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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 104698" data-attributes="member: 22">07 Oct 87: DYNASTY: The Aftermath v. 08 Oct 87: KNOTS LANDING: Under Pressure v. 09 Oct 87: DALLAS: Gone with the Wind v. 09 Oct 87: FALCON CREST: Obsession, PossessionIt’s Flashback Central on this week’s DYNASTY. With Matthew’s words from last week echoing in his ears (“You can’t survive in Blake Carrington’s world!”), Steven drives dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, Fallon flashes back to her alien encounter yet again as she plucks up courage to recount the experience to Jeff, and Alexis’s preoccupation with the Mystery Wood-Chopping Man manifests itself in her reliving their encounter from the season opener.Whereas Steven becomes withdrawn and depressed after killing Matthew, KNOTS LANDING’s Olivia grows increasingly nervy and erratic in the aftermath of Peter Hollister’s murder, for which everyone — her mother, the viewers and, by the end of this week’s episode, even the police — thinks she is responsible. Their respective parents are concerned, but while Blake and Alexis cordially agree to differ over whether or not Steven requires psychiatric help (“Why don’t I talk to him? Maybe he’ll confide in me,” Alexis suggests), Gary infuriates Abby when he goes against her wishes and hires Olivia a defence attorney. (“Do you want her to look guilty? Then get rid of him. And stop trying to help, Gary. Every time you to try to help, you just make things worse!”) While Steven’s eventual decision not to drive off that cliff (“You’re wrong, Matthew — I can survive!”) and get on with his life effectively draws a line under last season’s DYNASTY cliffhanger, the situation surrounding Peter’s death on KNOTS grows ever more complicated. In the final scene of this week’s episode, Abby finds Mack gently explaining Olivia’s rights to her as she is being arrested and suddenly announces that she killed Peter herself.Fallon’s UFO storyline is one of two current Soap Land scenarios that have often been cited as examples of the genre at its most campily bizarre — the other being Pam’s mummified state on DALLAS. In each case, it’s the husband’s response, Jeff’s on DYNASTY and Bobby’s on DALLAS, that is most revealing. Having inherited the UFO scenario from THE COLBYS, DYNASTY is quick retrieve it from the realms of science fiction and turn it into a more conventionally soapy drama. The burning question is no longer, “Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe?” but, “Will Jeff support Fallon through her latest trauma?” The immediate answer to that would appear to be “No”. “His skin was leathery and there was a scent of cinnamon,” says Fallon, earnestly describing the creature who beckoned her aboard the spaceship. “Cinnamon?” repeats Jeff with a straight face. “Was he baking?”Jeff’s amusingly dismissive attitude to Fallon’s story gives the audience permission (as if we needed it) not to take it seriously either. Conversely, the times Pam’s situation on DALLAS feels most believable is when we see Bobby’s heartbroken reaction to it. It’s when he’s emoting tearfully, either with family members at Southfork or at his wife’s hospital bedside, that I can most strongly believe that the person under all those bandages is the same character Victoria Principal played for the previous nine seasons, and the awfulness of her predicament comes into focus.Although Alexis tracks down Mystery Chopping Man in the final scene of this week’s DYNASTY, we still don’t know his name. The identity of Mystery French Woman, however, is revealed in the second scene of this week’s FALCON CREST. “My name is Nicole Sauguet,” she informs Maggie, adding that she and Chase were lovers during the Vietnam War: “For five years, Chase was like a husband to me. We didn’t stop loving each other just because he came home to you.” As if this were not shocking enough, we also learn that during some offscreen interlude at the very beginning of the series, “Chase came to see me in Paris. He was moving to California and needed money to start a new business. I loaned him thirty-million dollars.” First, the revelation that Richard is Angela’s son, and now this: not only does the marriage of the most wholesome couple in the Tuscany Valley turn out to have been a lie all along, but Chase’s mistress secretly financed FALCON CREST’s first six seasons! It’s exhilarating stuff — as if the rug were being pulled out from under the series itself. Is anything in FC still as we thought it was?Soap Land’s dead are commemorated in interestingly ambivalent ways this week. Nicole tells Maggie that, unless Chase’s loan is repaid within seven days, she will take control of his assets. “All this will be mine,” she declares. “I will tear up the vineyard and I will build a hospital, the Chase Gioberti Children’s Hospital, in remembrance of the man who saved little children. That was the man I loved.” The idea of Chase as two different men, the one Nicole loved and the one Maggie remembers, is echoed on DYNASTY. “The Matthew you knew never left the jungle. Whoever that was wasn’t the man I remembered,” Steven tells Krystle. Meanwhile, Greg takes receipt of Peter’s ashes on KNOTS. “As long as you’re gonna be hanging around the house, you might as well make yourself useful,” he says, mixing some of Peter’s remains in with the contents of a flower pot. “You had an opportunity to make this entire country grow. Now you’ve been relegated to fuel for these flowers, these dumb distractions,” he muses, managing to make this little speech sound both irreverent and wistful. “You never asked me why I let you be my little brother. I guess you must have known I was using you … You were my ticket to the White House. And you were perfectly willing, for a price, to be my stand-in.” Over on DALLAS, JR Ewing has acquired a Peter Hollister of his own. With his business reputation once again in tatters following the dissolution of Ewing Oil, he uses Casey Denault, posing as a young Oklahoman oilman “with a lot of old money newly acquired", as a dummy corporation in human form, secretly fronting for the deals that are going to “buy me back into power.”DYNASTY may have cornered the market in flashbacks this week, but there are other ways for Soap Land to convey its characters’ innermost thoughts. While Mack puzzles over the cheery messages that Paige left on Peter’s answering machine the day he died (“She was furious [with him], but on her phone messages she was friendly”), we see Paige herself thrashing anxiously about in her sleep before waking up in a cold sweat as if she’s just realised … something. Like Fallon following her alien abduction dream-cum-flashback on last week’s DYNASTY, it looks as though Paige just might have gained access to a memory her subconscious had conveniently repressed. Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, Richard suffers a creepy, hall-of-mirrors-style nightmare in which his newly acquired mother Angela snatches his baby son from his crib. Much like Ben Gibson after he awoke from the dream in which Jean Hackney shot Val, Richard’s relief upon waking is eclipsed by his real-life anguish. “She didn’t want me … She’s my mother,” he weeps in Maggie’s arms. There are some brilliant, emotionally raw turns from both Richard and Maggie in this week’s FC as each grapples with their own recent life-changing events.Back on DYNASTY, Blake’s servants politely decline his offer to take time off following the siege. “We belong here, Mr Carrington, with you and the family,” Gerard insists. So much for the Sunday picnics and ice-skating at Christmas he and Jeanette were pining for last week. Over on FC, Angela informs Chao Li that, as he refuses to undergo the life-saving surgery he requires, she’ll have to replace him as her manservant. Miss Ellie gives Clayton a similar ultimatum: either he starts taking care of his health or he leaves Southfork. Their bluffs called, Chao Li and Clayton each give in and agree to follow doctor’s orders.The Ewing-verse’s grumpy old men, Al the messenger guy and Dandy the boozy old wildcatter, have both taken to hanging around the offices of their new pals, Mack and Cliff respectively, and making presumptuous remarks. “Do me a favour — put more coffee in your coffee,” Al tells Peggy. “You better start getting in earlier — it’s the middle of the day already,” Dandy tells Cliff. They each then take a further liberty. On KNOTS, having persuaded Mack to hand over the keys to his office for the night (unlikely much?), Al invites a dozen or so shabbily dressed extras up for a sleepover. On DALLAS, Cliff finds Dandy making business calls from behind Pam’s desk and angrily throws him out. The topic of homelessness arises during both storylines. Mack’s altruistic gesture arises from a concern that Al might be living on the streets (his hurt expression when Peggy asks him, “Don’t you have a home to go to?”) while Cliff goes looking for Dandy following their altercation fearing “he might be asleep on the streets someplace.”“I don’t know what I should be feeling right now,” admits Angela to Father Bob on FALCON CREST. “How can I love the baby I lost and hate the man he’s become?” Later, sparks fly at Chase’s memorial service just as they did at Peter’s on last week’s KNOTS. “You are my mother — you cannot walk away from that!” Richard tells Angela. “As far as I’m concerned, my son died forty-five years ago,” she replies through clenched teeth. Jenna, Ray and Bobby don’t really know what they should be feeling regarding their current baby situation either. When Bobby is finally granted access to his baby son at Ray’s ranch, he is surprised to find Jenna just as hostile towards him as she was before Pam’s accident. She explains that she is making this concession “not for you, [but] for Ray … Do you know how much your brother loves and worries about you? … Do you know what he’s going through just letting you see your son?” Indeed, Ray’s attempt to do right by his brother takes a personal toll. “I thought I could handle it,” he admits to Jenna afterwards. “I saw Bobby here. I felt like an outsider in my own living room.” But it’s too late to turn back now. “Tell Bobby he can’t see his own child again after he’s already seen him? It would kill him!” Ray exclaims. So where does that leave Jenna? “It’s not just you that has to live with it. It’s me too,” she reminds him. I never realised before just how multi-faceted this situation is. Let’s call it the Ben Gibson Factor: everyone involved is trying to behave as selflessly they can (Ray by putting Bobby’s feelings before his own, Jenna by putting Ray’s before hers), but each is too flawed (i.e., human) to be able to deal smoothly with the consequences.Speaking of soap characters behaving suspiciously like actual human beings, I’ve always found the conversation between Bobby and his mother, where he talks about Pam seeing her face in the mirror for the first time since the crash, very interesting. “I’m scared about the way she’s gonna feel,” he says. “You remember how you felt after you had your mastectomy, the problems you and Daddy had because you didn’t think you were the same woman he fell in love with? … What if Pam has those same feelings?” It’s always felt to me as if, by focusing on Pam’s reaction, Bobby is deflecting his concerns about his own response to her burns. Perhaps the most relevant comparison here isn’t between Pam and Miss Ellie, but between Bobby and Clayton when Clayton quietly confided to Ray his fears about seeing Ellie in a state of undress after first learning of her mastectomy. However, such considerations are rendered seemingly moot when Bobby turns at Soap Land Memorial Hospital to find Pam’s bed empty. “I’m sorry, Mr Ewing. She’s — she’s gone.”And this week’s Top 4 are …1 (4) DALLAS2 (2) FALCON CREST3 (1) KNOTS LANDING4 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?