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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 246429" data-attributes="member: 22">03 Mar 14: DALLAS: Trust Me v. 27 Apr 16: EMPIRE: More Than Kin v. 09 Nov 18: DYNASTY: Queen of CupsFemale jealousy is a theme common to each of this week’s eps. On DALLAS, Pamela sees John Ross flirting with his pretty new secretary Candace and suspects him of sleeping with her. On DYNASTY, Fallon answers Culhane’s phone to a sexy-voiced woman who declines to leave her name and thinks the same thing. Pamela and Fallon are both wrong — unlike Sue Ellen who rightly suspects her son of having an affair with Emma Ryland and assigns Bum the task of confirming her suspicions.Sue Ellen’s jealousy-by-proxy is intriguing. Might obsessing over her son’s infidelities be a way of keeping the memory of her own dysfunctional relationship with JR alive? “I spent forty years being cheated on. I’m pretty good at picking up the signals,” she tells Bum. “It took JR most of his life to realise the pain that he had caused me and if he were alive, he would have told John Ross that the path he’s on leads to nothing but heartache and misery.” Maybe she’s right — or maybe she’s romanticising JR even in death. It’s just as possible he would have encouraged John Ross to do whatever it takes to keep one step ahead of Harris Ryland, up to and including bedding his daughter. Her conversation with Bum concluded, Sue Ellen discreetly takes a flask from her purse and drinks from it. It’s a poignant, lonely moment.While Pamela confronts John Ross about Candace (“You were all over her this morning”), Fallon asks Culhane about his mystery caller (“Is there something you need to tell me?”). Although both men are innocent of what they’re being accused of, each is still guilty of deception. “Hand to God, nothing’s going on with my secretary,” John Ross insists, neglecting to mention that something is going on with his step-cousin. And while Culhane isn’t cheating with the woman on the phone, he nonetheless pretends she’s his solicitor rather than evil boss lady Ada Stone from whom he is trying to extricate himself without Fallon's knowledge.Over on EMPIRE, Cookie is not happy about the growing attraction between Lucious and sexy reporter Harper Scott and addresses it with her customary forthrightness. “Ooh, it smell fishy in here!” she declares when she finds them together in his office. Harper gives as good as she gets. “This woman has a tracker device on your sack or something,” she mutters to Lucious. She may have a point. In a later scene, Lucious and Harper are alone in his club, indulging in a little afternoon S&M (slapping, choking, all that fun stuff), when Cookie interrupts them yet again, this time by phone. Harper describes her as “the manipulative bitch that has Lucious Lyon wrapped around her little finger.” “You’d do really good not to say anything bad about her ever again,” snaps Lucious in reply, bringing their relationship to an abrupt end.Back on DALLAS, Bum is caught in the middle: he already knows Sue Ellen’s hunch about John Ross and Emma is correct but doesn’t want to hurt her by telling her so. Nor does he inform John Ross about his mother’s concerns, for fear of jeopardising their relationship. (As he points out to Sue Ellen, “Things have been pretty good between you and John Ross since JR’s passing. Him finding out you put a tail on him — that’d end that real quick.”) Instead, he gives John Ross a warning: ”Your father was a great man. He did great things, but the way he ran around on your mother was a sin and he figured that out too late. Grow into your father’s greatness, not his weakness.”Like Bum, Carmen the cook finds her loyalties divided. Thus far in the series, she hasn’t been given much to sink her teeth into — even when Drew disappeared, she mostly just sat in a corner and cried — but here she gives great angry as Elena asks her to keep quiet about the fact that “the wayward boy we took in by the name of Joaquin” and Cliff’s representative Nicolas Treviño are the same person. “If Cliff Barnes is involved, this is about destroying the Ewings and I will not be part of that!” she insists passionately. Despite her better judgement, however, she agrees to keep quiet and instead delivers a moral warning to Nicolas similar to the one Bum gave to John Ross: “Since we took you in from the street as a boy, I have seen the darkness and light fight for your soul … If, even for a moment, I sense that you are leading either of my children into the darkness, not even St Christopher will be able to save you.” Interestingly, there’s a religious element to both Bum and Carmen’s warnings — he describes JR’s infidelities as “a sin” while she invokes the name of a saint.Two fun characters, Judith Ryland and Hank, aka Fake Adam, return to DALLAS and DYNASTY this week. “Let’s not shoot Mommy on her first day home,” suggests Judith when Harris, alarmed by an ominous thumping approaching his study, pulls out a gun, before realising that it is the sound of his mother’s new walking stick. Judith’s one-liners keep on coming. “I made my bones dealing with psychopaths and criminals while you were still playing with your Easy-Bake oven,” she snarls at her son. “Mama like!” she declares after snorting a couple of lines of the cocaine Harris has been smuggling for the Mendez Ochoa cartel. “Your grandfather had a saying,” she continues. “‘Money and morality are like two cars on a one-lane road. When they meet, morality’s gonna end up in the ditch’.” One can just hear JR attributing the same quotation to Jock. Ordinarily, I don’t go a bundle on fan-fiction, but a version of events where Judith and Jock once knew each other (and maybe even knew each other) is one I could get behind.Hank’s most recent appearance was in a funny scene a few weeks ago where Alexis tried to give him a Rembrandt painting she’d stolen from Blake as collateral for the money she owes him, but he had no idea what she was talking about. This week, that one joke is stretched into a full subplot with, alas, diminishing returns. First, Fake Adam tries to sell the Rembrandt (which is also fake) to an art gallery, thereby alerting Blake (who still thinks he shot Dead Cristal) to his whereabouts. So then Alexis, fearing her prior involvement with Hank will be exposed, pretends it was she who tried to sell the painting instead. The explanation she offers Blake (“I was desperate. I have nothing … I’ve never been good at looking after myself, you know that … Really, it’s your fault that I had to go to such lengths!”) sounds remarkably like the kind of self-justifying excuse Alexis’s former mother, Anne Matheson, used to come up with whenever she was caught with her hand in the cookie jar.Even as preparations for John Ross and Pamela’s wedding continue, the Ewings still find time to throw a traditional Southfork barbecue. “In the old days, these things would end up with a fistfight in the pool,” recalls Sue Ellen. Meanwhile, Fallon and Liam on DYNASTY and Lucious and Cookie on EMPIRE both decide that the best way to keep their respective shareholders onside is to throw a big party. I’m not sure I entirely follow the logic, but as the Van Kirks’ acquisition of Carrington Atlantic was predicated on Fallon and Liam’s marriage, they are now obliged to have “an amicable celebration of our separation," aka a divorce party, to demonstrate that everything is still cool between them. “It’s called conscious uncoupling and it’s all the rage,” Fallon sort of explains. Meanwhile, now that Empire’s board have removed Hakeem as CEO, there’s a good chance an outsider might be brought in to replace him unless the family present a united front. “We need to get that board to officially reinstall Lucious or I don’t know who the hell is gonna run my company,” frets Cookie. (Given that Lucious made such a big deal of taking a black-owned company public in the first place, it’s kind of ironic that it’s a largely white board of directors that he now has to appease.) “I’ll put something together really big,” Cookie decides. “Seeing all of us up there, we’ll remind that board what they get when the Lyons run the Empire.” Andre has an idea to make the event even more impressive: ”Tie in a fundraiser with the National Alliance for Bipolar Disorder and make me the spokesperson … It would really show the board family values.” While Cookie and Lucious are impressed that he is willing to go public about his condition to help his father regain his power, the fact that Andre is Officially Bad again means he has an ulterior motive. “If this gets [Lucious] reinstated as CEO, you know what that means?” he asks Rhonda. “With Jamal and Hakeem out of the running, that leaves you solidly in place for his number two,” she replies. “Mm, just a heartbeat away from the throne, baby!” he smiles. In other words, he’s willing to exploit his own mental health issues for his own ends, which puts a nice little twist on things.Female jealousy resurfaces at both the Ewing barbecue and Fallon’s divorce party. Angry when she sees John Ross flirting again, this time with an attractive blonde extra, Pamela asks Nicolas to dance and it soon gets very sexy between them, much to John Ross's displeasure. Nicolas also manages to get under Christopher’s skin by asking Elena to show him some Dallas nightlife. “I know it’s not my place to tell you not to go out with him, but don’t go out with him,” Christopher tells her.Elsewhere at the barbecue, Bum pretends to Sue Ellen that he has found no evidence of an affair between John Ross and Emma. “Is it possible that maybe you’re projecting the wrongs that JR did you onto your son?” he asks her. Culhane makes a similar suggestion to Fallon regarding her suspicions about him: “Maybe you’re projecting because this is your divorce party?” Unconvinced, Fallon gets drunk and kisses Liam passionately. New DYNASTY being New DYNASTY, this kiss doesn’t take place privately in the shadows, or even on a dance floor like Pamela and Nicolas’s bit of bump ’n’ grind, but on a stage in front of a room of people. Meanwhile, at the bipolar benefit on EMPIRE, the man who is meant to be on stage, Andre, goes missing after Harper the reporter, to get back at Lucious for dumping her, shows him pictures of “a group home outside Philadelphia … That woman’s name is Leah Walker. I believe she’s your grandmother.” To distract from Andre’s conspicuous absence, Cookie rashly announces to the assembled guests that, “For the first time ever, the Lyon family will be performing at this year’s ASA Awards … The first family of music — Hakeem, Jamal and Lucious Lyon — all on the same stage at the same damn time!” How she’s gonna accomplish this is anybody’s guess.Michael, aka Sam on DYNASTY, pops up on EMPIRE again to cater Andre’s fundraiser. He and Jamal pay a nostalgic visit to the coffeehouse where they first met and where Jamal did one of his early gigs. Tired of the show-biz politics and family infighting that constantly surround him, Jamal takes the opportunity to reconnect to his roots by getting up on stage and delivering a scorching impromptu performance with the house band as Michael, aka Sam, watches admiringly. Meanwhile, Sam, aka Michael, has a musical moment of his own (sort of). Pining for his husband who is busy finding himself in Paraguay or something, he tunelessly hits a few random notes on Steven’s piano. “I don’t really play. Steven does,” he explains to New New Cristal. “You miss him,” she observes shrewdly. “More than I thought I would,” he admits.In an act of whimsical indulgence, Sam then flies a psychic named Adriana over from Paris. Except for the Great Karlotti, Emma’s bigamist husband on FALCON CREST, previous Soap Land psychics have either been consulted as a last resort (such as when a character is seeking assurance that a missing-presumed-dead loved one is still alive) or portrayed as a one-scene harbinger of doom (the original Adriana whom Alexis consulted in Rome; Odessa the fortune teller whom Fallon encountered on honeymoon in Jamaica). New Adriana, however, is featured much more prominently and even drives the action forward as she predicts imminent plot twists for each of the Carringtons. (Cue much predictable eye-rolling and sarcasm from Fallon.) In Sam’s case, she actively instigates a new storyline as he interprets her cryptic references to “growth or new life” as a sign that he and Steven should have a child, and he immediately starts interviewing for a potential surrogate.This inevitably leads to a “Terrible Interviewees Montage”, a TV trope that felt tired when KNOTS deployed it nearly thirty years earlier during Frank Williams’ speed-dating phase. In quick succession, the potential surrogates are shown to be too stupid, too greedy, too spaced-out or too slutty for the job. According to tvtropes.org, the “Terrible Interviewees Montage” often ends with “the interviewer calling it a day, only to find the perfect person for the role outside of an interview situation a scene or two later.” Such is the case here as Sam finds himself telling his strapped-for-cash half-sister-in-law Kirby about the situation and suddenly realising she’s the ideal woman for the job.It seems pointless to keep complaining about New DYNASTY not being a traditional soap when it clearly doesn’t want to be, but then once again it redeems itself during the closing minutes of the ep. After much whimsical waffle about how New New Cristal losing her job is a sign that she and Blake are destined to be together (“It was fate,” he tells her, “because this is where you belong”), it is revealed that it wasn’t destiny, but Blake himself who was responsible — he deliberately bought the clinic where she worked so he could shut it down. Then we discover Hank is shacked up with Claudia Blaisdel and her newborn baby, Matthew. The highlight of the episode is Hank removing his false finger and putting it in Matthew’s mouth like a pacifier. And while Adriana’s end-of-episode prediction may not be quite effective as it was in 1981, it’s nonetheless intriguing. Apparently, “a powerful man … who may or may not be Blake” is going to ask Alexis to marry him. She will accept and they will wed, but then “he will expire — like death.”EMPIRE doesn’t feel like much a soap either this week. There’s a lack of momentum and the characters seem to be going round in circles. (A few weeks after nearly killing each other, Lucious and Hakeem are reconciled once again while Jamal has resumed the role of family rebel.) That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of individually great moments. The scene where Hakeem’s brothers find him nursing a champagne hangover following a three-day strip-club bender is reminiscent of one of those effortlessly natural domestic scenes between the Mackenzies on KNOTS (although I don’t think Karen ever told Mack, "You smell like stripper ass”). Hakeem’s been drowning his sorrows because, not only has he been removed as CEO of Empire, but his fiancee’s dumped him because “I got this kid coming.” Andre, who recently lost his own kid, isn’t impressed by this tale of woe. “Yeah, you got it pretty rough, Hakeem,” he tells him sarcastically. “I guess I just had it easy … No, no, let’s just baby the baby boy, okay? You know, I mean, I lost my kid, right? But let’s just pamper Hakeem — again.” “Bro, that’s not what I’m trying to say,” Hakeem replies earnestly. “It’s just that right now, I just suck at every point of life.” “He really does —seriously,” agrees Jamal. And then they all crack up laughing.After he sobers up, Hakeem tells Anika that he wants to do right by her and their baby, but she has other things on her mind. “Your father threatened my life the day the baby is born,” she tells him, adding that she is considering moving away for her own safety. “If Anika leaves, you won’t see me or the baby again,” Hakeem warns his parents. Cookie decides to take charge of the situation (“Let me handle Boo-Boo Kitty”) and as she knocks on the door of Anika’s apartment, we gird ourselves for a juicy confrontation. Instead, we’re as surprised as she is when the door opens and Anika is carried out on a stretcher by two ambulance men. It’s an arresting moment, but it turns out she is simply suffering from a panic attack. Elsewhere, Jamal’s stripped-down musical numbers are truly fantastic. So there’s plenty of good stuff going on, it’s just kind of hard to sense where all it’s headed and how — or even if — these individual moments are gonna pay off dramatically. But, hey, you know, at least it’s not predictable.The episode ends with two of Empire’s board members approaching Lucious and Cookie at the fundraiser. “The board had been looking at an outside candidate for CEO,” one of them says, “but we’re now unanimous in our thinking that it should be —” He looks at Cookie, but before he can continue, Lucious interrupts. “Well, before you go any further,” he says with faux-modesty, “I just wanna say that without the help of Cookie Lyon, my number one, this would not have been possible.” “That’s just what we were getting to,” chips in the second board member. Aha, we think, we know where this is headed, but then she continues: “Considering the fact that the two of you co-founded Empire and now continue to work together so well, the board would like you to come on as co-CEOs … Control of Empire would be split down the middle between the two of you.” This sounds very similar to the way Jock’s will split control of Ewing Oil between JR and Bobby. Lucious and Cookie are both taken by surprise. For a second, it looks like Lucious is going to object, but then he declares it “a fantastic idea … I wouldn’t have it any other way!” Then, as he and Cookie embrace, we see his eyes go cold. “I got your back,” he says quietly, managing to make it sound reassuring and threatening at the same time, just as JR’s toast to Bobby after the reading of their daddy’s will (“To your good health and very long life”) did.The closing moments of DALLAS also take us in an unexpected direction as it emerges that Harris Ryland, while still evil, maybe isn’t quite as evil as we previously thought. “He’s not working for a drug lord, he’s working for us,” a CIA agent informs Bobby and Ann. But if the drug lords find this out, Harris tells Ann, “they’ll kill both you and Emma.” Jeff Colby receives a similar warning when he tangles with Ada Stone on DYNASTY. “If I wanted to threaten you, I’d mention your sister getting hit by a delivery truck or your father going back to jail for drugs he didn’t know were in his possession,” she tells him ominously.And the Top 3 are …1 (2) DALLAS2 (1) EMPIRE3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?