Fashion notes first . . .
Maggie is looking kind of slinky. However, her hair is firmly in Marlo Thomas mode. She's wearing a sleeveless dress with a dropped waist and a pleated skirt. If I haven't said it before, I'll say it now: KLS was one skinny lady.
Carolyn chooses to hang with her uncle wearing a baby doll nightie. I know she's got on more than she would say if she had on shorts and a tank top, but there's something a little off about the ensemble.
For Vicki's post-captivity ensemble, I swear to God, I thought she was wearing a drop cloth. Upon closer inspection, it's some sort of patterned night dress.
Apparently there was a sale on pleats at Ohrbach's because Carolyn's second outfit is a plaid pleated skirt. Very cute.
Onto the show . . .
We go from Day 10 to Day 11 in this installment. Lela and Francis brought you both these episodes. I'm not really a huge fan of Swift's at the moment; I think that's primarily due to my noticing for the first time that KLS never performs well under her direction. But there are some other rather good performances in these episodes so I'm not damning her just yet as a director.
Woohoo! Not only do we have more of the rain sound effects, we have a visual of Collinwood in the rain. Never quite got why there wasn't more rain later on in the series. It's not like you can tell me that it would have cost them more.
Status check: Vicki is still locked in the attic room. I might add that she looks like she's been cleaning floors in a heat wave. Roger's hanging in the foyer where we see it's 1AM. Carolyn returns from what she no doubt considers her hot date. And at Casa Evans, Miss Evans is busy pursuing her MRS degree.
Casa Evans: Maggie apparently got her husband-catching skills from an issue of Cosmopolitan. She listens to every word that drops from Joe's mouth like Moses listening to God. She expresses a passionate interest in all matters nautical that I know we haven't heard of before and once they're an item, we never hear again. You just know she went on down to the docks and found an obliging old salt who got her up to speed on diesel engines and riggings. There is no way she came by that level of enthusiasm naturally. Chalk one up for Cosmo though because Joe is totally bowled over.
Now it's Joe singing a chorus of "What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?"
Drawing room: Carolyn is still ticked about the temerity of Joe dining with another female even while enthusing over her own evening with another man. God, she's such a twit. Roger, as might be imagined, isn't quite so euphoric. He's fairly casual about Vicki's disappearance (which is finally on Carolyn's RADAR now that she's had her big date). He gives it all a very final sound. Yeah, he knows what's up.
Casa Evans: At 2:15AM, the evening's finally winding down. Incidentally, Sam has clearly been nowhere near the house. Man, Maggie is good. I forgot how much of the relationship was instigated by her.
Drawing room: Roger is alone. Edmonds plays this all so beautifully. He casts a speculative eye on the ceiling. He looks around to make sure he's unobserved, and then he opens up the secret panel in the drawing room (there's a switch on the armoire on the back wall) that opens up a panel next to it). Later on total strangers will know about this passageway, but the family (including) Roger will not. David will know about it, but the rest of the family will not. But right now? The only one who knows about it, is Roger. I love that.
In fact, Roger appears to be pretty damn familiar with the whole house. He heads up some kind of back stairs. Apparently, he's got no qualms about being just one guy with a flashlight in a creepy portion of Collinwood.
Kudos to the lighting crew. It is dark.Yep, that's right. No inexplicable light sources. No burning torches or candelabra. It's a very spooky set and the illumination seems to come from the flashlight. It looks pretty cool. It's quite clever the way they shoot this whole sequence too. All we see are Roger's feet and part of his legs so all they have to build/dress is the lower half of the set. He goes up an iron spiral staircase. Not sure if we ever see that again.
We see Vicki in the attic room and the candle's burned way down now. She hears a noise outside and she calls out. Roger, meanwhile, stops at the sound of her voice, but he doesn't immediately reply. He gets the key from the floor and sensing an opportunity, starts moving objects around in order to make spooky noises. He muffles his mouth with a handkerchief, and in a suitably ghostly tone warns her to leave. I have to say, he looks pretty gleeful during this whole process.
By now Vicki is sobbing hysterically. Roger opens up the door and she basically throws herself into his arms. Moltke does a convincing job of someone in hysterics, I might add. It's not like she's shedding a delicate tear here and there; she's acting like someone in a full-blown hysterical fit. She also tells him that she saw Bill's ghost. Roger's glee lessens.
So it's the next day and Vicki and Carolyn are in the drawing room. Vicki, as might be expected, is not in a great mood. Carolyn doesn't believe in the ghost Vicki saw, which isn't helping Vicki's mood. The ghost, IMHO, is the least of it. Forget the ghost. The mentally unstable child deliberately led her to a room from which he clearly had no intention of letting her out; he tormented her unmercifully before locking her in; and then he displayed no signs of remorse or regret. Who the hell cares about the ghost?
Vicki, however, does. Elizabeth comes in and does her best to get her to calm down and shut up. The cynic in me wonders why. I would think she'd want to encourage the ghost story so as to minimize the damage of a lawsuit, but there you have it. Our little governess gets to more pertinent matters very quickly. David tried to kill her and she's done with this job. That seems like a splendid idea to me; Roger thinks so as well. Inexplicably Carolyn and Elizabeth do her best to discourage her.
Alone with her brother, Elizabeth gets into it. Roger totally lies about the door being unlocked (so one can infer she doesn't know about the secret passageway). He's very vague about what prompted him to check out the west wing. Liz is justly suspicious of the kid.
Roger's very inconsistent here. First he's saying that his son is a killer; then he implies that Vicki is unstable. It's not the first time he's employed this strategy and as always, it serves him ill. He'd be better off picking one story or plan of attack and sticking to it.
Upstairs in Vicki's bedroom, Carolyn is trying to persuade her to stay. Vicki is not so much terrified as she is mad. Mad at David and mad that nobody apparently missed her. Instead of oh, apologizing or reassuring her, Carolyn's response is to make the conversation all about her. Since Burke, Joe, or Carolyn had nothing to do with her being tormented and locked away, Vicki sensibly refuses to buy into it. There's a certain practicality and even cynicism about the way she puts up with Carolyn's dramatics and rationalizations. Carolyn does have the grace to admit she was wrong about a few things, but she's still all mushy about Burke. For about two seconds she brings the conversation back to Vicki and her plight. And then we're right back to Burke.
Drawing room: Oh, I love this scene. Possibly one of my top ten favorites. They're talking about Vicki and her Bill Malloy sighting, and Liz asks Roger if he's ever seen anything that could be categorized as a ghost. He says something like "I've seen and felt things that I can't explain, and don't tell me you haven't, because I know better." I like the scene for a number of reasons. There's such a great dynamic between Bennett and Edmonds; you can almost believe that they really are siblings. They play so nicely off the other. There's also the fact that with this short bit, we can instantly see how their relationship works, how they grew up, and how they employ denial to help them get through their daily lives. You just know that they would never dream of admitting any of this to anyone else--not their lovers or family or friends--but they have this special bond and for two seconds, they're honest with each other.
Vicki doesn't have her suitcase out for some strange reason. In her position I'd be calling the cab already. Turns out Carolyn's big reason for not wanting Vicki to leave is that she'll be without a confidante. With whom will she discuss Burke? Oh dear God. Listen to yourself already.
Attic: Roger takes Liz to see the room (using the west wing door not the secret passage). Liz is pretty horrified at the room. She finds evidence that David's habitation of the room has been of longstanding duration. They concede that David's actions were deliberate. Roger diagnoses David as an "incipient psychopath." Works for me. Moving on to the reappearance of the late Mr. Malloy, Elizabeth points out and picks up some wet seaweed. Cue the eerie music, please.
I forget where the next scene takes place. It's either Vicki's room or the drawing room, but Liz still wants Vicki to stay. Her reasoning is that David really needs her. Vicki thinks it's up to David, but what she really needs to know is why he hates her so much.
That's not that big a mystery to me and it shouldn't be one to her either. He's been fairly open and honest about why he hates her. He wants to be left to his own devices so he would hate anyone they'd hire. Also, he can pick on her in a way that would never work with his father (who'd swat him and is just dying for one reason to send him off to boarding school) or his aunt (who has a very forbidding manner about her at times). Then of course, there's the debacle of that damn pen. Mystery solved. Now go get on a bus out of Dodge.
