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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 3827" data-attributes="member: 22">16/Feb/81: DYNASTY: The Chauffeur Tells a Secret v. 17/Feb/81: FLAMINGO ROAD: Jealous Wife v. 19/Feb/81: KNOTS LANDING: The Loudest Word v. 20/Feb/81: DALLAS: Lover, Come BackTennis features on both DYNASTY and FLAMINGO ROAD this week. On the Carrington court, a game of mixed doubles serves as a neat illustration of Fallon's relationship priorities - her new husband and stepmother are left twiddling their rackets while she trains all her attention on her father. The exclusive tennis club in FLAMINGO ROAD is used to represent social standing in Truro, as Constance and her bitchy friends just can't believe they're having to share court space with trash like Lane Ballou."The Chauffeur Tells a Secret" might be a clunky title, but it's a really strong episode. While "the chauffeur" is obviously Michael, the "secret" is that Fallon married Jeff so that Cecil would bail out Blake. This leads to a great scene where Blake really lets Fallon have it:"I've been able to claw my own way up from setbacks before. I've gone to congressmen and kings and dictators and mob bosses when I needed help and I got it. When you were safely tucked off at school and on jets and in $200-a-night hotel rooms in Rio and Europe and the Caribbean with your beach boys and soccer studs and you name them, you found them, I was here, without you - handling the problems, clawing my way if I had to, and I did it without your damned help."I love the kaleidoscope of images this speech evokes: "congressmen and kings and dictators and mob bosses … private schools and jets and $200-a-night a hotel rooms … Rio and Europe and the Caribbean … beach boys and soccer studs." That's a whole (albeit trashy) novel right there.The cultural references are equally diverse in this week's DYNASTY: 16th century poetry ("And I will make thee beds of roses"), 70s soft rock ("Supertramp are boring??"), "The Taming of the Shrew", Baryshnikov, Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway …My favourite scene is where Michael orders the boss's daughter out of the limo and they take an impromptu walk in the woods. Something I never realised before: Michael's reminiscence about his childhood ("When I was a little kid, we were pretty poor and when my mother used to ask me, 'How much do you love me?' I'd say, 'A million dollars.' When she had to go to my grandmother's back East and she'd come home and she'd ask, 'How much did you miss me?' I'd say, 'A million dollars'") is his sullen way of telling Fallon he's in love with her. It's also the perfect expression of avarice and emotion intertwined.Another good scene is Claudia's session with her psychiatrist, Dr. Jordan. Theirs is a very different dynamic than the one between Sue Ellen and Dr. Elby on DALLAS. The Elby scenes, while hugely enjoyable, have mostly become an opportunity for Sue Ellen to grandstand, as befits a rich man's wife who's paying someone for the privilege of listening to her. With Claudia, it's different. Her therapy is presumably part of her ongoing medical treatment, and the relationship between doctor and patient feels more equal. Dr Jordan might tease Claudia as a prod to get her to say what's on her mind; she might evade the issue by complaining about the sunlight in her eyes, but it's not a personal rebuke. Dramatically, however, both doctors serve the same function: they allow Sue Ellen and Claudia to reveal what they cannot say to those closest to them, but what we, the audience, need to hear.And so it is we learn that at the Carringtons' dinner party, Claudia recognised, or at least intuited, Krystle as the woman Matthew slept with when she was in the hospital. It's interesting that this wasn't signposted at the time - in the same way that the moment where Laura's suspicions about Abby and Richard were alerted in KNOTS (at the Averys' party) wasn't marked by a big, dramatic close up.In FLAMINGO ROAD, Constance's reaction to an equivalent situation is far less subtle. As the titular "Jealous Wife", she spends the whole episode stamping her foot and complaining loudly about her Krystle/Abby equivalent, "that tramp" Lane Ballou. Morgan Fairchild is great fun, but compared to Soap Land's other wronged wives, Constance feels a little lightweight - understandably so, given that she is closer in age and upbringing to the genre's original spoilt princess, Lucy Ewing. In fact, at one point in "Jealous Wife", Lane actually tells her to grow up.Constance's attempt at revenge - barring her rival from a fancy reception in Field's honour - backfires when Lane makes a big GONE WITH THE WIND style entrance on Sam Curtis's arm, draped in a fur wrap and wearing a spangly dress that puts all the other women in the shade. Even worse for Constance (but fun for us), Field figures out her plan and forces her to eat crow and apologise to Lane.On DALLAS, Lucy also receives short shrift from her new husband for some underhand behaviour, when Mitch discovers she's been employing a cleaning lady on the sly. Sitcom stuff this may be, but it is funny - particularly the scene between Mitch and Dolores the cleaner, who so doesn't get the confidentiality clause in her employment contract.Younger than both Constance and Lucy, and sweeter-natured than either, Lindsay Blaisdel nevertheless manages to get into some deep doo-doo on DYNASTY this week. She invites a boy she's sweet on home from school to study Shakespeare, whereupon he gets horny (and disses Supertramp) and she gets freaked out. So far, so Diana Fairgate in "Step One", but instead of getting drunk with a strange guy on the beach, Lindsay drives off in her mother's car. Just as Claudia did when she first got behind the wheel, Lindsay ends up driving to the Lankershim/Blaisdel drill site as if it were a kind of beacon. The scenes that follow are all really good in a KNOTSian sort of way. There's a lovely little character exchange between Lindsay and Walter, then we see Lindsay reunited with her concerned parents, and then she and Claudia truly bond for the first time - think Karen and Diana in "Step One" only less strident - while driving home together. Foreshadow alert: oh, the irony of Claudia and Lindsay forging a connection in the same car in which their relationship will effectively end.The scene of Steven breaking bread with the Blaisdels is lovely in its ordinariness. To compare the warmth of this dinner with the chilly, austere one he shared with Blake and Fallon in the pilot episode is quite poignant. There's something so natural, so unguarded about the Blaisdels' reactions to his fairytales of New York, ("bicycling in Central Park on Sunday afternoon, riding a Staten Island ferry at twilight") and so unpretentious about Matthew excusing himself and Lindsay after dinner so that they can work on her homework, that when Steven starts spouting poetry to Claudia in the kitchen it feels like the most natural thing in the world …"The Loudest Word" is an exceptional episode of KNOTS. A stand alone episode dealing with something as major as bowel cancer just shouldn't work, but it does. The very fact that Val's diagnosis appears out of nowhere is precisely what makes it so real. This isn't an episode of high drama - there's no time for that. Instead, it's about fear - the kind of clammy, gnawing, intangible fear that turns into terror without you even noticing. The scene where Gary breaks down in front of Sid and Karen just after he's trashed his and Val's bedroom is the most nakedly emotional moment in the Ewingverse (and all of Soap Land) thus far.As the Fairgates and Averys wonder aloud what they would do in Gary's or Val's situation, one can't help but flash forward to what lies in store for Sid, Diana and Laura. And then the arrival of Bobby, with his words of comfort for Val and tough love for Gary, creates a connection to JR's death and Pam's fate - both cancer related - in New DALLAS. In fact, it feels like there's an emotional link between this instalment, Sid's death, "Noises Everywhere" and the episodes of New DALLAS that deal with the aftermath of JR's passing - where a kind of reality slices through the gloss and melodrama and the story becomes somehow greater than the sum of its parts. (It feels as though Jock's death should fit into this group, but I'm not sure it does.)The way Bobby lays into Gary, telling him he has no courage, is still kind of shocking. It's the sort of thing Bobby could never say on DALLAS, where somehow his moral proximity to his eldest brother - making him perpetually the good guy to JR's villain - means that he must always defend Gary. There simply isn't the space on DALLAS for Bobby to express his own ambivalence. There's an interesting symmetry here in that the only person Val can admit her fear to isn't one of the KNOTS cast, but her trusted crossover brother-in-law.Bobby is written in a harsher, less obviously sympathetic way on "The Loudest Word" than he ever was on the original DALLAS, (even during the character's "dark" periods) and Patrick Duffy really steps up to the plate. I'm not sure the character ever feels as three-dimensional again - not until the opening episode of New DALLAS anyway.Abby appears only once in "The Loudest Word" when she, Laura and Karen drop by the hospital to see Val the night before her operation. At first glance unremarkable, this is actually a little gem of a scene where everyone puts on their brightest smiles and no one says what they're actually thinking. There now are so many unspoken nuances between these four women, whose relationships have quietly and suddenly become quite complex.There's no real attempt to absorb Bobby's KNOTS excursion into this week's DALLAS, where he's run off his ass with campaign strategies, political meetings and whatnot. Like Field's advisers a couple of weeks ago, Bobby's counsel suggest he play safe when speaking to the public, and steer clear of thorny issues like abortion and women's rights. Mention of the latter is kind of ironic given that Pam's role in the campaign has been reduced to that of coffee maker - but at least she does it resentfully."Lover, Come Back" is one of those DALLAS episodes I've never quite got. Sue Ellen's discovery of Dusty alive but in a wheelchair, the revelation of his impotency, the weepy ending where he sends her away - it's always felt too overwrought, too soapy, too far removed from all the wheelin' and dealin' at Southfork and Ewing Oil. However, the DALLAS Decoder site has inadvertently provided me with "a way in" to this ep. I really liked the site's critique of "Prodigal Mother" which likened that episode to the Douglas Sirk women's pictures of the 1950s. Given the parallels between "Prodigal Mother", in which Pam ventures out of town for a bittersweet reunion with a previously dead loved one, and "Lover Come Back", where Sue Ellen does the same thing, I thought I'd see if the same Sirkian comparisons might apply - and they do. The superficial tropes are all present and correct - the fur coat, the runny mascara, the haughty maid and fancy house - as are the more crucial themes of female suffering, sacrifice and redemption. Suddenly, this episode makes sense to me - and it's only taken thirty-two years.And that brings me to another parallel: between "Lover, Come Back" and "The Loudest Word". In these episodes, Dusty and Val are each faced with a decidedly unglamorous, unsexy medical condition - impotence for him, a possible colostomy for her. (You wanna know how unsexy? Just watch how quickly Diana Fairgate - usually so keen to make issue-of-the-week stories all about her - exits stage left as soon as she hears the word "colostomy".) Can Sue Ellen and Gary surmount a lifetime of weakness ("My entire life up until this point has been a mockery," admits Sue Ellen; "You have no courage at all," Bobby tells Gary) to assume the burden of caring for a loved one?Aside from KNOTS, which resolves its story after Val gets the all clear, this week's soaps each end on, if not exactly a cliffhanger, then a note of tantalising uncertainty:At the fancy reception on FLAMINGO ROAD, Constance, having made her apologies to Lane through gritted teeth, takes to the dance floor with Field. So do Sam and Lane. As the two respectable looking couples glide dangerously close to one another, (the orchestra playing a saxed-up version of the title music) Field and Lane share a furtive glance over their partners' shoulders. At that precise moment, the frame freezes on the four of them.At the end of this week's DALLAS, Dusty asks Sue Ellen to leave and not come back. It might be intended as a noble, self-sacrificing gesture on his part, but the irony is that he's actually denying her the opportunity to become a better person. The camera freezes on Sue Ellen as she starts to walk away ... back to her self-described mockery of a life.Best of all is the final moment of this week's DYNASTY. In the midst of quoting Marlowe, Steven knocks a dish or two from the Blaisdel kitchen table, and he and Claudia find themselves kneeling on the floor gathering the broken crockery. (Here, I can't help but flash to an equivalent scene in a 1989 episode of BROOKSIDE: "I'm used to it, Billy - picking up the pieces.") The kiss that follows, between a gay young man and a non-judgemental older woman, comes as a genuine curveball, and yet it feels so wonderfully, illogically inevitable.And the winner is … KNOTS LANDING2nd: DYNASTY3rd: DALLAS4th: FLAMINGO ROAD.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?