investigating. Garner doesn’t know, but I’ll tell you that Frank has not, and indeed doesn’t even mention it to her when he sees her, because Betty Hanscom doesn’t matter anymore and Frank is a deceitful shithead who only wants an excuse to drink milkshakes with this girl, and if he gives her false hope, who cares?

Vicky is again kept from leaving by the arrival of Carolyn to give her testimony.

So, Nancy Barrett is a good actress. She’s also good at crying, as we saw in her excellent monologue in Episode 56. Maybe this was an off-day, I don’t know, but she doesn’t even make an effort to sound convincing in her sorrow. She speaks in this weird quavery falsetto, which does nothing to help her insipid dialogue about how Unca Roger can’t possibly be a murderer. She sounds like a child who’s been told the Tooth Fairy is a lie.

Now, the sheriff is inviting the suspect’s attorney to explain the situation to the witness. We run a tight ship at the Collinsport Sheriff’s Department.

Ah God.

So we get more recaps, this time from Carolyn’s more limited point of view. This goes on for about a minute and a half before Carolyn becomes the last person in the hemisphere to learn that Vicky found the goddamn silver filigreed fountain pen 31 episodes and an empire’s age ago.

I could easily just stop reviewing the episode now, you’d miss nothing until maybe the last two minutes, and that’s me being charitable.

There is some indication of story development when Carolyn realizes Vicky was testifying against Roger, implicating him as the killer.

This is Classic Carolyn. She’s being openly hostile to her one friend over an older man who cares only about himself. At least it’s a different man than usual. So, it’s possible this will provide fodder for conflict between the girls, but as we’ve seen, such conflicts are often self-defeating and agonizing to sit through, so we’re probably better off with this crap.

I mean, it is sad seeing Carolyn get like this over her beloved uncle. We don’t want to see Carolyn sad. We mostly like Carolyn, even when she’s being a miserable bitch. But this is just plain undignified. She’s acting like a five-year-old, because that’s one of the three modes Francis Swann has for women. Carolyn usually occupies the “irrational lunatic” mode. The third one is, of course, sexless unmarried woman who ought to settle down.

Patterson calls Vicky back in, telling her to escort Carolyn back home. He advises Vicky to stay put at Collinwood and avoid being alone. This is good advice, but you’d think she might benefit from, I dunno, some police protection given someone most likely at Collinwood keeps trying to kill her? I mean, I know Roger’s in custody but, just as a formality? There’s a child in this house who tried to starve her to death, like, last week.

Vicky proves better than I yet again, not telling Carolyn to shut the Christ up and just quietly shepherding her out of the room.

The episode is salvaged, if only briefly, when Patterson summons Roger into the office from wherever the hell he spent the night.

We’re not supposed to be on the side of the very suspicious foppish aristocrat but, you know what? I hope Roger burns this place to the ground. This is a circus. Garner could take out a knife and stab Patterson in the gut right now, and the sheriff would sternly tell him to behave himself as he went into sepsis.

Patterson, however, isn’t nearly as susceptible as his mustard-hating predecessor, so this is a non-starter.

Here we go again.

Patterson wonders why, if Roger is as innocent as he insists, he went to all the trouble of stealing the silver filigreed fountain pen from Vicky and burying it in the woods.

This is another of the many times the natural idiosyncrasies of the actors save the writers’ collective ass. Obviously, if the stupid story Roger told Vicky is true and he really did just drop the pen at Lookout Point after finding Malloy already dead in the water, Roger did nothing but make himself look like the murderer by stealing the pen and (not that they’ll ever get this on the record) manipulating his son into locking Vicky in the East Wing in an attempt to terrify her away from the house, or even kill her.

This is obviously the result of an oversight on Francis Swann’s part, placing dramatic tension and narrative twists over internal consistency and common sense. We’ll discuss that process in great detail a little later. The fact of the matter is, it’s a bunch of nonsense that has no sensible, sane explanation.

But Louis Edmonds plays it like he knows how stupid it is. Roger sounds all abashed and embarrassed as he says how ‘foolish’ it was of him to hide the incriminating evidence the way he did. He might as well be a kid in the principal’s office.

And, while that doesn’t save this mess, it does make it even a little bit more fun to watch.

For clarification, Garner interjects with this after Roger tells Patterson he intended to meet Malloy on Lookout Point that night. The one time he should’ve started making a ruckus and he was late to the jump. Maybe he was busy thinking about how soft Roger’s niece is to the touch.

Not that it matters, because Roger continues talking out of his ass. He seems quite proud of this choice. Maybe he found Jesus in the cell.

I’m being unfair, he’s probably saying the Sheriff wants “the truth”, but we’re 15 minutes into this and I need recourse.

So, Roger repeats the story he told Vicky last week, changing only one detail: the reason he went to meet with Malloy. He claims it was for a business meeting. Mind you, back before Burke told Patterson the truth about the meeting at Roger’s office, Roger had Patterson believe that meeting was about business too. Also, Roger knows that Burke told Patterson this, so I don’t know why he’s trying the same trick.

Patterson, bless him, is skeptical of all of this, so there’s hope for us yet.

Also, this is probably a good time to draw your attention to Roger’s stubble.

He’s been in jail for one night and he already has 5:00 shadow. Also, Louis Edmonds occasionally wore a beard (the facial hair kind, he never had a use for the other sort) before and after Dark Shadows and it looked much more impressive than whatever the hell this is.

But, yeah, he’s got stubble after a night in a cell. It’s like a cartoon. They might as well have given him some pinstripes to wear, just to really commit to it.

Patterson points out that Roger concealing evidence and lying about this purported “secret meeting” with Malloy at Lookout Point is a crime. It’s good, he’s learning.

He doesn’t know. Seriously, that’s what Patterson says. Even if Roger isn’t the murderer or Vicky’s assailant, he has committed provable offenses: hiding evidence and withholding information from the police. I’m not sure what the penalty is, but they are crimes.

But, here’s super attorney coming in a moment too late.

Actually, they did, pretty early on. Patterson knows Malloy was working to clear Burke’s name. sure, he only has Burke’s word for that, but it’s still a possible motive for Roger and, if taken as fact, it gives Roger the strongest possible motive, to the point that he has been a sustained major suspect for 56 episodes.

Sure, good question. What’s his favorite ice cream flavor?

Obviously, this is an important question, to establish the likelihood that Roger was the one who broke into Vicky’s room. They never talk about how Roger magically appeared seconds after Vicky screamed, which seems just as if not more important than whether Roger has access to his own keys, but whatever.

Roger says he has no key for Vicky’s room, which…okay. He still could’ve stolen Liz’s, I don’t see that this does much for anybody.

Not sure that’s helping your case, Rog.

They move on to Roger’s alibi for the hit and run. Roger claims he was driving around aimlessly for no clear reason, which is a great start.

Okay, so there’s something. An alibi that can be checked. Patterson resolves to check all the gas stations in the Clearwater area which, apparently, isn’t an insurmountable task, so maybe we’ll get some progress on this before Jupiter is swallowed by the sun.

So, here’s the thing. Consumers of the mystery genre can probably tell where this is going. The cops have apprehended the prime suspect. He tells them a dubious story and there’s a possibility he has an alibi for at least one crime.

Moreover, while people are skeptical of Roger’s story, nobody has yet arrived with contradictory evidence, suggesting Roger may actually be telling the truth and the real murderer is still out there. The soap opera format further compounds this by spending a Monday episode entirely on recapping the facts of the case before hauling Roger in to insist he’s innocent. That’s a much less likely outcome if he were guilty. Then we’d be more likely to see the recap going toward closing the case, rather than reviewing all the pertinent details.

On the one hand: good news, because we stan Roger Collins and this show hasn’t yet reached the level of moral depravity that will allow half its main characters to successfully get away with murder.

On the other hand: it’s bad news, because Roger’s story is so stupid it would be insulting to us all if it were true.

But here we are. Every narrative clue in the book suggests this story isn’t over and there’s more to come. Somehow, the most obvious suspect isn’t the killer, but here’s the thing… there are no suspects left.

Oh well, let’s see what else they can do in two minutes.

This scene is entirely pointless. Carolyn wonders if Vicky really believes Roger tried to kill her, Vicky says there’s lots of evidence in that quarter, Carolyn is obnoxious, the scene ends.

It doesn’t bear repeating but, yes, Nancy Barrett delivers this like she’s in love with him, because what else did you expect at this point?

Now that we’ve successfully prevented this episode from taking place entirely on one set, we go back to aforementioned one set.

He’s right, but that’s mostly a morale issue, not a moral one.

Obviously not. He’s just here to stand in the background and scowl at everything. It’s called lawyering.

I’m being hard on Garner now, of course, but we’re not gonna see him for a over a month after this week. Conversely, we’re about to be seeing more of his son than is at all ethical, so hold your breath.

This is a cute little extension of the Sheriff’s Station set. The coffee pot used to be in the same room as everything else, but they’ve moved it into this little anteroom that has some file cabinets and a calendar and is just kind of there. I’m honestly not sure what the point was. I don’t think it appears again after this week.

It’s probably hard to believe, because these men have been having the same conversation for five minutes, disregarding the pointless cut to the girls at Collinwood, but there’s less than a minute left in the episode. I feel like the episode could stop right now and you wouldn’t even notice. It can just end whenever it wants. Nobody’s learned anything we didn’t know already.

Now Patterson is telling Roger that Malloy may have found evidence that proves Roger was the one responsible for the manslaughter trial. This is something Patterson already brought up 1,000 years ago. Why isn’t Garner, who represented Roger in that trial, getting involved in this? How much money is he making?

Oh my God, they’re achieving self-awareness. They’re like spirits trapped in some cruel god’s endless game. This could go on for five minutes or another hundred years. There’s no way of knowing, we lost the plot a long time ago.

Okay, so…so I guess that’s the ending. See what I mean about the actors?  That line is a piece of crap. It could’ve been incidental, an act breaker, or the ending one-liner. It does nothing, but Louis Edmonds knows it’s supposed to be the ending, so he gives it all he’s got, and there it is, that’s the episode, come back tomorrow, but why would you want to?

Behind the Scenes Shenanigans

Sources differ, but Francis Swann writes either one or two episodes this week. He definitely wrote this one, and Ron Sproat definitely wrote Wednesday’s episode. Ron Sproat is credited for Episode 107, but other sources indicate it was Swann who wrote it. In any case, it wasn’t like it was anything to be proud of. But we’ll get to it.

This Day in History- Monday, November 21, 1966

The United States and Soviet Union engage in the first international computer chess competition at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow, and Stanford University in California. Given all the trope reference points this computer chess stuff introduced into late-century media, it’s kinda funny the practice never went anywhere.

John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore formally announces its opening (in July) of a Gender Identity Clinic, marking a landmark turning point for transgender people in the U.S.

Former NFL quarterback Troy Aikman is born. I guess he’s some sort of important man. I don’t know.

In Togo, the military quashes a coup attempt against President Nicolas Grunitzky’s government. Heh. Coups. That’s…well.

Hm.