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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 238874" data-attributes="member: 22">01 Apr 13: DALLAS: Let Me In v. 25 Nov 15: EMPIRE: Sinned Against v. 04 May 18: DYNASTY: Trashy Little TrampPrint media has a revival in this week’s Soap Land as a guilt-ridden Drew Ramos pores over the front page of the Dallas Register (“EXPLOSION DESTROYS EWING RIG”) and DYNASTY opens with a montage of various newspapers being delivered: Blake receives the Global News Flash (“CARRINGTON ATLANTIC IN CRISIS”), Fallon the Downtown Viewer (“BLAKE CARRINGTON HIRES DAUGHTER”) and Michael the Atlanta Mirror News (“CA ADDRESSES CLARK COUNTY SCANDAL”).While Carrington Atlantic is guilty of a cover-up, Ewing Enterprises is the victim of one. Despite Ken Richards telling Sue Ellen last week that TESHA’s initial investigation into the explosion indicated sabotage, the official ruling declares the Ewings guilty of negligence and they are issued a billion-dollar fine. This prompts some first-class swearing from the family — a “This is bullshit!” from John Ross, and one “Shove it up your ass!” each from Bobby and Christopher.While the Ewings urgently need to prove that Cliff was responsible for the explosion, Fallon looks for evidence that Blake was responsible for the Clarke County epidemic. In both cases, the answer may lie with a mentally vulnerable female character. On DALLAS, that means Pamela, who is grief-stricken since losing her babies. “If anyone can get close to Cliff, it's her. She can look at his schedule see where he's been,” Christopher suggests to John Ross. On DYNASTY, it means sanatarium inmate Claudia Blaisdel, widow of Matthew who, Cristal assures Fallon, “knew where all the bodies were buried … He knew everything.”Despite John Ross’s misgivings about approaching Pamela (“How do you think we should pitch this — ’Hey, Pamela, we think your dad's the one who blew up the rig and killed your babies. And by the way, can you check some dates for us?’”), he nonetheless goes to see her and finds her in a bad way (i.e., not wearing any makeup, which is never a healthy sign in Soap Land). While his concern for her is genuine — when he tells her he “ain’t going anywhere till I know that you’re OK,” he means it — it doesn’t prevent him copying her father’s computer files when her back is turned. Fallon is more upfront when she visits Claudia: “Hey, Crazy, remember me? … I’m here for intel on my father.” When Claudia assures her she has access to the relevant information, Fallon makes her a proposition: “You provide me with the location of those files and I will spring you from this joint in twenty-four hours.”Claudia’s situation is oddly similar to that of Amanda Ewing, Jock’s first wife whom the Ewing brothers visited in ’85, also in a mental hospital, hoping to find the evidence that would prove who really owned Ewing Oil. But whereas Bobby had to pretend to be Amanda’s dead husband to get through to her, Claudia’s dead husband turns out not to be dead after all. Look! I can see him talking to Claudia in the final scene! Hi, Matthew!EMPIRE has its own unstable female character, Anika. Like Claudia, she is pregnant and, like Pamela, she is first shown huddled on the floor of her apartment not wearing any makeup. While there’s no direct follow up to the shock ending of last week’s ep where she disguised herself as Laura’s blonde-haired cab driver, we get to see her trying on various psycho-bitch personas for size. Alone in her bedroom, we see her defacing magazine pictures of Hakeem and Laura together. Later, when she’s back to looking a million dollars, she gatecrashes a party of Hakeem’s and plays the conventional Soap Land bitch, calling Laura “some Nuyorican wannabe from the South Bronx” before informing Hakeem that “your Jenny from the Block jump-off lives in a hovel with seven brothers and sisters. You could do so much better, baby.” Later still, she shows up at Hakeem’s apartment and insists they are meant to be together: “Stop fighting it, Hakeem! It is so clear that you love me.” By now, he has completely lost patience with her. “You will never be a Lyon,” he tells her firmly. “You will never be one of us — EVER!” While part of me is kind of disappointed that they’ve turned someone as multi-faceted as Anika into a full-blown nut-job, a bigger part of me just really wants to see What Happens Next.Ken Richards on DALLAS and Laz Delgado on EMPIRE are both hanging out with the wrong crowds. While Ken is being blackmailed over a past indiscretion that sounds remarkably similar to what's currently happening on DYNASTY (“that tech company dumping all those toxic chemicals into that river — you turned a blind eye and no-one was the wiser”) into keeping quiet about TESHA’s conspiracy against the Ewings, Laz is a reluctant part of a scam to rip off Lyon Dynasty. After Lucious exposes Laz, Cookie pulls a gun on him. Meanwhile, Sue Ellen fixes Ken with her angriest glare. Both men plead for understanding. “Sue Ellen, you must know that I’m not jerking your family around,” Ken insists. “Cookie, listen to me. When this started, it was just a gig. I had no idea I was gonna fall in love with you … I was trying to fix this,” pleads Laz. When he finishes speaking, Cookie hands the gun she’s been holding to Lucious and then leaves him to do whatever he’s gonna do to Laz. Back on DALLAS, Sue Ellen, lets Ken have it with both barrels (metaphorically speaking): “What you’re doing now — covering up what really happened on our rig — is wrong. It’s morally and ethically wrong, and you know it. Understand me, Ken — when the Ewings unite, nothing can stop us. So you’re either on our side or you’re among the casualties — after we have taken down everyone who has screwed us.”Following her confrontation with Ken, Sue Ellen sees Emma flirting with an older man at a bar. “I think she was high,” she later tells Ann. Over on EMPIRE, Cookie and Candace see that their sister Carol is most definitely high when they finally track her down to a crack den in Philadelphia. The first thing Carol does when she sees them is puke all over Candace’s fancy shoes — which is exactly what a drunken Jeff Colby did to Sam’s diamanté-encrusted loafers on DYNASTY two weeks ago.Following Alexis’s “You’re a Carrington, Jeff” bombshell last week, Jeff and Monica turn to their maternal grandmother for confirmation. After some reluctance, she admits that their mother, Millie, was indeed the result of her affair with Tom Carrington. By chance, the original ‘80s Millie, aka Dominique Devereaux, gets a shout out on this week’s EMPIRE when Cookie loses patience with Candace’s airs and graces: “Would you stop acting like Diahann Carroll, heffa? You ain't been living in the suburbs with that white man all your life!”While Hakeem is shocked to learn that his mother’s lover was part of the gang who kidnapped him a few weeks ago, Blake takes one look at the young man Alexis introduces as their kidnapped son and rejects him as a fraud. “When Adam was taken from us,” he confides to son-in-law-to-be Sam, “the kidnappers cut off one of his fingers. I told the police but I wanted to save Alexis the horror.” Harris Ryland stops short of dismembering Drew Ramos but nonetheless has him knocked unconscious and dumped in the trunk of a car. He then drives Emma to a parking garage where he turns on the headlights of his SUV to reveal Drew, beaten and bloodied on the ground in front of them. “This is what happens when you go looking for trouble, honey,” he tells her. Despite Blake’s rejection, Adam (or is it Hank?) insists on throwing Steven and Sam a bachelor party. This leads to some tiresome stereotyping as Sam first sulkily assumes the party will be too gay (“I’m not interested in a straight man’s idea of what gay men think is fun — we’ll end up covered in glitter and drag queens”) before complaining that it isn’t gay enough (“I wanted bad and bougie, not sad and douchey,” he says looking around the honky-tonk bar where the party is being held). At this point, I found myself siding with the anonymous homophobic loudmouth (a possible cousin of the anonymous racist drunk at JR’s memorial service) who snarls at Sam, “It ain’t Pride week and your rainbow is showing. You and the gays might wanna take off.” This turns into a crucial plot point as Adam/Hank, coming to Sam’s defence, gets into a brawl with the loudmouth, during which his prosthetic finger goes flying through the air. This is all the proof Blake needs that Hank is Adam after all.A couple of weeks ago, it felt like everyone in Soap Land was calling each other junkyard dogs. Now the insult du jour is "whistle-blower". “I will go into your offices tomorrow and I will tell everybody that you are a whistle-blower and a liar!” Christopher threatens Ken Richards on DALLAS. “He’s a classic whistle-blower. He’s gotta go,” declares Blake, referring to Michael Culhane who has just taken a job at Carrington Atlantic. While Blake fires Michael, Ken Richards is forced to resign from TESHA by Sam McConaughey, the crooked new Governor of Texas. As a parting gesture, Ken sends Sue Ellen evidence of a link between Shaughnessy and Harris Ryland. “The governor is in his pocket,” Bobby realises. “We’re in a stickier web than we realised,” Sue Ellen adds.Everyone is on the move. With the fickleness of Angela Channing, Lucious has decided that Andre, the son he disowned at the start of the season, is his golden boy once again and so buys him and Rhonda a six-bedroom mansion in Long Island as a thank-you for giving him a grandchild: “Because of y’all, the Lyon legacy is gonna live on … My grandson is so fortunate and blessed having you as his father. I’m through testing you, Dre.” Meanwhile, John Ross takes advantage of his recent inheritance from Miss Ellie and moves back to Southfork as its half-owner: “The whole family under the same roof again, just like old times,” he remarks. “Not everyone wants to live under this roof their entire life,” counters Cristal, explaining to Alexis why she bought a condo as a wedding present for Steven and Sam, but it’s a lie — she bought it on the advice of a divorce lawyer who is secretly counselling her on how best to get away from Blake.Like Ewing Enterprises and Carrington Atlantic, Empire is looking suddenly vulnerable. Lucious’s determination to acquire Slipstream (“I want us to be the dominant force in music streaming long before my grandson is potty-trained!”) means he needs to raise some capital. When Andre suggests leveraging some of the company’s other assets, Lucious initially vetoes the idea (“The moment you start selling off pieces of Empire, we’re no longer an empire”). But that’s before Lee Daniels, EMPIRE’s co-creator, makes a cameo appearance as himself directing Jamal’s Pepsi video (which is the equivalent of David Jacobs guesting on DALLAS to direct Sue Ellen’s movie about JR). “You represent the past; this kid [Jamal], he’s the future,” Daniels tells Lucious. This taps into Lucious’s fear of obsolescence and he immediately changes his mind. “Do it,” he instructs Andre, “sell everything, leverage whatever we have to, just get me Swiftstream … Sometimes in order to win the game you gotta be willing to sacrifice.” Meanwhile, the Ewings’ financiers are getting nervous. “If your fine doesn’t go away,” their banker tells them, “your debt-to-asset ratio will turn upside down. That’s a sinking ship we don’t wanna be on board.” Thankfully, the Ewings have the oil from Southfork to fall back on. “We’re sitting on a two billion barrel reserve. As long as we continue to pump oil, we can stay afloat,” states John Ross confidently. But then TESHA buys the land the Ewings have been using to slant drill onto Southfork. On ‘80s DALLAS, the implications of this would have to be spelt out to Sue Ellen, but now she’s the one doing the spelling out: “If we can’t pump oil, we can’t pay the fine or the bank.” “This is what they’ve been building towards, Cliff and Ryland,” Christopher realises. “They wanna see us lose everything!” Meanwhile, Blake chooses to fight Carrington Atlantic’s current crisis through the medium of public relations. That means reinforcing the idea that “CA is a family company with solid family values.” “‘Make Carrington Great Again’ — should we cap off our outfits with a red hat?” retorts Fallon. DYNASTY is big on the contemporary references this week. While Jeff and Monica’s grandmother remarks that “this whole #MeToo thing would have never flown in the ‘70s at Carrington Atlantic,” Fallon even brings herself to say the ’T’ word. “This family has more secrets than a Trump mistress,” she quips.While the Ewings continue to unite against their common enemies, the Carringtons experience an unusually sweet moment of togetherness as an emotional Blake welcomes Adam to the family. It’s the last thing Fallon, who has secretly been plotting her father’s downfall throughout the ep, was expecting. “My dad has tear ducts after all,” she marvels to co-conspirator Michael. “If I go through with this, my relationship with him will never be the same, and my family is in an oddly great place right now and if I move on our plan, that all ends.” But go through with it she does. Calling a secret meeting of the Carrington Atlantic board, she uses the evidence she obtained from Claudia as proof that “my father is no longer fit to run this company … It’s time to vote Blake Carrington out and name me as your new CEO.” (Wait, I thought she already was CEO. Oh no, she's COO. Turns out there’s a difference between the two. I don’t think there were any COOs in ‘80s Soap Land.)John Ross’s return to Southfork and Blake’s acceptance of Adam lead to two similarly reflective scenes. While John Ross enters JR’s bedroom to find Bobby looking a black and white photo of JR with John Ross as a little kid (a very convincing photoshop of Larry Hagman and baby Josh Henderson), Alexis enters the Carrington study to find Blake looking at a black and white photo of himself and Alexis with their newborn son Adam. “Last time you moved in here,” Bobby recalls, turning to his nephew, “I said some pretty harsh things to you. I said family meant nothing to you.” “And I said that it does, we’re just on two different sides of it,” John Ross replies solemnly. “You remember the day Adam was born?” Blake asks Alexis. “Every minute of it,” she replies. “We had everything — a beautiful son, a new family. I was in love with both my boys. When we lost Adam, it ruined our marriage, didn’t it?” “Mama gave you half of Southfork. Welcome home, John Ross,” says Bobby. The scene ends with a handshake and an unspoken agreement between the two men to start over. Alexis has something similar in mind for her and Blake. “I know we can’t go back in time, but maybe, maybe we could go forward?” she suggests. “Please stop,” he says gently. “Things are going well with Cristal again … and I want my marriage to work.” “Sweet, ignorant Blake,” she replies (echoing Sue Ellen’s similarly ironic “Poor, sweet Gary” from a few weeks ago). “Your precious wife Cristal is cheating on you. I saw it with my own eyes. She was with a man at a condo in Brookhaven and it’s time to face the fact that you married a whore with decent cheekbones.”When confronted by Blake, Cristal admits she’s planning to leave him. “You’re not going anywhere,” he informs her. “I stood in front of the press and I told them that you were stepping down to focus on your family. Now how would I look if my wife suddenly filed for a divorce? … If they think I was lying about my wife, they’ll think I was lying about Clarke County … so you are staying in this marriage whether you want to or not.” When she protests, he lists the dirt he has on her: “grand theft, attempted murder and the whole identity fraud thing. Did you think you were the only one planning for this day?” A man blackmailing his wife into staying married to him — this has the same soap noir vibe as some of JR and Sue Ellen’s early scenes.There are two unexpected Soap Land kisses this week. At the end of EMPIRE, Jamal kisses a girl (fictional pop star Skye Summers played by real-life pop star Alicia Keys) and quite likes it. This is slightly reminiscent of the first episode-ending smooch between ‘80s Steven and Claudia, only not quite as exciting. (Also, Steven and Claudia were doing the dishes rather than duetting on a song about racial empowerment.) The other surprise kiss recalls the moment Tommy Sutter planted a smacker on his sister Rebecca’s mouth in the antepenultimate episode of DALLAS’s first season. How our minds reeled in the brief moment before Tommy’s next line of dialogue explained everything: “Man, are you so deep in this lie that you still think we’re brother and sister?” Now, in the penultimate episode of DYNASTY’s first season, our minds reel again when Adam Carrington kisses his mother passionately — but again, the next line explains everything. “Sorry to spoil your little Oedipus complex,” Alexis tells him, “but pretending to be your mother is no aphrodisiac.” Yep, it seems that Hank is a lover/accomplice enlisted by Alexis (just as Tommy was by Pamela Rebecca) to help infiltrate a rich family and pull off an outrageous scam. Whereas Tommy had to sacrifice two years of his short life to the DALLAS scam, Hank has had to chop off one of his fingers for this one. “This damn thing itches,” he complains. “Quit being such a baby,” Alexis replies.While Bobby lets Sue Ellen in on JR’s masterplan (“JR knew that Cliff and Harris would join forces and come after us. That’s why he wanted us to … take them down once and for all. Barnes Global financial history, Ryland’s trucking in Mexico, Christopher’s mother’s whereabouts — somehow it’s all connected”), Alexis drops some hints about her own “billion-dollar plan” to Hank/Adam: “Jeff Colby and his sister are the other shiny facets of our multi-pronged plan” — for Jeff and Monica, as Tom Carrington’s grandchildren, are entitled to a slice of Carrington Atlantic. ”Together, you’ll have close to controlling interest,” Alexis explains to Adam/Hank. “Blake’s not gonna hand over the reigns to CA so I’m gonna have to take them before he drives that company into the ground.” Not if Fallon gets there first.And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (3) DYNASTY2 (1) DALLAS3 (2) EMPIRE</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?