This episode was a bit of a letdown from the glories of yesterday's episode.
Strange to say it, but I think Matthew's being too "clever" here, returning to the Old House to hide.
Matthew went straight for the secret room, so I think the room is what made him decide the Old House was a good place to go. I wondered, as he entered it, how he knew about it, and why he was so sure that nobody else knew about it. Elizabeth plucked him out of his cannery job 18 years ago, if I remember correctly, so apparently he didn't grow up on the estate, with an older person showing him the ins and outs. The Old House doesn't look as though Matthew ever took enough care of it so that he would come across the room accidentally. Maybe a ghost showed him the room, in some roundabout way that would still leave Matthew in doubt as to whether supernatural agency was involved in his discovery - but why would a ghost want to do that? Or maybe there was a dead animal in there that started to smell, prompting him to figure out how to get in there.
It struck me for the first time today that the secret room in the Old House is in roughly the same position as the secret panel that we've seen at Collinwood: walk into the house, turn left into the drawing room, and then turn right. I suppose it's merely a matter of the logistics of how you design a set, but it started me thinking about the people who built both houses. Maybe it just seemed natural to put a hidden something in that location. At any rate, this new secret seemed to me more of a departure than when we saw the secret panel at Collinwood. The Collinwood secret panel seemed like a one-off, but now my feeling is: there could be more! The houses are becoming characters in their own right.
We are slowly learning more about the Old House, although we haven't yet seen the staircase.
We haven't? I'll take your word for it. So, in the area where we later see a staircase, there could be a wall with a door leading to another room. Maybe a ballroom. I'm always looking for a ballroom.
David said today, for the first time I think, that in his crystal ball he had seen his father bending over Bill Malloy's body. David was talking to Burke, which raises the likelihood that David was telling the truth. Sort of spooky - more so, to me, than David talking to Josette's portrait, because we don't know that the answers David claims to hear are for real.
