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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 226999" data-attributes="member: 22">18 Feb 13: DALLAS: Trial and Error v. 07 Oct 15: EMPIRE: Fires of Heaven v. 16 Mar 18: DYNASTY: Our Turn Now  Several characters pass through the revolving doors of Soap Land’s justice system this week. Like Cecil Colby, Lucious Lyon is now out on bail, but with certain provisions — while Cecil is under house arrest, Lucious is prohibited from setting foot inside the Empire building. However, Cecil is granted special permission to attend Jeff’s wedding to Fallon at the Carrington Manor. Although Bobby Ewing is no longer under arrest for shooting Harris Ryland, his wife Ann is. Drew Ramos is picked up the police and has to be bailed out of jail by his sister, and Vicente Cano is being considered for extradition back to Venezuela. “The man’s a murderer, for Christ’s sake!” protests Christopher when he and his father run into him at Soap Land Court House. “Christopher, you’re so judgemental — very unattractive,” teases Vicente before winking at Bobby and reminding him they still have “unfinished business”.Bogus weddings, specifically those where the bride is lying to the groom, are a specifically C21st soap trope. New DALLAS and DYNASTY each began with a woman (Pamela and Cristal respectively) marrying a man while using a fake name. On last season’s EMPIRE, Anika was planning a lavish wedding as part of a revenge plot against Lucious but got rumbled before the big day. Now it’s Fallon’s turn to walk down the aisle under false pretences. It's all part of Blake's fiendish plan, which he helpfully spells out for us: “Jeff Colby bugged our house. He’s been gathering dirt on us for months now. In light of Cecil’s house arrest, this wedding is the only way that we can get all of the Colbys out of their home so my security team can break in.” “Once they’ve succeeded in eradicating his arsenal, we’ll be informed,” Anders chips in. “And then Fallon will call off the ceremony before vows are exchanged,” Blake concludes. As is often the case on DYNASTY, the farcical elements of this convoluted plot threaten to overwhelm the drama, but there are a few intriguing moments where we glimpse the human beings behind the charade. For example, Michael’s anger feels real when Fallon proposes to him the night before her wedding (for reasons too torturous to explain, she needs to be married for real before she pretend-marries Jeff). “After four years of hiding every part of our relationship the last thing I want is to marry you in secret as part of a plot!” he shouts at her. Likewise, Fallon’s frustration at Blake for ruining her childhood dream also rings true: “This is the day that every little girl dreams of and you’ve turned it into a nightmare!” Blake’s response — “Fallon, you need to separate your feelings from the fiction” — echoes Cliff Barnes’s words to his daughter at the start of this week’s DALLAS. “Three people dead, one of whom I considered as my son, and all because you allowed your heart to dictate your actions.”While Pamela insists that she has learnt her lesson (“There won’t be any more mistakes, any more emotions getting in the way,” she promises her father), Fallon is also intent on fulfilling her mission: “I’ll do whatever it takes to stand by this family.” But it’s Cristal who most impresses during the fake wedding scenario simply because she is completely opposed to it. What’s more, she is determined to help Fallon despite herself (“I still can’t believe you’re making her do this,” she protests to Blake. “He’s not making me do anything,” Fallon insists) and goes so far as to enlist the aid of her racist father-in-law Tom. “La Señorita called me on the telefono,” he explains to Blake and Fallon when he shows up at the wedding uninvited. (Tom is one of two characters to use the ’s’ word pejoratively this week: JR refers to Elena Ramos as “our ambitious little señorita” on DALLAS.) “You are my responsibility like it or not and we are bound together for life,” Cristal tells Fallon. She may not succeed in stopping the ceremony, but she does win Fallon’s grudging respect, to the extent that she ends up walking her down the aisle. As Fallon and Cristal have done the bitchy thing to death by now, this makes a refreshing change.Soap Land’s other bitter female rivalry, between Cookie and Anika on EMPIRE, also takes an intriguing turn this week. Lucious, unaware that Cookie has already booted her out of her new record company, asks Anika to be his spy at Lyon Dynasty. Anika plays along, but then runs back to Cookie who is surprised to see her: “Let me guess — those five job offers never happened? Are your knees sore? Did you run out of lubricant?” In the same way that Cristal allows Fallon’s insults to wash over her (“Mrs Flake Carrington” is this week’s gem), Anika puts up her hands to Cookie in mock surrender. “I get it, I get it — you are the baddest bitch ever. You are badder than all the animals whose prints populate your wardrobe, OK?” She then warns her that Lucious “wants your music, Cookie. He wants everything.” “… Why are you telling me this?” asks Cookie suspiciously. Up to this point, it’s been a little unclear whose side Anika is truly on, but when she delivers her next line, I believe her: “I understand how ugly this sounds, but it is very important for me to hurt Lucious.”To honour the “there won’t be any more emotions” promise she made her father, Pamela breaks off her affair with John Ross. When she tells him it’s “nothing personal — just protecting our business arrangement,” he looks like he might cry. She then uses her pregnancy to get Christopher back on side. When she puts his hand on her stomach so he can feel their babies move, he actually does cry. “I don’t want our kids to be raised with their parents poisoning their minds against each other,” he says. “I’ll agree to mediation.” Cliff congratulates his daughter for “thinking with your head instead of with your heart … This divorce is gonna be good for business. I always knew you could do it!”Over on EMPIRE, Andre makes another plea to be let back into his father’s company, but Lucious turns him down flat: “You’re a brilliant MBA, but I could hire fifty other mugs that can do exactly what you do … You would have to bring me something so unique, something so incredible, something nobody else could bring me.” So Cookie, taking a leaf out of Cliff Barnes’ Guide to Parenting, advises Andre think with his head instead of his heart and use the fact that he is going to be a father to get back in Lucious’s good graces. “He wants his own legacy and nothing says legacy like a grandchild,” she says with incontrovertible Soap Land logic. But unlike Pamela, Andre is reluctant to “use my unborn child as leverage with him or anybody else.” “Sometimes you gotta pull at those heartstrings to get paid,” argues Cookie. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that.” So Andre tells his father the happy news. “An heir? A grandson?” Lucious asks excitedly. He pulls Andre to him, close enough so their foreheads are touching. “I always wanted a grandson,” he whispers. “Congratulations. But I swear to you, you are breaking my heart, the fact that you are using this right now to get what you want from me.” It’s a chilling moment, reminiscent of Cliff and Frank’s “I love you, kill yourself” scene on last week’s DALLAS.The last ever conversation between JR and his oldest enemy occurs this week when Cliff calls “to let you know how nice it was to finally see your son after all these years … He gave me a heads up about you and Frank. Thought you’d like to know who sold you out.” JR’s so angry, it looks like his eyebrows are about to take flight. “You go to hell, Barnes!” he snarls. “I would, but it looks like you’ve cornered that market,” chuckles Cliff, kind of prophetically. Like JR, Lucious also receives news of a son’s betrayal over the phone, when (real-life) DJ Sway calls him during a live radio interview with Hakeem: “So I’m sitting with your son and we’re talking about how he’s following in the same footsteps as Azealia Banks and Lil Wayne by leaking his album.” Lucious is no less furious than JR was but manages to control his reaction slightly better. “You know, I always said that boy got a lot of growing up to do. I guess I was right, huh?” he replies coolly.During the same interview, Hakeem brags about his new proteges, a girl group (“they’re Latina, they’re sexy, they’re cute”) with the brilliant name of Mirage à Trois. (Could this be another DYNASTY homage?) He then rashly accepts an invitation to put them on the air in three days. Cookie worries they won’t be ready and she’ll end up looking bad (“You done put my name on the line!” she scolds her son) so she puts the girls through their paces with military precision. This leads to tantrums, meltdowns and a “Fame costs …” style lecture from Cookie (“Everybody wants to be Beyoncé, but they don’t wanna put in the work!”) before she finally knocks them into shape. Then, on the day of the broadcast, Lucious sweeps into the radio station and informs Cookie and Hakeem that not only has he signed Mirage à Trois’ lead singer (and Hakeem’s latest squeeze) Valentina to an exclusive record deal with Empire, but he has also acquired every black radio station in sight, including the one they’re standing in: “Empire now has a controlling interest in every urban outlet and in every major market in the country … Without radio, your little label dries up and dies.” This move is reminiscent of JR buying up all the oil the Farlows needed to supply their refineries back in the ’81-82 season of DALLAS. But whereas JR’s scheme was a high-risk gamble that jeopardised Ewing Oil, Lucious pulls off his deal without appearing to break a sweat. It’s almost too easy.For the first time in its history, DALLAS does a “one month later” time jump midway through this week’s episode, which I found kind of exciting. It means we don’t have to wait weeks see Ann on trial for attempted murder and it also denotes how long JR has been angry with John Ross for betraying him to Cliff. We see them glowering at each other across the reception area of the Soap Land courthouse as the family arrive for Ann’s trial. This is quickly followed by JR’s final scenes with both his ex-wife and son. In an unintentional, unsentimental way, each scene is an ideal summation of his relationship with both of them. First, an angry Sue Ellen marches up to him. “What the hell is the matter with you, JR?” she barks. “I’m sure you’ll fill me in,” he replies wearily. “Is forgiveness beyond you?” she asks. “John Ross had his reasons for going to Cliff … Fathers are supposed to take the high road when it comes to their sons. Forgive John Ross!” Watching them bicker, they genuinely seem like an old married couple, even if they are divorced. She then stalks off and he is left pondering her words. The scene is even more meaningful in hindsight, of course, when it becomes clear that JR knows he doesn’t have much time left.The setting for JR and John Ross’s last face-to-face conversation, a men’s room at the courthouse, feels both incongruous and somehow perfect. John Ross emerges from a stall to find JR waiting for him, Bum looking on silently. He scowls at his daddy and heads for the basin to wash his hands. “Your mama thinks I should forgive you for consorting with the enemy and since staying on Sue Ellen’s good side is a prudent thing to do at the moment, I’m inclined to oblige,” says JR. “I don’t need your forgiveness,” John Ross snaps, addressing his daddy’s reflection in the mirror rather than looking at him directly. “You don’t need my wrath either — we dinosaurs are known to bite,” JR replies calmly. John Ross is distracted by a text message that makes him smile despite himself — Drew Ramos has been arrested for receiving stolen goods. JR is pleased too. “That puts our ambitious little señorita in moral violation of her contract with your mother, doesn’t it? Wonderful,” he says. John Ross is surprised: “You knew about that, the morals clause?” “You still don’t know who you’re dealing with, do you, son? I can hardly blame you for that, but I forgive you,” JR replies. And that’s their whole relationship in a nutshell — estrangement, resentment, oneupmanship, remorse, forgiveness and a spot of shared deviousness at someone else’s expense — all executed with the lightest of touches.Ann’s trial serves several narrative purposes. On one level, it’s a dramatic way to establish some juicy details of the characters’ history, just as Alexis Carrington’s turn on the witness stand in ‘80s DYNASTY did. For example, we learn that Harris Ryland’s father committed suicide before he was born, that his mother subsequently controlled his life and that Ann is from a poor background and was made to feel a freak as a girl because of her height (an unusual detail in Soap Land where specific references to a female character’s appearance, other than hair colour, are rare. The only exceptions I can recall are Val referring to herself as “flat as a board," Greg mentioning Abby’s propensity for eyeshadow and the occasional short joke at Lucy’s expense). Also, the Ann/Harris/Judith backstory deploys the kind of melodramatic ingredients that made up any number of black-and-white Bette Davis/Joan Crawford movies — a tyrannical husband, a vicious mother-in-law, class snobbery, drug addiction, child abduction, mother/daughter estrangement, a shooting, a trial — to illustrate the very contemporary issue of emotional abuse within a marriage. And Dallas Decoder provides yet another, very interesting take on the trial in its critique of this ep: “Ann isn’t really being tried for shooting Harris; she’s on trial for being an imperfect wife and mother. The show isn’t asking us to forgive Ann as much as it’s asking us to accept her humanity.” <a href="https://dallasdecoder.com/2013/04/11/critique-dallas-episode-22-a-call-to-arms/" target="_blank">https://dallasdecoder.com/2013/04/11/critique-dallas-episode-22-a-call-to-arms/</a>In a sweetly earnest scene of the kind we rarely see in C21st Soap Land, Christopher appeals to his newly acquired stepsister shortly before she is called to the witness stand: “Emma, I know how much you love your father and I know how difficult and painful this all must be for you, but your mother, she could go to jail for twenty years because your father pushed her to do something she shouldn’t have done … If you wanna help make things right for you and your mother, tell the truth, not somebody else’s version of it.” Over on EMPIRE, Jamal also reaches out to a troubled young woman, one from the opposite end of the social spectrum as the cosseted Emma — a streetwise MC called Freda, who just happens to be the daughter of the drug kingpin whose execution Lucious ordered in prison. “She means everything to me musically,” Lucious declares before instructing Jamal to sign her to the company. She is duly summoned to Empire and a contract placed in front of her. “For an unknown artist, this is really big. It’s gonna change your life,” Jamal’s right-hand woman Becky informs her. But just as Christopher’s words to Emma went for nought (“I love my father and I wake up every morning grateful that he rescued me from my mother,” she says on the witness stand), so Becky and Jamal fail to persuade Freda to sign on the dotted line. “You don’t know nothing about my life,” she snaps. “This is bull, man. Lucious Lyon ain’t coming to sign my ass out of no ghetto!” And with that, she and her crew storm out of the Empire boardroom. “You see her evil little ass that just walked up out of here? My dad says musically she’s his everything. The hell’s that supposed to leave me?” Jamal asks angrily. His jealousy at having to share his father’s attention echoes Pamela’s words to John Ross on DALLAS: “My father, he loved Frank and maybe deep down I hated Frank for that.”Back at the Carrington Manor, the wedding between Jeff and Fallon takes place. Jeff, of course, has his own ulterior motives for going through with it, but — long story short — the Carringtons outwit the Colbys this time around. Cecil is so incensed he goes after Blake with a gun — but confuses him with Blake’s father Tom. (I guess all white billionaires look alike.) The shock of having a gun pointed at him causes Tom to have a heart attack. Jeff walks in, sees what’s happened, tells Cecil how much trouble he’s in (“It doesn’t matter if you pulled the trigger or not, if he dies, you could still be charged with murder!”) and, before you can say Tommy Sutter, Vernon Turner, Alejandro Raya, Ted Dinard or Harris Ryland, insists they cover up his involvement in what’s happened ("We need to get outta here right now! Go!"). Tom regains consciousness long enough to gasp a somewhat confusing confession to Fallon: “Cecil was wrong — Blake never cheated on your mother, he was protecting me!”In midst of all this hoo-ha, we’re introduced to Liam Ridley, Sam’s plus-one at the wedding who turns out to be a stranger Fallon paid to marry her after Michael turned her down. Laidback, good-humoured and apparently sane, Liam’s like a character from an entirely different, far less archly ironic show.And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) EMPIRE3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?