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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 42611" data-attributes="member: 22">15 Oct 86: DYNASTY: Focus v. 16 Oct 86: THE COLBYS: The Matchmaker v. 16 Oct 86: KNOTS LANDING: For Appearance's Sake v. 17 Oct 86: DALLAS: Enigma v. 17 Oct 86: FALCON CREST: The Stranger WithinWhile Krystle Carrington is rushed to the hospital at the beginning of this week’s DYNASTY, Karen Mackenzie and Maggie Gioberti are also both recovering from their recent ordeals at the hands of dangerous men. But whereas Maggie is still suffering from nightmares on FALCON CREST — “You’re not eating. You’re hardly sleeping. You’re distracted all the time … Jeff Wainwright’s still holding you hostage,” Chase tells her — Karen puts on a brave face. “I don’t wanna be a victim again. I want to lead a normal life,” she insists.Meanwhile, the men responsible are all still on the loose. While the police helpfully advised Blake to "keep a low profile", Karen’s and Maggie’s houses are put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Despite this, all three assailants succeed in making contact with members of their victims' families. Blake receives a call in Krystle’s hospital room from Phillip Thorpe, the man who drove them both off the road at the end of last week’s episode. "So help me God, I am not through with you yet,” he tells him. These sentiments are echoed by another Phillip — Phil Harbert — in the card accompanying the roses he sends Karen but which are intercepted by Mack: “You won’t get away next time, Mrs MacKenzie.” While Harbert's face is splashed all over the front page of the KNOTS equivalent of the New Globe, his FALCON CREST equivalent, Jeff Wainwright, is still able to move freely through the streets of San Francisco. So it is that he approaches Maggie's unwitting daughter Vicky and, using an assumed name, starts flirting with her.Despite the cops assuring Blake that Phillip Thorpe has “gone back to his hometown somewhere in the east" and Greg’s order to Phil Harbert on last week’s KNOTS to “set up shop back east”, both Phils resurface towards the end of this week’s episodes. While Phillip T surprises Krystle by pulling a gun on her in her hotel suite — “Your husband murdered my wife. Now he’s gonna come here and find his wife dead!” — Phil H shows up in Greg’s office after hours with an ultimatum: “You help me get out of the country … Otherwise, I am gonna have to tell them that you put me up to it, that you hired me [to kidnap Karen].”Both scenes acknowledge the class divide between the rich Soap Land character and the “angry little man” confronting them. “You never knew her,” says Thorpe to Krystle referring to his wife, "and if you had, what would she have meant to you — a Carrington? Who are we to you? A couple of people you couldn’t care less about.” “You marginal people are extremely difficult to deal with,” Greg tells Harbert witheringly before pointing out the difference in their stations: "Who’s gonna believe an ex-con over an ex-senator?”For all that KNOTS is the more liberal-minded soap, DYNASTY and DALLAS have portrayed their “angry little men” this season — Phillip Thorpe and Mark Scotfield — with far more compassion than KNOTS has Phil Harbert. DYNASTY’s Thorpe is a truly tragic figure. As if losing his wife in a fire and having his anguish exploited by Alexis’s newspaper were not enough, he tells Krystle that he is also grieving the death of his twelve-year-old son. During their encounter, Krystle succeeds in making the kind of connection with her captor that Karen Mackenzie, for all her dime-store psychology, spectacularly failed to do with hers over the course of three episodes. Such is Krystle’s empathy that she finally manages to persuade Thorpe to relinquish his gun. Over on DALLAS, no one disputes a minor character’s conclusion that Scotfield — the unemployed roughneck who set fire to the Ewings' oilfield and then hanged himself — was “a poor son of a gun". Bobby even pays for his funeral. Phil Harbert, however, is firmly depicted as a dumb ass, albeit a dangerous one. “You’re more stupid than I thought and I thought you were pretty stupid,” Greg tells him.A week after Cliff Barnes gave Jack Ewing a cheque for $500,000 on DALLAS, Dominique hands one to Blake for $50,000,000 on DYNASTY, which enables him to settle his debt with Alexis. Meanwhile, on THE COLBYS, Sable’s discovery that Jason has set up a $10,000,000 trust fund for Jeff and Fallon’s unborn baby triggers a chain of events culminating in Miles eloping with Channing Carter against her wishes. Back on DALLAS, Cliff’s extravagance last week means that when Jordan Lee asks him for a mere $2,000,000 to shore up their deal, he’s obliged to admit that he’s cash poor. (The scene where he subsequently asks Pam for the money is very funny — “Family? I’m more your own personal banker!”) Over on FALCON CREST, Chase, Richard and Melissa are likewise short of cash which leads to some very soapy business dealings. Chase is in competition with Angela for Melissa's harvest, but the price she is asking is more than he can afford. Meanwhile, Maggie has inherited her sister’s shares in Richard’s racetrack. Chase, who doesn’t approve of Maggie’s friendship with Richard, persuades her to give him power of attorney over the shares which he then sells to Angela (“You wouldn’t be [Richard’s] partner, you’d be his master,” he tells her persuasively). Then he uses the money Angela pays him to beat her to the Agretti harvest. Richard then accuses Maggie of betraying him to Angela while Maggie, in turn, is angry with Chase for manipulating her.As characters gradually begin to look towards the future and away from the traumas of last season’s finale episodes, a newfound optimism begins to creep into some of the soaps. There are parallel scenes on DYNASTY and THE COLBYS where Blake and Jason excitedly show their lady loves, Krystle and Frankie, around an unspoilt parcel of land for which they have big dreams. “I’ve always loved it here,” enthuses Blake. "There’s something about this place. I can feel it in the dirt.” “The sun goes down behind that ridge,” points out Jason. "In the spring, it’s all covered in wildflowers.“ “It’s beautiful out here!” exclaims Krystle. “It’s beautiful,” echoes Frankie. While Blake aims to rebuild his business empire (“This could be the biggest thing we have ever done!”), Jason’s plans are more personal. ("I’ll build you a house where every day can shine on you,” he promises Frankie.) “You seem happy, Blake,” Krystle observes, “happier than I’ve seen you in a long time.” “I have never seen your father so happy,” Maggie tells Vicky on FALCON CREST. Indeed, now that he has recovered from his shooting, Chase seems like a new man. “There’s so many things I haven’t done,” he tells his wife. "I don’t wanna die saying that … I wanna have a party, a big party … make it a celebration to a new beginning for both of us!" Likewise, on DALLAS, JR and Bobby react to the current oil crisis positively by deciding to buy up smaller companies that are going out of business. "Like Daddy used to say, 'When things get tough, buy don’t sell',” quotes JR, once again adhering to the principle laid down by Fallon Carrington in the first season of DYNASTY: “The poor cut back in hard times. That’s why they’re poor. The rich know that’s the time to spend.” To this end, the Ewing boys pay a visit to their friendly banker, Franklin Horner, to request a loan of $500,000,000 — and are mortally offended when he insists on Ewing Oil as collateral.This situation becomes kind of ironic when one recalls that Horner only recently extended JR a line of credit for twice that amount as part of the dream season. In fact, there are a few scenes in this week’s DALLAS that strangely echo moments from Pam’s dream. Jack Ewing uses his windfall from Cliff to purchase a red convertible strongly reminiscent of to the one he bought and then gave away to Jamie (with explosive results) during Season 8. (Chase Gioberti takes a similar looking car for a test drive on this week’s FALCON CREST.) And just as Marinos lawyer Alex Garrett made his onscreen debut via some old news footage JR was watching on his office VCR, mercenary BD Calhoun makes his first appearance in the same way. This time JR is watching a PBS documentary about a rescue mission Calhoun undertook in the Persian Gulf. The narrator introduces BD as “a man one state department spokesman termed a rebel who should be hunted down, a man others have hailed as the spirit of America reborn, the embodiment of the word hero”, while the accompanying footage of burning effigies and bombed-out buildings is grimmer than anything we’re used to seeing in Soap Land — and indicates the darker side of the kind of heroic derring-do Daniel Reece and Daniel Reece embarked on during last season’s DYNASTY. After watching the footage, JR is convinced: “He’s the man I need.”While THE COLBYS' Frankie has a change of heart about living with Sable after she and Jason are married (“I was wrong. I’ve had to cope with her all my life. I can still cope"), JR hasn’t changed his attitude towards the idea of living with Pam after she and Bobby are married. "If there’s anything to give me indigestion, it’s looking across the table at her every morning,” he grumbles. As for Pam herself, her mixed feelings as she prepares to return to Southfork echo those expressed by Laura Avery on KNOTS while she was preparing to leave the cul-de-sac a few weeks ago. “I’m really gonna miss this place,” said Laura then, “a lot of memories here, you know? Of course, some of them aren’t so great, are they?” “I miss Southfork,” says Pam now. "I have some good memories here. Well, not all good memories.” Meanwhile, on DYNASTY, Steven decides to move out of the family mansion and into his own apartment. Alexis, upset as any other Soap Land mother would be when her fully-grown millionaire son attempts to leave home, accuses him of betrayal.This week’s KNOTS and DALLAS both feature unusually sexy scenes which might be described as playfully fetishistic. A pre-coital bedroom scene between Abby and Peter Hollister becomes a succession of close-ups of body parts as they undress: her eyes, his eyes, her mouth, his chest as he unbuttons his shirt, her waist as she undoes her robe, his feet kicking off his shoes, her bare shoulder as she opens her robe, etc. The DALLAS scene is less stylised but possibly even kinkier. For her Valentine Girl audition, Mandy poses in black lingerie and matching headdress as the offscreen photographer urges her to “think about all those men you’re going to turn on, think about last night.” Even though it's already been established that Mandy spent the previous night with JR, we cut to a reveal of JR’s wife watching the photo shoot, which she herself has arranged, and smiling in approval.In keeping with this playful post-Pam’s dream/post-Empire Valley atmosphere, both Ewing-verse shows take a conventional Soap Land scenario and then overturn our expectations by having the characters react flippantly rather than melodramatically to it. Last week, JR learned that he and Mandy were being followed a detective hired by Sue Ellen. The last time he made such a discovery, back in Season 2, all hell broke loose and Sue Ellen ended up physically attacking him in front of the rest of the family. This week, when he angrily confronts her, she is simply amused. “So does this mean that we’re not gonna make love?” she teases. Only when she speaks to the detective on the phone at the end of the scene do we realise that she wanted JR to realise he was being followed. It’s all part of a grand scheme we are not yet privy to.Meanwhile, on KNOTS, Gary enters his marital bedroom to find his wife in bed with his political opponent. Unlike previous characters in his position (e.g., Sue Ellen when she walked in on JR and Holly Harwood or Val when she discovered Gary himself in bed with Abby), he does not flee the scene in distress. Instead, he walks calmly across the room, stepping over Abby and Peter’s discarded clothes as he does so, and picks out a tie from his closet. He then turns to ask Abby and Peter — who remain frozen in mid-coitus — for their opinion on his choice. They don’t reply. After reminding Peter not be late for their televised debate that evening, he retraces his steps and leaves the room. If either the musical score or the acting in the scene was in any way heavy-handed or self-consciously comedic then the humour would be killed stone dead. At is, thanks in large part to Ted Shackelford’s straightforward performance, it works. As with the DALLAS scene, it’s hard to imagine it taking place any earlier in the series. Gary, Sue Ellen — these are battle-scarred characters who have spent several years living inside a soap opera and have now started to learn from the experience.By way of contrast, DYNASTY offers more traditional Soap Land behaviour when Blake walks into what was until recently his marital bedroom to find his ex-wife in his brother’s arms. “My, what a pretty sight,” he says, “the scorpion and the cobra.” However, he is less concerned with Alexis’s relationship with Ben than with the role she has played in sending Mr Thorpe over the edge. “If Krystle doesn’t come through this, I’m going to finish what she stopped me from doing. I am going to kill you!” he vows as the music builds and swirls madly around them and the screen fades to black. It’s a deliciously quintessential Soap Land moment. Nor is Blake the only DYNASTY-verse good guy to harbour murderous thoughts this week. “I’ll love this baby,” Jeff tells Fallon on THE COLBYS, "but when I think that Miles could be the father because he raped you, I could kill him." Back on DALLAS, I’m not sure if JR’s line about Sue Ellen — “I oughta string that woman up by her thumbs!” — constitutes a death threat, but it certainly made me laugh.Fallon’s fear that Miles will find out that he could be the father of her unborn child is central to her current storyline. Jeff comes dangerously close to blurting out this secret after he accuses Miles of raping his wife. “That wasn’t rape, we were married … What happened between Fallon and me is our business,” Miles insists. “Not when she is maybe going to have —“ Jeff begins, only to be interrupted by Fallon. “Jeff, stop!” she orders him furiously. A similar situation arises on FALCON CREST after Maggie admits to her daughter that she too was raped while being held captive by Jeff Wainwright. (This revelation echoes the one Lucy made on DALLAS four years ago about the rape she endured at the hands of her kidnapper. Neither rape was alluded to during the kidnapping itself, only coming to light afterwards.) Vicky implores Maggie to tell Chase about the assault, but Maggie cannot bring herself to shatter his newfound optimism and finds herself planning a party instead. Vicky is incredulous. “A party? To celebrate what — being raped?” she asks. Maggie’s instinctive response to this is to put her hand over her daughter's mouth, almost as if she were trying to push the words back inside it. “Never say that again!” she orders. It’s the most powerful moment of the Soap Land week. Maggie’s distress is compounded at the end of the episode when she discovers that she, just like Fallon (and Lucy Ewing and Kirby Anders before them), is pregnant, possibly as the result of rape.While Jason and Sable’s divorce progresses in a civilised manner on THE COLBYS (“That’s like you — to do the decent thing,” says Sable when he hand delivers her copy of the relevant papers), Gary and Abby have postponed their divorce due to the impending election on KNOTS. Instead, they are once again living under the same roof for the sake of appearances (hence this week’s episode title). Also concerned with appearances is JR on DALLAS who explains to Mandy why, now that Sue Ellen’s stuck a private detective on them, they have to keep a low profile in public. “Sue Ellen knows that I would give her the quickest divorce this side of Juarez … She’s gathering evidence … she’s trying to get custody of my boy.” This puts Mandy in the same position she was with Cliff two seasons ago when all he wanted to do was stay home home and eat take out. “I wanna get out of here for a change!” she complains. “I will not be kept in a prison. I don’t care how much caviar there is.” Just as Cliff’s behaviour drove Mandy into JR’s arms in the first place, JR’s leads her into Sue Ellen’s trap as she begins to seriously entertain the idea of becoming the Valentine Girl.There are parallel discussions involving THE COLBYS’ Bliss and KNOTS LANDING’s Olivia regarding the women they blame for breaking up their parents’ marriages. “I didn’t cause the split between your mother and father. There were problems long before,” Frankie patiently explains to Bliss. “I wish for the sake of your brother and yourself that your mother and I got along, but we don’t and we haven’t for some time,” an equally patient Gary informs Olivia. “Problems are part of a marriage ... If it weren’t for you, they’d still be together, working them out,” snaps Bliss. “If it weren’t for [Jill], you and Mom would still be working things out,” huffs Olivia.Since Empire Valley became a dirty word, John Coblentz has washed off the pan-stick he wore in a failed effort make him look older than Greg Sumner and made his way to DYNASTY where he appears as Gary Tildon, a former business associate of Michael Culhane. Surprised to find Michael, now a millionaire, slumming it as Blake Carrington’s chauffeur, he surmises that Michael is planning to avenge himself for past wrongs by seducing Blake's daughter Amanda. “I’d watch out for that Carrington girl,” he warns. "She’s beautiful, very beautiful, and if you end up really falling in love with her, where’s your revenge?” In other words, beware "The Spy Who Loved Me" syndrome, the latest victim of which is Channing Carter on THE COLBYS. This week, she attempts to defect from her controlling Uncle Lucas’s camp to elope with Miles. "You had a job to do for me and it had to do with Jason Colby, not his son,” Lucas reminds her. “I quit,” she replies. "What’s more, I don’t give a damn about Jason Colby and his business with the Red Chinese … I’ve found someone who loves me, who can take very good care of me.”It is implied that Channing, like Jordan Roberts on FALCON CREST, is also a victim of another kind. “You’ve had everything you could have wanted from me,” Lucas tells her. "I’ve had more than I wanted from you, Uncle Lucas,” she counters bitterly. "Honey, I tried that once a long, long time ago,” he replies.Michael Culhane isn’t the only first season returnee. This week’s FALCON CREST sees John Saxon returns to the role of Tony Cumson almost exactly two years after he was gunned down as Rashid Ahmed on DYNASTY. Like Michael, Tony is now a rich man, having struck it big in the oil business (Rashid would have been proud) before cashing in his assets and narrowly avoiding the crisis currently afflicting the oil communities on DALLAS and DYNASTY. Angela and Lance are no happier to see Tony back than Blake was to see Michael. And just as Blake has tried to keep Michael away from his daughter Amanda, Angela attempts to keep Tony away from her daughter (and Tony’s ex-wife) Julia, each with a similar lack of success (although to say Julia is happy to see Tony wouldn’t be technically correct as FC's recent earthquake has rendered her blind).With La Mirage burnt to the ground and Lotus Point closed for business, there’s a gap in the Soap Land market for a swanky new resort or two. Indeed, no sooner does THE COLBYS’ Zach Powers purchase Dominique’s hotel and rename it in his own honour (“How does the name the Powers Excelsior strike you?” he asks Sable) than FALCON CREST’s Angela acquires the River Oaks Spa and renames it Del Oro (“and which I will try to turn into a first class resort,” she promises). Meanwhile, we get our first proper look at the interior of the Carlton Hotel, DYNASTY's comparatively modest replacement for La Mirage, and very nice it is too.Three major Soap Land characters are currently under suspicion for crimes they didn’t commit. While this week’s DYNASTY ends with the police taking Blake in for questioning over the possibility of arson at La Mirage, KNOTS ends with Mack demanding answers from Greg about his role in Karen’s kidnapping. Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Richard is still trying to prove he didn’t shoot Chase.A week after Vicky Gioberti admitted that her apparently successfully dance career ended in failure, Sable Colby launches a new dance company. Her previously idle daughter Bliss starts working for the company’s public relations department, thus following in the footsteps of the previously idle Amanda on DYNASTY, presently working in PR for her father’s new corporation, Carrington Ventures. Despite their newfound work ethics, both blondes are ineviatbly drawn to unsuitable men they encounter in the workplace — even if neither choice is quite as disastrous as that of Vicky G, currently dating her mother’s rapist. Instead, Amanda and Bliss are attracted to Michael the chauffeur and Nikolai the Russian ballet dancer respectively. While Blake threatens Michael (“If I open a door, any door, and I see you within ten feet of my daughter, I’m gonna see to it that you get booted out of Denver and that you stay out this time"), Nikolai’s choreographer also makes his disapproval clear. Thus far, the DYNASTY scenario is more fun as it contains fewer prolonged ballet sequences and Russian stereotypes.In what I believe is a first, DYNASTY dips into KNOTSian territory by cross-cutting between Krystle and Thorpe's confrontation and Michael driving Blake back to the Carlton Hotel (Blake threatening him over Amanda as they go). KNOTS itself goes one better by cross-cutting between three different conversations: Paige and Michael (Paige worrying that Karen doesn’t like her), Karen and Mack (Karen insisting that she does like Paige) and Val and Lilimae (Lilimae saying that she doesn’t trust Paige: “Call it a premonition — she’s up to something”).While Lilimae is the first character to voice suspicions about Paige, Angela heavily hints to Skylar aka Kit that she has outstayed her welcome at Falcon Crest. Meanwhile, Miss Ellie couldn’t be clearer when she orders Wes aka Jock to "get off my land! … I never wanna see your face again!"Wes’s presence triggers memories of Jock for Ellie just as Paige’s has of Anne for Mack — memories so personal that they cannot be expressed to another character. Instead, they are conveyed to us by extra-diegetic means. Whereas Mack’s state of mind was indicated via flashbacks to his romance with Anne in '67, Ellie’s memories are evoked through a voice over of her reading the letters she wrote Jock in South America in '81.A recurring theme so far this season: an alteration in hairstyle and/or colour to denote a change of identity. First, Phil Harbert cut Karen’s hair while holding her prisoner in order to make her look more like his late wife. (Although this aspect of the plot wasn’t further developed, the hair-cutting was a physical violation, a rape substitute in the same way that Luther Frick forcing Sue Ellen to parade in her bathing suit or Joel Abrigore watching Krystle take a bath was.) Then Kim Novak cut and dyed her brunette hair blonde in order to transform herself into Skylar Kimble. And this week, we see Wes Parmalee doing the same thing in reverse — washing the brown dye out of his hair until it’s completely white, making him appear, in Ray’s words, “fifteen years older”. Given his claim that he is Jock Ewing back from the dead, the fact that this transformation scene takes place in a shower feels significant. Even more intriguingly, Bobby — who has yet to learn of Wes’s declaration — uncharacteristically refers to Jock in the present tense during his argument with Franklin Horner: "Our daddy’s been doing business with this bank since before we were born … Daddy’s always been loyal to this bank, Franklin. Is this what he gets for his loyalty?”Speaking of double identities, FALCON CREST is full of them. Not only has Jeff Wainwright adopted the alias of Larry Miller, but Skylar Kimble is interviewed by a New York cop about the murder of her friend Kit Marlowe in Palm Beach. What we know, but nobody on screen does, is that Skylar is really Kit and Kit is (or was) really Skylar. However, the real twist comes when we learn that the cop questioning Skylar/Kit isn’t really a cop but a reporter hired by Richard to dig for dirt on Peter Stavros.And this week’s Top 5 is …1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) FALCON CREST3 (-) DYNASTY4 (3) KNOTS LANDING5 (-) THE COLBYS</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =