Episode 268: Suicide Is Painful

July 1967, Ron Sproat, ,

“All right, mother, I’ll tell you. I was out with Buzz. And what’s more, I had a ball.”

We take you now, live, to Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who’s sitting in her bedroom with a seriously bewildered look on her face.

Her gaze darts across the room to the Collins Family Bible, which is sitting on a nearby credenza, apparently calling to her in a fairly urgent way. She stands up, leafs through the book until she finds the Family Register page, and stares at her own birthdate.

Suddenly, she slams the book shut, looks around, and says, “What am I doing?” Then she pauses, waiting for an answer. I thought that was a rhetorical question, but she might actually be asking the director.

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Episode 267: The Least Torment

July 1967, Malcolm Marmorstein, , ,

“Death is fascinating, when one considers the wide possibilities that it offers.”

It’s a new day, bringing another opportunity for Liz to wander over to the cliff on Widows’ Hill. She looks down and sees the waves crashing against the shore, just like in the opening titles. It kind of looks like she’s come outside to watch an episode of Dark Shadows.

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Episode 266: Jump Start

July 1967, Ron Sproat,

“The sea is my grave. My grave is the sea.”

At the beginning of today’s episode, Vicki’s introductory voiceover tells us that Liz is dreaming about her own death, and I don’t blame her one bit. We’re starting on a full week of Liz/Jason blackmail episodes, so I can see how things might seem pretty hopeless.

You can tell that today is going to be an action-packed barn burner, because we start out with a dream sequence that involves a woman in her nightgown walking around in the woods. At least, I think that’s what she’s doing. There’s so much vaseline on the lens that there’s hardly any lens.

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Episode 265: Doctor Strange

Joe Caldwell, June 1967, ,

“In the name of sanity, what’s going on in Maggie Evans’ blood?”

Good news: As a special treat today, we’re going to leave Collinsport and travel a hundred miles away, to a private sanitarium called either Windcliff or Wyndcliffe. (Or possibly Wyndcliff. We never see it written down, and nobody can agree on how to spell it. Someone asked the writers once, and they said they didn’t care.)

Even more good news: Maggie is now under the care of Dr. Julia Hoffman, who’s shining a penlight in her eyes and pretending to hypnotize her.

“Concentrate on the light,” she says. “Raise your right hand.” Maggie starts to move her left hand, and the doctor corrects her: “Your right hand. Raise your right hand.”

Maggie raises her right hand. “Very good,” the doctor says. “Lower your right hand.”

Which begs the question: Why doesn’t Maggie know which is her right hand? Also, what kind of voodoo medical care is this supposed to be?

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Episode 264: Unconscience

June 1967, Malcolm Marmorstein, ,

“This has the terrible sound of a family disintegrating.”

Happy birthday, Dark Shadows! Today’s episode aired on June 29, 1967, which is just a couple days past the show’s first anniversary. It’s an exciting milestone, because until very recently, it looked like the show was going to get cancelled at the end of the first year. The ratings were declining, and they’d never been that great in the first place. The end seemed inevitable.

And then they introduced a vicious, psychotic madman to the show, and America fell in love. Dark Shadows was renewed, and now they have the interesting problem of coming up with a new storyline for the undead creature that they never intended to keep around for this long.

This episode takes the first steps toward a new direction for Barnabas. When we saw him last, he was the vicious monster relentlessly pursuing Maggie through underground tunnels, determined to end her life.

But that was three days ago. Today, he’s… something else.

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Episode 263: Don’t Say Anything

June 1967, Ron Sproat, ,

“Apparently, that madman is still around.”

Yesterday, Vicki spent the entire episode having feelings about Maggie’s death, and today she’s going to have them all over again. This is exactly how a traditional soap opera is supposed to run — something happens maybe once a week, and the rest of the time is processing everyone’s feelings.

If you don’t watch a lot of soaps, that probably sounds like the most boring possible TV show, but a well-written soap opera makes it work. You just need to build up the stakes, so that a character’s emotional response has an effect on other people.

On Downton Abbey, when Matthew is wounded in the war, they spend weeks exploring how Mary feels, and how Lavinia feels, and how Matthew feels about Lavinia’s feelings, and how Mary feels about Matthew’s feelings, and on and on, and we’re all sitting there with our eyes glued to the TV, because we can’t imagine living another day unless we find out what these make-believe people are going to say to each other.

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Episode 262: Feelin’ Gloomy

Joe Caldwell, June 1967, , ,

“I just don’t care. I know that I should… but I just don’t.”

Up to this point, Dark Shadows has been one of the slower-paced soap operas, which is quite an achievement given the pace of the other shows in its weight class. But they’ve started experimenting recently with new storytelling techniques, including “creating interesting characters” and “having things happen”, and so far it’s working out okay.

So this episode plays kind of a mean trick on audience members who missed yesterday’s installment. The entire episode is about characters reacting to the news of Maggie’s death.

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Episode 261: Bigger on the Inside

June 1967, Ron Sproat, , , ,

“It could be a matter of minutes. Then again, it could be a matter of hours.”

On Friday, we had the first genuinely suspenseful Dark Shadows episode, with an exciting cliffhanger that promised an unpredictable change in the status quo. Today, they have to deliver on that promise. Let’s see what happens.

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Episode 260: The Secret of My Suspense

June 1967, Ron Sproat, , , , , ,

“The clue is large! That doesn’t make any sense.”

Picture this: It’s 3:30, on a sunny Friday afternoon. It’s late June, so this might actually be the last day of school, and it’s 1967, so the kids are looking forward to a long, hot and mostly unsupervised summer. Mom’s been watching General Hospital, so the TV is tuned to ABC. The last notes of the Wurlitzer pipe organ playing the GH theme have faded away, as the kids pile into the house and throw themselves down on the living room floor.

And just at that moment, in a dirty prison cell in the basement of a haunted house, a man brings a tray of food to the pretty young woman who’s trapped there. They exchange a few words, and then he hands her a glass of poisoned milk.

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Episode 259: Cell Blocked

Joe Caldwell, June 1967, ,

“Cracking up your car and getting your life saved can be pretty exhausting, you know.”

Okay, this is a tough one. For one thing, it’s another Liz/Jason blackmail episode, and that storyline has been getting to me lately. But the really tough thing is that I have very clear memories of this episode, which it turns out are partly false.

The way I remember it, this episode is a turning point in Liz’s relationship with Carolyn. Liz takes a big step, Carolyn is touched, and they have an emotional breakthrough. Then there’s the climactic wedding sometime next week, and after that it’s all vampires and witches, and I don’t have to deal with this boring storyline anymore.

But I think someone must have come along and tampered with these episodes since the last time I watched them, because that’s not what happens, and the wedding is still three weeks away. Three weeks!

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