Roger and Vicki encounter each other on the peak of Widow’s Hill. Roger remarks it is the highest point in the area. At the end of their conversation, Vicki will call to Carolyn, inviting her to join them “down here.” This may seem to be a blooper, but since we hear “down” used to mean “up” in a later episode, I speculate that it’s a peculiarity of Collinsport English.
Little happens to advance the plot in this episode, but between Roger’s announcement that he and Vicki are standing on the highest point in the area and Vicki’s invitation to come “down here,” we hear a lot about the ghostly legends of the place. After the scene in episode 11 where the ghosts are troubling Elizabeth while David is doing something mysterious involving motor grease and little pieces of metal, it seems that the show is using the ghosts as a sign that something big is happening. Certainly the “Widow’s Wail” is a striking sound effect, and Louis Edmonds does a good job of selling the idea that Roger really does believe in all the legends about the house that his social position might require him and Elizabeth to ridicule publicly.
It’s a bit jarring that Carolyn drifts into the scene asking what Vicki and Roger are doing- “planning a suicide pact?” She had just told Vicki about the legend that a third governess would die by jumping off the cliff, and the series story bible still calls for Roger to throw himself to his death from it. So you might think it would be in questionable taste to bring that particular topic up just now.
There’s also a scene in the Evans cottage where Maggie (Kathryn Leigh Scott) tries to get Sam (Mark Allen) to tell her what’s been bothering him. In episode 11, Conrad Bain had triumphed over a weak script and Mark Allen’s relentless whine to turn what might have been a lot of tedious recapping into a compulsively watchable scene. At the beginning of this scene, Kathryn Leigh Scott is mustering such powerful emotions that it looks like she might be about to accomplish the same feat, but Allen has switched from whining all his lines to bellowing them. So the scene is a dead loss.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 