Mrs. Stoddard Meets the Monster

Previously on Dark Shadows, her name is Victoria Winters, and

She ain’t seen nothing yet, but while we’re here, let’s make the best of it.

For those of you just catching up, we’ve reached what we are meant to believe is the thrilling climax of the Murder of Bill Malloy, Dark Shadows’ first major multi-month storyline. I refuse to dispense any further words to discuss the logic and structure of this storyline, because I already ground my brain to dust doing that for last episode, so let’s rejoin our damsel in distress, the monster who distresses her, and the bold hero who is the only thing standing between Victoria Winters and a swiftly snapped neck.

In a neat subversion, it isn’t Vicky’s milquetoast new love interest (or even her cool, if Problematic old one) Frank Garner who has come to deliver her from the clutches of the crazed Matthew Morgan. It’s Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard, lady of the manse, and the particular object of Matthew’s weird servant-master fixation.

This is a good and cool type of surprise. You really would expect this to end with the man swooping in to rescue Victoria but, in all the “Sproatnappings” (a fandom term seemingly coined by Dark Shadows Every Day, the blog that currently holds the record as Most Complete in its run through the series) he’ll give us throughout his quite impressive run on the show, none of them really end with the abducted woman being saved by a man. Sometimes it looks like we’re going that way regardless and then something else happens. It’s a nice middle ground between plot twist and contrivance.

Elizabeth showing up like this is closer to plot twist, which is a good start.

Nobody likes a snitch, girl.

Here we see Elizabeth’s talent for micromanaging. As Roger once told her, she “has a way with managing people”. We saw this in her deft handling of the suppository saga, but now the stakes are much higher. She’s learned that her closest and oldest friend was murdered by her most trusted servant, the most constant presence of her household for 18 years.

And, as we’ve heard time and again, Matthew just can’t lie to Mrsh. Shtoddahd.

Have I been spelling that mangling consistently over time? I seem to remember I had some uncertainty about it back when Thayer first showed up, but that was a very long time ago; the pandemic was still a novel news item.

Because this is still a soap, we get lots of color recaps from both Vicky and Matthew about how he did it. So, essentially, you can have missed last Tuesday, last Wednesday, and yesterday, and still be all caught up for how the big mystery story ended. And, given the messy mechanics of aforementioned ending, you may have been better off.

Needless to say, in a sensible world, Victoria would take advantage of this moment to run the fuck out the door, but that breaks Recap/Story Segregation. It’s like on Dragon Ball Z where all the men float into space and monologue while they unlock special powers and all the others can do is stand in the crowd below and make inappropriate gasping noises.

This is great stuff, by the by. Thayer David didn’t have to attempt to lend human nuance to the two-dimensional creepo they’d decided to make him, but here we are. You understand that Matthew is a sick and deranged lunatic, but he honestly believes what he did was right. And the initial act of killing was, as far as he’s concerned, an accident, an act of violence that pushed him off a (not literally, in his case) slippery slope and precipitated his descent into madness.

The trouble is, Matthew isn’t hot and doesn’t appear to have a tragic backstory (I mean, I’m positive he was kicked in the head by a mule at some point, but they never get around to saying it), so the teenagers of 1966 probably weren’t in a rush to see him redeemed. Ah well.

It’s such a tense, chilling sequence. We know Matthew is a firecracker, that any slightest movement can set him off. We spent the last two episodes watching an increasingly desperate Victoria helpless to get away from him. And now this middle-aged woman in a knit coat is standing there, looking him in the eye and speaking like she’s talking him off the ledge.

Elizabeth promises that she won’t let anything happen to Matthew. He seems genuinely taken aback.

Dark Shadows will become famous for inexplicably humanized monsters. As a trial run, there really isn’t much that’s ‘human’ about Matthew Morgan. From the moment Thayer took on the role, they had him slathered in ghoul makeup, including those ridiculous caterpillar eyebrows that always look like they’re about to fall off his head.

I’m planning a feature entry that will be devoted to discussing a hypothesis I’ve developed about potential origins for Matthew. Without getting too into it, if I’m right, it’s entirely possible we were supposed to get nothing more than a thick-headed old goon, a garden variety horror movie lunatic.

But Thayer David went to Harvard.

He’s scary and dangerous and, even if you don’t want to forgive him…you do feel bad. He’s essentially been a slave to the Collins family for 18 years. There is one (count ‘em: 1) person in the entire world he can trust, and he’d do anything for her, believing he owes her his life.

And now he’s ruined his entire life for her. And he’s only now realizing just how screwed he is.

And it shows too. No matter how many times Liz tries to talk him down, Matthew refuses to let Vicky leave the house, not trusting that she won’t immediately go to the police and tell her story.

Dark Shadows isn’t very good at tension in the first year. I think we’ve well-established this. But this stand-off is one of the all-time great suspenseful moments in the entire series run.

Over the course of five minutes, we are made to watch the growing implosion between two immovable forces: an unrestrained, unstable maniac, and a woman in complete and total control of her senses. And it finally breaks, finally, with Matthew lunging forward, hand outstretched as if to grab Elizabeth by the throat. Victoria screams…

And Matthew, silently shaken, either by what he’s almost done to the woman who has been his world, or even terrified by that immutable, almost superhuman restraint she has displayed in the face of his raw fury, flees into the night.

End of Act Fucking I.

It’s such a perfect moment, and one of the best Joan Bennett has in the entire series. Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard doesn’t need to be big and strong and angry. She just needs to stare with those piercing, electric eyes of hers, and the monster runs off with his tail between his legs.

I’d even go so far as to say this is quite…feminist. Especially compared to what we’ve been led to expect from this show. Ron Sproat is the first writer we’ve had who not only seems to understand writing women of different types (Wallace also could be credited thus; he did invent most of the women we’ve seen to this point), but also isn’t afraid to place women in these tense, highly volatile confrontations. The soap opera is the ‘woman’s genre’, after all. Why shouldn’t a woman be allowed to save the day?

If you need to be caught up, Frank and Sheriff Patterson are doing exactly what they’ve been doing for the last three episodes, standing around and talking about the case, with neither of them offering any solutions or even any coherent thoughts for that matter.

Thankfully, the ladies arrive promptly and Frank wastes no time ensuring we get back to business.

Patterson is told everything about Matthew being a mad killer currently on the loose and, somehow, he makes his first priority contacting somebody else to try and find him, like a sensible commander of men.

For the record, he even says that like it’s somehow her fault.

Things begin settling down to some version of ‘normal’. After the high octane first act, Dark Shadows is quick to remind us all that this is still a Tuesday episode, and there may be some people in Siberian gulags who missed one of the last four recap sequences.

Elizabeth briefly credits Frank’s chance comment about “someone loyal enough” to Elizabeth to kill for her as giving her the idea to go to Matthew’s cottage. I think this was some sort of narrative compromise, to have Vicky’s love interest somehow be responsible for saving her from Matthew, without actually making us suffer through watching him save her from Matthew.

I don’t think he wants the honest answer to that one.

Patterson enters stage left, pursued by boom mic.

The sheriff has apparently sounded the alarm for Matthew, which means his job is done for the night as far as he’s concerned and there’s nothing stopping him from planting himself on the couch and letting Vicky tell him everything that’s happened to her the last three episodes.

Still, five minutes of must see TV is a pretty good record for Dark Shadows at this point. I won’t hold any grudges. Feel free to go to the bathroom. Have a cigarette. Hell, you can even turn off the TV, you won’t miss much.

Vicky makes it a full two minutes of recapping before she breaks down sobbing because, yanno, she was almost killed half an hour ago and the closest thing to ‘rest and medical care’ she’s been administered is a glass of brandy.

But this doesn’t stop the recap sequence. It just means that Liz takes over where Vicky left off, and now we get to describe the first five minutes of the episode in case you missed it or something.

There’s a brief moment of introspection where Elizabeth admits to feeling responsible, since Matthew killed Malloy out of his misguided sense of loyalty to her, but everybody is very quick to assure her she did nothing wrong, which is actually true this time, but is still giving me trauma flashforwards to the eventual ‘Good Person/Bad Person’ problem they’ll be struggling with come springtime and the introduction of You Know Who.

Patterson wonders if Matthew has any family or friends he may try to hide with when he goes on the run.

He’s been working here for 18 years, honey. Does Elizabeth not know what a background check is?

The answer to this, by the way, is no she does not, and they’ll end up milking that for all it’s worth later. It may even be a sort of hint, in this instance, as the shady nature of Elizabeth hiring Matthew after dismissing the rest of the staff 18 years ago, but it’s not like we’ll be visiting that question anytime soon.

Patterson resolves to search Matthew’s cottage for clues as to where he may be headed and Liz decides to accompany him, an offer which Patterson accepts because he’s lonely and needs the company and who cares about preserving the integrity of the crime scene.

Regrettably, it’s not this unlikely duo that we end up following. Instead, we’re stuck with the young lovers.

You probably think I’m being harsh, but every word out of his mouth sounds like he resents her for causing him trouble. He’s speaking to her like she’s a hysterical child. And that’s not an isolated incident; he’s been doing this since they met.

This sounds more like something he wants to do. I have no idea how late at night it’s supposed to be, but it’s hardly advisable for Vicky to be going out anyplace when the man that just tried to break her neck is on the loose. And, anyway, what do you talk about on a dinner date in these circumstances? All the embarrassing things you saw when your life flashed before your eyes an hour ago?

Roger has been released from jail, presumably by a very embarrassed deputy who is the hero of his own story. All told, he looks pretty good given he’s spent 24 hours in a cell. That embarrassing stubble is gone, for one thing, so maybe he was allowed to shave…or wash it off.

What follows is a minute-long exchange that encapsulates the entire case for not killing Roger off as originally planned. Vicky awkwardly apologizes to Roger for suspecting him and admits she was wrong, and Roger responds thusly:

Wait, wait, this isn’t doing enough justice. You have to hear him say it to really appreciate it.

It’s beautiful. The complete case for why Louis Edmonds should always have job security. That little sardonic laugh he does when he tells her it was nothing? The way he acts like he was just hauled down from the crucifix, like he’s just endured the most horrible inhumanity possible? The way he’s saying this to a woman who was just almost killed? It’s perfect, high audacity. Camp in its purest form.

So, of course, Frank has to object.

Well, that’s your problem, isn’t it?

For those of you keeping track at home, Frank has now been verbally put down by Burke, Patterson, Elizabeth, Roger and his own father. If we’re going to keep him around, it might as well be as the designated punching bag.

Roger takes off to find his sister, presumably so he can tell her his grandiose plans to replace the Sheriff’s Station with a bathhouse, and again we’re left in Squaresville.

He’s right, but that doesn’t matter because, as we learned last episode, ‘right’ on Dark Shadows isn’t what we see on screen, it’s how we feel about it. And the only feeling Frank inspires in me is incontinence.

This is the second time in three minutes that he’s told her ‘what she’s going to do’. I’m starting to miss Burke. Really, I am, it’s a crime he was left out of this whole sequence of events. I guess if it’s any consolation, we won’t be seeing Frank until the next storyline’s gotten underway. Maybe someone behind the scenes is realizing they made a bad investment.

So, Vicky and Frank go out on their date or whatever ill-advised arrangement Frank thought was a good idea in these circumstances, and we head over to Crime Scene Investigation to check in on the mature crowd.

Patterson discovers some correspondence between Matthew and his brother Walter about some property they have in Coldwater. This raises many questions: first and foremost, is Walter attractive? Dashing? Can we expect him to show up in a few months to get vengeance for his brother, only to subsequently fall in love with Mrs. Stoddard?

Obviously, we aren’t supposed to think about any of that, though. Patterson simply uses this as a potential location for Matthew to flee too and then calls “Chris”, asking him to put some patrols out on the highway. Chris apparently tells him that a vehicle resembling Matthew’s station wagon was seen en route to Coldwater, so that’s probably where he’s headed, which puts a rest to all that dry police talk.

Oh, thank God.

Roger proceeds to continue constantly raising the bar for us all, and doing it flawlessly.

It’s not a constabulary, guy; they replaced it with a democratically-elected office last week. But who cares, when you’re having this much fun?

And, of course, what does one say to that? It’s no wonder Patterson quietly shuffles out of the episode. Left to their own devices, Roger and Elizabeth talk about their longstanding caretaker as if they just discovered he has a weird fetish as opposed to learning he’s a deranged murderer.

Nobody until approximately two weeks ago, but you know how it is.

Coming as no surprise to anybody, Roger takes advantage of this opportunity to lobby for Victoria’s dismissal from Collinwood for the hundredth time. It’s just their thing now.

Kinky.

Liz, of course, thinks it’s absurd and irrational to dismiss Victoria because, indeed, she had every reason to think Roger was a maniac.

That’s right, he didn’t have to do any of those very incriminating things. But it was all in fun and we’re past that now and they’ll never have to retcon whole chunks of established canon ever again.

So, Roger drops the Vicky subject and prepares to return to whatever passes for the status quo around this place.

Not quite, though, Liz reminds him.

Oh yeah, Burke. So here’s the thing. We’re again beginning to wade into that mire between storylines. The gap isn’t as impressive as the one between the suppository and Malloy’s murder. In fact, it’s much more seamless, with one flowing into the other, as we’ll see over the next few weeks into December. A lot of the episodes this week will be about examining where everything is now.

One of the biggest issues we’re left with is what happens to Burke’s vendetta? For the last 60-plus episodes, his quest for justice was married to his investigation into Malloy’s death, as he believed Roger responsible both for Malloy’s murder, and the manslaughter that Burke went to prison over. We know now that Roger is innocent of the one thing, even if he’s always been guilty of the other.

And yet, Burke’s original plan has barely progressed in the interim. The last update we got is he’s trying to buy another cannery to compete with the Collinses financially as part of his long game to ruin them and acquire all their property. As we’ve seen, this doesn’t make for very compelling television.

But the original ending for the storyline is now beyond our grasp. Roger isn’t about to go plummeting off Widows’ Hill anytime soon, as we belabored last episode. So…what next?

I’m sure they’ll think of something.

So, Frank and Vicky are back from their insipid dinner date, at the very least sparing us having to actually see any of it. Frank proceeds to make more plans to take Vicky away from what passes as her everyday life, suggesting she visit him in Bangor for the weekend. Reminder that she was just in Bangor a few days ago.

He keeps using Betty Hanscom as an excuse to string her along. It’s actually really gross, especially since he has not discovered a single thing about the girl since they met.

Anyway, I guess Vicky still has some hope in her heart, because she decides this would be a great idea and then they speak to Liz about it and she also thinks it’s a great idea and there is no war in Ba Sing Se, and all the evil is past and oh, look a teleprompter.

With Frank gone, Vicky begins apologizing to Liz for suspecting Roger, which seems excessive and unnecessary. See, I can simultaneously believe Roger has every right to be a fuming queen about this, and that Vicky should learn some self-respect. I contain multitudes.

Vicky is comforted to learn Matthew’s car was last seen speeding off 50 miles from Collinsport and, indeed, everything seems nice and tied up, the saga of the Murder of Bill Malloy at last at an end.

I was worried there wasn’t enough ‘Peril’ to justify my three stage system.

This Day in History- Tuesday, November 29, 1966

Members of the Cultural Revolutionary Red Guards destroy the tomb of Confucius, whose teachings had come under criticism as symbolic of China’s past. The students dig up the grave, only to, reportedly, find it empty.

Has anybody done Vampire!Confucius? Is there an appetite for that? Someone call the CW!