The Beginning, Collection One - Disc 4

Episodes 28 - 35

Airdates: August 3 - 12, 1966


THE PLOT

Vicki has seen the missing bleeder valve from Roger's car, and she now knows that it was David who attempted to kill his own father, and that Burke is innocent. David panics, fleeing with the valve into town. His plan is to sneak into Burke's room and plant the valve there. But when Burke finds him lurking by his room, it isn't long before he figures out exactly what David is up to.

Meanwhile, Vicki finds herself with time again to pursue her quest for her own past. If anyone at Collinwood has answers, they aren't saying. But she does know of one man who hired a private detective to search for the same answers, a man who is willing to share his findings with her: Burke.


THOUGHTS

As the first episodes on this disc unfolded, I started to become a bit impatient with the "car accident" plot. With David going up to plant the evidence in Burke's room, it seemed that the writers were engaging in the time-honored soap opera technique of dragging out a subplot until every bit of entertainment value has long since departed. Then an interesting thing happened. At the end of a lengthy, often charming scene between Burke and David, Burke sends David into the bathroom to wash up... and then walks right to the place where David hid the bleeder valve, pulls it out, and shakes his head at the spot the boy has gotten himself into. With Elizabeth basically admitting that she knows that David is guilty, and his father finding out soon after, a plot turn that seemed to be trying to further extend this subplot instead ends up wrapping it up.

The door is closed firmly enough that the plot feels satisfactorily completed, but we are left on an ominous note. David is far from a sweet, innocent cherub, after all. Roger's warning that he is a troubled boy who is likely to become worse, not better, doesn't seem terribly far-fetched. If his aunt will shield him from the consequences of attempted murder, then why should he consider the consequences of whatever he might do next?


Recasting of the Week

It is a time-honored soap tradition that when an actor either moves on or doesn't work out, the producers don't write out the character. They just change the actor. Wouldn't it figure that not only does that happen startlingly early in this series' run, but it happens with one of the better-acted supporting characters.

Mark Allen is gone, with the role of Sam Evans now played by David Ford. Ford's Sam appears in only one episode on this disc. My first impression is that he is not an improvement, but I'll withhold judgment until I've had a little time to get used to him. I will miss Mark Allen, though, who was quite convincing playing the tortured Sam, and whose booming voice was a good fit for the potentially overblown "poetic" dialogue which, thus far at least, doesn't sound nearly as convincing coming from Ford.


Cast & Characters

One thing the car accident subplot has done, beyond simply chewing up episodes while delaying the trigger on Burke's revenge, is to really focus on David Collins. How odd it must have been, for viewers of mid-1960's daytime television, to witness a 9-year-old boy who not only attempts to kill his father, but who willfully tries to shift that blame onto others, who runs to his aunt claiming that his governess "tried to hurt (him)," and who growls at that same governess - the show's audience identification figure - that he hates her. There's often a pause in David Henesy's performance, and he often looks up at camera - probably a simple matter of getting indications about what he should do. But it helps to create the sense of something "off" about David. He's also almost frighteningly good when he growls his hatred of Vicki. Small children often say they "hate" others. When David wheels on Vicki, though, he truly sounds as if he means it.

Unfortunately, not all of the characters are developing quite so well. Joe Haskell has got to be about the most tedious character imaginable. The show keeps trying to cram him down our throats as a "really nice guy." But his repeated whining about wanting to marry Caroline (the subject of very nearly every scene in which he appears) has passed the point of being potentially sympathetic, and now passed the point of being merely tiresome. At this point, it's downright obsessive.

In real life, Caroline's loving mother shouldn't keep trying to push her into his arms - She should be trying to get him away from her daughter, with police intervention if necessary. I'd half expect him to start going after people with an axe... only I fear Joe will never do anything half so interesting, since being boring appears to be his mission in life. No disrespect to actor Joel Crothers, who has been generally competent in his performance, but Joe ranks highest on the list of characters I would like to see slip off the top of Widows' Hill.


Final Note

The Collinwood sets deserve special praise. The sets representing the entry hall, the drawing room, and the upstairs areas are extremely well-designed, particularly by the often creaky standards of 1960's television. The house's internal architecture - at least with regard to these major areas - is always clear to us when watching, and each set feels like part of the same house. Given that these are the key sets of the series, it is worth observing just what a good job the production team did in creating them.

Unfortunately, I have already come to dread any scene set in "The Blue Whale." That set is almost laughably poor, and the canned music makes the overall impression even worse. It doesn't help that the scenes set in there (frequently ones involving Joe and Caroline) tend to be the weakest of the series. On my relatively new and brief wish-list for the show, top of the list is... Well, top of the list is "Joe Haskell has a tragic accident," but second on that list is "No more Blue Whale."

The show itself remains entertaining. Once the "car accident" plot is tied up, though, the last couple of episodes go by very slowly, with most of the momentum gone.  Hopefully, Burke's true revenge plot will kick in soon, and things will start gathering steam again.


Previous: Episodes 19 - 27
Next: Episodes 36 - 44


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The Beginning, Collection One - Disc 3

Episodes 19 - 27

Airdates: July 22 - August 2, 1966


THE PLOT

Roger Collins is recovering after his car's brakes failed on the windy road down from Widows' Hill. The crash was no accident. A bleeder valve was removed, causing the brakes to gradually fail. Roger is convinced that Burke Devlin caused the wreck, as is Elizabeth. Carolyn (Nancy Barrett) insists that Burke couldn't possibly have done it - all the while plagued by guilt that, if Burke did try to kill her uncle, then she was responsible for bringing him there.

Burke seems almost startlingly blase about the accusations, maintaining his cool in the face of a confrontation with Roger and a visit from the town constable (Michael Currie). He even commissions Sam Evans to paint a portrait of him: A portrait of the exact kind that hangs in the drawing room at Collinwood...


THOUGHTS

The Gothic atmosphere has largely vanished by Disc Three, as the mechanics of the Burke/Roger plot overshadow the series' other elements. The show now seems to be borrowing more from film noir than from Victorian Gothic, though I'm sure that particular pendulum will swing back again.

This is not to say that the show's gotten worse. Though the pace isn't as driving here as it was during the Disc Two episodes, the story is still ticking along at a much better pace than one would normally expect of a daytime soap. The Burke Devlin plot continues to generate interest. If the writers focused solely on the "car accident," then the story would become tiresome very, very quickly. But we also see Burke making tantalizing phone calls to put his own plan into gear, and we see him engaging Sam to paint his portrait. The juxtaposition, between Roger's desperation as he tries to get Burke arrested, and Burke's calm calculations as he works on his own agenda, is very effective.

I will say that the timeline is starting to become a bit of an issue. In Episode 19, Sam apologizes to Vicki for spooking her "the other day."  The other day" was, of course, that morning. In Episode 25, Elizabeth laments that Vicki has been wondering why she was hired by strangers "from the day she walked into this house."  The day she is referencing could also be described as "the day before yesterday." These are matters that would have been invisible to viewers watching one episode per day five days a week. But watched in closer proximity, these timeline-bending references start to stand out a bit.


Cast & Characters

Any Dark Shadows drinking game would be incomplete without having an entry for "Vicki launches into a story about something that happened to her in the foundling home." Alexandra Moltke's performance as Vicki is much better by this point than it was at the start... but I have already devised a special eyeroll that belongs solely to anytime Vicki starts a sentence with, "When I was in the foundling home..."

I noted in my last review how quietly impressive Frank Schofield's background performance as Bill Malloy is. Three discs in, and he's still consistently excellent, rarely fluffing a line, always completely in character. Other actors also fare well.  Michael Currie stumbles over some his lines, but has a general authenticity in his role as the town contable.  Kathryn Leigh Scott loses the bad wig and immediately looks much, much more attractive. Her performance also improves, and she gets some good material in Episode 22, in some very well-scripted and acted scenes opposite Mitchell Ryan and Mark Allen.  And it's always a pleasure to see Barnard Hughes, who pops up on the last episode of this disc as Burke's nervous researcher, Bronson.

Finally, David Henesy's David continues to emerge as a rather well-scripted child character. It's unusual, in 1960's television, to see a regular child character who is as completely self-absorbed, manipulative, and dangerous as David. And all of David's behavior is understandable, through the eyes of a child. His father threatens to send him away. It's an offhand comment, but one David takes to heart. He has an excellent understanding of mechanical things, and takes action - and then is absolutely certain, and terrified, that he is going to be discovered. Mix in Roger's antipathy toward him, with Roger reacting to David's worries in the worst possible way in every scene they share, and the characterization is believable in context. It works, not least because there is something genuinely spooky about the way Henesy lurks in corners, and looks at the camera - an acting no- no that actually helps to make David feel a bit "off."


Gaffe of the Week

The key scene of Episode 24 is a meeting between Burke and the town constable (Michael Currie) - a scene which is initially made up of a series of minor gaffes. None of them on their own would be anything special. But it's the combination of them: Mitchell Ryan, stumbling over a few lines; Michael Currie, straining a bit too obviously to hit his mark for a close-up; audible talkback on the soundtrack, which is actually louder at one point than the character dialogue; then the recurrence of that talkback while Ryan is speaking, prompting the actor to really emphasize an odd word in mid-sentence in an attempt to coverup the production noise. Wrap it all up together (and all of these hit within a space of about 2 minutes' screentime), and it's absolutely priceless.


Overall

Three discs in, and the series is still holding my interest. The Burke Devlin plot is ticking along particularly nicely, with the final episode on the disc benefitting from an extremely well-scripted scene between Devlin and Bronson, in which we finally learn something of Burke's plan... and it's a plan that actually makes sense.

The episodes on this disc are less atmospheric than the earlier discs, but some of that atmosphere comes back in the last two episodes, through a nice slow pan of the empty drawing room and a couple of nice close-ups of doors opening, with a gap between that and the person behind the door appearing.

A final thought that really struck me during the scene between Roger and the constable is how much I actually like the way the people in this show tend to talk around situations before getting to the point. I know some of that is just a function of this being a daytime soap, where padding out scenes is a prerequisite. But Carter's deflecting Roger by talking about his sandwich, then putting Roger off while taking a call about a missing dog, are little things that make him feel authentic.

For all the flubbed lines and intermittently stagy performances, this show has created a feeling of authenticity about its setting and characters (particularly the peripheral ones). That goes a long way toward maintaining my interest in a 45-year-old daytime soap, and - along with the eventual vampires and werewolves - may well be one reason why this show has endured in the popular imagination for so very long.


Previous: Episodes 10 - 18
Next: Episodes 28 - 35


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