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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 149845" data-attributes="member: 22">05 Apr 89: DYNASTY: Tale of the Tape v. 06 Apr 89: KNOTS LANDING: Dial M for Modem v. 07 Apr 89: DALLAS: And Away We Go! v. 07 Apr 89: FALCON CREST: Enquiring Minds   Two of Soap Land’s most memorable songbirds make a comeback of sorts this week. On DYNASTY, Dominique Devereaux gets her first mention since leaving two years ago. “Your father had a black sister. I think that’s interesting,” Zorelli remarks to Fallon. It is interesting — in fact, at the time of discovery, it was utterly unique — yet this is the very first time Dominique’s race has been referred to on screen. (Ditto the Williams family and the description of Frank as “a very attractive black man” four weeks ago on KNOTS.)Like Zorelli, Cliff Barnes isn’t afraid to acknowledge the elephant in the room when DALLAS’s own chanteuse, Afton Cooper, returns — as a redhead. “I like the colour of your hair,” he declares fearlessly. Aside from the new ‘do and the synthesised backing track that now accompanies her when she sings (“It takes two-ooo to flyyyy …”), it’s the same old Afton — her unique combination of fluffiness and solemnity still very much intact. As welcome as the returns of Monica and Not-Melissa to DYNASTY and FALCON CREST have been, this is the homecoming of the Soap Land season.DYNASTY has done a great job of keeping us guessing this year. No sooner was the “Who is the dead man in the lake?” mystery resolved than it was replaced by “Who killed Roger Grimes?” And now that the question of the terrible secret Blake has been hiding all these years has been answered, a new puzzle emerges to take its place: “Who blew open the vault and stole the Nazi treasure?” Blake thinks the solution could lie with his ex-wife. “Grimes might have given Alexis something besides that painting,” he speculates, “something that might tell us where the Collection had been moved to … I wonder if there isn’t a way we could find out what else she may have?” Sable volunteers for the job: “I do have a passkey to her suite.” Nor is she the only Soap Land character up for a spot of illegal trespass this week. On KNOTS, Karen Mackenzie and Paula Vertosick sneak onto what used to be Lotus Point in the hope of finding something to “keep this land from being destroyed.”The possible consequences of getting caught are dealt with in opposing ways on DYNASTY and KNOTS. “Mother, sneaking into Alexis’s suite is illegal!” Sable’s daughter Monica points out. “It’s called breaking and entering … Even rich and powerful people get thrown in jail, you know.” “If we get arrested, it’ll be good publicity for our cause,” Paula tells Karen. “Getting arrested for a cause — the possibility of that hasn’t happened since 1972,” Karen replies nostalgically. “If Mack could see me now, he’d say, ‘way to go!’”Karen and Paula get what they came for when they spot surveyors working in an area deemed environmentally off-limits. “They took a lot of pictures and Paula’s been cataloguing all the data on her computer — I think they can stop Murakame from drilling,” Michael later informs his Aunt Abby — not realising, of course, that she is Murakame. Sable’s search of Alexis’s suite, meanwhile, doesn’t yield any concrete discoveries, but she does overhear an urgent phone message from an art expert Alexis has engaged to examine the Frederich Stahl painting. It’s previously been established that the last thing Blake wants is for the existence of this painting to become public knowledge, so we know that this is not good news.Fortunately for Blake, all Sable needs to do to erase the message is press a couple of buttons on Alexis’s answering machine. It’s not so simple for Abby when it comes to eliminating Paula’s computerised evidence against Murakame, however. First, she must learn all about modems and viruses and “booting up”. Luckily, the Sumner Group’s computer whizz (they aren’t yet known as geeks) is only too happy to educate on her on such matters. (There was a similar situation during DALLAS’s Dream Season where JR likewise feigned interest in computer technology in order to gain access to Dimitri Marinos’s medical records.)While Sable erases messages and Abby wipes data, Lance Cumson favours a more traditional method of destroying evidence — in his case, the real deed proving that Falcon Crest genuinely belongs to the Agretti family. He burns it.At present, Lance is one of several characters who is concealing evidence of one wrongdoing while simultaneously investigating another. “Something is wrong!” he insists regarding his grandmother’s trip to Greece — but no-one will take him seriously (including a senatorial aide played by a youthful-looking Walter White from BREAKING BAD). Likewise on DYNASTY, while a federal marshal bursts into Alexis’s office with a warrant in order, as Sable puts it, “to find out some fascinatingly unpleasant things about Colby Co,” Alexis herself puts pressure on the cops to reopen the Roger Grimes murder investigation: “Listen to me, Captain. You keep on sitting on this case and I’m going to blast you right over the front page of my newspaper!” And while Zorelli bugs Dominique’s relatives, someone else is bugging Zorelli. Back on FC, Nick Agretti is trying to get to the bottom of what Lance is covering up (i.e., who really owns Falcon Crest) whilst also avoiding some tricky questions regarding Anna’s death. “There seems to be a question about the medication I prescribed for Miss Cellini,” her doctor tells him. “According to the law, that missing morphine has to be accounted for.”KNOTS LANDING’s Paige is likewise playing detective (last week, she was Melanie Griffiths in Working Girl; this week, she’s Nancy Drew), posing as a casting director (just as her father did earlier in the season) in order to track down the name of the actor masquerading as a Murakame executive. (Another Ewingverse blonde can also be seen sifting through actors’ headshots this week — DALLAS’s Lucy flies to Malibu to give her input into the casting of ex-husband Mitch in Sue Ellen’s movie.)As if all these unsolved mysteries weren’t enough, more arise throughout the course of this week’s eps: Who is the unknown person lurking outside Elsworth Chisolm’s apartment on DYNASTY? Is it the same unknown person that later pushes him to his death? Who is Gary’s mystery caller known only as 'Sally’s Friend' on KNOTS? And is theirs simply another mistaken identity “meet-cute” like Sammy Jo and Tanner’s on DYNASTY, or is something more sinister afoot? (The way the camera avoids showing her face suggests the latter.) And why does Richard look so pleased at the end of FALCON CREST as he observes Not-Melissa helping Angela escape from her penthouse prison? “Right on schedule and all according to plan,” he smiles enigmatically.In lieu of any such mystery on DALLAS, there’s a fake murder. JR and Cally take Gustav Hellstrom out for “an old-fashioned evening of Dallas nightlife.” One thing leads to another and Gustav ends up “killing” a jealous husband (played by the same stunt guy who’s appeared in virtually every barroom brawl on DALLAS since the series began). JR offers to intercede with the cops on Gustav’s behalf in return for “the name of the man behind the European consortium, and when and where the meeting is gonna be held … and the top dollar you’re willing to pay for the oil.” So it is that Gustav becomes the Scandinavian version of Walt Driscoll, but hey, call it Soap Karma for his other self, Hamilton Stone, betraying Alexis to Sable over those tankers earlier in the year.“Because of the way you are, everybody you know has to be related until life with you is like living in a soap opera,” Mack tells Karen after she decides to set Paula up on a date with Gary. If you think that’s meta, it’s nothing compared to what’s going on on DALLAS as Sue Ellen’s lover Don attempts to turn her soap opera reality into cinematic fiction. Overhearing him read a scene from the movie with an actress auditioning to play her, she mistakes their scripted exchange for soap opera reality and assumes he’s cheating on her. Just to add an extra layer of artificial reality, portraits of real-life movie stars gaze down at Sue Ellen as she eavesdrops — among them Joan Crawford, one of the prototypes for long-suffering soap heroines like ... Sue Ellen herself. And while we’re on the subject of classic Hollywood, is it mere coincidence, as the Murakame storyline grows ever murkier and Abby ever more villainous, that she should suddenly adopt the peekaboo hairstyle famously associated with film noir femme-fatale Veronica Lake?Each of the soaps sounds a note of finality this week. Blake receives his final divorce decree from Krystle. Val announces her decision to give up writing on KNOTS. Jordan Lee, the longest-serving member of the oil cartel on DALLAS, sells out to West Star. And on FALCON CREST, Tommy Ortega tells his girlfriend, Kelly, he doesn’t love her anymore. This last one shouldn’t matter as much as the other three — Tommy and Kelly only arrived in Soap Land this season and aren’t even in the opening credits — and yet somehow it does. The subsequent scene where Kelly approaches Maggie outside her office echoes previous encounters where a heartbroken poor girl confronts her uncomfortable rich rival: Claudia and Krystle at the art gallery in DYNASTY Season 1; Lucy and Betty the waitress on the cardboard patio in DALLAS Season 7. “It’s so unfair,” Kelly tells Maggie. “You have everything. If you let him go, he’ll come back to me.”There are other references to past storylines throughout the week: Zorelli’s visit to Dominique’s uncle, Cliff’s reply when Afton asks how he ended up a partner in Ewing Oil (“Pam — with her gone, my whole life changed”), Angela warning Not-Melissa against Richard (“He killed his step-father, the man who raised him from infancy”) and, most subtle of all, a brief reminder of Karen’s pill addiction on KNOTS when Paula turns up at the Mackenzies’ house with a celebratory bottle of wine. Karen politely declines to drink without explaining why, leaving Mack and Paula to share a toast “to the good guys.” There’s an equivalent moment on DALLAS when Tommy McKay’s doctor prescribes him pain medication following the beating he received from Bobby last week. “Don’t give him the bottle,” the doc warns Tracey. “Why?” she asks. “He’s an addict, isn’t he?” “He was.” “Then he still is.” Later, she and Tommy struggle over the medication and she is forced to finally see his drug problem for what it is. This has the effect of waking her up from the walking coma she’s been in ever since Tommy first arrived, making her suddenly interesting again. Alas, it also results in her following Tommy out of the show. Her farewell scene with Bobby (“Tommy’s gone — I have to find him, Bobby. He’s an addict” “… You’re condemning yourself to a terrible life” “… He’s my brother and I believe that he will die without me”) is as poignant as Afton’s and Mandy’s original departure scenes.There’s no Frederich Stahl or Cally Ewing painting on display this week, but there is a new portrait of Angela hanging at Falcon Crest (well, sort of new — it’s based on a Season 1 publicity shot). No-one comments on it directly, but its presence helps emphasise the absence of its subject from the family home. Over on DALLAS, Bobby and April get to make fun of modern art when he arrives at her place to find her hanging an abstract painting sent over from a gallery “on approval”. “What is it?” he asks, a comedically pained look on his face. “It’s an imitation Neo-classical interpretation of 1920s Dadaism … It’s pretty awful,” she replies smugly. There were a few equivalent exchanges between Paige and Greg last season when she was working for an art gallery and trying to persuade him to make some adventurous acquisitions. Like Bobby, Greg wasn’t always impressed with her choices, but there was nonetheless a light, witty quality to their discussions. By comparison, Bobby and April come across as narrow-minded and complacent, taking cheap shots at something they don’t understand and which is easy to mock — modern art, what a joke! Way back in Season 1, Jock’s bemused reaction to the abstract sculpture Sue Ellen gave him and Ellie for their anniversary was funny — because the joke was on Sue Ellen and JR, and how their attempts to impress had backfired, rather than the object itself. That’s not the case here. (I realise I’ve overthought what is a very brief scene, but hey — why stop now?)And this week’s Top 4 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (3) DALLAS3 (2) DYNASTY4 (4) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?