Despite some misfires in every season, the show had the genre nailed down right from the get-go, unlike its earlier Texan predecessor which took a while to let go of the stand-alone episode format, and there was a grand narrative which offered audiences the illusion that they were watching a planned story, one that would take some time to develop, but that there was someone (or many) crafting the overall design.
While the first three seasons were a novelistic family saga of the nighttime soap genre, this season DYNASTY becomes a daytime soap opera with a bigger budget and bigger actors than its daytime counterparts. The difference is huge: in a daytime soap characters come and go (“Tracy,” “Peter de Vilbis,” who even get their own episodes named after them together with “Dex” who at least had staying power), create their complications with their mini-arcs, entangle the main characters, and then they exit and new characters come by but nothing changes much. This was not the case with DYNASTY up until then, or DALLAS for many of its seasons past the first.
After the merger storyline ends early in the season, the show puts Blake and Krystle on one sphere and Alexis on another, one that involves Dex almost 24/7. As I said I liked Dex right away, both the actor and the character, but he needed to be more than Alexis’ sex on a stick (many forum members have given good ideas). The primal character with her vengeance and her rage for all the years of exile is now becoming a high society name, a sexy diva, and occasionally a meddling mother.
After season three where Fallon wanted to prove herself as a businesswoman, overcome her daddy issues and reconcile with Krystle, and finally ended her loveless marriage to Jeff, Fallon resorts to the spoiled brat again who wants the toy she discarded back and beds Jeff. And instead of intense therapy sessions, she goes for a washed-out Eurotrash playboy whose deal with the devil must be over for the portrait must now be ageing along with him. Laughingly, the show wants to use another daytime trope, that of the necessary secret, to create tension in the Jeff-Kirby marriage in earlier episodes: Fallon and Jeff must be in cahoots because they investigate Adam and can’t tell Kirby (did he have her hair bun wiretapped?) Except—that is not what created tension. It is the tiny detail that Jeff cheated on his wife with his ex who only wants him while he has somebody else’s ring on his finger.
How did we get here? while the season started strong with the trial about Danny’s custody, clouds were obvious on the horizon: first, Steven is once again straight, so straight that his storyline is about the burden and conflict of the successful business man whose boss (and also mom) places demands on his time and he neglects his new bride. It is such a joke on Steven as created by Al Corley how this storyline plays out by Jack Coleman’s Steven, that somehow I kept hoping that this would turn out another one of Claudia’s hallucinations—how she imagined being a housewife to Steven as she imagined the doll being Lindsay on the roof. Krystle standing up to Blake during the trial was the last we saw of her spine. After the Claudia magical resolution, Mark, who was getting progressively more decent for many episodes, tries to force himself on her. And then Blake concocts a magical PR position for her that will never be touched by Alexis as CEO of the merged company, supposedly. Dufus that she has become, Krystle buys all of it, proposal and all. And then they announce it to the family at the time: Kirby, Jeff, and the father of their baby, Adam.
Adam is the only one who has a continuing arc, and while in season 3 his story is one of many (the merger/Steven’s disappearance/Mark’s return) affecting core characters, it is now the only core one. Not only that, but while Adam is larger than life before—butting heads with Blake right away, flirting with his sister and brushing it off, poisoning Jeff as an antagonist to Colbyco power and Kirby but also subconsciously to Fallon and Alexis, and conflicted between wanting to have a brother in Steven and being Alexis’ lackey against him—here he is merely a father and a man in love.
I do think the writer inconsistency 