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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 58101" data-attributes="member: 22">12 Nov 86: DYNASTY: Romance v. 13 Nov 86: THE COLBYS: Deceptions v. 13 Nov 86: KNOTS LANDING: Over the Edge v. 14 Nov 86: DALLAS: Bells Are Ringing v. 14 Nov 86: FALCON CREST: Double JeopardyMiles Colby and Peter Hollister each admits to a serious crime this week — rape and attempted murder, respectively. Each confesses to a family member rather than the authorities but receives a very different reaction. “I raped my wife,” Miles tells his mother. “I’m not proud of it, but that’s the truth. Are you satisfied?” “Yes, enormously!” Sable replies, beaming with pride. “I can’t believe I actually thought of killing somebody,” Peter tells his sister, referring to his slow poisoning of fake mom Sylvia. “Thought, Peter? You tried to do it!” exclaims Jill in disgust. “You’re no better than [Paul Galveston] was!”Bearing in mind what we’ll later learn about the circumstances of Miles’s own conception, Sable’s dismissal of her son’s rape of Fallon is fascinating. “Darling, we’re not perfect works of art,” she tells him. “We’re human, You were overwhelmed by your loss, by your love of the girl, out of control. It happens.” Meanwhile on KNOTS, in spite of her anger towards Peter, Jill helps him conceal Sylvia’s sudden disappearance when Ben Gibson comes calling. “You’re innocent, Peter, so act like it,” she tells him. (It later transpires that Sylvia has grown suspicious of Peter and is hiding out at Abby’s ranch.)Sable, of course, has a surprise of her own to deliver: “Miles, the baby, the baby she’s carrying, is yours. Fallon’s baby is yours!” So it is that Miles Colby, Bobby Ewing and Jeff Wainwright each now knows that Fallon, Jenna and Maggie are — or at least might be — pregnant with their respective babies.Miles and Bobby confront their corresponding baby-mothers-to-be, both adopting a similarly indignant tone. “Hiding this from me — how could you?” Miles chides Fallon. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby? … I had a right to know,” demands Bobby of Jenna. Both women make it clear they want nothing to do with these men. “This is Jeff’s baby,” insists Fallon. “I know it’s Jeff’s and nobody else’s opinion counts … Nobody’s!” “As far as I’m concerned, this baby doesn’t have a father,” snaps Jenna. Over on FALCON CREST, Jeff Wainwright’s meeting with Maggie is even less harmonious. After smashing his way into the Gioberti house, killing a cop and knocking Chase unconscious in the process, he attempts to take her hostage again. She pulls a gun on him. “Is this any way to treat the father of your child?” he asks, grabbing her by the hair.Miles and Bobby must also deal with the feelings of the other women in their lives, new bride Channing (who claims to be barren) and bride-to-be Pam (who really is barren). While Miles favours one approach (“This has nothing to do with you, Channing … This is strictly between me and Fallon and Jeff”), Bobby adopts another. “You’re the one I love,” he assures Pam. “I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life without you.” “Pregnant women alone seem to be the fashion these days,” observes Donna on this week’s DALLAS. Alone or not, I can’t remember a time when there were so many expectant mothers in Soap Land. And if Laura Avery gets her way on KNOTS LANDING, there’ll soon be one more. “I really wanna do it all again — teething, diapering, potty training,” she tells Karen. But even in this situation, there’s a snag. Laura admits that she hasn’t “had the courage” to broach the subject with hubby Greg.Amongst all these complicated pregnancy storylines, the subject of abortion inevitably surfaces. “It’s crossed my mind,” Jeff Colby admits to Fallon. She is appalled. “You’re wrong!” she yells. Bobby Ewing, meanwhile, can’t even bring himself to say the word. “You’re not thinking of …?” he asks when Jenna tells him she’s undecided about having the baby. While Jeff apologises profusely (“I don’t wanna hurt your baby,” he tells Fallon, “I wouldn’t do that for anything in the world”), Jenna remains impressively defiant. “It’s none of your damn business what I do,” she tells Bobby.“If they put this in a movie, you wouldn’t believe it,” complains Gary on KNOTS when Peter shows up at Jill’s door in the middle of the night asking for a heart-to-heart talk. “Romance novels have more truth to them than Parmalee’s story, believe me,” echoes JR in DALLAS. But how much truth does Val’s novel about the Ewings contain? A whole lot, according to Gary. “Read it? I lived it!” he laughs when Val asks him to reread it to see there’s anything he’d prefer left out of the TV adaptation.While Val and Gary speculate over who’ll play their younger selves in the movie, Bobby and Pam play their own younger selves when this week’s DALLAS flashes back to their original wedding, which occurred just before the series began. This belongs to the same recent trend for prequel scenes as the 1967 flashbacks in KNOTS and DYNASTY’s reenactment of the night when Blake found Alexis in bed with Roger Grimes. The black and white footage of Bobby and Pam exchanging their vows in 1978 takes place as they are exchanging them again in the present day. Like the non-linear Parmalee flashbacks a few weeks ago, it’s an atypical DALLAS sequence that one cannot imagine occurring any earlier in the series. Similarly, the warning that Cliff amusingly delivers as he’s escorting Pam down the aisle — “You’re walkin’ straight into hell” — seems to belong exclusively to the post-dream era.As DALLAS revisits the origins of Bobby and Pam’s story, Gary and Val also recall their early life together on KNOTS. “The daughter we couldn’t raise, my drinking, the marriage I was too ignorant to appreciate,” recounts Gary. With KNOTS reaching the halfway point of its entire run in two weeks, it’s fitting that Gary should be in such a reflective mood. This week, he looks back, not only on his history with Val, but with JR (“I let my brother mess up my life when I was a kid”), Abby (“Sex was never our problem”) and Olivia, whom he poignantly describes as “the only one I got a chance to raise.” This makes it sound as if he regards her as a sort of Lucy surrogate, which had never really occurred to me before. It also echoes Bobby’s line to Charlie on last week’s DALLAS: “You’re like a daughter to me.”In fact, the theme of raising someone else’s child recurs throughout this week’s Soap Land. Before learning that he could be the father of Fallon’s baby, Miles is surprised when his father suggests that he and Channing consider adopting a baby. “It wouldn’t matter to you that it didn’t have Colby blood?” Miles asks. “It’s what’s in the head and heart that matters, not the blood,” Jason replies. This sentiment is echoed by both Peter Stavros on FALCON CREST (“I treat you as my own because you are my own — blood has nothing to do with it,” he assures the woman he thinks is his stepdaughter Skylar) and Bobby on DALLAS (“Christopher’s our son, no matter how he came to be,” he tells Pam). However, as Skylar aka Kit points out, “Not everybody’s capable of treating another person’s child as lovingly as they treat their own.” Certainly not Sable Colby, judging by her dismayed reaction to the prospect of an adoptive grandchild. “Of course, I’ve got nothing against adoption — under certain circumstances,” she adds hastily.At the end of last week’s DYNASTY, divorcees Alexis and Dex unexpectedly wound up in bed together. Even more unexpectedly, exes Gary and Abby do the same thing on this week’s KNOTS. Whereas Dex insists that he and Alexis now have a future (“We were together again last night and we belong together for thousands more”), Mr and Mrs Ewing mutually agree that their reunion was a one-off. “I sure had a good time last night,” Abby tells Gary. “Yeah … but it’s not enough, not anymore,” he replies. “Who said it was?” she shrugs.As if he has caught the remarrying bug from Lance and Melissa on FALCON CREST and Pam and Bobby on DALLAS, Dex re-proposes to Alexis. “I’ve tried marriage,” she replies, letting him down gently. “It doesn’t seem to be one of my talents … I need my freedom now.” She then adds, as though she’s been casting an envious eye towards her cousin Sable’s dance company on THE COLBYS, that she wants to “endow museums, start a new opera company, become a civic leader.”While Dex urges Alexis to sever all ties with Ben Carrington (“Will you stay out of this?” “Not until I get him out of your life, Alexis!”), Gary presents Jill with a direct ultimatum: “Peter Hollister or me … I love you and I think we could have a hell of a future together … but we’re never gonna find out until you get rid of Peter Hollister.” What neither Dex nor Gary realises, however, is that Alexis and Ben, and Jill and Peter, are each bound together by a secret — that Peter isn’t Greg Sumner’s brother but Jill’s, and that Ben and Alexis are both guilty of criminal conspiracy and perjury.“Even you wouldn’t send your own brother to jail,” says Peter after Jill threatens to expose their deception. “I trust you’re ready to go to jail,” Ben tells Alexis, threatening to expose their deception after she orders him out of her life. “We’d probably get ten years … I love you, but I swear I’ll destroy you before anyone else has you,” he continues as Alexis twitches nervously. It’s the juiciest scene of the episode. (And at the end of this week's KNOTS, it starts to look as though Peter might be capable of similarly drastic action in order to keep Jill quiet.)Blake Carrington and JR Ewing both believe that the only way to regain their former status in the oil business is to stage an overseas coup. For Blake, that means springing Caress Morelle, the only person who can prove Ben and Alexis perjured themselves against him in court, from the Venezuelan prison where she is being held. For JR, it means blowing up the oil fields in Saudi Arabia that produce the cheap crude which is crippling the Texas oil industry. To achieve these ends, they require the services of Dex Dexter and BD Calhoun. “If we could break Caress out of that prison, bring her back here to Denver and prove that Ben kidnapped her, once and for all we’d be rid of Ben,” Blake tells Dex persuasively. “I don’t care about the nuts and bolts, I just want the price of oil to go up,” JR tells BD curtly, handing him a downpayment of a million dollars.Last week, Jason Colby tried to fire Cash Cassidy after he found him kissing his daughter Monica. This week, Blake Carrington fires Michael Culhane when he finds him kissing his daughter Amanda. Blake isn’t the only character to find Michael and Amanda together. Fallon and Jeff cross over from THE COLBYS to DYNASTY, ostensibly in order for Jeff to finalise some pipeline business with Alexis, but really so that Fallon can catch her sister and her old flame in an embrace. “Amanda, he’s bad news!” she declares. There’s more sisterly interference on THE COLBYS when Russian ballerina Anna pleads with Bliss to stop seeing her brother Kolya: “It is very dangerous for him. If Sasha reports him … they will send him back to Russia and he will not be allowed to leave ever again or to dance again … If he is not allowed to dance again, he will do something terrible!” (Anna delivers this speech with so much tremulous emotion, I can’t tell whether she’s the best actor in this week’s Soap Land or the worst.) While Amanda dismisses Fallon’s concerns with a smile, Bliss heeds Anna’s warning and breaks things off with Kolya. Meanwhile on KNOTS, Karen adopts a less direct approach when she spots new houseguest Paige knocking on her son Michael’s bedroom door wearing just a towel — she buys her a welcoming gift of a robe.Last week’s FALCON CREST ended with Vicky Gioberti falling off a cliff during an altercation with Jeff Wainwright. This week’s KNOTS LANDING ends almost identically with Jill Bennett plunging off a similar precipice while arguing with Peter Hollister. There’s a further variation on this scenario at the end of THE COLBYS. As on KNOTS, it’s another sibling showdown, this time between Miles and Jeff on top of the Colby building. Whereas Jill and Peter’s altercation is solely verbal, Jeff and Miles’s soon turns violent and here it’s Miles who topples over the edge. After Jill falls on KNOTS, she manages to grab on to a branch and calls out to Peter for help. Miles similarly grabs onto a lower ledge of the building. Whereas Peter hesitates instead of immediately reaching out to his sister, Jeff instantly grabs onto his brother’s hand and tries to pull him up. While Jill’s branch snaps and she continues to plummet down the hillside, THE COLBYS concludes with a shot of with Miles’s hand slipping dangerously out of Jeff’s. (DYNASTY also ends with a close up of two men’s hands, as Blake and Dex seal their agreement to rescue Caress with a handshake.)Whereas the staging of Jill’s fall on KNOTS feels a little clumsy — you can kind of tell where they’ve used a stuntwoman and her final landing place seems to take place on a studio set rather than a real location —  THE COLBYS’ rooftop scene feels impressively cinematic. The inclusion of rain and mist add to the drama and atmosphere, and the cliffhanging moment itself is a real nail-biter in the classic “Saturday Morning Picture Show” tradition.The climax of this week’s FALCON CREST is even more action-oriented. Following his attack on the Giobertis, Jeff Wainwright is shot in the arm and forced to flee in Chase’s truck pursued by police. A lengthy chase sequence ensues. Then as the truck reaches a bridge, a bomb is detonated by Richard’s fake bride Erin Jones, who mistakenly believes Chase to be the driver. The bridge collapses and the truck goes up in flames. This collision of storylines is a familiar Soap Land convention, but the tone of the sequence itself is more rock video than soap opera. The emphasis is more on the pounding synthesised soundtrack and visual effects — the car chase, the camera lingering on the burning truck in sadistic slow motion as it plunges off the bridge and explodes — than on the characters. It’s not unimpressive; it just feels a bit anonymous. And I’ve kind of lost track as to why Miss Jones would still be trying to kill Chase at this point anyway.As well as these big action sequences, there’s also room for a couple of fun moments in this week’s Soap Land where Jack Ewing and Melissa Agretti angrily push Cliff Barnes and Lance Cumson into swimming pools. (The DALLAS scene is the funnier of the two, due to Cliff being fully dressed at the time.)And this week’s Top 5 are …1 (2) DALLAS2 (1) THE COLBYS3 (4) KNOTS LANDING4 (3) DYNASTY5 (5) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?