10 May 89: DYNASTY: Catch 22 v. 11 May 89: KNOTS LANDING: The Heat of Passion v. 12 May 89: DALLAS: Mission to Moscow v. 12 May 89: FALCON CREST: The Last Laugh
After a season’s worth of accusations and infighting, several of DYNASTY’s warring characters finally reach an understanding — more or less. Take Blake and Alexis, for example. Now that Fallon has been revealed as Grimes’s killer, Blake proposes a truce: “Maybe some good can come out of all this, maybe we can finally put an end to the war between us.” Alexis agrees and they embrace — but there’s still the small matter of “that extraordinary art collection that’s buried underneath this estate.” Alexis goes on to describe it as “community property.” Blake smiles uncertainly — can she really be serious? This is their final interaction of the series and it’s a nicely ambivalent note on which to leave them.
Similarly, Zorelli is taken into Jeff and Dex’s confidence and the three of them pool their knowledge of Captain Handler and the Collection. This leads to Jeff and Zorelli staking out Handler’s apartment like a pair of mismatched cops in a buddy movie. “You know, Zorelli,” says Jeff dryly, observing his new partner’s eating habits, “had I known you were gonna be having an eight-course meal, we’d have taken your car.” “You don’t like me much, do you?” deduces Zorelli.
Conversely on KNOTS, nobody can agree about what the hell’s going on. The episode starts with Karen marching into Abby’s office and declaring with total confidence, but only fifty per cent accuracy, “that you and Greg are involved with Murakame.” When Paige and Abby separately conclude that Ted must have killed Rick Hawkins, they can’t get anyone to take them seriously. “You know how paranoid you sound?” Mack asks his daughter. “Do you know how paranoid you sound?” echoes Ted himself, when Abby tentatively suggests the idea. And in spite of Karen and Paula’s repeated accusations, Mack stubbornly refuses to believe that Murakame is corrupt. “You people — concocting this incredible plot because you hate this company,” he tells them. “Large corporations are not inherently evil.”
In the second half of the episode, however, the discoveries come thick and fast. First, Ted tells Mack about Paige’s affair with Greg, then Paige tells Greg about Ted’s affair with Abby. Meanwhile, Ted realises he’s been tricked by Abby and blabs to a reporter who, in turn, calls Karen for a quote (“I was wondering if you had any comment that one of your former business partners defrauded you?”). The episode then ends as it began, with Karen confronting Abby, only this time in a room full of party guests: “Abby owns Murakame. She has all along. She defrauded me, she defrauded Gary and she is going to jail!”
On DALLAS, it’s all about trust. Can JR trust what Vanessa says about the Russians? Can the Ewings trust what the Russians say about the Europeans? Can Cally trust JR when he tells he is no longer interested in Vanessa? Can Afton trust Cliff when he tells he isn’t only interested in her because of her daughter? Can Sue Ellen believe any man ever again? “I find it hard to trust and believe anymore,” she says, speaking for practically the entire cast. “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
While Blake seems to have finally come to terms with his daughter’s relationship with Zorelli, Mack’s problems regarding his daughter’s relationship with Greg are only just beginning. “Look at ya, Mack — you’re almost jealous!” Paige yells provocatively when she sees how angry he is. “I’m not jealous, I’m ashamed,” he replies. “It’s bad enough you slept with him before he was married, but to have so little pride, Paige, that you let him set you up in this apartment afterwards!” I love the little misunderstandings here: Mack’s assumption that the affair carried on after Greg married Abby and that Paige is now his kept woman. These details don’t make a scrap of difference to the plot, but they add texture, a further layer of miscommunication between father and daughter.
After Cliff tinkled the ivories for Afton two weeks ago and Ted Melcher did the same for Abby last week, Fallon becomes the third surprise pianist of the season. This time, however, the tune she plays is pertinent to the plot. “I dreamt about a music box,” she explains to Zorelli, “one I used to play with when I a kid, and it was playing this lullaby.” The music box in question contains a miniature merry-go-round, just such like the one Fallon had her slow-motion freak-out on back in Season 4 and later had flashbacks about when she turned into Randall Adams, thus trying all her various mental maladies together.
In a creepier version of the recent FALCON CREST scenario which found Richard Channing and his son stuck at the bottom of a well, Fallon’s search for the music box ends with her trapped at the bottom of a disused mine shaft with a spooked Krystina, a rapey Dennis Grimes
and the long-lost Nazi treasure. “I’ve been in prison a long, long time. You know what that does to a guy?” leers Dennis while breathing down her top. Sure we do, Dennis — your daddy-once-removed, Tommy McKay, gave us a pretty good idea when he got out of jail and started rubbing up against every blonde in Texas. Fallon responds by shooting Dennis, much like she did his original daddy, just before the roof literally caves in on them all.
No sooner is the murder of one minor Soap Land character, DYNASTY’s Elsworth Chisolm, resolved (courtesy of a throwaway line from Mystery Limousine Lady regarding Dennis: “That man is a lunatic — he killed that witness!”) than another crops up to take its place: the bespectacled appraiser who faked the deeds to Falcon Crest is shown dead on the floor of his shop. (All in all, it’s not been the healthiest season for forgers: as far as we know, Mrs Bailey is still lying in a catatonic state at Soap Land Memorial Hospital.)
As DYNASTY draws to an end, there’s a sense of closure for some of its characters. Sable is keen to make a fresh start (“I want this baby to come into the world with a clean slate — free of lies, free of vendettas, free of secrets”) while Dex is no longer willing to kowtow to either Alexis or Sable (“Sorry, girls, but I’ve run out of cheeks to turn”). Others, however, seem destined to go on repeating past behaviour: Sammy Jo embarking on yet one more doomed romance, Adam spewing out yet one more vicious one-liner.
Speaking of one-liners, the news of Sable’s pregnancy in the penultimate scene elicits Soap Land’s first ever reference to the menopause. “So, Sable’s going to have a change of life baby,” Alexis smirks. It’s also fun to hear her talk about the Führer. Her delivery of the line, “Does the name Adolf Hitler ring a bell?” to Sable is hard to beat. Bobby Ewing’s corny jokes about Russian tzars and caviar and fur coats seem puny in comparison. But there’s a certain novelty in hearing JR talk about Perestroika, Glasnost and even Communism: “You know how Daddy used to feel about communists — he used to think that they were behind everything that ever went wrong.”
Punch of the Week: it’s close, but Monica socking Adam for engineering her and Jeff’s incest scandal narrowly beats Mack taking a pop at Greg for nailing his daughter. That’s not to overlook the thrilling (and possibly fatal) blow Adam inadvertently delivers to both Dex and Alexis that sends them crashing through the balcony railings of the Carlton (their slow-motion screams are a terrific touch). There’s something pleasingly traditional about this cliffhanger — it feels like a throwback to the great Falling Down epidemic of ’81 when Constance Carlyle, Kristin Shepard, Sid Fairgate and Jason Gioberti all plummeted off either a balcony or a cliff towards death or paralysis or, in Sid’s case, both.
There’s a heatwave on this week’s KNOTS, which builds on the claustrophobic tension of last week’s ‘Double Indemnity’ homage. The scene in Abby’s bedroom where she silently realises Ted has killed Rick explicitly references the 1981 movie ‘Body Heat’ (which, in turn, owed a great deal to ‘Double Indemnity’). ‘Body Heat’ is also set during a heatwave, but it is the sound of wind chimes tinkling outside Abby’s window that directly parallel the wind chimes that play on Kathleen Turner’s balcony throughout the film. While the KNOTS characters swelter and look sultry in the heat, the Ewing boys must battle their way through a blizzard in Moscow. The last time DALLAS saw snow, Lucy was skipping school to fool around with Uncle Ray. The title of Afton’s latest synthesised offering, ‘Through the Eyes of Winter’, is therefore apropos.
Karpov and Alexi, the two Russians Bobby and JR encounter in Moscow, turn out to be quite jolly, but the way their lip movements fail to correspond with any of their dialogue puts one in mind of Hood, the bad guy puppet with the non-specific foreign accent from THUNDERBIRDS. They tell JR and Bobby that OPEC is behind the big deal that has brought both them and West Star to Europe and that it’s all part of a fiendish plot to stockpile the world’s oil and hold it to ransom. “The idea of OPEC dictating to us just makes my skin crawl,” frets JR, his dormant patriotism coming into play. “You gotta say you care for your country.”
Carter McKay is less impressed by the Russians’ revelation. “Whatever America used to be, it isn’t anymore,” he tells the Ewing boys upon their return to Vienna. “In a few years, there may be half a dozen corporations that control the country … It’s already half-owned by the Japanese and the Arabs and the Europeans. It’s all a question of investment and profit.” “I don’t know if it’s patriotism or you can call it Texas pride … but I don’t want any foreigners running my state,” says JR flatly. I guess you could also call it xenophobia, but let’s not get hung up on labels. As McKay says, “Like it or not, JR, there are no more borders, there are no more countries. There are just dollars and yen and pounds and marks … We’re making Japanese cars in America, we’re making American cars in Europe and guess where we’re making European cars? In Asia. There’s just one world, there’s just one country, there’s just one language. That language is power. Do you think that people that own West Star stock care where their dividends come from? They only care that they get them. Their only loyalty is to profit and to the man that brings it to them. That man is going to be me.” This extraordinary speech has no precedent on DALLAS but does recall a scene between Richard Channing and his mother a few weeks ago on FALCON CREST where she accused him of selling his children’s valley out from under them. “I haven’t sold their valley,” he replied. “I’m trying to kick its butt into the twenty-first century!” “There won’t
be a twenty-first century if you have your way!” Angela insisted. “Don’t let heritage and family pride and all that nonsense keep you on the sidelines,” Richard urged. “You do and the parade’s gonna pass you by. Falcon Crest has to change if it’s gonna succeed in the future.” Richard and McKay seem to be saying the same thing: adapt or die. One might easily imagine Jock Ewing and Old Man Southworth having the same argument about drilling for oil on Southfork back in the ‘30s or recall Cecil Colby challenging Denver Carrington’s upper management policy of “no blacks, no Jews and no women” nine years ago: “I’m not a feminist. I'm not a masculinist. I don't care if a person buttons his fly on the right or the left, but if he's smart, if he puts a dollar's profit in my pocket … I'll hire him — or her.” Forget heritage, forget patriotism, forget gender — “it’s all a question of investment and profit.”
“So you just sell your soul and to hell with whatever comes after, huh?” Bobby asks McKay. “Maybe that works for you … but it doesn’t for us.” Pilar Ortega says pretty much the same thing this week when Richard boasts that, with him in charge, “Tuscany’s gonna be one of the most prosperous communities in the state.” “… At what cost, Richard?” she asks, anticipating a time when “the valley … becomes so ugly and polluted we can’t live here anymore … You’ve made a lot of enemies, including your own mother … How much is enough?”
So if Richard Channing and Carter McKay represent the faceless, soulless, corporate future, where does that leave Angela and JR, with their “heritage and family pride and all that nonsense”? In an increasingly globalised business world, is their brand of homegrown, sentimentally justified villainy now obsolete? As Alexi says to the Ewing boys (even as his lips are mouthing something else), “You are very wise in the business of oil, but of international affairs, you know nothing.” It seems very telling that McKay’s “whatever America used to be, it isn’t any more” speech should come just two nights after DYNASTY, a vivid example of something American television used to be but isn’t anymore, ends its run.
This new sense of global corporate anonymity has also permeated KNOTS — Murakame, anyone? While we’ve been “making Japanese cars in America”, Abby’s been giving American companies Japanese-sounding names she found in the phone book. And there’s also the vagueness of the Sumner Group itself — what sort of business is it, exactly? As viewers, we neither know nor really care — any more than West Star’s stockholders “care where their dividends come from. They only care that they get them.” Greg may have inherited the company from his father, but he has no interest in “heritage and family pride and all that nonsense.” There are no childhood reminisces about the first time he walked knee-high with his daddy through the vineyards or the oilfields and vowed that one day he too would blah, blah, blah.
But TV abhors a vacuum and the absence of a traditional Soap Land family running the Sumner Group allows its employees to emerge as a kind of ad hoc TV family. We see them in action this week, throwing Ted a leaving party in his office, and lining up to sing Harvey’s praises to Abby. (According to Mort, “he’s been accepted to Stanford on a full scholarship.” According to Bob, “he’s a great athlete, star shortstop on the company softball team”). As in any Soap Land family, there is plenty of room for sibling rivalry and ambition. “If you can’t see the implications in this letter to Paige Matheson,” Mort tells Bob, “if you can’t project the possibilities of this situation, if the raw potential of this opportunity doesn’t leap out at you, I don’t think you’ll ever be a senior vice president.” “It’s just a letter to Paige,” Bob shrugs.
Ultimately, the Ewing boys back out of the not-so-European-after-all deal, suggesting that when it comes to making money, even JR has a line he will not cross. In Alexis’s final business move on DYNASTY, however, she doesn’t hesitate to use Nazi war crimes to her own advantage. “Drop that lawsuit and I’ll give up all claims to that Nazi treasure,” she tells Sable. “You would use
that against Blake?” Sable asks, appalled. “I’m a survivor and nobody brings me down,” she replies unapologetically.
The final seconds of DYNASTY, following the staircase shoot-out which leaves both Blake and Handler wounded (possibly fatally) are interesting. Zorelli goes to Blake’s side and carefully takes the gun out of his hand without leaving any fingerprints on it. He then passes it, along with his own gun (which might or might not have fired the shot that hit Handler), to his former partner Rudy. Zorelli may no longer be a cop but he clearly hasn’t forgotten police procedure. The same cannot be said for Rudy who simply grabs the guns, instantly putting his own prints all over them. Conversely, the sequence used to depict the discovery of Rick Hawkins’s body on KNOTS is solely about police procedure. It begins with a close-up of a cloth-covered hand unplugging the murder weapon — a hairdryer — before the same cloth is used to retrieve said weapon from the bathtub, while another cop photographs the crime scene, etc.
During their penultimate week in Soap Land, Sue Ellen and Abby each receives a reminder of her chequered past. At Southfork, Clayton’s memory is jogged when he recognises Sue Ellen. “It seems to tie in with Southern Cross,” he puzzles and she is obliged to admit that she and John Ross lived there for a while. Harold Dyer likewise triggers an awkward memory for Abby when he tells her he’s got a job at Knots Landing Motors. “That’s where you got your start — in the parts department, right?” he asks. “Wrong,” she replies coldly, taking none too kindly to this unintentional reference to Sid’s demise. Back on DALLAS, Miss Ellie is much more forthcoming about Jock’s death. “It was as if a hole opened and swallowed me up,” she tells Lucy. “I always thought that somehow I’d be the one that went first. I used to pray for that.” There are further recollections as Ellie tries to nudge Clayton’s memory by leafing through a family photo album. So it is that we catch our first glimpse of Victoria Principal’s actual face since Pam’s car collided with that tanker. There’s also an unintentional allusion to the nondescript outfit Ellie wore at her and Clayton’s wedding. Pointing at a random picture of the two of them, she says, “That’s the day we were married.” It isn’t, but it might as well have been.
KL's Abby and FC’s Richard have been at their most ruthless in recent weeks — they’ve each double-crossed a lover (Abby setting up Ted over Murakame, Richard framing Not-Melissa on a drugs charge), and while she’s been defrauding her partners, he’s been gaslighting his own mother. Both, however, have the rug pulled out from under them by a surprise wedding announcement. Abby invites Harvey from the Sumner Group to Olivia’s eighteenth birthday party in the hopes of pairing them off — only for the guest of honour to announce that she and Harold “were married this morning.” Abby is stunned and for all of her wicked, wicked, wickedness, you can’t help but feel for her. Meanwhile, in the FALCON CREST courtroom, Richard has succeeded in convincing the judge that Angela is “mentally disabled to conduct her affairs.” He has just been granted conservatorship of her affairs when Angela’s lawyer hands the judge a document which causes him to amend his previous ruling: “Due to evidence just presented, conservatorship is awarded to Angela Channing’s husband Frank Agretti.” While Frank and Angela exchange a conspiratorial wink across the courtroom, Richard glowers and the frame freezes.
And this week’s Top 4 are …
1 (1) DYNASTY
2 (2) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) DALLAS
4 (4) FALCON CREST
You have a very strong argument, I don't think this could have worked on THE COLBYS.
She would have to pretend to believe that Miles deserved it all since that legitimacy would have been based on a lie, and her actions based on fear rather than genuine feelings of primacy and superiority, which made her schemes and attacks so believable and justified. And delicious.
And since she was already involved in so much emotional turmoil I think this would have been too much to handle, even for a character like Sable. The fact that Jeff turned out to be Jason's first son was already a huge thing, making him Jason's only son would have undermined that particular angle.
They could have done it of course, but I think it would have put Sable in a different position, probably too much of a victim.
Yes, whereas re-watching Old DALLAS this time around, I've often found my mind flash-forwarding to New DALLAS, with one show informing my appreciation of the other, I didn't do the same thing while watching Sable on THE COLBYS -- there was simply too much going on in the present to think about what we'd find out in the future about the past. One exception: Sable's unphased reaction to learning Miles raped Fallon is even more fascinating in retrospect.
However, since THE COLBYS was over and done I think we can accept both versions - like Richard really was Jacqueline's son for a few years.
Yes, exactly.
But of course, since Jack Coleman left the show, it makes sense that his secretary would end up not being important at all.
