Vicki asks if Roger can do a favor for her if he's going into town - getting some magazines for David. Roger says he won't have time. She lets Roger know she saw that his keys were already in his car. After Roger leaves the drawing room, Vicki tells Elizabeth she saw Burke Devlin near the car before he left.
Roger and Elizabeth discuss his plans to meet with Burke. Roger is starting to believe that perhaps Devlin is on the level.
In Vicki's room, David finds out his father won't be getting him the magazines Vicki promised. David says his father is a liar, a very terrible man that he hates, and that he hopes he dies. He doesn't want to be sent away. He says everyone but his mother and Aunt Elizabeth hate him. He doesn't even believe that Vicki likes him. Vicki tells him a story about a girl in the foundling home who had no friends, and how it was her own doing. David doesn't get the very obvious parallels to his own behavior.
Liz sends Roger off with advice not to give Devlin any information. In the foyer, David asks if he has to take the car this night. He also asks if his father really means to send him away, and Roger leaves without answering.
Liz answers a call from Devlin, and lets him know that Roger is on his way to meet him. Elizabeth asks Vicki to sit with her for a few minutes. She asks Vicki why David is so tense tonight.
Roger gets into his Mustang for the drive down the hill. David watches from the window, and declares, "He's going to die mother. He's going to die." Next we see Roger's car go off the road.
The phone rings in the foyer. David approaches it but does not answer it. Liz does, and gets the news that Roger was in a car accident. The camera pans to David as the episode ends.
Our thoughts
John: Interesting twist. While we don't know if Devlin had done anything to Roger's car, we can safely assume David had. It's not clear what he did, but it explains why he was so dirty when Liz found him a few episodes back. One thing seems certain: Devlin will no doubt be blamed for the accident.
Christine: I guess Elizabeth forgot to mention to Roger that Vicki saw Burke by Roger's car while she was trying to convince him to stay away from Burke.
John: Vicki continues to make headway with David, though he still gives us the impression that he's going to be a pretty nasty kid for some time to come. I am surprised Vicki didn't ask about his mother when she came up in conversation.
Christine: David is definitely channeling Billy Mumy from the Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life." He'll be making 3 headed gophers next. It's real good that he's tampering with cars. Real good. We all love that boy David. I hope the firearms and sharp knives at Collinwood are kept safely out of the darling boy's reach.
3 comments:
Yes, it does now appear that Burke Devlin may have "innocently" picked up the wrench he was holding in the garage when Victoria Winters found him beside Roger's car. Perhaps David left the wrench there.
Is Roger dying - catastrophically injured in the car crash? It's a Friday!
This is a vitally important episode. The scene in David's room is the first of many in which David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles act their way out of weak writing to establish a relationship between two characters who can always make a connection with each other. Their body language, tones of voice, etc, triumph over some remarkably tedious dialogue to show us what people look like when they're starting to trust each other. The growth of that relationship is really the only story that works in the first 42 weeks of the show. The big events involving characters we've only heard about or who will soon be recast matter insofar as they represent developments in that story, and other events don't matter at all.
The scene that Liz and Roger play out in the drawing room while Vicki and David are talking upstairs is important in its own way. That these conversations are going on simultaneously is an example of the mirroring of Vicki and Liz that is such a strong motif in the first 42. Vicki is open and uncomplicated as she tries to talk David down from his superheated hostility to his father; Liz is guarded and double-minded as she tries to talk Roger back up to fear of Devlin. In the contrast between the two women, we see the difference between the innocent one with no past, and the frightened one with nothing but a past.
The contrast between father and son plays out in those scenes, and also in the two brief scenes between them. Roger's narcissism renders him utterly childish, making no effort to take his son's feelings into account or to understand Devlin's motives. David's fear and pain drive him to mimic adult behavior with absurd and indeed horrifying results. Liz tries to make Roger grow up, as Vicki tries to free David to be a child, but Roger's inability to take anyone's feelings but his own seriously dooms both efforts.
The moments between Liz and Vicki call for comment. Later on in the series, these characters will be stuck in many frustrating scenes where they inexplicably fail to pass on information that would resolve story points. At first glance, Vicki's failure to tell Roger about Burke's presence in the garage and Liz's failure to pass the word of it on to him after Vicki tells her may seem to be the first of those failures. But Vicki has no reason to trust Roger, and very little to suspect Burke of wrongdoing. On what she's seen of Roger so far, she can only assume that if she tells him what she saw he will jump to the most sinister possible conclusion and enlist her in his mad campaign against Burke. Liz seems relatively reasonable, at least on the topic of Burke Devlin, so by telling her Vicki is both satisfying an obligation and reducing the likelihood that she will be a party to slander. Indeed, Liz and Vicki tell each other quite a bit about themselves, much more than they will later on.
Oh, and Liz's failure to repeat Vicki's news to Roger isn't a problem. Liz is deeply preoccupied, and Vicki's report wouldn't be particularly interesting to anyone who hadn't been watching the show.
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