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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 35074" data-attributes="member: 22">24 Sep 86: DYNASTY: The Victory v. 24/25 Sep 86: THE COLBYS: The Gathering Storm/No Exit  v. 25 Sep 86: KNOTS LANDING: Reunion v. 26 Sep 86: DALLAS: Return to Camelot“Do you believe what they say about dreams … that they only last for a split second? They have to last longer than that, don’t you think?” asked KNOTS LANDING’s Val a while ago. On the evidence of this week’s Soap Land, the answer would seem to be yes and no. THE COLBYS' Fallon has only been asleep for a short time when she is awakened from a nightmare by her husband Jeff. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Pam awakens from a bad dream to find her future husband Bobby in the shower. Fallon describes her dream as "too awful, terrible” to talk about. Pam calls hers as “a terrible nightmare”, but is anxious to share it with Bobby: “I dreamed that you were here and you were leaving and Katherine was in her car and she was waiting and when we started to leave she tried to run me down, but you pushed me out of the way and she hit you … and then we took you to the hospital and you died … there was so much more, Bobby, it seemed so real.” “It’s over. None of that happened,” declares Bobby firmly. And so it is we learn a dream can last a lot longer than a split second — it can last thirty-one episodes.Aside from the pop culture thrill of seeing an entire year’s worth of drama calmly swept aside in a few lines of dialogue, there’s also a real sweetness to this opening scene, as Pam (and we) slowly starts to accept that Bobby really is here and they really are back together. This is the happy ever after we were never meant to see.“It was a bad dream, that’s all … You’re safe now,” Jeff tells Fallon after her nightmare. However, it is not always easy to draw a line between one's dreams and one’s waking life. (As Olivia Cunningham informed us on last season’s KNOTS, “Dreams are about anxieties.”) “It’s not yours, it’s not yours,” we heard Fallon murmur in her sleep — a manifestation of her fear that Miles might be the father of her unborn child. And just as we don’t always realise we’re dreaming ("It seemed so real,” Pam insists), it can even sometimes feel like we’re dreaming when we’re awake: “La Mirage, it’s gone … The place is a nightmare,” Blake tells Krystle on DYNASTY.Previous end-of-season fires in Soap Land — the Southfork inferno at the end of DALLAS Season 5, the cabin fire at the end of DYNASTY Season 3 — have been pretty much over as soon as the next season begins. However, the blaze at La Mirage had barely gotten started at the end of last season’s DYNASTY and so is allowed to rage a while longer at the top of this week's opener — and very exciting it is too. As is traditional, it’s mainly the men who do the rescuing: Dex saves Dominique’s daughter Jackie and Amanda is rescued by a man who looks strangely familiar (which is more than can be said for Amanda herself who suddenly has a new face and accent) while Steven rushes around being generally heroic. Sammy Jo bucks the trend by helping boyfriend Clay Fallmont to safety. There’s more fire on THE COLBYS, where Monica is dragged from a burning plane by a kindly ranger, and on DALLAS where Bobby enlists the aid of renowned oil well firefighter Pinky Noonan (a fictional equivalent of the real-life Red Adair) to quell the flames of an explosion caused by an unknown saboteur at the Ewing 12 oilfield. Each of the fires in this week’s Soap Land looks pretty darn good, but DALLAS’s creates the most impressive spectacle.In the second of this week’s double helping of THE COLBYS, Fallon finally lets Jeff in on her pregnancy secret but asks him not to tell Miles. "He doesn’t know he could be the father. I don’t want him to,” she explains. Nevertheless, Jeff can’t mask his antipathy towards his half-brother and there’s an exquisite Soap Land irony in seeing the sibling bond that took an entire season to forge torn apart after just a couple of episodes. Miles may not understand the reason behind Jeff’s sudden hostility, but reacts snidely after Jeff orders him to stay out of his marriage: “What’s the matter, Jeff — the ratings come in and I’m ahead?” There’s a sibling parallel on DALLAS where JR’s yearlong devotion to his dead brother’s memory is immediately jettisoned now Bobby’s back from the dead and re-engaged to Pam. Like Jeff, Bobby warns his brother to stay out of his marriage: “I’m bringing Pam back here to the ranch as my wife and the first time you step out of line with her, JR, Sue Ellen will be a very attractive widow.” JR’s contemptuous response — “You’re a whole lot dumber than I ever thought a brother of mine could be, with the exception of Ray and Gary, of course” — is a classic. God, it's good to see the Ewing boys at each other’s throats again. In fact, resetting the DALLAS clock back one year means that nearly all the show’s relationships are far more adversarial than they were even an episode ago: Ray and Donna go from being the smuggest couple in Soap Land to the most poignant, Cliff and Jamie stop fawning over each other and start sniping at one another amusingly, former allies JR and Jack are suddenly bitter adversaries, and the recently well-behaved Sue Ellen is back to swigging cocktails at lunch and making cynical wisecracks about everyone in sight. In each case, it’s a big dramatic improvement.JR’s crack about Ray and Gary is the only acknowledgement on either Ewing-verse show of the other's existence. Now that DALLAS has wiped out a year but KNOTS hasn’t, the connection between the two shows' timelines is unclear. (As if fearing a similar schism in the DYNASTY-verse, Dominique Devereaux begins severing her ties with THE COLBYS — first breaking her engagement to Garrett, then selling off all her business holdings in California.)Without hitting the reset button as blatantly as DALLAS does, there are some curious alterations to the KNOTS LANDING narrative. Having started back a week earlier than the other soaps with a double bill of episodes, we’re now three instalments into the new season and any direct reference to Empire Valley — the prized piece of land everyone’s been fighting over since the beginning of Season 6 — has been studiously avoided. Nor, if memory serves, will it be spoken of again for several years. Not even Peter Hollister and Jill Bennett, whose family vendetta back-story is entirely based around Empire Valley, have mentioned it. “None of that happened,” Bobby told Pam (and us) clearly at the beginning of DALLAS. There’s no such clarity on KNOTS where it’s unclear if anyone even remembers Empire Valley’s existence anymore (and if they don’t, should we?). With E***** V***** suddenly verboten, that also means no more talk of legacies and birthrights and the sins of the father being visited upon the son. The trade-off for this loss of soapy gravitas is an infusion of playfulness and pace into the characters and storylines. Just two weeks into the season, Gary is suddenly running against Peter Hollister for the state senate and things are as knotty as can be: Abby is married to one candidate while sleeping with the other and Peter’s secret sister is both his opponent’s campaign manager and his mistress. (In fact, the senatorial race has neatly replaced E***** V***** as Jill and Peter’s main source of contention.) Meanwhile, Greg, Abby and even Laura are busy manipulating the election from behind the scenes, and all eyes are on Ben Gibson (last year a mere station manager, now rebranded as a respected political pundit) to see which candidate he'll endorse: his wife’s ex-husband or the brother of the man whose organisation he is under orders to infiltrate.This brings us to a twist almost as outrageous as turning Bobby Ewing’s death into a dream: giving Ben Gibson, one of Soap Land’s most soulful, thoughtful and believable characters, a terrorist back-story straight out of FALCON CREST. It’s a bizarre juxtaposition, but the tension created by placing such a three-dimensional character inside such a two-dimensional plot is precisely why I’ve always found this storyline so fascinating.Throwing off the shackles of a year’s worth of storylines means that DALLAS feels similarly liberated. Running parallel to KNOTS’ senatorial story (the lightness of which is best illustrated by the sequence where Gary gets a fit of the giggles while trying to film a TV ad for his campaign), DALLAS has its own political plot which is similarly fun while also incorporating a wide range of characters. In order to combat OPEC’s stranglehold on the oil industry, Jamie comes up with the bright idea of lobbying Washington to place a tariff on all imported oil. Cliff chauvinistically passes off this idea as his own, winning the approval of the Dallas oil community in the process. JR, in turn, steals Cliff’s thunder by persuading Donna to head up the lobby, a decision which threatens to impact her already troubled marriage to Ray, who has developed a bond with Jenna following her split from Bobby, … and so on.Following its bizarre yet sweet introductory scene, “Return to Camelot” is something of a slow burn ep compared to the other season premieres. Nonetheless, it has a power, a grandeur. The location scenes — a Fort Worth cattle auction, the anti-OPEC meeting at Energy Square — recall past DALLAS glories, while the familiar musical score takes the show back to its roots. Likewise, Bobby and Pam breaking the news of their engagement to their dismayed relatives recalls the aftermath of their elopement at the very beginning of the series. Ironically, while mocking his brother Steven’s idealism on last season’s DYNASTY, Adam Carrington referred to Camelot as a dream. According to the title of this week’s opener, DALLAS regards it as the exact opposite.Yet DALLAS also feels more aware this season —  both of its own history (JR and Cliff’s eye-rolling reactions to Bobby and Pam’s news, while perfectly in character, are laugh-out-loud funny in a way they couldn’t have been in 1978) and of the outside world. Given that “South East Asia” was as specific as the show got during its offshore drilling and counterrevolution storylines of Seasons 2 and 3, JR’s passing wisecrack — “Any chance that Iraq/Iran war’ll spread?” — is surprising, as much for its specificity as its irreverence. Similarly, given how culturally parochial the Ewings have always been, Bobby quoting Woody Allen feels strange — but not strange in the stilted way that Donna and Ellie rearranging the Southfork furniture did last season — just looser and more playful.Another example of that playfulness is the new depiction of Sue Ellen. During what can now be referred to as "the dream season”, she solemnly underwent a lengthy process of recovery in order to get sober and “become my own person.” This culminated in her reconciling with JR once again, but on a far healthier and more mutually respectful basis than ever before. This week’s episode delights in throwing all of that of the window. Whereas JR stopped her in her tracks towards the end of last season with the simple statement, “There's a magic between us, Sue Ellen. I know that and so do you”, here it’s Sue Ellen who tells JR, “There’s something between us that I’ve never found with another man,” before getting him to admit he feels the same way about her. However, this time it is part of a mock seduction scene designed to humiliate JR. “Well, you’re never gonna have me!” she tells him. Forget rehab and AA and becoming your own person, “hating you the way I do’s enough to keep me sober.” Hallelujah.Fallon Colby pulls off a Soap Land first this week, appearing in no less than three flashbacks — one on DYNASTY, two on THE COLBYS — each conjured by a different person. On DYNASTY, Amanda’s familiar looking rescuer turns out to be Michael Culhane, the Carrington chauffeur from Season 1. He helpfully jogs viewers’ memories by flashing back to a scene from his murky past where he attempted to extort money from Fallon over their affair. Over on THE COLBYS, Fallon herself flashes back to the night she was raped by Miles — another reminder to the audience of the pregnancy dilemma she now faces. Later, Miles also has a flashback of himself and Fallon, this time in more romantic circumstances. That it takes place while he is on a date with another woman serves to illustrate that he is still hung up on his ex.Meanwhile, this season’s KNOTS introduces a new narrative convention: an ongoing series of flashbacks that tell the tale of Mack Mackenzie and Anne Matheson’s poor boy/rich girl romance back in 1967. As with DALLAS’s recent prequel “The Early Years", it’s not entirely clear whose memories these flashbacks are based upon. At times, it looks like Mack is thinking back. At others, Paige seems to be recounting the story as it was passed down to her by her late mother. And sometimes the story seems to be running independently of any one individual. Another parallel with “DALLAS — The Early Years”: just as Jock and Digger's friendship was forged while riding the rails back in the thirties so Mack and Anne’s courtship also begins on a train, on which he is a guard and she is a passenger.In the flashback of the scene between Michael and Fallon on DYNASTY, Old Fallon is played by New Fallon. Meanwhile, in the flashback sequences on KNOTS, Anne is played by her (fictional) daughter Paige while the young Greg Sumner is played by his (real life) son. There’s more duplicate casting on DALLAS where Wes Parmalee is played by Ben Stivers.I kind of love it when a brand new character shows up out of nowhere at the beginning of a season trailing an entirely new storyline behind them. On last week’s KNOTS’ opener, Ben received his summons from Jean Hackney, a mysterious redhead from his mysterious past. On this week’s COLBYS, Miles's eye is caught by an equally enigmatic redhead in a hotel bar, Channing Carter. What appears to be a chance encounter turns out to be no such thing when we later see Channing in her hotel room, looking through files she has prepared on each of the Colbys. “Nice to meet you too, Mr Miles Colby,” she says to an empty room. Likewise, Michael Culhane rescuing Amanda from the fire on DYNASTY isn’t as accidental as it first seems. “I got to Blake Carrington finally — through his daughter”, he informs someone over the phone. Whereas Blake isn’t pleased to be reunited with his former chauffeur, aka "the most arrogant opportunist that I'd ever come across,” Greg Sumner’s all smiles when "a guy I went to law school with”, Phil Harbert, shows up unexpectedly at his office at the end of this week’s KNOTS. The big reveal comes in the final shot of the ep when we realise that Greg’s old buddy and Karen’s kidnapper are one and the same.Channing Carter, Jean Hackney, Michael Culhane, Phil Harbert … there is no shortage of new faces with secret agendas. And there are a couple of familiar ones as well. FLAMINGO ROAD’s Claude Weldon shows up on THE COLBYS as powerful publisher Lucas Carter, uncle of the aforementioned Channing. Whatever she’s up to, he’s in on it too. “How you doing with the Colbys, making any progress?” he asks after she returns from a date with Miles. Meanwhile, Ben Stivers, aka Wes Parmalee, has somehow crossed the divide that separates Pam’s dream from the “real” DALLAS world. Again, he takes a job at Southfork. Again, he strikes up a bond with Ray. Again, he appears to have a strange affinity with the ranch. But he too has a secret. In place of the Colby dossiers Channing Carter keeps in her hotel room, he has a snapshot of the young Miss Ellie hidden in the bunkhouse. (In the photo, Miss Ellie is represented by a young Barbara Bel Geddes rather than the version of the character we saw in “The Early Years”.)Last season’s DYNASTY-verse ended with Alexis evicting her ex-husband Blake from his family home and Sable Colby falsely accusing her estranged husband Jason of trying to kill her. In this season’s openers, we get to see the reactions of their respective children. Blonde bimbettes Amanda and Bliss respond almost identically to their mothers’ behaviour. “How could you do something so horrible?” demands Amanda of Alexis. “Did you really expect me to believe that Daddy did these terrible things?” Bliss asks Sable. Both mothers attempt to justify their behaviour, but neither daughter is buying it. "I think your motive is hatred for my father rather than love for me,” Amanda insists. "I don’t think Daddy did anything. I think you’re doing this to hurt him,” accuses Bliss. Alexis and Sable’s golden-haired sons, while no less disapproving of their mothers’ actions, at least try to reason with them. "Mother, I know how much love you’re capable of,” Steven tells Alexis gently, "but somebody has … to get you to understand that what you’re doing is wrong.” “I’m not judging you, Mother,” Miles tells Sable with equal tact, “but you can’t force him [Jason] to stay with you anymore than I could force Fallon to stay with me … You know it can’t work … Let him go.”Miles eventually manages to get through to Sable and midway through the second of this week’s episodes, she withdraws her allegation against Jason — inevitable, perhaps, yet every dramatic beat the story takes along the way feels believable and satisfying. Zach Powers' refusal to back up Sable's story — even after she goes to bed with him — is particularly great: “My adorable Sabella, do you really think I don’t know what this is all about? You’re trying to hold onto Jason, get him to drop the divorce … I’m not going to help you hang onto him.”Alexis, meanwhile, carries on regardless. At the end of this week’s DYNASTY, she takes over as editor of the Denver Mirror. Her dismissive attitude towards the paper’s editorial style recalls Richard Channing’s when he took control of the New Globe on FALCON CREST four years ago. "This paper’s in the nineteenth century. It reads like the Farmer’s Almanac,” Richard complained then. “So dull even fish wouldn't want to be wrapped in it,” is Alexis’s verdict now. Just like Richard, Alexis’s first order of business is to employ sensationalist reportage to wage war against a member of her own family. “Blake Carrington Accused of Arson-Murder in Hotel Fire: 'You Killed My Wife!' Cries Grieving Husband” is her first headline.On three of this week's soaps, there is a situation where a husband is involved in an extra-marital relationship which his wife knows all about. On THE COLBYS and DALLAS, Sable and Sue Ellen do nothing to hide their contempt for their husbands’ mistresses. “I must say, husband-stealing agrees with you, darling. You are a walking ad for adultery,” purrs Sable after seeing her sister Frankie with Jason the morning after their first night back together. “Don’t tell me JR let you out of bed long enough to have lunch?” Sue Ellen asks Mandy, aka “the Winger tramp”, after running into her at a Dallas restaurant. By contrast, Abby Ewing and Jill Bennett conceal their mutual dislike behind their roles of political wife and campaign manager and are all smiles when they meet at a function where Gary is giving a speech. Behind the scenes, Abby covertly hands Peter Hollister inside information on Gary’s campaign and Sue Ellen gives an unnamed man pictures of JR and Mandy with instructions to do … something to them. “I’ve done some strange things, but I’ve never done anything like this,” he replies enigmatically.With Alexis now installed in the Carrington mansion and Jason trying to get Sable out of the Colby one, each has an interesting speech about the memories their respective house, specifically the main bedroom, holds for them. Alexis admits to being overwhelmed to be standing in her former marital bedroom at the mansion. “Do you know, it was just twenty years ago that Blake threw me out of this house, out of this room?” she asks Ben. “I love this house,” Jason tells Frankie. "My mother died in that same room. I held her and said goodbye. I will not have those memories spoiled by lies and deceit."In the original feature-length edit of “Return to Camelot” (which differs from the two-episode version on the DVD), there is a discussion between Sue Ellen, Donna and Miss Ellie in which Sue Ellen declares that “any woman who builds her life around her husband is heading for disaster, and if you want a shining example of that, just look at me.” Or, alternatively, one could look at Sable Colby. Indeed, now that Sue Ellen has been restored to her former dysfunctional glory, it’s interesting how often her situation dovetails with Sable’s. “How can you stand to be with a man who no longer wants you?” Mandy asks her, but it could be just as easily be Frankie asking Sable. “She’s not going to be easy to get off Southfork, JR,” Mandy predicts in the final scene of this week’s DALLAS. Meanwhile, in the final scene of this week's COLBYS, Sable proves impossible to get out of the mansion.And it’s not as if she doesn’t try. “I wouldn’t spend another night under this roof if you begged me!” she snarls at Jason. Having packed her bags, she even manages to descend the staircase without falling down it. “It’s all yours — lock, stock and baccarat,” she tells Frankie as she heads for the front door, but as soon as she gets there, it’s as if a psychic forcefield has descended. She stops, then sways, then collapses into Jason’s arms in a dead faint. Like FALCON CREST’s Julia at the end of “Tony Comes Home” or one of the characters in Luis Buñuel's THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, she literally can't leave the house: she is both physically and psychologically trapped. The frame freezes on Frankie's reaction as Jason carries Sable back upstairs, but the real cliffhanger here is: how many more weeks can THE COLBYS keep stringing out this storyline?If Sue Ellen won’t leave and Sable can’t, others can and do, albeit somewhat reluctantly. As well as Blake and Krystle moving out of the Carrington mansion and into the Carlton Hotel, Val and JR find Laura and Jenna preparing to move off Seaview Circle and Southfork Ranch respectively. (Laura carefully loading an oil painting into the trunk of her car recalls an amusing exchange between Krystle and Alexis where they discuss who owns what in the Carrington mansion. Alexis dismisses “the two oils in the West gallery” as “dreadful calendar art.” “Yes, the Monet and the Turner — pretty expensive calendar art,” counters Krystle.) While the KNOTS gals reflect ruefully at their lives have turned out (“Who would have ever thought things would end up like they did — you know, with you married to Greg and me married to Ben?” sighs Val. “And Gary married to — what’s that broad’s name?” Laura replies), JR is more concerned about the future ("You’re the one Bobby should be marrying,” he tells Jenna. "There’s always hope.”) Whereas Laura’s mood is bittersweet (“I’m really gonna miss this place. A lot of memories here, you know? Of course some of them aren’t so great, are they?”), Jenna is just bitter: “You can’t live on hope, JR. I tried it once. It doesn’t work.”And this week’s Top 4 is … very close — this is the strongest week in ages:1 (-) DALLAS2 (1) THE COLBYS3 (3) DYNASTY4 (-) KNOTS LANDING</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?