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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 38772" data-attributes="member: 22">09 Oct 86: KNOTS LANDING: Slow Burn v. 10 Oct 86: DALLAS: Once and Future King v. 10 Oct 86: FALCON CREST: Living NightmareLa Mirage, Monica Colby’s plane, the Ewing 12 oilfield, Kim Novak’s car — three weeks into the new Soap Land season and all four have gone up in flames. Following the cliffhanger at the end of last week’s KNOTS, it’s now time for Phil Harbert’s house to burn. Karen's trapped inside, but after much gasping, coughing and plucky resourcefulness, she escapes. No sooner is she out of the fire than she's into a prolonged chase sequence which is when the action really takes off. Along the way, several horror/thriller movies are referenced. The ones I caught were THE HITCHER (a relieved Karen flagging down a car only to realise the driver is the man she’s been trying to escape from), DELIVERANCE (Phil stalking Karen through the woods), EXTREMITIES (abused woman overpowering her attacker via the judicious use of domestic cleaning products) and THE SHINING (madman chopping down a door with an axe). In his pursuit of Karen, Phil exhibits a clumsy relentlessness that evokes both Frankenstein’s monster and one of the creatures from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.Following the departure of KNOTS LANDING’s Cathy at the end of last season and the demise of FALCON CREST’s Terry at the start of this one, DALLAS’s Jenna Wade is now the last of the four Soap Land working girls who arrived at the start of the 83/84 season. (The other was DYNASTY’s Tracy Kendall.) After residing at Southfork for the past two years as an honorary Ewing, she’s back to living something approximating an ordinary life after being jilted by Bobby. As if to emphasise her change in circumstances, she and Charlie are renting an old house far more ramshackle than the modern-looking condo she was somehow able to afford as a waitress back in ‘83. This week, a conciliatory Pam drops by to find her cleaning windows in a headscarf (while, admittedly, still looking great). “I just thought one of us should make the first move. We’re bound to run into each other sooner or later,” Pam explains. "Oh, I don’t think we’ll be travelling around the same social circles from now on,” Jenna replies bitterly. Charlie shows up at the end of the scene to scowl at Pam. It's a look every bit as dirty as the one Olivia gives Jill Bennett on this week’s KNOTS. The formerly squeaky-clean Charlie pulls ahead of Olivia in the teen rebel stakes by taking off on the back of a bad boy’s motorbike without her mom’s permission. Whether she’ll turn out to be as big a screw-up as FALCON CREST’s Vicky remains to be seen, however. “I have made such a mess of my life,” Vicky confesses to her family this week. "Two marriages, two divorces, more lies than I can count.” Vicky’s former KL counterpart, Diana Fairgate, who likewise left California for an artistic career in New York, makes an offscreen “reappearance" this week — she's on the other end of the phone with Eric and Michael when Karen (thanks to the timely but discreet intervention of Greg Sumner) finally makes it home from her kidnapping ordeal.Olivia’s hostility towards Jill on KNOTS is prompted by a gossip item, fed to the media by the Sumner/Hollister camp, about Gary’s affair with Jill. Abby orders Peter to kill the story. “What if I don’t?” he asks. “Well, then we’ll have another nasty scandal on our hands, won’t we?” she replies, conjuring up a series of imaginary headlines: "‘Candidate Peter Hollister a Fraud. Galveston Paternity Disproved. Sumner Vows Prosecution’.” Subsequently, when the subject of the affair is raised during a live TV debate between the candidates, Peter insists it should be dropped in favour of issues more relevant to the voters. Greg isn’t happy, but Peter points out the positive impact on his own campaign: “My statement is being applauded everywhere. I bet it winds up helping me a lot more than Ewing.” “But you’re not smart enough to have anticipated that,” counters Greg, guessing correctly that Abby was the one pulling the strings. For her own part, Abby points out the irony at the heart of her husband’s political success: “Nobody expected Gary to make a race out of this campaign, least of all Gary … and now, all of a sudden, just because he doesn’t give a damn whether he wins or not, he seems fresh and honest."Much of the enjoyment in Soap Land's political campaign stories — going all the way back to Cliff Barnes running for “Election” during DALLAS's first season — is the characters’ cynical attitude towards the voting public (that’s us, folks) in terms of how susceptible we are, how easily our opinions can be swayed. But whereas the likes of Abby and Greg manipulating public opinion is nothing new, it’s Sue Ellen Ewing who really surprises when she displays a media savvy previously unsuspected in this week’s DALLAS.“I want a campaign that puts Valentine Lingerie right into the laps of the respectable,” she declares during a meeting with her advertising expert. To that end, she explains, she wants a specific kind of model to front the campaign. It takes the ad guy a little while to grasp the concept of the Valentine Girl, however. “By day, she’s an executive, a modern woman on the go, and by night, men are her slaves,” is his interpretation. Sue Ellen’s eye-rolling response to this is fascinating. After all, the '80s cliché of the sexually voracious ball-busting businesswoman is one that has has been popularised, in large part, by the Soap Land genre itself. DALLAS started the ball rolling with Sally Bullock, Leslie Stewart and Marilee Stone before DYNASTY and KNOTS LANDING took it to greater heights with Alexis Colby and Abby Ewing. These women spawned both imitators — PAPER DOLLS’ Racine and FALCON CREST’s Cassandra Wilder — and wannabes, as everyone from Laura Avery to the recently deceased Claudia Blaisdel Carrington and Terry Hartford Channing demanded their “piece of the pie” as if it were a basic human right. Ironically, it’s through this storyline that Sue Ellen herself will be reinvented as a variation of the exact archetype she so readily dismisses. In spite of her protestations — “Please, spare me ‘Today’s modern woman on the go’!” — a modern woman on the go is precisely what she is about to become.For now, however, she makes it clear that “I am selling sex … The Valentine Girl —  and let’s call her that — the Valentine Girl should exude sex. The suggestion should be that she is in every way available … a sex symbol, a sex object. The look should say, ‘That’s what she’s there for, that’s what she’s good for.’” Placed in a real world context, Sue Ellen’s words — “she is in every way available … a sex object … that’s what she’s there for, that’s what she’s good for” — are breathtakingly misogynistic. Within the world of Soap Land, however, her lack of hypocrisy feels bracing, even exciting. Here is a former beauty queen and trophy wife dismissing the feminist fantasy Soap Land has been paying lip service to (i.e., “today’s modern woman on the go”) in order to expose — and exploit — the sexist reality underneath. “Chauvinistic for the eighties,” nods the PR guy, beginning to get the idea. Indeed, the phrase “chauvinistic for the eighties” might apply to Soap Land’s depiction of women in general. For all Alexis Colby’s rhetoric about being a pioneering female role model in a man’s world, she is fundamentally depicted as an irrational woman scorned. As Sue Ellen says, “some things never change.”I also love Sue Ellen’s “Trash with Class” slogan. To me, that feels like a pretty fair summation of the entire Soap Land genre.This season of DALLAS was always a favourite of mine, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it and I was a little concerned it might not live up to my memories. So far so good, however. This episode is crammed full of scenes that give me the same frisson today as they did when I first saw them. Ray, in particular, has some great moments. He and Bobby haven’t exchanged a harsh word since the aftermath of Jock’s death almost five years earlier and so it's fascinating to see him bristle when his younger brother somewhat tactlessly asks him to “look in on [Jenna], make sure she has whatever she needs … whatever the expense, just let me know.” It’s been an even longer period of time (about eight years) since Ray last recalled his pre-series relationship with Pam, but this week, he does. “You wanna hear something funny?” he asks Jenna wryly during a bittersweet late night conversation. “Way back, once upon a time, Pam was my girl. I lost her to Bobby. I guess all God’s children got something in common, huh?” (There’s a very different, but also satisfying call-back on this week’s FALCON CREST. “You are the bastard son of my late husband,” Angela reminds Richard. "I always wondered how much you had to do with that — driving him into the arms of another woman,” Richard replies. Ouch.) Ray also delivers a wonderfully poetic line to his wife as she heads off to Washington to do battle on behalf of the Texas oil community: “Donna, oil goes up and oil goes down and the world goes round and round, but all that really matters is that little baby that you’re carrying."Then there’s the excellently KNOTSian scene where Mrs Scotfield, the wife of the man who set fire to the Ewing oilfield (played by Karen Carlson, as pregnant here as she was as Roy Champion’s ex-wife on THE YELLOW ROSE), pays a visit to Bobby (and Pam) at Ewing Oil and pleads with him to visit her husband in prison. She explains that he is full of remorse for his actions, that he even surrendered to the police. “He couldn’t bear that he had done that,” she tells them. "That’s why he turned himself in … He was crying. I’d never seen him cry before.” By way of contrast, KNOTS LANDING's equivalent "angry little man”, Phil Harbert, refuses to take responsibility for his crimes, even when caught axe-in-hand by Greg. “It’s not what you think,” he insists. “She’s the one that’s crazy … it wasn’t my fault … it was an accident.” “… You’re the one that’s the accident, Phil,” Greg replies in that laconic way of his. "You burn a house to the ground and you leave your car on the highway in plain sight? … That’s always been your problem, Phil — no master-plan. You were never able to think things through … I guess you’re just an East Coast guy, huh? Lots of cloudy days.” Rather than alert the authorities, he suggests Phil "head back east and set up shop there … because I don’t ever wanna to see you again, Phil. I even don’t wanna hear from you. I don’t even wanna to know you exist."Bobby doesn’t want to see Mark Scotfield either. “It’s a criminal matter now,” he tells Mrs Scotfield coldly. “I guess you haven’t been laid off in quite a while,” she snaps back. "I guess all your bills are just paid ahead.” “Mrs Scotfield, you’re out of line!” scolds Pam, but in fact this episode of DALLAS is littered with casual, unthinking references made by the Ewings to their own wealth that stand in stark contrast to the Scotfields' tale of hardship ("The bank sent us a letter. They were gonna take our mobile home back. We just got it.”) “Money is no object,” Sue Ellen assures the advertising exec regarding the Valentine campaign. “I'll write a cheque for the whole damn thing if I have to,” boasts Bobby at a meeting of the anti-OPEC lobby. JR doesn't bat an eyelid when his ex-CIA contact tells him he’s "gonna have to have a lot of cash ready at a moment’s notice” if he decides to go ahead with his mysterious plans for the Arabs' oil supply. We later see him casually buy himself what Mandy describes as "the most beautiful car I've ever seen.” Meanwhile, Pam consoles herself over her unfortunate encounter with Jenna by also going on a shopping spree and Jack is decidedly unimpressed when Cliff makes him a gift of $50,000 ("Is it a cheque with my name on it supposed to make me turn into jelly? Come on, I’m not that big of hick!”). To quote Kim Novak’s character in another context on this week’s FALCON CREST: “Isn’t it almost immoral to be that rich?” In fact, the only major DALLAS character who doesn't appear to take his wealth for granted is Cliff ("When I was poor, when I was out there grubbing around, I took a lot of guff from a lot of people, but not today — people smile, they tip their hats”) and he is depicted as a penny-pincher instead.Bobby is unusually tough and unyielding in his scene with Mrs Scotfield. This interesting, three-dimensional interpretation of the character is more in keeping with how he is portrayed in New DALLAS than in the original series. Pam’s involvement in the situation puts her in an unusual position too, that of appealing to Bobby's conscience, Karen Mackenzie-style. “You can’t just disregard that woman,” she tells him. "Maybe I’m just being female and sentimental, call it whatever you want — just talk to the man."The leads to a later scene where Bobby has to tell Mrs Scotfield that her husband has committed suicide. This is the third scene as many weeks where a Soap Land character has broken the news of someone’s death. First Adam told Blake about Claudia on DYNASTY and then Richard told Maggie about Terry on FALCON CREST. Remarkably, given that Claudia and Terry were long term characters and Mark Scotfield never even appeared onscreen, the DALLAS scene is by far the more emotionally powerful of the three — a testament to both Karen Carlson’s gutsy performance and the sharpness and clarity of the writing of this ep. I keep coming back to it, but the DALLAS characters seem somehow more “real” this season — but, crucially, not at the expense of their quintessential larger-than-life DALLAS-ness. It’s a tricky balancing act which last year’s “dream season” also attempted, but largely failed, to pull off.Despite knowing it's coming, Wes Parmalee’s line to Miss Ellie at the end of this episode after she discovers Jock’s buckle, knife and letters in his possession still feels jaw-droppingly momentous: “They’re mine, Miss Ellie. Always have been.” While the frame freezes on Ellie’s expression of astonished disbelief at the implication that this stranger is her dead husband come back to life, Kim Novak manages to convince everyone at Falcon Crest that she is Peter’s step-daughter with relative ease (no pun intended). There are echoes of Rita pretending to be Krystle in the Carrington mansion, but while Rita had the advantage of looking exactly like the person she was impersonating, Peter hasn’t seen Skylar since she was a kid anyway. “I’m embarrassed to say I wouldn’t have recognised you,” he admits. And as ditzy as she may appear, Novak aka Kit aka Skylar is resourceful enough to eavesdrop on Peter recounting anecdotes about “her" childhood and then appropriate them as her own.The most tantalising moment of last season’s FALCON CREST finale was Jeff Wainwright taking Greg Reardon and Jordan Roberts hostage. That cliffhanger is resolved this week when we learn, via a brief, one-sided phone call, that Greg and Jordan escaped offscreen and won’t be returning to Falcon Crest — or indeed, FALCON CREST — because they’ve decided to start a new life in Boston. It’s interesting to compare this storyline resolution to that of Pam’s dream on DALLAS. Even though that explanation rendered an entire year’s worth of storylines nonexistent, the principal characters who suddenly evaporated into nothingness had at least each been given a conclusive onscreen ending. While Angelica Nero received her comeuppance at the hands of the police, good guys Mark Graison and deaf kid Tony were each granted a happy-ever-after, as Pam’s husband and Ray and Donna’s son respectively. This begs the philosophical question: is it better to achieve onscreen closure yet, retroactively, never to have existed (like Angelica, Mark and Tony) or to burn brightly and significantly and then just fade away quietly offscreen, as Greg and Jordan have?KNOTS and FALCON CREST end almost identically this week, with a reminder that Karen and Maggie’s respective kidnappers are still at large. While Phil Harbert sits brooding in his car listening to classical music (I think it’s the Winter section of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, but I can’t be sure), Jeff Wainwright alights from a truck at a gas station in the Tuscany Valley. “It’s so good to be home again,” he declares happily.And this week’s Top 3 is …1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) FALCON CREST3 (5) KNOTS LANDING</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?