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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 265551" data-attributes="member: 22">08 Sep 14: DALLAS: Victims of Love v. 30 Nov 16: EMPIRE: What We May Be v. 22 Mar 19: DYNASTY: Motherly OverprotectivenessA gift-wrapped box containing a prostitute’s severed hands, an aunt discovering her nephew’s body dangling from a noose, a long lost son pushing his mother’s face into a fire — all in all, it’s been quite a gruesome week in Soap Land. And has any previous character had such a grim introduction as this? “This guy, El Pozolero, he’s like a ghost who only appears to inflict horror. Last week alone, he killed seventy-five villagers who dared oppose him. He boiled them in acid in front of their families.” That’s FBI Agent Tatangelo, Harris Ryland’s handler, describing the head of the Mendez-Ochoa cartel. When we first meet El Pozolero, however, rather than boiling people in acid, he is carefully tending his tomato vines and recalling with fatherly affection the first time he met Nicolas Trevino: “He was only a teenager, but I knew there was something special about him. I never met anyone with a more inherent grasp for business and mathematics. That’s why I educated him, trained him to take over the finances of our operation.” (Sounds like Cliff and Frank Ashkani, no?) Listening to this reminiscence with silent but obvious jealousy is Luis — until now, the most senior member of the cartel seen on screen. It seems not even members of ruthless Mexican drug cartels are immune to the sibling rivalries that afflict every other Soap Land dynasty. Case in point: Fallon’s immediate reaction upon meeting her long lost brother Adam on DYNASTY is to dismiss him as a scam artist. Alexis, anxious to cover up her scheme with Hank, is obliged to agree. Last week’s DALLAS was so extraordinary, with one intra-family explosion after another, it was hard to imagine how this week’s episode could be anything but an anti-climax. Remarkably, though, they’ve kept the momentum going, in part by widening the show’s canvas as Ewing Global finally goes public to incorporate the various parties with a stake in the outcome, while continuing to fan the flames of familial conflict. Two real-life American media pundits pop up on the Ewings’ and Lyons’ TV screens this week, adding a sense of verisimilitude to the proceedings (although I can't say I'd ever heard of either of them). Wolf Blitzer (according to Wikipedia, ‘an American journalist, television news anchor and author’) appears on screen in the Ewing Global boardroom to announce that “Hunter McKay, the founder of video company Git It Games, just purchased all 48% of Ewing Global that was up for sale this morning … This purchase now gives McKay a controlling interest in the company.” Meanwhile, Charlamagne tha God (‘an American radio presenter, television personality, actor, and author’) appears on his regular show Breakfast Club to proclaim Jamal as not merely “Donkey of the Day”, but “Turkey of the Year.” The Ewings react with bewilderment to Blitzer’s news. “Hunter Mackay — where did he come from?!” exclaims Christopher. “Our fight with that family’s been over for years!” adds Bobby. It falls to Pamela to explain how John Ross “just happened” to run into Hunter McKay when he was out with Nicolas, and that Hunter sold him on the idea of taking Ewing Global public as a way of seizing control of it. “Dammit, John Ross! How could you be so reckless?” Sue Ellen snaps. “Your greed has cost us control of this company!” Bobby yells. “You idiot, they were working together! They set you up!” Christopher adds for good measure. But it’s John Ross’s estranged wife who really lets him have it. “You selfish bastard!” Pamela shouts, slapping him hard across the face. “Lying and cheating were the only two things you were good at and now you’ve failed at them too!”The atmosphere is comparatively calm in the Empire boardroom where Lucious, Jamal, Andre and assorted employees listen to Charlamagne’s takedown of “one of Lucious Lyon’s khaki-coloured kids, Jamal Lyon. Here’s a guy born into music royalty and then he bitched up after he got shot … It’s hard for me to believe that Lucious could raise such a soft ass individual!” “Everything Charlamagne’s saying is true,” Lucious informs Jamal. “Your stats are dropping on Empire XStream and we need to have a little conversation about this, son.” Whereas John Ross is humiliated by his family, Jamal keeps his cool while under attack. “I wish that you literally did not even buy this streaming service because ever since you did, it kills all creativity. It’s all about numbers now,” he tells his father before assuring him that he has something great up his sleeve: “I have the chance right now to possibly do something that could change the game, but if y’all just keep on killing me with stats, it’s not gonna happen.”The legacy of violent death passed down from Roger Grimes and Tommy McKay to their descendants continues. Roger and Tommy were both shot dead — the former by an eight-year-old girl, the latter during a struggle with his father. Roger’s son Dennis was also shot (by the same woman who killed his dad) before being buried alive, and now it’s the turn of Tommy’s son Hunter to meet a grisly end. Poor Hunter. What he lacked in Roger, Tommy and Dennis’s leather-jacketed, greasy-haired insouciance, he more than made up for in geeky business expertise. “You’re asking me if it feels good to do what my grandfather never could and own both the Ewings and Barnes at the same time? Yeah, it sure does!” he crows to the press after becoming the majority shareholder in Ewing (formerly Barnes) Global. Alas, he doesn’t have much time to savour his victory before he is hanged in his apartment. It looks like a suicide, but Christopher suspects otherwise. “It had to be the cartel,” he tells Bobby. “They’re cleaning up loose ends, people who knew too much about the deal … What if they come after Nicolas? He could be a loose end too — and he’s with Elena!” He phones Elena to warn her she’s in danger, unaware that Nicolas is intercepting her calls. EMPIRE’s Cookie and DYNASTY’s Adam each have a series of flashbacks this week that depict the events leading up to a parent’s death — her father’s, his fake mother’s. In each case, they are at least partially responsible for these deaths. Cookie’s flashbacks take her back to when she was a teenager seeing Lucious behind her father’s back. When her daddy found out, he disowned her and then died of a heart attack. Adam’s flashbacks begin with his supposed mother confessing that he was kidnapped from the Carringtons as a baby and end with him administering her a fatal drug overdose. EMPIRE and DYNASTY each contain one of those slightly meta speeches where a character — in both of these cases, the show’s patriarch — all but acknowledges that he’s living inside a soap opera by describing how crazy his family is to an outsider. “Let me introduce myself,” says Lucious to Diana Dubois, the snooty mother of Cookie’s boyfriend Andre. “My name is Lucious Lyon. That woman right there is my wife Anika — she just gave birth to my granddaughter, my son’s baby mama … He somehow got her pregnant during the time he was proposing to his fiancee and getting left at the damn altar … I see you’ve met the gay one and you’ve met the irresponsible one. Where's Andre at — where’s the crazy one?” Blake, meanwhile, describes the Carrington clan to his newly acquired son Adam thusly: “Alexis’s biggest asset is the last name we let her pretend she still has — that and the trailer we used to let her sleep in. Fallon’s thing is she almost married her cousin but then she decided to marry a total stranger instead. And there’s Anders — Anders is like a second father to me and an actual father to Steven. He and Alexis had an affair in the past. We just found out about it and that’s why Steven’s gone.” On paper, these speeches seem similar, but in context, they’re very different. Lucious is out to undermine Cookie in front of Diana, whom she wants desperately to impress, because he’s jealous of her and Andre’s blossoming relationship. Blake’s motives are less clear. He is in the process of welcoming Adam to his family so painting such a negative picture of them doesn’t make much sense. Ultimately, he’s saying it because the writers think it’s funny for him to say it. After all, this is a crazy show about a crazy family who do crazy things! Crazy, huh? “There’s a poison that seeps into every limb of this family tree,” Elena told Bobby on last week’s DALLAS. Cookie uses similar imagery in response to Lucious’s speech on this week’s EMPIRE. “This is my family,” she tells Diana Dubois. “Yeah, we are a twisted tree, but I wouldn’t trade one gay, one high, one low, one crazy, one lazy branch of it. This is who we are. Take it or leave it.”The closest DALLAS comes to a wackily dysfunctional family this week isn’t the Ewings but the Rylands. “You people,” says Luis wearily during a sit-down meeting with Judith, Harris and Emma where they try to extricate themselves from the deal Emma rashly made in last week’s ep to double the cartel's shipment of drugs across the border. While Luis plays the straight man, Judith gets all the best lines. “I am extremely unhappy right now,” he says sternly. “Would any of you like to guess as to why that is?” “You’re a Taurus?” she asks brightly. When he refuses to allow them out on the deal, she does that sexy-yet-grotesque thing she does and starts to unzip her top. “Luis, I have always been a proponent of reciprocity in all my relationships,” she purrs, “and … I am willing to renegotiate in a way that helps both of us. Now, I believe our son has tasked you with finding our wayward whore Candace … Once you take care of our Candace problem, I will agree to increase the amount of product running through the pipeline by 25%.” As much as it pains me to say it, there are only four weeks of DALLAS (and therefore this thread) remaining. Intentional or otherwise, there are glimpses here and there of characters’ journeys coming to an end. “The hardest part of knowing the truth about JR’s plan was not being able to confront him on why he did what he did, on how he felt so entitled to lie to all of us. As a result, I’m afraid I’m never going to be able to move on,” says Sue Ellen on DALLAS — an admission made all the more poignant for being devoid of self-pity. Even more significantly, this week also marks the final appearances of two Soap Land legends: Cliff Barnes and Nicollette Sheridan (once Paige, now Alexis). Both Cliff’s and Alexis’s fates are sealed by the children they betrayed: Pamela, whose unborn children her father sacrificed, and Adam, whose identity his mother denied to save her skin. While Pamela visits her father in prison, Adam visits his mother in her loft. Initially, each adopts a conciliatory tone. “I’m sorry for helping the Ewings put you in jail, for failing to protect your legacy,” says Pamela. “I hope that someday you’ll be able to accept me, Mother,” says Adam. Pamela then slides an envelope across the table to her father. He assumes it contains the pardon he needs to get out of jail. Instead, it’s the deed to Ewing 6. “That plot of land was robbed from your father,” she tells him “and because of that, I was robbed from ever having one … All I ever wanted from you was love, but you always hated the Ewings more than you ever loved me.” Adam likewise produces a document that symbolises his mother’s betrayal. “Do you know what this is?” he asks her. “Of course I don’t. Why would I?” she replies nervously. He explains that it is a copy of Hank’s genuine DNA results which proved all along he was not a Carrington: “They were signed for by someone in the family, someone who clearly switched them. Someone who is you, Mother.” Cliff and Alexis plead for forgiveness. “I’m so sorry for what I did,” says Cliff. “I know I failed you.” “I am so sorry, Adam,” says Alexis. “Please tell me that you understand.” “I can never forgive you,” Pamela tells her father. “I’m gonna listen to my heart and forgive you,” Adam tells his mother. Whereas Pamela withholds Cliff’s pardon from him (“You wanna leave me here?” he asks. “You’ll forgive me if I stay in prison?”), Adam hands Hank’s DNA test over to Alexis. “It’s over now,” Pamela tells Cliff. “You avenged the wrongs done to your father, and I’ve avenged the wrongs done to me by mine. Goodbye, Daddy.” "Burn it," Adam tells Alexis, referring to the test. “It’ll be our little secret. And from this point forward, it’s me and you against the world.” As Cliff watches his daughter walk away, his hands outstretched towards her, a confused, haunted look on his face, Alexis crouches down in front of an open fire and watches contemplatively as the DNA test burns. Adam stands behind her, gently places his hand on her shoulder, and then abruptly pushes her head into the flames, holding her down as she screams. This is easily Soap Land’s most macabre visual ever, and there should be something satisfying about Alexis finally receiving her comeuppance for the deception she perpetrated so long ago (i.e., passing Hank off as Adam), but alas we’ve been burnt by New DYNASTY (no pun intended) too many times. We now understand that this is a show that has scant interest in the dramatic repercussions or emotional consequences of its characters’ actions and that there’s nothing here for us to believe or invest in. While there’s an undeniable frisson to the moment, a moment is all it is. DALLAS also ends darkly. Judith and Harris are unnerved when Luis shows up at their home unexpectedly bearing a gift-wrapped box. Even before opening it, Judith knows she isn’t going to like what she finds inside. (I’m tempted to suggest it’s because she’s already seen the episode of EMPIRE where Cookie opens a similar box to find her cousin’s head inside, but that won’t be broadcast for another two years.) In any case, she’s sufficiently prepared not to scream the house down when she finds herself presented with a pair of dismembered human hands. “Those hands belong to your whore, Candace,” Luis explains smoothly. “It’s my gift to you to show you that I’m a man of my word — and this here is to make sure you keep yours.” He shows them live footage on a laptop of Emma and Ann bound and gagged in the back of a truck. All her composure lost, Judith whimpers in horror. “I propose a new deal,” Luis continues. “Double the shipment immediately or they’re dead.” It may not be quite as shocking an ending as Adam pushing Alexis into the fire, but it means more.And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) EMPIRE3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =