Let the River Run

It’s a nice thing, when you finally find a place you belong.

While it’s nice that Victoria is beginning to feel at home in Collinwood at last, she’s certainly chosen strange circumstances to feel such a way considering…well, everything.

But she has made friends with Carolyn, and Liz seems to be depending on her and even Roger is getting to the point where he’s more frightened of her than she is of him, and David is more interested in scrying than framing anybody for murder, so it could be worse.

After all, she’s just coming off the heels of the wildest slumber party of her life, why wouldn’t she feel at home?

So it’s a new day and Victoria is having breakfast with her young charge, who is sharp as hell in his cardigan.

David cannily wonders if he missed anything interesting last night, saying that he heard all the screaming. I’m not sure how Vicky convinced himself he hadn’t. Either way, she prepares herself with her ready-made rebuttal: lying.

She’s becoming part of the family after all.

I get she doesn’t want to traumatize him, or whatever, but this kid tried to murder his dad a few days ago, I don’t think he risks much mental scarring from being told about the marvelous missing body.

David, his mind ever on spooks, wonders if Vicky and Carolyn saw a ghost. Not that they know this, but they almost did.

But that book business was nothing more than a teaser, and the show seems to want us to all-but forget about it before it becomes important.

Vicky tells David there’s no such thing as ghosts and David, who must be very tired of this conversation by now, says, in the manner of someone long suffering:

Vicky insists she didn’t.

There are plenty of other reasons to scream, kid. Like when you’re driving downhill and realize somebody removed the life-saving suppository from your car. Just for example.

Victoria alludes to her fitful sleep, which is a weird thing to confide to this kid you are deliberately going out of your way to pretend everything is fine too.

Vicky decides to humor David, suggesting he consult his crystal ball for answers to his many questions.

Oh. Well, in that case…

At this point, Victoria has no grounds to be surprised he would say something like that. She all-but invited him to.

But the lovable scamp isn’t done yet.

Can’t be too surprised Vicky has no come back for that. that was pretty good.

Victoria does wonder why David doesn’t like her very much, which allows Francis Swann to revive something else from the series bible that Art Wallace didn’t have the gumption to follow through on.

This was a big deal thing in the very earliest (by which I mean pre-suppository) episodes. David told Elizabeth this was why he hated Victoria so much and that’s clearly why he wanted to frame her for murder. But, as with so many things, it got waylaid as a plot device during those dark “lost in the serial entertainment desert” weeks that comprised most of the show’s first month.

Victoria insists that she is only here to do the job for which she is paid. Speaking of, I wonder when she gets her first paycheck. Her first week on the job is almost up, and I think she and David have had a total of three lessons, two of which we even got to see onscreen!

Why would that encourage him to be more sympathetic to her? She’s basically telling him that if he keeps doing what he’s doing, he’ll guarantee her life becomes a living hell. Honey, that’s what he wants.

David points out he can’t help thinking about widows because they’re always hanging out around him. He even brings up his mother…

Wow, we learned something about the woman besides which men she may or may not have screwed around with. Only took 11 ½ weeks.

That Laura hated Collinwood and told her son terrible things about it may be a point against Roger being David’s father, but it’s just as likely Laura just hated her husband. Nevertheless, Victoria wonders if David has a picture of his mother. She should know that he does, he went to great lengths to keep her from looking at it at the end of the suppository thing.

We must assume this is the same picture he showed Burke. Of course, it’s possibly Francis Swann is making another whoopsie. Either way, David concludes his father is the likeliest thief because he sucks like that.

Victoria shows a sliver of extra sympathy for David as he tells her how his parents always argued.

We’ve seen more than enough evidence of that, which makes it particularly infuriating when Vicky tells him that can’t possibly be true.

Vicky knows he does. What does she expect to get out of constantly gaslighting this child?

Yeah, that tricky new generation with its nipple robots and attempted patricide.

This scene is going on way too long and it feels longer the more insufferable Vicky determines to be. She tells David he should be lucky to have a father because, in case you’ve forgotten, she is an Orphan With No Past.

We also know this to be true. He confirmed to Liz that Roger beats him way back in Episode 6. I don’t know why Liz hasn’t yet confronted her brother about this (she confronts him about literally everything else), but there it is. It’s fact. It’s canon. I have no idea why, after everything she’s seen, Vicky still doesn’t believe it.

Don’t get too excited. Liz arrived too late to hear anything about the domestic violence. Also, check that badass houndstooth shawl.

Indications of the French farce Dark Shadows has all the tools to be and won’t become for a very long time yet.

Liz wonders if Vicky’s seen Matthew, because we’re using him more than once every 10 episodes now.

David, who is not easily swayed by any means, asks Liz what all last night’s commotion was about. As you can imagine, Liz’s first instinct is to pretend he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Is it any wonder this kid turned to homicide before he hit the double-digits?

Don’t worry, though, David has an evolved plan for getting through the adults’ bullshit facades: Pot stirring.

Neither of the ladies seem at all curious about this statement. Who knows? Maybe Roger has decided to go to work on time in case that son-of-a-bitch Ned Calder decides to come back after all.

Liz departs to get Matthew. David departs for…I don’t know, reasons, I guess. But before he goes…

Victoria does, and this finally gives them something in common.

You have to appreciate a young man with feelings. I like that his only response to everything, even positive things is murder.

What do you expect? He has two plastic guns and a possibly real knife in his room, but Vicky can’t possibly raise any objections to all the violent stimuli her charge is surrounded by on a daily basis because that would mean doing her job.

A knock comes to the door and Victoria, in further abdication of her responsibility, asks David to open it. Then again, I guess the house on the crest of the lonely hill doesn’t have to worry too much about visits from wandering sex perverts. It’s too long a walk.

In what may be a sign of maturity, David does not immediately slam the door in Joe’s face. This is his second visit to Collinwood in as many days and, again, Carolyn isn’t around to see him because, according to David, she’s “still asleep”.

Which is funny but maybe also justified considering her adventures of the previous night.

Joe, who is apparently here on cannery business again because we do not (yet, thank God) have any other cannery employees besides that guy who we’re supposed to pretend might not actually be dead, resolves to wait, leading to this awesome screencap.

Joe wonders if David has seen anything else in his crystal ball. Why he’d want to know more about that given what happened last time is a mystery, but Joe is nothing if not a glutton for punishment.

Quite a bottom on young Haskell, I do declare. But you’re only here for me to drool over Roger, though he has no ass to speak of.

David basically calls Joe a Philistine for not understanding how his sorcery works.

Not like the knock-offs you buy at the airport giftshop.

David tells Joe that Burke is the one who got him the crystal ball.

Joe considers that David is only seeing what Burke wants him to see in the Orb. I have to assume Joe is speaking creatively there because he can’t possibly believe Burke has pre-loaded digital images of himself banging Carolyn for the sole purpose of convincing David that Joe is a cuck.

Victoria arrives, which is both unfortunate for us and great for Joe because David was five steps away from physically attacking him for impugning the Devlin’s honor.

And Victoria thinks he’s a cheap date. Turns out she’s much closer to the truth for once.

David says with such princely conviction. Vicky urges him upstairs and invites Joe into the drawing room to wait for Liz to come back from feeding Matthew his kibble or whatever she’s up to.

Privately (but not really, because David is doing That Thing He Does), Joe tells Vicky Roger never turned up to the office, which should make her think twice about David’s revelation from earlier, but not insofar that she’d credit him or anything.

Mr. Malloy, who Vicky last night bluntly reminded Carolyn is the one person in town known to be missing and, therefore, a not unlikely candidate for the body they saw but nobody else believes they did.

 Vicky tells Joe the story. Joe is surprised and taken aback, but hilariously also finds the time to take umbrage that the whole thing only happened because Carolyn lost that watch he gave her for her birthday.

Ah, Seaweed Body Thing. One of DC Comics’ more avant garde ventures.

Liz returns, catching Davey boy in the act.

Why should he? Nobody ever does anything to him for it. This very woman got him out of an attempted murder charge on the exact logic that members of her family shouldn’t be beholden to the laws of common men.

It is what he said. Really weird coincidence that ended up being. Naturally, Liz doesn’t see it that way and sends him on his not-so-merry way.

Or, as Joan Bennett tells us: “Skewlbooks”.

David is sufficiently scared off (she’s the only one that can manage it) and Liz goes to meet her visitor, full of hopes that maybe her bearded protector is alright after all. He is, naturally, not.

I’m imagining all the hairy dockhands and fish-skinners breaking down for the first time in years, their scarred hands pressed to weeping faces as they bemoan the loss of their colleague, their brother, their father, their friend.

O, woe, Malloy, you who were the greatest of all men, oh how we lament your passing/O woe, oh woe…

Liz gets rid of Vicky and asks something she could’ve asked him when he was here yesterday but didn’t because…reasons: when he last saw Malloy. Joe, then, tells her about his encounter with the old salt at the Blue Whale two days previous. Not that this goes anywhere, so it doesn’t matter nobody said it sooner.

Joe tells Liz what he already told Victoria (Pacing!) about Roger not being at the office today.

True. Usually he’s running around doing errands for this woman.

Liz learns from Roger’s secretary or whoever and learns that Roger is not, in fact, at work. Again. This accomplished, she and Joe talk about the Dead Man at the Foot of Widows’ Hill (copyright trademark), which would appear to indicate that Liz is privately more concerned about it than she otherwise lets on.

This also doesn’t go anywhere, except to provide an excuse for why Carolyn is still asleep (Vicky, meanwhile, was up, spry and doing what passes for her job, so…). Joe prepares to leave, joking he wouldn’t want to leave the plant too long with Malloy already gone.

It won’t make her marry you any faster, man.

The operator must be relieved. Imagine how many times she’s been cussed out by Ned Calder these last few days.

Liz is connected with her correspondent…

George? That doesn’t sound like our friendly neighborhood morally and intellectually bankrupt Constable/Sheriff/Puppet Authority Figure Jonas Carter.

You’re right. It doesn’t. But more on that in the next one.

For now, the relevant fact is that this mysterious Sheriff George has been called by a reluctant Elizabeth who is unwilling to spend much longer lingering in uncertainty over the whereabouts about her firm right hand.

In the last lesson we got to see (in-universe, yesterday morning), David and Vicky were covering the American Revolution. Now they’re talking about, in Vicky’s words, “The development of transportation”. I’m not even sure if this is the same class. They never seem to do math, which isn’t surprising given we’ll later be reminded over and over again that Victoria Winters is incapable of putting two and two together.

The answer, by the way, isn’t Rome, but a prehistoric road in Egypt. This wasn’t common historical fact in 1966 though, like how the dinosaurs in Fantasia look absolutely frigging ridiculous by today’s standards.

David doesn’t mention Egypt, though, but rivers, which Vicky treats as the correct answer, even though waterways and roadways are two distinct methods of transportation and have been since ancient times.

There’s a reason for this bullshit, by the way, but for now let’s return to David being understandably bored to death.

Vicky, somehow, is surprised that David was eavesdropping.

Bald faced lies, but also Vicky could’ve helped herself out by closing the doors. Probably wouldn’t have stopped him, but she’d have less ground to be pissed.

Honey, I’m fairly certain he’s heard his father wish he’d paid for an abortion several times by now. Also, this is another stupid thing to say to a child. I’ve never heard that as a warning against eavesdropping. “you might hear something you won’t like”. Half the reason people eavesdrop in the first place is to hear people talk shit about them.

Your face is a bad habit.

David keeps pressing Victoria about the dead man, which she is having trouble maintaining she didn’t see and wasn’t really there, as she struggles to teach him about rivers and so on.

There’s this cute moment where Vicky asks David what the largest river in the country is and he just brightens up…

See? He knows stuff. He just couldn’t care less about any of it.

It turns into this clever ritual where David answers a question and then asks one about the scene at the cliffs, which Vicky answers. It’s not like she thought of this strategy herself, but it’s the most effective teaching him has ever been.

Back at the phone, Liz is just finishing telling “George” that it’s likely Malloy is, in fact, fine, but he should probably check the hospitals for corpses just in case.

This done, Joe returns to Collinwood, having found Carolyn’s missing watch.

It’s such a cute little thing. It has no obvious plot significance; it doesn’t advance anything really. But it shows Joe being kind to his girlfriend. Sure, he bought her the watch in the first place, but he still got it back for her.

Who wants to bet she’ll never thank him? You’d be right.

Liz is speaking to Roger’s secretary or some such person at the plant, again looking for Roger who, it seems, has yet to turn up.

Employing the same borderline sociopathy that allowed her to vindicate her patricidal nephew without batting an eye, Liz tells whoever she’s speaking to to tell anybody looking for Malloy that he’s out on business, presumably to keep a panic from breaking out, though this seems the kind of thing that would backfire once something bad is found out to have happened and it looks like Liz was covering something up.

Good to know we had one notable body who didn’t own slaves.

The real reason for this fairly unusual lesson is provided when Vicky informs her pupil that one can move just about anything by water.

It’s a wonder she hasn’t started drinking.

David reminds Vicky that he’s fairly certain there was a dead man and, as he told her yesterday, it was almost certainly Bill Malloy, because the Orb does not lie, woman.

But Neanderthal indentured servants do.

Matthew is answering Liz’s summons from the beginning of the episode. He wasn’t around when she came looking for him because, evidently, “Mr. Collins wanted me early.”

Huh. Mr. Collins, who left the house very early in the morning and never went to work.

That’s weird.

Matthew tells Liz Roger wanted to “walk along the rocks” with him to make sure there truly wasn’t a corpse down there.

This isn’t entirely implausible, given Roger’s poorly-disguised paranoia and constant attempts to assure the girls they had, in fact, seen nothing. Whether he’s responsible for that body or not, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility he would want to make sure there wasn’t a body there. Anymore, at least.

There was, we are assured, no corpse.

Why? Because of the altitude? The dangerously high winds? The occasional roving drunk?

Heh. Taint.

Well…not the first Mrs. Collins. Josette was the first Mrs. Collins to live in Collinwood, but her husband was descended several times over from the first Collins of Collinsport. Not that they ever talk very much about Isaac. Never mind.

Also, why is he telling this to Liz as if she would be unfamiliar with the most infamous ghost story associated with her house? I feel that was only thrown in there to remind us who it was that opened that special book last episode.

Not that we’ll be getting anything like that for a while.

Liz points out that the tale of Josette’s suicide is “just a story”. Really? Is it…is it not known that she died falling from the cliff?

There it is again, the insinuation that Josette was murdered. Perhaps in a way very similar to the tell-tale dead man at the foot of etc. etc. but Matthew isn’t talking about plain old foul play.

Mind you, in 1966, murder-by-ghost was much more palatable than depression driving somebody to suicide, so we see why he thinks that’s the more rational explanation.

You’d think. I mean, either way, you can justify having a ghost after the woman died. And suicide and murder are both plausible. I just think the “possessed by ghost and made to jump” thing is too much to suspend disbelief.

Heh.

Anyway, Victoria is continuing to insist that she did not see a dead man, and David is making this little coquette pose like he knows she’s just trying to convince herself at this point.

David again repeats that his father has killed Malloy.

Almost as horrible as the suggestion that David tried to kill his father. Good thing that didn’t turn out to have anything to it.

Victoria insists this is all in his imagination, and this was the worst possible thing she could tell him because he launches into a spooky monologue:

Vicky’s response to all this?

I think trying to kill him is a little more intense than “getting him into trouble”, but sure, the point still stands.

Well, Vicky’s only been here six days and hasn’t been near effectual enough to be fairly accused of “making trouble” for anybody.

In yet another example of this woman failing to get this kid’s entire point, Vicky notes that David’s accusation would land Roger in prison for life, as if this isn’t exactly what he wants.

Elsewhere, Liz asks Matthew to remind her how long he’s worked for her. As we already know: 18 years. And as has since been retconned: he used to work the boats, whereas tiny choking Matthew made his living as a floor sweeper. Regardless.

And here Liz notes that Matthew’s manner in telling the story of what he saw last night was very deliberate and very careful. We’ll recall that when we saw Matthew climb down the cliffs, he looked quite shocked, as if he had seen something. He claimed later in that episode to Liz that he did, for a moment suspect there was a body there, but suppose there’s more…

Matthew said there was no body when he came back down the beach. But the first time around…

So it turns out that Matthew pushed the body back into the water and lied about ever seeing it. This was heavily foreshadowed in that episode with Matthew’s repeated concerns about keeping the whole thing quiet to avoid scandal and “adding ghost stories” to Collinwood’s sizable repertoire. It’s the first real twist in this developing mystery story and it almost makes up for the farce of spending all this time debating whether or not there ever was a body in the first place.

Liz asks, as if afraid to hear the answer, if Matthew recognized the body and, of course…

We see Thayer David’s tremendous skill as an actor here, elevating the provincial hillbilly hokum he’s to this point been given to work with. In a shaky, ashamed tone, not even willing to look his believed Mrsh. Shtoddahd in the eye, as he tells her that he thought it was for the best.

Elizabeth obviously disagrees.

Liz gets through to “George”, telling him to call off the search for Bill Malloy.

It’s too late for him now.

This Day in History- Wednesday, September 7, 1966

Stories from polar ends of this year factor into today. In one theater, the U.S. Department of Defense announces what will be the largest draft call of the Vietnam War. 49,200 registered men were called for military service for October, the highest numbers since the Korean War. What is it good for? Etc. etc.

Elsewhere, an attempt was made on the life of Martin Luther King. King was driving through Mississippi when a white gas station attendant accosted his car, holding a gun to King’s head. King, according to the other passengers, did not flinch and said only “Brother, I love you”, which proved efficacious enough that the would-be assassin turned away. Afterward, when King’s companions urged him to take greater care when driving, he pointed out that all the protection in the world couldn’t save President Kennedy: “When they are ready, they will get me.”