Episode 62: "Counting Flowers on the Wall"
Sept. 20, 1966
Burke Devlin spent five years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. After this episode, I know a little about how he feels, because it amounted to 22 minutes of my life I'll never get back. This doesn't exactly qualify me for a teardrop tattoo or anything, but I'm here to tell you ... hard time changes a man. By the time the episode ended I'd learned how to make a shiv.
It not like I didn't know what I was getting into. Two episodes back the show introduced a dangling plot point of pornographic proportions, only to immediately forget it. Then, after a bit of drama at the Evans Homestead, it looked as though Sam was going to finally confess his part in the conspiracy to Devlin ... only I think we all knew THAT wasn't going to happen. Not yet, anyway.
Instead, we get a bunch of rambling dialogue from Sam that sounds like Sylvia Plath doing bad improv comedy as he explains (repeatedly) why he fled the dinner party a few hours earlier. It goes nowhere. All we get from him is a confession that he didn't kill Bill Malloy.
For Burke, this "confession" is all the evidence he needs that Roger Collins is the killer. The suspect list is a short one, after all, made all the shorter by how much Devlin hates Roger. Even the town's most studious fan of homicide, David Collins, seems blameless in the crime. Roger doesn't do himself any favors by pouring on his brandy-soaked charm for Victoria Winters, not-so-slyly interrogating her about the dinner party with Sam and Maggie. Much to my surprise, Victoria doesn't fall for his bullshit and flat-out asks him what he wants to know.
She also reveals herself to be a blabber mouth on par with Gladys Kravitz. Not only did she spill to Maggie, Sam and Burke on all the recent activities at Collinwood, she tells Roger everything that was discussed at the Evans home. It's like the Collins family hired Facebook to instruct David.
Anxious to rid his home of the walking Status Update, Roger tells Victoria that he's got friends in Florida that could use a governess, and paints a tiny portrait of the state as some kind of tropical paradise. She declines (duh) and the status quo of Collinwood remains unchanged.
I guess telling everybody everything everyone else said is the next best thing to not telling anybody what anybody else said. Keeps it fair on both sides.
ReplyDeleteAs much as I've seen Roger swill down that whiskey. He's not in any shape to be driving anything.. seems like every conversation.. gulp gulp.
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