#richard garner

So! Six episodes last week, five of which were queued and went up at a regular time. Looks an awful lot like a schedule, don’t it? Let’s try that again. Gonna knock it down to five, though, because I like the idea of the weekdays matching up.

Right off the bat, this episode looks funny. You can see little dots moving around the screen. Also, Liz is dangling a coat off her shoulders, which makes her arms look deflated until you notice she’s folded them in front of her.

Liz and Carolyn converge at the door to meet Richard Garner--who, admittedly, I’ve never seen before, and whom I’ll admit I went and looked up on the Dark Shadows wiki so I could tag him. Apparently this is his last appearance, so I don’t have to retain any information about him, at least not until I circle back around to the first 210 episodes. Suffice to say he’s the Collins’ lawyer, here on emergency business. He and Liz duck into the drawing room.

Vicki enters from that door under the stairs and Carolyn confides in her that she feels like something awful is about to happen. Of course, if she’d heard Liz out last time they talked, she’d know exactly what was about to happen, but instead she’s got nothing but aimless panic.

Anyway, Liz is finally divorcing Paul Stoddard, who is apparently thought by the town to have simply packed up and left. Garner thinks it’s about damn time, and wonders whether Liz is getting married again. Liz says she has no plans to--after all, who would she even marry? Jason then enters, because of fucking course he does. (Also, Garner says it’d take Liz around ninety days! Even for this show that’s fucking glacial. Can you imagine three months of divorce proceedings? Yeesh.)

Garner shows himself out and Jason taunts Liz about their impending marriage some more. Liz asks how she could marry a man she detests and--y’know, that’s a good fucking question! Liz hasn’t exactly been subtle about her feelings on Jason, how’s marrying him going to look less scandalous than giving him board and sending money to his overseas accounts?

Roger continues to be awful and I’m baffled that I ever liked him. He’s complaining that the recent attacks--y’know, the two recent attacks, one of which was on an office rather than a human being--has scared the secretaries away from work, and his response to this is to bitch that he had to do--gasp!--clerical work. He also bitches that Jason, when he bothers to show up to work, is “about as useful as David would be.” Damn this guy hates his son. 

The discussion comes around to the subject of marriage, with Roger claiming that neither he nor Liz were cut out for it since it ended so badly for both of them (oooh aromantic headcanons), and Liz--trying to seem her upcoming engagement to Jason seem more natural--insinuates that she might remarry, if, y’know, she met someone. Roger, incredulous, points out that she’s a recluse and wouldn’t have the opertunity, but Liz says that she’s been getting lonely and there’s no harm in speculating. Roger asks if she’s hinting at something, which she denies, and then Jason enters because--look, there’s only so many ways to make this joke. Because irony. Because subtlety is dead. Because speak of the Devil. This show pulls this trick far too often and writing gags around it is becoming excruciatingly difficult.

Roger picks on Jason for ducking out of work, and in return Jason insinuates that Liz finds him a part of the family. Roger says that she might, but he doesn’t, and Jason responds that he may have to change his tune on that. Roger asks what he means, Jason says to ask Liz, Liz says she doesn’t know what he’s talking about and anyway needs to talk with Mrs. Johnson about dinner. (It’s probably worth pointing out that Mrs. Johnson hasn’t appeared since 211, well over a month in show time.)

After the commercial, Carolyn asks Vicki to go into town with her, because she--like every other woman on this show--is straight-up terrified of the outdoors now that one woman’s been abducted and so they all need to travel in packs. (Okay, okay--it being Maggie specifically probably hit home for them, but this show’s been playing the “easily cowed women” card hard as of late, and it’s bugging me.) Vicki agrees, even though she’d promised to read to David and--look, did “tutor” mean something different back then? What is Vicki’s job description, exactly?

Roger enters, making a big fuss about Liz’s potential remarriage and how either she’s gone insane or he has. “She was making all sorts of schoolgirl pronouncements of ‘being alone’ and ‘needing someone’, I could scarcely believe my ears!” Roger is a fucking jackass, in case you haven’t noticed. Stop patronizing your middle-aged sister, dude. Anyway, he’s figured out Liz was talking about Jason, though all he can do is bitch and drink. Carolyn, on the other hand, decides to take decisive action, finding out what’s in the room and using it to expose Jason. Vicki warns them both that they might be “jumping to a lot of wrong conclusions”, but of course they’re not, shut up Vicki, we’re looking at potential for actual plot progression here, stop fucking it up. Roger tells Carolyn it’s around Liz’s neck, and despite Vicki’s protests Carolyn is determined to get the key or break into the room somehow. Way to go, Carolyn! And to think way back when I wrote you off as a complete airhead. You might save the day yet.

Jason and Liz are doing their whole spiel. You know how it goes--he insists they’ll get married, she says no, he asks what choice she has, and so on until he’s looming over her left shoulder on the very edge of the set while she stares into the camera. Fortunately, Carolyn enters, demands the key, proves its around Liz’s neck by lunging for it, and then announces her intention to break in. Liz flees, upset.

If I might pause for a moment--literally the only thing that could be in there is Paul’s desecrated corpse. Nothing else could possibly incriminate Liz. And yet--while it certainly looks like Paul bolted, aren’t the police supposed to inspect disappearances? And wouldn’t they, perhaps, start with his place of residence, just to be sure? Granted, having a fucking town named after you might grant you some immunity, but still. Eventually dead bodies start to rot. Is the room Paul’s locked in a vacuum? Or is the house so freakishly large that it would take at least twenty years for the scent to make it to a part of the house that’s being lived in? 

I’m open to suggestions of what else it could be. A signed confession could’ve been made under duress. There’s no video surveillance in the house, I’m pretty sure. So it kinda has to be the dead guy.