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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 146572" data-attributes="member: 22">01 Mar 89: DYNASTY: House of the Falling Son v. 02 Mar 89: KNOTS LANDING: Double Jeopardy v. 03 Mar 89: DALLAS: The Way We Were v. 03 Mar 88: FALCON CREST: Uneasy Allies     Blake loses his temper with Adam on this week’s DYNASTY, first striking him across the face with the back of his hand, which sends him tumbling down the Carrington staircase, and then banishing him from the mansion: “Go on, get out of here, get out of this house!” Such is his volatile state of mind (“Steven runs off God knows where, Adam drives Krystle’s cousin away and won’t even own up to it and you, you’re cavorting with a cop that’s trying to put me behind bars — you call that a family?!” he barks at his daughter) that it falls to Fallon to play peacekeeper. Over on DALLAS, JR and Bobby are scarcely on speaking terms and so Cally adopts the same role. “I don’t care how many problems we have right now — we are a family and that won’t change,” states Fallon emphatically. As the new addition to the Ewing clan, Cally is on less certain ground, and so turns to her new mother-in-law for some insight into JR and Bobby’s sibling rivalry. However, Miss Ellie proves of little practical use. “They’ve always been opposites, ever since they were children, and it’s just gotten worse since they’ve gotten older,” she shrugs.There is no-one left to keep the peace on FALCON CREST after Richard’s wife and mother both turn against him upon learning that he was behind Troilus all along. Angela disowns him (“I don’t have a son”) while Maggie walks out on him yet again. “You can do whatever you want to, but you’re not going to take the children anywhere,” he tells her. Maggie consults an attorney who offers some familiar sounding counsel: “The days are long past when a woman would automatically get custody of the children in a divorce … then there’s your history of alcohol addiction.” Yep, it’s Sue Ellen and JR fighting over John Ross all over again.As one custody storyline is introduced, another returns to bite Greg Sumner in the ass. Much to everyone’s surprise, his decision to leave Meg with Karen and Mack plays well with the voters and it looks like he is on his way to winning the election — until someone leaks details of his original suit against them to the press and his popularity starts to plummet. That someone turns out to be Paige, motivated partly by love — she wants to prevent Greg moving away to Washington — and partly by revenge: “You don’t need sympathy — you don’t get hurt, remember?” she tells him coldly after he loses.While Paige’s betrayal goes undetected on KNOTS, Pilar’s association with Richard is exposed on FALCON CREST. “He brought her back to the valley to help him buy up all of the land,” Angela tells Lance. Pilar does a good job of talking her way out of trouble. “I swear I didn’t know what Richard was up to,” she insists, “not until a few weeks ago. I tried to stop him … He threatened Lisa.” She then secures her place at the Falcon Crest table by persuading Lance to marry her straightaway, before anyone can talk him out of it. This brings Lance’s wedding tally up to four, making him both Soap Land’s most married male (level with Alexis and Abby) and the character that has tied the knot most frequently on screen.Richard’s justification for “buying up the valley” is interesting. “I’m trying to kick its butt into the twenty-first century!” he tells his mother. “Don’t let heritage and family pride and all that nonsense keep you on the sidelines … Falcon Crest has to change if it’s gonna succeed in the future.” But his words fall on deaf ears. “Angela Channing still has her feet planted firmly in the nineteenth century,” he declares. If Angela isn’t willing to move with the times, neither is DALLAS’s Jordan Lee, who announces his decision to quit the oil business: “Too many damn foreigners in Texas already … It’s enough to make any decent oilman turn over in his grave … I don’t wanna stick around to see the end, Cliff.” Cliff responds with a couple of xenophobic remarks of his own: “I suppose before long they’re gonna ask us to trade in our Stetsons for turbans … We’ll be having roast goat for Thanksgiving instead of turkey before long.” While there have been examples of casual racism throughout this season’s FALCON CREST (directed towards the Hispanic community), these have been shown in a wider context. Crucially, the “damn foreigners” on FC are characters in their own right rather than offscreen bogeymen. In the absence of an opposing point of view, Jordan’s and especially Cliff’s comments leave a somewhat nasty taste. (It’s funny — while I have no problem whatsoever with Cliff blowing up his grandkids on New DALLAS, hearing him deliver a couple of lame racist gags is genuinely dispiriting.)This week’s DYNASTY and KNOTS each feature some demented behaviour from a female character who is having a delayed reaction to a traumatic event. Sable Colby, recovering from the shock of having Fritz Heath pull a gun on her, shows up at Dex’s apartment and delivers a rambling anecdote about the death of her childhood nanny (“We all heard the collision and we ran — the windshield was just like a spider’s web”) before producing Fritz’s gun from her purse and pointing it, finger on the trigger, at her own face. Meanwhile, Val reacts to the news of Jill Bennett’s death by going for a run then collapsing, not in tears but in hysterical laughter. Not even the fact that her ex-husband is in the slammer on a murder charge can kill her vibe. “I can’t believe it’s finally over!” she exclaims happily as she and Karen await news of Gary’s fate.It is very common in British soaps to see characters discussing a storyline they are not directly involved in. They may have no vested interest in the outcome and usually aren’t in full possession of the facts, but that doesn’t stop them speculating and even passing judgement in a gossipy, “over the garden fence” type manner. Such scenes are far more rare in the 80s super soaps but are nonetheless very satisfying. They help widen a show’s canvas and makes the characters seem less compartmentalised. Such a scene takes place on this week’s KNOTS with Greg and Abby discussing Gary’s arrest for Jill’s murder. To begin with, Abby doesn’t think he did it. “Don’t you think it’s a little strange to be caught driving around with a corpse in the trunk of your shiny new jag?” responds Greg drily. “I just can’t imagine him killing anyone,” she replies. “Why do people always say things like that?” he asks. “You take fifty schoolboys who think that killing is immoral — you send them to boot camp, you put a rifle in their hands and you tell them it’s for the greater good and all of a sudden, you have fifty war heroes sitting around telling war stories about the dead they’ve chalked up.”I find myself comparing this observation of Greg’s with Cliff’s jibes about “Stetsons for turbans” and “roast goat for Thanksgiving” on DALLAS. Whereas Cliff’s feeble, knee-jerk wisecracks seem even more depressing in a present-day context than they did in 1989, Greg’s remarks sound positively subversive now that we’re living in an era where the prevailing assumption is that anyone who enlists in the armed services is automatically a hero.As well as being enjoyable in its own right, Greg and Abby’s discussion also serves to advance the Jill murder plot — for it is in this scene that we are first offered an alternative reason as to why her body ended up in Gary’s trunk. “He could have done it to protect Val,” Abby concedes, “or he could have been stupid enough to cover up if Val had done it.“  And so it gradually emerges that, for the first time since the deaths of Carlo Agretti and Ciji Dunne, Soap Land has two concurrent murder mysteries on its hands: Who killed Roger Grimes and Jill Bennett? That said, save for Adam’s not-so-veiled accusation towards his father this week (“Why are you so concerned because some two-bit cop is nosing around your past? The minute the body was mentioned, you looked as guilty as hell!”), all is quiet on the Grimes front at present, what with Zorelli consigned to desk duty and Alexis out of the country for weeks at a time (all the better to tease the storyline out to the end of the season).Theme of the week: Physically estranged exes communicating from a distance. On DYNASTY, Dex is miffed because Alexis left for Paris without even telling him. He still manages to argue with her long distance, however: “I used to have a life of my own before I talked myself into trotting along behind you like some damn little pet lemming … We do have a terrible connection and I’m not just talking about the damn phone line!” Meanwhile on KNOTS, the geographical distance between Val and Gary isn’t as great, but the dramatic stakes are even higher. “The police told me not to talk to you,” he says when she calls him following his release on bail. “They’re gonna be asking me a lot of questions and I don’t wanna have to stand up in court and say we talked the whole thing over.” Hmm, there certainly seems to be some kind of conspiracy between them — but what? We’ve been here, or somewhere very similar, before of course — back when Val believed Gary was taking the rap for Ciji’s murder to protect her. Just as he did then, Mack acts as an unofficial liaison between the authorities and the cul-de-sac gang.Flashbacks are an important component of the Ewingverse’s storytelling this week. Last week’s DALLAS included Soap Land’s first flashback-within-a-flashback and this week’s KNOTS brings us another spin on the convention. After Gary has flashed back to what he claims are his final moments with Jill (including his terrific “I hate everything about you” rant: “I hate the smell of your hair, I can’t stand the sound of your voice, I can’t stand the way you dress, I can’t stand your mannerisms, the way you chew your food …”), we are shown what the police think happened next — a “flash-hypothesis”, if you will: Gary knocking Jill unconscious, then tying her up, forcing pills and booze down her throat, gagging her, wrapping her in a blanket and taking her out to his car. This makes Sue Ellen’s flashback to her drunken confrontation with JR over with Holly Harwood followed by her and Mickey’s car crash look a little vanilla in comparison. After recounting the police version of events to Karen, Mack passes judgement on Gary: “He did it!” After filling Don Lockwood in on the sad fates of Walt Driscoll and Mickey Trotter, Sue Ellen kisses him for the first time. End of both episodes.In fact, there is no shortage of budding romance this week. Like DALLAS, DYNASTY concludes with a newly paired couple embracing. Its freeze frame has Sable pinned against the wall of her hotel room, eyes closed and mouth open in a portrait of ecstasy as Dex buries his face in her décolletage. DALLAS’s final shot is comparatively clunky with Don, wearing what looks like his best Christmas jumper, rolling on top of Sue Ellen, who is dressed as if to go sailing, while they both lie on a prop bed in a fake bedroom on the soundstage of Sue Ellen’s movie studio. Back on DYNASTY, in spite of her surprise assertion that, “I’m not much of a one for one-night stands”, Alexis insists on giving Cray Boyd a Parisian afternoon to remember before sending him off to battle — or at least Natumbe to steal back her tankers. Rather more chastely, Pat Williams confesses to feelings for Gary on KNOTS. “It’s OK — every woman gets a crush on Gary once in her life,” Karen assures her intriguingly. Even more intriguing is the new pairing hinted at following the mayoral election. Greg is watching the TV coverage in his office when he realises his defeat is inevitable. Fortunately, Abby is on hand to provide first class consolation and support — she’s philosophical (“we may have lost the battle but we’ll win the war”), witty and teasingly affectionate. “You’re so understanding you’re making me horny,” Greg tells her. We then cut immediately to Abby standing in Ted Melcher’s office moments later, all of her twinkly good humour suddenly evaporated. “He didn’t wanna win badly enough,” she snaps coldly. ”Maybe he’s losing it, I don’t know, but I do know I didn’t get into this marriage to lose. I’m interested in winning and if Greg doesn’t feel the same way, I’ll find someone who does.” As she strides out of the room, Ted grabs her by the wrist. “You’ve found him,” he assures her. She looks down at him approvingly.Less than a year after KNOTS' excursion to Santa Tecla, clay Colombian objet d’art are a Ewingverse plot point once more as DALLAS’s Tommy McKay starts importing vaguely ethnic-looking sculptures from South America to sell to the arty set of Texas. Inevitably, this turns out to be a front for a drug operation. Tommy’s subsequent meeting with a local dealer, O’Reilly, includes one of DALLAS’s rare gay references. “How’s Gustavo’s wife? Understand she’s been sick,” O’Reilly asks warily as he sounds Tommy out. “He seemed fine when he visited Gustavo in prison, OK?” Tommy replies. “It works for Gustavo, not for me,” chuckles O’Reilly. Gone are the days, it would seem, when’s Soap Land drug dealers (suave Eurotrash like Peter de Vilbis and Naldo Marchetta) conducted their business in swanky hotel rooms. Now, the scuzzier likes of Tommy McKay and Tommy Ortega’s pal Paco on FALCON CREST must convene in public bathrooms.Come to think of it, FC’s Tommy O is kinda the anti-Tommy McKay. Whereas Tommy M declines his father’s offer of a job at West Star, preferring to “be my own man”, Tommy O is busting with pride over his respectable job at the Tuscany Herald, even though his girlfriend resents it. “Ever since you got involved with that Maggie Channing you don’t have time for nobody else,” she complains. And while Tommy M effortlessly suckers his sister Tracey into fronting for his import business, Tommy O stands loyally by his no-account pal Paco, even fighting alongside him in a barroom brawl. This decision has serious consequences when the bad guys later take revenge by running Tommy’s baby brother Gabriel and Ben Agretti off the road and over a hill.And this week’s Top 4 are …1 (1) KNOTS2 (2) DYNASTY3 (-) FALCON CREST4 (3) DALLASYes, I thought/hoped it might win too, but DYNASTY and especially KNOTS were exceptionally good that week.</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?