“I haven’t spent the evening browsing through anything.”
At the end of yesterday’s episode, the trap was sprung — thinking that Maggie’s memory had returned, the kidnapper came to Maggie’s room in the middle of the night, and was shot by the police.
Today’s episode starts with a reprise of that scene, and darn it, the guy shows up and gets shot all over again. People in teasers just never learn.
“And if that girl turns up dead, I’m going to book you… on suspicion.”
Soap opera cops have a pretty hard life. Somebody gets murdered, and it turns out that over the last couple weeks, eight different people have been walking around saying, “That guy makes me so mad I could kill him!” — often at the top of their lungs, in crowded restaurants. But the soap opera format requires the cops to be slow and methodical, chasing blind leads and arresting at least two innocent people before they find the killer. The night-time cops on CSI can solve a case in one hour; daytime cops have to go the long way around.
By comparison, the Collinsport police have it unbelievably easy. Three new people have shown up in town in the weeks before Maggie’s disappearance, and all three are currently involved in at least one crime. They have nonexistent alibis, and one of them can’t even produce a birth certificate.
And if those aren’t enough people of interest, then there’s also Burke Devlin, who recently came back to town after serving a five-year prison sentence for manslaughter. That’s not a bad place to start; maybe Sheriff Patterson should bring Burke in for questioning.
“They just kept asking me questions, nothing but questions!”
So here’s the thing about soap operas: just because it’s on every day doesn’t mean you’re actually supposed to watch it every day. I mean, you’re allowed to have a life of your own. It’s 1967, you’re probably tie-dyeing something.
You can tell how often you’re supposed to watch a soap by seeing how far back they’ll recap the story for you. If the characters are still standing around talking about something that happened two weeks ago, then you can probably just show up on Fridays and you won’t miss much. In the early 2000s, NBC had a soap opera called Passions, which was so glacially slow that the optimal viewing schedule was one episode every three weeks. Or, preferably, not at all.
“I’m in a graveyard. How did I get in a graveyard?”
It’s been four weeks since we opened the mystery box and let the vampire out, not that anyone’s actually saying the word “vampire” yet. The show is actually strangely coy about it — nobody says the V-word out loud for nine months. They finally break it out in episode 410, and by then it’s not the craziest thing on the show anymore.
But who needs labels when you have howling dogs? Over the last month, we’ve seen hypnosis, nightmares, fangs and unexplained blood loss — and this is the episode where it all comes together. This is the first big Friday cliffhanger, and exciting things are finally happening.
Dark Shadows Every Day 