Episode 1 of a shiny new series, although of course everything looks old. Elizabeth's earrings sparkled, though.
Vicky doesn't impress me much. She drops everything to go off to a job in the middle of nowhere, sight unseen. In her shoes, I'd be sort of nervous about it even before Burke Devlin and Maggie Evans started talking. And then she talks too much to Burke Devlin, a complete stranger, and gets into a car with him, too.
When the old lady on the train (Jane Rose was wonderful) asked what Vicky would do for fun, I remembered my grandmother telling about how she arrived in a new town to teach English and Latin in 1920 and looked around for some fun by going to church. The first Sunday she went to Church A and they said, "You can teach Sunday School!" and that didn't sound like fun, so the next Sunday she went to Church B and they had something else she could do to help them that she didn't care to do, so the next Sunday she went to Church C, and so on. But with the way the old lady on the train was talking, there may not be all that many churches in Collinsport for Vicky to try.
I kept thinking, as Roger held his brandy glass, "Did they have to use a glass that was so obviously plastic?" And then Roger crushed it in his hand, and I understood why the glass was plastic. We should be impressed by the tension that enables him to break glass in his bare hand (ouch!) but what if it really is a plastic glass? In my family we have tons of lovely old dishes that have come down through the generations, but very few glasses, because those were more likely to get broken. Maybe the Collinses have broken all their old glasses and don't care to spend much money on more.
Did "jerk" ever mean what Maggie apparently intends it to mean? I think she meant "fool".
If I were watching this episode as a new show today, knowing nothing more about it than what I saw today, I think I wouldn't be terribly tempted to watch tomorrow's episode. There's the misuse of "jerk", there's Vicky being not terribly bright, and there's that plastic brandy glass. But I do know more about it than what I saw today, and I enjoyed seeing the beginning of what turned into something wonderful.