Episode 34: You amaze me, Miss Winters

Everyone who is going to know that David tried to kill his father now knows it, and Liz has decreed that the incident will have no consequences. So we’re back to the basic story elements laid out in week one, as modified in subsequent episodes to make sure everyone had plenty of people to talk to.

Vicki is at the Blue Whale. Harvey Keitel is gone, but Burke is still there, so she sits with him. He asks her why she joined him. She looks off into space and says “Inches, feet, miles.” He tells her she reminds him of a drink that fizzes and foams, but he isn’t sure what kind. He asks what she’d like to have for dinner. She replies “I’d rather go to your hotel room.” He flashes the same dopey grin any fellow would in this situation, and says “You amaze me, Miss Winters.”

Vicki is supposed to be a street kid from NYC, so we can assume she knows how to go about finding inches when she wants them, and that she’s no stranger to feet, either. Miles may be in short supply in the city, but she’s willing to learn. It turns out that all she wants from Burke is a look at the report his private investigator prepared about her. In the hotel room, she tells him what the audience knows about her origins and about Liz’s refusal to give a straight answer to the question of why she hired her. She looks through the report, and says it doesn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. He orders two steak dinners from the hotel restaurant.

A knock comes on the door. It isn’t room service; it’s Joe, come to repay Burke for settling his bar tab. Joe is about to tell Burke he still doesn’t like him, when Vicki comes out of the bathroom. Joe excuses himself, startled to see her. Vicki goes a moment later, leaving Burke alone, waiting for two steak dinners.

I summed up my reaction to this episode in a comment on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

“Miss Winters, you amaze me.” Me too! Any woman as young and attractive as Vicki in a town as small and gossipy as Collinsport would be the scandal of the month if she went unchaperoned to a bachelor’s hotel room. When the woman lives with and works for the richest family in town and the bachelor is their sworn enemy, “indiscreet” isn’t any fraction of the word needed to describe her boldness.

Burke has time and again talked about how gossipy Collinsport is. For example, in episode 27, he seemed almost unhinged as he told his associate Bronson about how deeply secretive his investigations of the Collins family holdings would have to be, since anything that happens in or near the town of Collinsport is immediately known to everyone there. So we have to assume that he plans to get everyone talking about his evening with Vicki.

At this point in the show, we usually have to guess what Burke’s plans are, and even when they are revealed we can’t decide whether they are good or evil. In the case of his attempt to get rumors going about himself and Vicki, I think it’s a little more straightforward. He keeps telling her she should get away from the Collinses and leave town. If the Collinses think she’s involved with Burke, Vicki is very likely to find herself on a train back to New York. Maybe not to the Hammond Foundling Home- Burke might have a little apartment in the East Village where Vicki can stay until she finds something…