We've already watched, in the first episode, as Beth wanders downstairs to the basement to find a taciturn janitor with a haunted expression brooding over a chessboard, but rather than molest her, he teaches her to play.
He seems tired and withdrawn. His eyes do not seem to really look at her. They seem ... lifeless. On Friday night she decides they need to have a talk.
For the stalwart crew and their slim, quiet commander, that must have been a time of great excitement which followed the return of the sun to the vast whiteness that made up the Ross Ice Field.
In his memoirs, Gilmore recorded how Dean was uncommunicative with the cast or how he read his lines flatly and slowly, mumbling through dialogue or improvising without warning.
Mr Leach is at his best when profiling men such as Edwards, Scudder and others, including solitary, taciturn Herman Strecker and resentful, bilious Augustus Grote.
His tall brothers were a grim, quiet lot, in whom the family tradition of past glories, lost forever, rankled in unspoken hate and crackled out in bitter humor.