FALCON CREST versus DYNASTY versus DALLAS versus KNOTS LANDING versus the rest of them, week by week

[James from London]

30/Sep/82: KNOTS LANDING: A Brand New Day v. 01/Oct/82: DALLAS: Changing of the Guard v. 01/Oct/82: FALCON CREST: The Challenge

… in which marriages crumble, presidents are deposed and partnerships forged. As the episode titles of this week’s KNOTS and DALLAS indicate, we are now entering a new era of Soap Land. The resulting turbulence means a tricky adjustment period for the characters involved. “You can’t imagine what it’s like living in that house. Every time I see him, my migraine comes on!” complains Lilimae on KNOTS LANDING of sharing a living space with her estranged son-in-law. “Grim is not the word,” exclaims Emma, describing life at Falcon Crest. “We had a lot of unpleasantness here this evening,” is Miss Ellie’s more restrained account of events at Southfork.

Reeling from the events of last season’s cliff-hangers, Val spends most of this week’s KNOTS hiding out, first at a motel and then on her old pal Rusty’s ranch in Ventura, while Sue Ellen wanders through DALLAS in a daze, telling everyone she meets how confused she is and responding to every question with the mantra, "I don’t know, I really don’t know." By the end of their respective episodes, both women have retreated to familiar ground - Val to the cul-de-sac, where she takes control of her situation and gives Gary his marching orders, and Sue Ellen to Southfork, seemingly for no other reason than Miss Ellie has suggested it. In fairness, three narrative weeks have elapsed between the end of last season's KNOTS and the beginning of this one, allowing Val a head start in coming to terms with things, whereas this season’s DALLAS picks up just where the last one left off - minus amount of time it has taken Sue Ellen to acquire Soap Land’s first femullet.

The frequent shifts in living situations result in a little confusion over exactly who is sleeping where. “Your bed’s across the street,” Abby reminds Gary during a lover’s tiff. “Seems kind of strange you being here at Southfork and us not sharing the same bed,” JR tells Sue Ellen.

If the overarching theme of Soap Land's 1981/2 season was "Death of the Patriarch”, (RIP Sid Fairgate, Jock Ewing, Jason Gioberti and Douglas Channing) then it follows that 1982/3 should focus on the next in line to the throne. It’s telling that the first time Gary Ewing references his father’s death on KNOTS, it should be in the context of his own inheritance - or lack thereof. “Bobby called yesterday from Dallas,” he tells Abby. "He thinks Mama’s ready to hear the will.” He then goes on to speculate that his slice of the pie might be contingent on his marriage to Val. ("Daddy never trusted me ... He used to call her my anchor.”) Jock’s will is not mentioned in DALLAS’s opening episode of the season, but we do see a newly unemployed JR on the phone, anxious to reach his lawyer Harve Smithfield for some unspecified reason. Abby bridges the gap between these two worlds by sending the manuscript of Val’s book to JR at Southfork. (As with JR, her precise motives for doing so have yet to be explained.)

In the meantime, the first Soap Land character of the season to accede to her father’s throne is a newcomer, Holly Harwood, whom we learn has just inherited the title of President and Chief Operating Officer of Harwood Oil. “She’s mighty young to be running an oil company,” observes Bobby Ewing. Over on FALCON CREST, Richard Channing gets ready to assume his seat as Chairman of the Board of his late father’s newspaper empire, while Chase Gioberti spends the episode preparing to begin his partnership with Angela as half owners of Falcon Crest.

JR, currently on the outs with his family, and Gary, now a self-described leper within his community, travel curiously similar paths this week. For starters, both are ousted from jobs that were given to them by Jock and Sid by those same men’s widows. When Karen, coldly furious at Gary for his treatment of Val, impulsively fires him from Knots Landing Motors, the unexpectedness of the moment feels like a smack in the face. By contrast, a bid to remove JR from the presidency of Ewing Oil has been coming for a long time. Ever since Jock’s letter from South America divided the company up into voting shares, JR has been preparing for such a day - as Miss Ellie learns when she attempts to rally the troops to her side and discovers Ray has already signed over his voting proxy to JR in a moment of weakness. JR arranging for his son’s belongings to be moved back to the ranch in time for the big family meeting (thereby ensuring he will also have control of John Ross’s shares) feels like a militaristic manoeuvre. In spite of his best efforts, however, JR, like Gary, is removed from the position he has held since the first episode (that brief post-shooting period of incapacity notwithstanding) of his respective show.

Both Ewing boys find themselves on the receiving end of some physical punishment as well. When Gary tries to forcibly drag Val away from Rusty’s ranch, Rusty gives him a pounding for his trouble. Bobby, meanwhile, makes good on his promise to flatten (or at least punch) JR over Christopher: “You tried to blackmail me with a child you thought was your own. You’re scum!” Similarly, Carlo Agretti socks Cole on FALCON CREST for suggesting that he (Cole) might be the father of Melissa’s unborn baby: “You come here and accuse my daughter of breaking her marriage vows. You scum!"

After being voted out of Ewing Oil, "JR left the house without saying a word,” according to Miss Ellie. Following his run in with Val where she tells him she is removing both him and his mother’s furniture from her house, (the very same furniture that was moved in at the very beginning of the very first episode of KNOTS) Gary exits the cul-de-sac the same way. We're then shown both brothers alone in the darkness, each with a bruised face - Gary in his car looking out at the ocean, JR gazing forlornly up at the Ewing building. Later that night, Gary returns to Abby’s house, somehow renewed, and manages to convey, without the use of words, that he is re-committing himself to her. (There are a lot of dialogue-free scenes in this week’s KNOTS.) It takes JR a little longer, but by the end of this week’s DALLAS, he too has got his groove back thanks to a woman. “To JR Ewin’, back in power again,” toasts Holly Harwood. “As it should be,” he chuckles in reply.

JR and Gary might both be out - but what of their replacements? “By turning Ewing Oil over to Bobby, you stand a very good chance of ruining everything my daddy spent his whole life working for,” JR warns his mama. But however poor a choice for successor Bobby might be, he has to be preferable to Wayne, aka "the best mechanic in town”, aka the man who fatally sabotaged Sid Fairgate’s car, whom an unwitting Karen has appointed as Gary’s replacement at KLM. Over on FALCON CREST, Angela - who seems to be in denial over the fact she too is about to be deposed ("It will never happen,” she states flatly, dismissing Chase’s plans to run Falcon Crest alongside her as his “fantasy”) - appoints Lance as her general operations manager: “Your first job is to make sure Chase Gioberti never sets foot in this winery.”

Holly Harwood is one of three new faces to appear this week. Her alliterative counterpart on KNOTS, Mack Mackenzie, replaces Nick Toscanni as Soap Land’s resident New York-Italian hybrid with an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes about his culturally confused childhood: "The Italians would call me a mick, the micks called me a wop. All I could do was stand on the corner and have fights with myself!” Mack and Holly are both swiftly assimilated into their respective shows. By the end of their first episodes, Mack has kissed Karen (their chemistry being both immediate and unmistakable) and had dinner with her kids, whilst Holly has given JR total control and 25% ownership of her company. The third Soap Land newcomer, Richard Channing on FALCON CREST, remains an outsider. In fact, he is conspicuous by his absence. While the regular characters speculate about when he will show up in San Francisco to claim his inheritance, he remains in New York, plotting his next move.

Richard is the adoptive son of Henri Denault whose diverse and international business interests ("Brazilian timber, African diamonds, Indonesian copra, American wheat, Japanese steel”) rival those of Michael Tyrone, Richard’s previous incarnation on FLAMINGO ROAD ("hotels, airlines, oil”). Like Tyrone, Richard is dark and brooding, but also somewhat childlike. In his first scene, he politely asks Denault for his freedom so that he may take his place at the Globe (and possibly learn the identity of his biological mother). An apparent graduate of the Patricia Shepard School of Parenting, Denault hasn’t so much raised Richard as programmed him to fulfil a pre-determined destiny: "As your adoptive father, I only wanted to be a good teacher, that's all. I never was anything more.” He grants Richard’s request, but only after Richard has promised to deliver him the entire California wine industry in return.

Back in the Tuscany Valley, Angela and Lance try to convince Emma and Julia to part with their voting proxies in the Globe newspaper (just as JR tried to get his hands on Ray, Lucy and Bobby's voting shares in Ewing Oil during last season’s DALLAS). The sisters refuse - the shares are an opportunity for them to be independent of their mother for the first time. For Richard Channing, however, the Globe is part of a much bigger agenda. “The newspaper gives us a chance to use another form of power,” he explains to his assistant, Miss Hunter. “Information. You control what people think and you control their lives.” Michael Tyrone would be proud. Indeed, as with Michael Tyrone and Truro, one gets the sense of Richard Channing’s world being much bigger than the one he is about to enter into. The inhabitants of Falcon Crest seem almost puny in comparison - like those little chess pieces Tyrone named and then tossed into the fire.

In the race to be the first daughter-in-law get her Ewing exposé onto the bookshelves, Val is still making revisions to "Capricorn Crude" while Donna is busy proof-reading “Sam Culver: The Early Years” - which I guess puts Donna slightly ahead. Over on FALCON CREST, Maggie amuses her family when she admits to working on a screenplay.

Meanwhile, in Soap Land's Department of Life and Death, DALLAS’s Lucy learns that she’s pregnant - the result of a retrospectively revealed rape. Alongside Laura on KNOTS, Melissa on FALCON CREST and an off-screen Sammy Jo on DYNASTY, this makes Lucy Soap Land’s fourth current mother-to-be. (“Not if I have an abortion first,” she tells Muriel.) Meanwhile, ten minutes into its second season, FALCON CREST continues to live up to its reputation as the black widow soap by claiming Soap Land’s first death of the year. Adios, Gus Nunuoz - yet another patriarch - killed in an off-screen gas explosion.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are ...

1 (3) KNOTS LANDING
2 (-) DALLAS
3 (-) FALCON CREST

 

[James from London]

07/Oct/82: KNOTS LANDING: Daniel v. 08/Oct/82: DALLAS: Where There's a Will v. 08/Oct/82: FALCON CREST: The Arrival

With Soap Land suddenly more focused on big business than ever before, it’s ironic that almost all the businesses it depicts are in decline. Last week, as his adoptive son Richard Channing prepared to take his place as publisher of the San Francisco Globe, Henri Denault dismissed newspapers as "a dying business, economic anachronisms”. On this week’s KNOTS, where Val’s first novel is awaiting publication, JR describes the future of the book industry as "kind of dicey - everyone’s watching TV nowadays.” “There’s a world out there being taken over by a media explosion,” Richard echoes in this week's FALCON CREST as he frets about the Globe’s relevance. "This paper’s in the nineteenth century. It reads like the Farmer’s Almanac.” And it’s not just the publishing industries that are struggling: "Since I was last in charge, the world situation has changed somewhat,” reflects DALLAS’s Bobby during a meeting with Ewing Oil's department heads. "Oil doesn't seem to be the hot item it once was." Accordingly, he agrees to 25% cutbacks in the company's drilling and refinery operations. “This is wonderful,” he remarks. “I take over and we all start talking about cutbacks!” On his first morning in charge of the Globe, Richard Channing goes one better - he fires the editor-in-chief, rewarding his loyal service of thirty years with a week’s severance pay.

It’s been over a year since JR appeared in KNOTS LANDING, but as always, Larry Hagman’s interactions with Joan van Ark are comic gold, with JR finding various ways to twist the knife into his sister-in-law, (such as feigning ignorance about her separation from Gary and deliberately mispronouncing "Capricorn Crude" as "Crude Porn" and "Corn Pone”) all under the veneer of Southern hospitality - “Valene, you still got a way with iced tea!” In fact, JR never seems more Southern than when he crosses over to KNOTS. Partly, it’s in the writing, but also in Hagman’s performance. For instance, I’m not sure he would ever pronounce “motorcycle” in DALLAS the way he does in KNOTS - as "motor-sickle”. This occurs during a really great speech he delivers to Abby about a motorbike Gary worked hard all summer long to afford when he was sixteen, winning Jock’s respect in the process: "Come September, my daddy took him down to the showroom, gave him a slap on the back and a blank cheque. And of course, Gary had read all the brochures and motor-sickle magazines. He knew exactly what he wanted. He signed the cheque, revved that old motor-sickle up - and drove straight through that pate glass window.” I love what Dallas Decoder had to say about this speech in his critique of the episode:

Next to the parable about the blind horse that J.R. shares with John Ross during an early episode of TNT’s “Dallas,” this might be Hagman’s most memorable monologue. It makes me wish he had taken this act to the stage. Imagine: a one-man show where Larry Hagman tells stories, in character as J.R., about growing up on Southfork. It could’ve been this generation’s “Mark Twain Tonight.”
http://dallasdecoder.com/2013/05/28/critique-knots-landing-episode-55-daniel/

Between this week’s KNOTS and DALLAS, we are offered an intriguing glimpse into the past lives of each of the Ewing brothers. Following the story of Gary’s motor-sickle, an affable pimp by the name of Carl Daggett drops by Ewing Oil with this nugget about Bobby: "You shoulda seen him in the old days. He was a real playboy - right, Bobby? Your style, my ladies. Good for Ewing Oil too!” Ray, meanwhile, receives a letter from "from my Aunt Lily" in Emporia, Kansas, which gives us just a hint of the economic circumstances he grew up in while his half-brothers were busy spreading the bees around and driving motorbikes through showroom windows. “Your daddy, Amos Krebbs, has been taken sick,” Lil writes. "He's been moved to the charity ward, but even that is costing more than we can afford.”

Perhaps most tantalising of all, however, is the oh so brief encounter between JR and Lilimae when they pass each other in the doorway of Val’s house on KNOTS. Again, JR plays the smiling Southern gentleman to the hilt, helping Lilimae with the lamp she is carrying before continuing on his way - but the untold story that lies behind Lilimae's quaking delivery of the line: “What’s he doin' in this house??”, spoken only once JR is safely out of earshot, is one I dearly would have loved to hear Larry Hagman tell in his one-person stage show as JR (and/or Julie Harris’s in hers as Lilimae).

If this week’s KNOTS brings out JR’s more comedic side, then Abby is noticeably harder and less playful in their scenes together than in previous encounters. In the old days, she was just flirting with power; now she clearly means business. She talks of marrying Gary (and therefore, of a divorce between him and Val) as if it were a foregone conclusion. With that in mind, she is as anxious to see Jock’s will as JR is in the following night’s episode of DALLAS. “Honey, you’re gonna have to wait until it’s read,” JR tells her, just as Harve Smithfield will later tell him: “No one will see that will until such time as it is read to the entire family.” However, JR already knows enough about the will (or at least claims to) to assure Abby that "Gary’s coming into money. Big money.” What JR's really interested in, it transpires, is the codicil Jock added to the will while he was in South America - and though JR pays lip service to Harve’s words, it is clear he isn’t prepared to wait to see it. “Where there’s a way, there’s a will,” he murmurs to himself. A similar line is delivered Angela in this week’s FALCON CREST. “Wills can be broken, and interlopers can be bought off,” she declares, referring to Richard’s inheritance of the Globe. Back on KNOTS LANDING, JR is canny enough to head a potential interloper off at the pass. “Keep [Gary] out of Dallas,” he tells Abby. "What makes you think that I want to be in Dallas?” she asks him. "You wanna be Queen of the Ewings,” he replies. "I’ll settle for Princess,” she counters wisely. “Fine, you got it,” he agrees. "You get the ermine and the jewels - but the crown stays in Dallas, ‘cos the crown is mine.”

Towards the end of last season’s FALCON CREST, Lance purposefully arranged for Melissa to find him in bed with another woman the night before their wedding. Then in the season finale of KNOTS, Val accidentally found Gary in bed with Abby. In this week’s DALLAS, JR combines both scenarios when he accidentally on purpose walks in on Harve’s son-in-law and trusted employee, John Baxter, in a compromising position with Serena, his own loyal hooker-in-chief. JR then toys with John in much the same amusingly disingenuous way as he did Val on the previous night’s KNOTS (“I’m a firm believer in the sanctity of marriage and I’m damn disappointed in you, John”) before dropping the other shoe: “I wanna see my daddy’s will."

A week after JR and Bobby move into new offices at Ewing Oil, Val redecorates her house and Richard Channing modernises the office he has inherited from his father at the Globe. Meeting him there for the first time, Angela registers her disapproval at the changes made in much the same way Katherine Wentworth did when Cliff refurbished her father’s office at Wentworth Tool & Die last season. Richard’s one concession to history is to keep his father’s leather desk chair - but even this he ends up slashing with a knife after an attempt to establish some sort of familial connection with Angela is coldly rebuffed. "Your birth was an unfortunate accident,” she informs him, "the result of Douglas Channing's weakness."

Contrasting references to "the Mob" in KNOTS LANDING and FALCON CREST serve to reinforce the gulf between Soap Land’s “us” and “them”. Richard Avery tells Karen that Sid’s killers, Frank and Roy, (who resurface this week, having eluded prison on a technicality) "are working for the Mob.” On FALCON CREST, a curious Melissa wonders if Richard Channing belongs to that same organisation. “Organised criminals, the Mob, whatever you call them,” her father Carlo tells her, "they are just street punks compared to Channing. He is a true warmonger. Anyone else is just fighting for scraps.” Carlo also reveals that he left Italy as a young man to get away from the kind of murderous family feuds that Richard Avery parodies on this week's KNOTS. "Where do you think you are, Sicily?” he asks Karen in an attempt to dissuade her from pursuing a personal crusade against Frank and Roy. "You gonna talk to your Godfather? Poison their well? People like us, civilised people, we’re not equipped to deal with the Roys and Franks of this world. We need the law and people like [Mack] to enforce it.” Karen later concedes the point, telling Mack, “I'm a nice lady with three kids, a house and a business to run, not Michael Corleone.” Or Richard Channing, come to that. It’s interesting that Soap Land’s two major male newcomers - Mack Mackenzie and Richard Channing, one a federal prosecutor, the other an alleged warmonger - should come from such polar opposite worlds.

The final third of this week’s KNOTS centres around the delivery of the Averys' baby. This is the fourth Soap Land birth thus far, and the third in which a car crash is central to the story. This time, however, the mother-to-be is not seven months pregnant and the crash is not caused by her being too drunk or hysterical to drive safely. Nor does it lead to a premature delivery, followed by much life-or-death operating table drama. In fact, Laura’s waters have already broken before she and Richard leave the cul-de-sac for the hospital. A diversion, a wet road and a minor accident that leaves both Averys uninjured but stranded mean that Richard is obliged to deliver the baby himself. The subsequent drama then stems not from the kind of emotional melodrama that surrounded the births of Baby John on DALLAS and Little Blake on DYNASTY, but from two people with a shared and difficult history trapped together in an extreme situation, his mounting panic and her morbid certainty that something is going to go horribly wrong (“Do you know how many women die in childbirth?”). As a result, there is a genuine feeling of danger and, ultimately, relief when the baby, Daniel, is born safely.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are … it’s a close run thing as they’re all pretty great ...
1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (2) DALLAS
3 (3) FALCON CREST

 

[James from London]

14/Oct/82: KNOTS LANDING: Encounters v. 15/Oct/82: DALLAS: Billion Dollar Question v. 15/Oct/82: FALCON CREST: Troubled Waters

Alongside books, newspapers and oil, another Soap Land industry is now officially in the doldrums: “Count yourself lucky to be out of the car business, it’s getting worse and worse,” a former associate of Gary Ewing tells him. "Computers, video - that’s where to be nowadays.” Or maybe restaurants. Or even singers.

This week we meet Ciji (sporting a longer version of Sue Ellen’s femullet) and hear her sing what is, by real life standards, a conventional power ballad (Journey’s “Open Arms”), but which, in the context of KNOTS LANDING, feels genuinely exciting. That is, we share the characters' excitement as they watch her perform. Seeing Gary and then Kenny fall under her spell is strangely affecting. Similarly, I find myself deriving a weird sort of pleasure from Richard’s enthusiasm for the restaurant-for-sale he happens upon while waiting for a job interview, and his subsequent realisation that perhaps he wasn’t cut out for lawyering in the first place. ("I never liked it. it was never right for me.”). I’m not used to empathising with Soap Land characters so strongly. Maybe it’s the vicarious thrill of one of “us” deciding to follow his dream. Or maybe it’s seeing the KNOTS LANDING world starting to expand in front of our eyes. Or perhaps it’s just not possible for me to watch this period of the show without the benefit of hindsight, and therefore anticipating what an impact both Ciji and Richard’s restaurant are about to have.

Over on DALLAS, Richard’s counterpart in despair at the end of last season, Cliff Barnes, also turns a career corner this week, taking his first step into the oil business by accepting a job with Marilee Stone.

Elsewhere on KNOTS, as part of the PR campaign surrounding the upcoming publication of “Capricorn Crude”, Val is introduced to Hilda Grant, a gossip columnist with a readership of three and a half million. (What Richard Channing wouldn’t give for that kind of circulation.) "This book is really about the Ewings of Dallas, right?” Grant asks her. “I made it up,” Val insists, but Grant perseveres: “I heard your sister-in-law begged you not to publish this for fear it would block the adoption of her baby.” Add this to JR’s claim in last week’s KNOTS that Miss Ellie and Sue Ellen are also upset about the book’s publication, and it would appear that the Ewing wives on DALLAS are up in arms over “Capricorn Crude".

Needless to say, none of the women in DALLAS has even mentioned Val’s book. They’ve all got their own story-lines to contend with (or in Pam’s case, Lucy’s, as she undergoes Soap Land’s first abortion). So it appears there are several “versions” of the DALLAS Ewings currently floating around. There’s Val’s fictionalised version (“about ER and the brothers and that poor Lila Sue”). Then there’s the version of the Ewings described by JR and Hilda Grant, who are responding angrily to Val’s version. And then there’s the way KNOTS as whole depicts the Ewings - as "one of the most notorious families in the country,” according to Val’s new publicist, Bess Riker. "This book exposes all sorts of shady dealings that we’ve all heard whispers about,” concurs Hilda Grant. This perception contrasts with the one presented on DALLAS itself where, in spite of JR’s notoriety, the Ewings continue to be regarded by their peers with respect. "You have a reputation for being the most honest independent oil man in Dallas,” Holly Harwood tells Bobby in this week's episode.

"When that book appears, Val Ewing’s name is going to be on everybody’s lips,” Bess Riker predicts. Val reacts uncomfortably to the idea of fame, and in particular, the prospect of her private life becoming public. ("We’ve got to exploit the 'deserted housewife' angle,” decides Bess.) In fairness, Val reacts uncomfortably to pretty much everything this week. She runs up the same flight of the stairs in a panic no less than three times in the same ep. "I just wanna hide!” she wails. Miss Ellie, meanwhile, prepares to take her first steps back into public life by shopping for a dress for the Oil Baron’s Ball. "I still feel strange going to a social event without Jock,” she reflects. “You’re gonna be the centre of attraction anyway, why not enjoy it?” suggests her friend Mavis. This sentiment is taken onboard by Richard Channing, who proves nowhere near as publicity shy as Val in this week’s FALCON CREST when the first issue of the revamped Globe is unveiled with a picture of his own face plastered across the front page.

While Val uses the final revisions to her novel as an excuse to keep others (her neighbours, her husband, her publicist, her publisher) at arm’s length, Soap Land’s other writers are distracted from their work by the events surrounding them. Donna Krebbs may have completed "Sam Culver: The Early Years”, (“blood, sweat and tears - six hundred neatly typed pages of it”) but plans to deliver the manuscript in person to its New York publisher are scuppered by the news of a death. Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, Maggie’s attempts to finish her screenplay are continually disrupted by family members wanting advice. On the one occasion she insists on continuing with her work rather than listen to Chase describe his latest battle with Angela, he goes off in a huff.

Now that Abby and JR have each had a sneak preview of Jock’s will and like what they’ve seen, they are both impatient to move things forward. Abby wants to consolidate her relationship with Gary by finding a house for them and her children away from the cul-de-sac, and JR wants Miss Ellie to have Jock declared legally dead so the will can be read officially. However, neither Gary nor his mother is about to be rushed into anything. "I'll make that decision when I think the time is right,” Miss Ellie tells JR. “I can’t go starting something new till I finish with the old,” Gary tells Abby.

Like JR and Abby, Richard Channing is also piling on the pressure in order to further his long term plans. His first move is to acquire Carlo Agretti's vineyards. Carlo, however, angrily and adamantly refuses to sell. “He’s after the whole valley,” Carlo warns Angela. "He won’t stop until he controls all of it, even Falcon Crest!” How very Michael Tyrone of him.

When the direct approach fails, Richard and JR resort to the same kind of dirty tactics. "What if I was to tell you there's solid proof of my daddy's death and it's being withheld to keep the will from going into probate [and] postpone paying taxes?” JR whispers into the ear of IRS agent Nelson Harding. Meanwhile, Richard's emissary Miss Hunter (think DYNASTY’s Andrew Laird in the body of a Playboy centrefold) levels a similar accusation in Carlo’s direction: “Agriculture can be very risky. People have gone to prison for tax evasion … Maybe liquidating your holdings might be the best idea."

Miss Ellie, Gary and Val are not the only Ewing-verse characters struggling to move on with their lives this week. “Every time I think about the future, the past seems to get in the way,” frets Sue Ellen while taking stock of her life at the Southern Cross. “I just wanted to close the door on that part of my life forever,” sighs Ray Krebbs, after agreeing to attend the funeral of his step-father Amos in Kansas. (This is Amos Krebbs' second Soap Land death in less than a year, having already passed away as Lane Ballou’s daddy on FLAMINGO ROAD.)

Melissa Cumson also loses a father this week when Carlo Agretti is bludgeoned to death on FALCON CREST. (Carlo is the fourth father on FALCON CREST to die since the series began: Chase is now the only one left.) Like Titus Semple in the FLAMINGO ROAD finale, Cole Gioberti is lured to the victim’s house where he discovers the body. In lieu of an eyewitness to find him kneeling over it, Cole picks up the murder weapon with his bare hands, smearing blood on his shirt in the process. Inevitably, he is under arrest before the closing credits. Following the shooting of Michael Tyrone in FL’INGO RD and the kidnapping of Little Blake on DYNASTY, this is Soap Land’s third whodunnit in quick succession.

“Who Killed Carlo?" is another clever variation on the "Who Shot JR?” scenario. Instead of providing the end of year cliffhanger, the mystery is placed at the beginning of the season where we least expect it. (Indeed, it’s only in retrospect that we realise how many people had a motive for getting rid of Carlo: Cole, Richard, Lance, Angela ... maybe even Miss Hunter). In addition, by selecting a powerful but nonetheless minor character as the victim, the show can afford to definitively kill rather than merely injure him - thereby upping the dramatic stakes.

The bad news reaches Melissa, by now heavily pregnant, in the final scene of the ep, which takes place at a meeting of the Globe’s stockholders. Surrounded by her husband and his family, she spurns their attempts at comfort and condolence. Instead, it is Richard Channing, a man she has only just met and of whom she has heard only the most terrible things, that somehow manages to break through her defences. As everyone else looks on in bafflement, she collapses in his arms. David Selby is great at this kind of sudden shift - the alleged warmonger turned grief whisperer.

The final scene of this week’s KNOTS is equally intriguing. When Gary and Val eventually meet, Gary surprises us, and maybe even himself, by asking Val for a reconciliation. She refuses and walks away, but then changes her mind and turns back … only to find him gone.

Lucy’s abortion isn’t the only Soap Land first of the week: KNOTS LANDING boasts the premier toilet scene of the genre wherein Joe Cooper perches on the crapper to counsel a bath-ridden Val, weeping and nude aside from a few strategically placed bubbles. (This is probably the most naked anyone’s been in Soap Land since Lucy’s spontaneous strip in Mitch Cooper’s apartment two years ago.)

Blatant plot contrivance of the week: Karen Fairgate overhearing Wayne the mechanic blow his alibi for the afternoon of Sid’s accident (he was supposed to be at the dentist) by boasting to Laura that he hasn’t seen a dentist in five years.

Weirdest scene of the week: Having split up with boyfriend Mario, a heartbroken Vicky Gioberti stumbles sobbing along the roadside before suddenly breaking into an elated sprint. It’s one of those incongruous real life moments that appears totally fake in a fictional context.

Only few months ago, there were two Hispanic families living in Soap Land - the Sanchez clan of FLAMINGO ROAD and the Nunuozes of FALCON CREST. This week, the last remaining member of either, Mario Nunuoz, leaves the Tuscany Valley on an unspecified crusade “to save his people” (for which maintaining a profile on a prime time TV show apparently isn’t a priority). The occasional Chinese or Mexican servant notwithstanding, Soap Land is pretty much an exclusively white-skinned zone once again.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are …
1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (3) FALCON CREST
3 (2) DALLAS

 

[James from London]

21/Oct/82: KNOTS LANDING: Svengali v. 22/Oct/82: DALLAS: The Big Ball v. 22/Oct/82: FALCON CREST: Murder One

Two male twenty-somethings make their Ewing-verse debuts this week. It’s safe to say that Chip Roberts - cheerful, charming, attentive - makes a more favourable first impression on Lilimae and Val than Mickey Trotter - surly, sarcastic, indifferent - does on Donna and Ray. But then, things aren’t always how they appear in Soap Land.

My favourite scene of the week is between Chip and his boss Bess Riker. Two ambitious, calculating characters, each trying to get the better of the other - it’s a traditional Soap Land scenario of the kind KNOTS LANDING has never really done before. Although different in tone, it reminds me of the scene that introduced Richard Channing and his adoptive father, Henri Denault, to FALCON CREST a few weeks ago. The characters in both scenes are outsiders. They don’t belong to the familiar worlds of their respective shows, and they view those worlds dispassionately, referring to characters we know as commodities to be exploited.

There are differences between the two scenes. Where Richard has worked diligently for his father all his adult life, Bess hired Chip “two months ago against my better judgement [as a] messenger. If you ever again try to con one of my clients into thinking you’re any more in this office, I’ll fire you right on the spot.” Where Richard is asking Denault for his freedom, Chip wants more responsibility in Bess’s company. Each delivers a persuasive sales pitch. “If you give me time,” Richard proposes, "I’ll deliver a multi-billion dollar per annum business to you … the California wine industry.” “She was ready to dump you, you know," says Chip of Val. "She doesn’t want a PR firm. I convinced her she had to have one.” Denault and Riker each give their consent. “Yes,” agrees Henri, "having a little wine would be nice." "All right, Svengali,” Bess tells Chip. "Let’s see what you can do. Groom her, do what you think she wants.” However, both scenes end on a warning. "If you don’t deliver this wine business in a reasonable time, I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel this agreement of ours,” Henri tells Richard. “And my freedom from the company?” Richard asks. "You simply won’t have any,” he replies. "Just don’t let me down,” Bess warns Chip, "because I’m going to be watching you every step of the way.”

Bess greets Chip’s claim that Val "is going to be as big as Jackie Susann or maybe even Judith Krantz” with derisive laughter, but he insists that she is “a fabulous writer.” Without question, he is motivated by self-interest here, but he also seems to believe what he is saying. Could it be that Chip sees the same kind of potential in Val that Abby sees in Gary?

Val and Miss Ellie both find themselves in the spotlight this week. While Ellie's dressmaker puts the finishing touches to her gown for the Oil Barons' Ball (which JR refers to as his mama’s coming out party), Val is persuaded to splash out $600 on a dress for her TV debut as a guest on THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW. (However, neither outfit - nor any of the others at the Oil Barons’ Ball, come to that - is as bold or glitzy as some of those seen on last season's DYNASTY or FLAMINGO ROAD.)

After mentioning Val’s name during the introduction of his show, Mike Douglas looks directly down the camera lens at us and adds knowingly, “And if that name Ewing sounds familiar, then it’s who you think it is.” Later, during their interview, Douglas asks Val if her book is "just a thinly disguised story of the real life Ewing family.” “Nothing the Ewings do is ever very thinly disguised!” she quips nervously. The impression one gets from these references is of the Ewings as a somewhat notorious, if not infamous family, perhaps even regarded as a little vulgar. This isn’t a hundred miles from how they were viewed by real life television audiences of the time (at least in the UK). In other words, within the context of KNOTS, the DALLAS Ewings feel almost fictional.

“Nothing the Ewings do is ever very thinly disguised!” The implication of this line, that the Texas Ewings lack subtlety, is borne out the following night by the standing ovation Miss Ellie receives at the Oil Barons' Ball, initiated by her own family. Conversely, Mike Douglas’s wink-at-the-camera attitude towards the family ("it’s who you think it is!”) contrasts greatly with Punk Anderson's solemn description of Jock Ewing as "the kind of man that made Texas great” and Miss Ellie's pronouncement of him as simply "the finest man that God ever put on this earth.” Instead of a chuckling studio audience, this plays out in front of a ballroom full of people blinking back tears.

The blurring of the real and the fictional continues with the first use of celebrity cameos in Soap Land. As well as Mike Douglas, KNOTS has Zsa Zsa Gabor and Billy Curtis playing themselves, while Lilimae - a fictional representation of the ordinary "us" - fantasises that she’s Elizabeth Taylor - a real life example of the extraordinary "them". This is itself ironic, given that Julie Harris co-starred with Taylor in the 1967 movie REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, and is a far more celebrated actress than Zsa Zsa Gabor, whose films Lilimae purports to be a big fan of. “Which ones?” Zsa Zsa asks her. “All of them,” she replies vaguely. (And who can blame her - can you name a single Zsa Zsa Gabor movie?)

Making her TV debut, a nervous Val, consciously or otherwise, ends up playing the country hick in order to ingratiate herself with her host and his audience. It works. And each time she elicits a laugh or stumbles upon a piece of homespun wisdom, we cut to Chip standing in the wings looking genuinely pleased and relieved. Since we’re on Val’s side, we share his reaction. Does that mean we’re on his side too?

While Val is under the glare of a fictional media, KNOTS itself puts Ciji in the limelight, devoting nearly a full three minutes of screen time to her uninterrupted rendition of another soft rock cover, Rick Springfield's “Hole in my Heart”, accompanied by some cool camera moves. Neither of Soap Land’s previous songbirds, Lane Ballou and Afton Cooper, were ever showcased in such a way (although Lane got pretty close during her demo recording of “Could It Be Love”). While Lane and Afton were already established characters before we saw them perform, Ciji’s spoken dialogue has thus far been minimal. The only indication we’ve been given of her personality is the gutsy earnestness with which she sings. Again, we’re seeing her through the excited eyes of Kenny and Gary, and again, it feels very seductive.

In FALCON CREST, it’s Cole who hits the spotlight when the Globe newspaper launches a smear campaign targeting him as the most likely suspect in Carlo Agretti’s killing. “I want headlines on this murder!” Richard Channing orders his reluctant editor. "I want it to be sensational … Murder sells newspapers, whether we like it or not, especially when the victims are rich and the suspects are rich and the setting is right.” As well as the Globe’s readers, Richard might also be describing Soap Land’s audience here. After all, what was “Who Shot JR?” but a story about rich people trying to kill each other? Could FALCON CREST be implying that its own viewers are as prurient and easy to manipulate as a tabloid readership? Ah, but then it flatters us. When Miss Hunter suggests that Cole is too obvious a suspect, Richard assures her that his readers won’t care about that. “Don’t wanna make it too challenging,” he tells her, adding cynically that "simplicity is the key to genius.” As we the audience already know Cole to be innocent, that means we're one step ahead of the Globe’s easily duped readers.

Back on DALLAS, it’s good to see wildcatter Walter Lankershim, who unceremoniously evaporated after striking it big on DYNASTY two seasons ago, resurface as “snake oil salesman” Frank Crutcher at the Oil Barons’ Ball. He offers his condolences to Miss Ellie for her loss of Jock in the same treacherous jungle that also claimed his friend Matthew. Meanwhile, Soap Land’s first businesswoman, Sally Bullock - the one who joined forces with JR to defraud Bobby out of a tanker full of oil - is discovered slumming it as a struggling vineyardist and widow in this week’s FALCON CREST.

The occasion of Amos Krebbs' funeral on DALLAS introduces us to Ray’s Aunt Lil. Like Lilimae on KNOTS, she is a warm, endearing archetype of homespun country folk. “Land sakes, where are my manners?!” she exclaims before ushering Donna and Ray inside her house, insisting they stay with her rather than at a motel. "If a heavenly angel came down when I was a child to tell me that a daughter of mine was going to be on THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW, I’d have told her she was crazy!” declares an even more exuberant Lilimae at the beginning of this week’s KNOTS. It’s interesting to compare the two Lils. “Little more grey in my hair since you left,” Aunt Lil shyly admits to Ray. Yeah, she’s the Lil that stayed behind to bury a sister (“That was a beautiful service”) and raise a son (“Michael was such a good boy growing up”) while Lilimae (nothing grey about her hair) abandoned her family to chase a dream. Now it looks as if that dream is about to come true, albeit once removed. “We’re gonna be a star!” she cries after Val’s TV appearance is deemed a success. She goes on to declare the recording as the most exciting afternoon of her life. “Afternoon?” queries Chip. “Well, there was a night, but I can’t talk about that,” she replies. It’s hard to imagine Aunt Lil admitting to one of those.

DALLAS and KNOTS each end on a forward-looking note. “Jock, of all men, always believed that we had to be ready to face tomorrow and so we will,” concludes Ellie's speech, while on KNOTS, the direct reference to ALL ABOUT EVE might be excessive, (a fawning young admirer at the stage door introduces herself to Val as Eve) but clearly illustrates that as a result of her talk show appearance, Val has been transformed from one of "us" to one of "them". Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, there’s none of that "brave new tomorrow” crap - just a nice, juicy, traditional Soap Land cliffhanger where Cole is arrested for murder as his family look on helplessly.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are …

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (2) FALCON CREST
3 (3) DALLAS

 

[James from London]

03/Nov/82: DYNASTY: The Roof v. 04/Nov/82: KNOTS LANDING: Investments v. 05/Nov/82: DALLAS: Aftermath v. 05/Nov/82: FALCON CREST: The Exposé

After the hysteria of the season opener, this week’s DYNASTY feels slightly more conventional. Broadly speaking, it depicts characters behaving plausibly in implausible situations. I’m particularly taken by the scene where Fallon tells Jeff that if she'd known at the time that she had an elder brother who was kidnapped as a baby, she would have gone through with aborting her own child - who has now been snatched away himself.

The night before this episode aired, BROOKSIDE began in the UK. A twice-weekly soap opera, it explored the modern British class system by depicting four households from differing economic backgrounds living in close proximity in a newly developed cul-de-sac: an upper middle-class family obliged to downscale after the father is made redundant, a working-class clan from a rundown council estate now moving up the social ladder, and two young couples: one, upwardly mobile professionals, the other representing the black market economy. Socially realistic and overtly political, BROOKSIDE was as different from its glossy American counterparts as a soap could be - and yet the same theme of "the haves and the have-nots" reverberates throughout this week’s Soap Land.

"My father worked very hard for all of this,” continues Fallon on DYNASTY, looking around her missing child’s expensively furnished nursery. "He had genius and he had guts and he got it all for us, and until now it never occurred to me that people might hate him for that, might hate us, might even hate our baby enough to take him from us. Is this way it really is for people like us, Jeff?”

We also hear from characters on the other half of the class divide - those whom Jeff and Fallon, in their (understandable) paranoia, now suspect of taking their baby. “You rich are all alike, ain’t ya?” snarls Alfred, the weirdo at the cemetery. "You put the cops on me - me, a guy who can barely eke by. People like me can’t even make a remark about the rich without them getting their hackles up … Maybe I ain’t a Colby or a Carrington, but I got my feelings too.” “Your money, it’s always your lousy money, isn’t it?” snaps Little Blake’s nurse Susan. "Well, it’s not going to buy a confession from me. There isn’t enough money or decent wine in the world for that!”

There are also contrasting references to rich kid Jeff’s education ("A very intelligent man I put through Princeton,” brags his Uncle Cecil from his sickbed) and Montana farm boy Michael Torrance’s law degree which his grandmother struggled to pay for. With Kate Torrance now dead and Michael apparently believing himself to be the abducted Adam Carrington, he heads to Denver to redress the balance.

On KNOTS LANDING, Gary’s inheritance means that he - and subsequently Abby - are now operating in a different financial sphere to the rest of the characters. This creates tensions of its own. After Gary offers to bankroll Kenny in his own record company so they can launch Ciji themselves, (“Damn,” he laughs, “this is the first time since the reading of the will that I actually feel rich!”) Ginger worries that Kenny is gambling their future on a rich man’s whim. Conversely, Abby turns Gary’s friendly loan to Richard into a formal agreement. “We can foreclose if you don’t make your payments promptly,” she informs him. “This gives you control of my entire restaurant!” Richard protests, but he has no choice but to comply.

Nowhere in this week’s Soap Land is the class divide more noticeable than on FALCON CREST, where unethical labour practices in the vineyards are exposed by Richard’s newspaper. Chase is aghast to learn that Falcon Crest hires a third of its workers on a part-time basis in return for minimum wage and no benefits. He finds a large group of them (all Hispanic) living in a shack without running water, heat or sanitation - conditions that make the barrio on FLAMINGO ROAD look almost cosy. (A thought: if Mario Nunuoz had really wanted to help “his people”, he could have started in his own backyard instead of leaving the show. As it is, all the Hispanics left on screen are bit players and extras.)

When confronted, Lance and Angela insist that the situation is perfectly legal. The episode sidesteps the issue of illegal immigrants raised in last season’s “Victims”, but the very fact that this practice is sanctioned, even acceptable, ("It’s the way it’s always been,” says Lance) is just as disturbing, and FALCON CREST’s willingness to question it feels somewhat bold. “The least these people deserve are the basics of a decent life,” insists Chase. “I don’t force them to live like this,” Angela shrugs. “Don’t you?” he asks, "How do you think this happens?” This is as close as this week’s Soap Land gets to making a political statement.

The storyline concludes with Angela hi-jacking Chase's press conference and claiming his pledge to pay all of Falcon Crest’s workers a decent wage as her own idea, thereby turning a defeat into a PR victory in much the same way JR did back in “Community Spirit”, his first episode of KNOTS.

Chase's recent inheritance of half of Falcon Crest means the Giobertis must now surely qualify as millionaires, yet the series continues to depict them as an ordinary, everyday relatable folk. We are told that the family has put up their house as collateral for Cole’s bail, and see them worrying about whether or not he has the right attorney, just as the Fairgates did after Sid was arrested for attempted rape. (The Giobertis aren’t the only Soap Land characters to have their wealth played down to fit current storylines. I’m not certain, but wasn’t Kenny Ward once the boss of Oracle Records? He certainly had the authority to hire Kristin as a receptionist and reject Lilimae as a potential superstar. Now he is depicted as an employee powerless to sign Ciji to his label - hence his eagerness to accept Gary’s offer of a partnership.)

Talking about his son’s kidnapping twenty-five years earlier, Blake tells Krystle, "Denver Carrington is its way a tribute to my first child.” This reminds me of Jock describing Ewing Oil in his will as "precious to me beyond anything in my life save my dear wife Ellie and my sons.” On KNOTS, Richard Avery names his restaurant in honour of his newborn son Daniel, and this week DALLAS cartel member Wade Luce sadly bows out with the line, "I invested a lot of my life into that company”, before signing it over to Rebecca Wentworth. But while Soap Land’s men might refer to their businesses in such tender, almost romantic terms, its women are decidedly less sentimental. “Labour is a commodity and we pay as low a price as we can,” says Angela Channing after being shown the appalling conditions in which her workers are living. “These are human beings,” Chase protests. “But I’m a businesswoman and this is a business decision,” she replies flatly. Meanwhile, Abby’s response to Gary’s dream of living and working on his own ranch (“it's in me,” he explains, "it's a part of me“) is our first indication of the extent of her ambition. "Just because you dreamed about something as a kid doesn’t mean you have to do it,” she tells him. "You’ve got the money - now use it. Use it to make more money, to build bigger dreams. Money is power, Gary. Power to make things happen … We can build an empire much bigger than this ranch.”

Blake also speaks of empire building in his scene with Krystle. "When I finally had to face the reality that we had lost Adam,” he says, "I poured all my energy into positive things. I built an empire on that energy.” It seems that when a man in Soap Land is deprived of a child, he builds an empire. When the same thing happens to a woman, she ends up on the roof of a building. This week, Claudia Blaisdel follows in the footsteps of Pam and Val Ewing by climbing to the top of a tall hotel, apparently carrying Little Blake in her arms. The moment where she drops the bundle over the edge and we see in slow motion a doll flying through the air before smashing onto the roof of the ambulance below remains as absurdly, shockingly surreal as ever. It's David Lynch meets “Fembots in Las Vegas”, laced with a paedophobic quality all its own. Once again, Jeff and Fallon’s reactions are quite believable in the extraordinary circumstances. Thinking they’ve found their baby, then seeing it fall to its death, then finding out it’s really a doll, then realising that means their baby is still missing … you can feel their heads about to explode.

While Gary dreams of owning a ranch on KNOTS LANDING, on DALLAS, he is the dream. "My father appeared like a dream,” complains Lucy, referring to his near-mute appearance in last week’s episode. "Now he's gone. He appeared then disappeared. The Case of the Vanishing Father."

At the end of this week’s KNOTS, following an unsuccessful camping trip where they bicker amusingly like characters in a Neil Simon movie, Karen and Mack take their relationship to the next level. Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, Cole and Sally Bullock simultaneously kneel down in her kitchen to clear away a broken plate and end up kissing - the very circumstances that led to the first kiss between Steven Carrington and his older woman, Claudia, during DYNASTY’s first season. “Then it’s true,” as Abby mockingly observed upon meeting “Karen’s Mack” last week, "older women really are more attractive.” A variation on the same theme: Chip Roberts, (“young and pretty”) who last week got dumped by Bess Riker, ("old and haggard”) now finds himself the object of Lilimae’s touchingly unrequited affection.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (-) FALCON CREST
2 (2) DYNASTY
3 (1) KNOTS LANDING
4 (3) DALLAS

 

[James from London]

10/Nov/82: DYNASTY: The Wedding v. 12/Nov/82: DALLAS: Hit and Run v. 12/Nov/82: FALCON CREST: Home Away From Home

DYNASTY solves the “Who Kidnapped Little Blake?” mystery in the first two minutes of this week’s episode, when Jeff finally thinks to mention the weirdo in the cemetery who has the same surname as one of Blake’s enemies - in much the same way that Pam suddenly remembered the photographer she had warned off Lucy a full two days after Lucy mysteriously disappeared in last season’s DALLAS.

No sooner is the baby recovered safe and sound than we bid farewell to Claudia, who takes her leave of the Carrington mansion (“Goodbye, sweet house”) before being led away to the Soap Land Sanatarium in a scene that is ridiculous and endearing at the same time. The long walk down the staircase, the fur stole, the weeping servants we’ve never seen before - the allusion to SUNSET BOULEVARD is blatant, but what’s less clear is whether the show is cruelly having fun at the expense of its most fragile character or somehow elevating her by giving her such a grand exit.

The one moment in this week’s Soap Land that feels genuinely cinematic - or at least “Old Hollywood” - is on FALCON CREST. We see stock footage of a plane landing on a runway at night, then a chauffeured limousine pulling away from the airport, and finally Jacqueline Perrault’s partially revealed face as she checks her makeup in a compact mirror and orders her driver to take her to the Tuscany Valley.

Both Cole in FALCON CREST and Fallon in DYNASTY announce their decisions to fly the nest this week. "I wanna move out and take the baby,” Fallon informs Blake. "I should have gotten out a long time ago, to prove myself, to prove that I’m a worthwhile human being.” “I’m moving to the Demery place,” Cole tells Maggie. "I feel like I’m living in a fishbowl here.” (Abby likewise compared Seaview Circle to a goldfish bowl in the first KNOTS episode of the season.) Given that keeping their family under one roof for the rest of their lives is an imperative for any self-respecting parent in Soap Land, Blake and Maggie each reacts with predictable dismay. “You don’t have to move out,” Blake insists. “This is crazy, Cole, this is just crazy,” protests Maggie. "What do you think this is going to do to your father, to the whole family?” Maggie’s plea might be more impassioned, but Blake ultimately proves the more persuasive parent as Fallon relents when he offers to set her up in a business of her choosing. Cole, meanwhile, moves in with DALLAS’s Sally Bullock, aka Katherine Demery, his older woman. His parents are far from pleased when they find out the nature of the relationship - the first time age difference has been presented as an issue in a Soap Land affair.

I didn’t derive the same vicarious pleasure from watching Fallon looking around the La Mirada hotel as I did from seeing Richard Avery scope out the venue that subsequently became his restaurant on KNOTS LANDING a few weeks ago. However, watching her inadvertently flirt with her own brother Adam is fun. This is Soap Land’s first intentionally unintentional incest storyline (as opposed to Lucy and Ray's romp in the hay, which was unintentionally unintentional).

Fallon isn’t the only spoilt princess in Soap Land to locate her work ethic this week. Over on DALLAS, Lucy resumes her modelling career following her kidnap/rape/abortion/daytime TV sabbatical. Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Melissa finds herself in an almost identical position to that of Soap Land’s quintessential spoilt princess, FLAMINGO ROAD's Constance, when she discovers her husband of convenience in the arms of a woman he genuinely loves. Even though Lori Stevens is nowhere near as established a character as Lane Ballou was in F’LINGO RD, Lance is depicted as being as serious about her as Field was about Lane. Also like Lane, Lori is a chick from the wrong side of the tracks (albeit with an incredible apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay) who cares little for the trappings of money and power. While Melissa may not be in love with Lance the way Constance was with Field, she has her own complication - her pregnancy. By the end of this week’s episode, she has been confined to bed for the remainder of it.

DYNASTY’s Alexis Carrington and DALLAS’s Rebecca Wentworth both move out of their somewhat modest homes this week (Alexis’s wonderfully atmospheric studio, Rebecca’s nondescript condominium) in favour of somewhere grander. “I’m going to be living in his palazzo,” boasts Alexis to Krystle before setting off from the Carrington kitchen to marry Cecil. Meanwhile, Rebecca shows Pam round the grounds of her impressive new mansion in Dallas. Both women seem to want recapture times gone by. “I wanted something like what I had in Houston,” Rebecca explains while Alexis brags of how brilliant Denver’s social scene will be once she and Cecil start entertaining, "as it used to be when I entertained in this very house [in] the good old days.” Rebecca also talks about playing hostess, but rather more wistfully: “Cliff might wanna entertain. Who knows? He might even wanna live here.”

A change of address isn’t the only thing Alexis and Rebecca have in common (although only one of them jarringly refers to a bit player as “an obese nurse” and "a fat phantom in white”). Both still carry scars from the unhappy marriages that led to them being separated from their children while they were growing up. "Fallon is his darling daughter and Steven is his embarrassment. Everyone is his, his, his!” rants Alexis of Blake. "Pam, I was seventeen," Rebecca pleads. "I could barely read or write. I wasn’t ready to be a wife or a mother. And Digger, Digger was destroying me. I didn’t want to leave you, but I had to save myself and somehow I found the strength to do it.” Alexis was also seventeen when she married Blake. Both women now see revenge against a powerful family as a way of assuaging their wounds.

"The past is over and nothing can change it,” Alexis continues, "but let me tell you something, Krystle, the future is going to be very different because in a very short time, this faultless family is going to be hearing from me - including you, and you especially are going to cringe at what you hear, Krystle Jennings Carrington, the oh, so sterling, once and maybe future secretary!” There’s nothing much Krystle can do but roll her eyes at this bewildering verbal onslaught.

The discussion between Rebecca and Pam is more balanced. "I know how angry you are at JR, and God knows you have every reason to be,” Pam tells her mother, "but I'm asking you now, please stop this vendetta before it gets out of control ... Buying Cliff an oil company is one thing, but buying Wade Luce's company and getting him into the cartel, that could hurt all of Ewing Oil. It'll turn the cartel against the whole family. That affects Bobby, Christopher and me!” “… You have the Ewings' strength behind you,” argues Rebecca. "Whose strength does Cliff have?" "He should have his own,” Pam replies. "Yes he should," Rebecca agrees, "but he doesn't, not yet, and maybe that's because when he was growing up, when I should have been there to give it to him, I was off trying to develop some of my own.” There follows one of Pam’s all time greatest lines: "Mother, you've always had strength. You proved that when you left your children to go out and start a new life. It's a cold, calculating kind of strength. Is that what you want for Cliff?"

Adam Carrington gains access to Blake’s office under false pretences this week in order to meet his father for the first time. However, their meeting is about as successful as Richard Channing’s was with Angela in FALCON CREST a few weeks ago. Both end the same way - in total rejection. “I know right now I’m your son,” Adam tells Blake, "but now that I’ve met you, I’m happy to remain just the guy I was before I ever heard your name - Carrington. What a rotten family it must be!” “Get the hell out of here!” shouts Blake. This week, Richard also meets Cole Gioberti for the first time. This also goes badly, with Cole bursting into his office and accusing him of press harassment before threatening him with violence. Elsewhere, Chase’s mother Jacqueline takes one look at Richard and high tails it back to Zurich. By comparison, Mickey Trotter’s introduction to the Ewings goes pretty smoothly, with only a dismissive put-down from JR to contend with.

The final scene of this week’s DYNASTY - Alexis and Cecil’s bedside wedding - poses the same conundrum as Claudia’s departure earlier in the ep. Are the programme makers joking or are they deadly serious? Is this scene a pastiche of melodrama, or melodrama taken to the next level? As it is, the scene - with Cecil in pyjamas and Alexis decked out in a girlish white wedding dress - feels like an episode of SOAP scored by Max Steiner.

Following the end of “Silver Shadows”, the KNOTS instalment in which ageing movie director Andrew Douglas becomes besotted by Abby, this is the second Soap Land scenario where a wealthy man on his deathbed spends his final moments with a woman he knows is after his money. Andrew Douglas might have been confused enough to bequeath his fortune to a woman who was already dead, but such behaviour is almost rational next to Cecil’s gloriously bonkers wedding speech to his bride: “My wedding gift, a gift without peer, is such that, when I do go, I can leap into my grave laughing, knowing that I’ve left you with power and money, and with you and Blake at each other’s throats. What’s the matter, sweetheart? Is this honeymoon talk upsetting you?” He then goes on to feverishly quiz Alexis about the night of her wedding to Blake. Bizarrely, his final line of dialogue echoes Miss Ellie’s back in the DALLAS mini-series when she spoke about how lucky she was to have married a man with dirty fingernails: "Tell me, were his nails clean that night, Alexis, or were they stained with the oil of his Carrington Rig Number One?"

We’re only seven weeks into the season and the Soap Land death count is already unusually high when Cecil clutches his heart and then joins Gus Nunuoz, Carlo Agretti, Amos Krebbs and Kate Torrance in the great eternal cliff-hanger in the sky.

Next to this week’s DYNASTY - all verbose cod-Shakespearean dialogue and bright daytime soap lighting - DALLAS feels comparatively earthy. Even JR’s most recent schemes - setting Harve’s son-in-law up with a hooker and now framing Walt Driscoll’s wife in a hit and run car accident - seem less outlandish than those of the past few years. There’s a pleasingly back-to-basics feel about his machinations, much like those perpetrated by him and John Ross in New DALLAS’s first season.

As a freshly bereaved Alexis bows her bridal-veiled head in sorrow in time for the DYNASTY freeze frame, her predecessor in widowhood, Miss Ellie, reaches the stage Karen Fairgate was at nine months ago when she felt able to accept a lunch invitation from another man. In Ellie's case, it's twinkly old Walter Lankershim from DYNASTY.

Minor parallel of the week: Krystle and Pam both playfully refer to their husbands as “cute". (In each case, this is the calm before the marital storm.)

And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are …

1 (1) FALCON CREST
2 (4) DALLAS
3 (2) DYNASTY

 

[James from London]

17/Nov/82: DYNASTY: The Will v. 18/Nov/82: KNOTS LANDING: Man in the Middle v. 19/Nov/82: DALLAS: The Ewing Touch v. 19/Nov/82: FALCON CREST: The Namesake

Another week in Soap Land, another last will and testimony. “All that money and power riding on a few lines in Cecil’s will,” taunts Fallon. "Is Alexis in or is Alexis out?” Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Melissa sneaks a look at Angela’s will. Chao-Li’s inheritance of $25,000 and lifelong employment compares favourably to the $10,000 and year’s salary awarded to Cecil Colby’s housekeeper.

DYNASTY being DYNASTY, Cecil’s will reading is more formal than Jock’s was in DALLAS a few weeks ago, (it’s more of a business meeting than a family gathering) and also more glamorous (Alexis looks quite stunning in her widow’s weeds). Just as Jock’s will contained a codicil drawn up shortly before his death in South America, Cecil’s includes some last minute instructions added by the deceased the day before his death in hospital. Like the codicil, these instructions - a letter and videotape revealing that Cecil was behind the assassination attempt on Blake last season - trigger a war from beyond the grave. That, in fact, is his main bequest to Alexis: “I haven’t achieved my goal of control of Denver-Carrington,” he writes to Blake, "but that I leave in the hands of the woman who shares my dedication, my wife Alexis - confident she will find a way to bring you to your knees.”

This is not Soap Land's only vow of vengeance this week. Losing out to Bobby over the McLeish oil deal is enough to reignite Cliff’s anger towards the Ewings. He promises to "turn the Ewing empire into a broken down, two-pump filling station.” Meanwhile, four weeks after the announcement of the Jock Ewing Memorial Scholarship, Richard Channing proposes the Douglas Channing Memorial Garden as a tribute to his late father. However, this is really a front for a winery he plans to build - which in turn is a way of attacking Angela. "I’ll start a bidding war in this valley for all the available grapes and force Angela to pay more for premium crops than she ever has before,” Richard explains to Miss Hunter. "Within a year, Falcon Crest will be in a complete negative cash flow position."

Meanwhile, back on DYNASTY: Left alone after the reading of the will with only half of Cecil's fortune and a triplex penthouse apartment for company, Alexis wonders what to do next. “Damn you, Cecil,” she says aloud, addressing her thoughts to her late husband's office chair in the same way Karen Fairgate used Sid's headstone and Miss Ellie a pile of broken crockery, “damn you for dying and leaving me to take care of this myself! Bring Blake to his knees? How??” “You're gonna have to do it with brains,” Afton advises Cliff on DALLAS, “not passion.”

In last week’s DALLAS, JR implicated the wife of government official Walt Driscoll in a car accident in order to obtain an oil variance. In this week’s FALCON CREST, Richard Channing has county supervisor Nick Hogan’s vintage truck blown up as a way of persuading him to vote his way over a land deal. Like JR, he retains his gentlemanly charm throughout the transaction.

Three life-changing events on the theme of parentage take place in this week’s Soap Land: Bobby and Pam’s adoption of Christopher is finalised at a court hearing in DALLAS. A rainswept Melissa collapses in Cole’s arms before telling him that he’s the father of her baby on FALCON CREST. (She then observes the Soap Land tradition of giving birth prematurely to a male heir whose life is left hanging in the balance.) And in a near-majestic scene at the end of this week's DYNASTY, Alexis is reunited with her son Adam twenty-five years after he was snatched by Kate Torrance from his baby carriage. For some reason, I’ve always been a sucker for Adam’s detailed description of the day it happened: "It was a fine September morning, she said, and as she got on the bus with me, it began to rain - a sun shower. It was as if the very skies were sharing her sorrow and her newfound joy, she said.” There are more meteorological memories on FALCON CREST. "It was a rainy night like this one, twenty-two years ago, in this very hospital, when you were born,” Julia tells Lance, "and I had such hopes, such dreams.”

Elsewhere on DYNASTY, Fallon tries to convey to designer Billy Dawson her vision for turning the stuffy La Mirada hotel into "a pleasure palace … a fantasy land.” “A class A bordello,” translates Billy teasingly. Over on KNOTS LANDING, when Richard Avery attempts to explain his upmarket vision for Daniel’s, Abby complains that he is "running that restaurant like the Court of Versailles.” Two weeks after stomping on Gary’s dreams of owning a ranch, she now does the same thing to Richard: “It [the restaurant] might be your dream,” she snaps, "but as long as Gary and I are in control, you better learn to dream a bit more profitably. Otherwise, you might find your dream turning into a nightmare.” Money might not be a problem for Fallon, but getting her father and husband to respect her as a serious businesswoman is.

Serious is the key word here. Fallon, previously so witty and insouciant, is now oh so anxious to be taken seriously. Similarly, Alexis, whose brazen wit allowed her to glide effortlessly through the Carrington mansion for much of last season, now appears to have exchanged her joie de vivre for a kind of shrill paranoia. (This week, she accuses Krystle of trying to seduce Cecil before she married Blake.) Even Abby, now that she has money, seems to have mislaid the sense of humour and excitement she had when she was still scheming to acquire it. The one businesswoman to retain her sense of fun this week is Holly Harwood, who conducts a meeting with JR whilst stretched out by her pool in a bikini and flirting outrageously.

As DYNASTY grows more earnest - this week’s episode contains at least three long discussions about Fallon’s journey to become “a woman who's found a sense of self” - KNOTS LANDING becomes a shinier, glitzier, more glamorous place. Those stay-at-home, down-to-earth Fairgates are suddenly established members of an exclusive beach club (“This place is very popular with the young execs”) and are sufficiently well-connected for the ambitious Chip to attach himself to Diana. (“Oh man, if I stick around you long enough I could build up a whole new career!”) In fact, the family now have a lifestyle Sid’s snobby first wife would have approved of. With shy little Val becoming a public speaker and everyone else preparing for Ciji’s singing debut at Daniel’s, it feels like Victoria Hill’s charity fashion show all over again, only now it’s the show itself that's playing dress up.

The transformation is augmented by some typically striking direction by Larry Elikann - scenes filmed from odd angles that make the familiar look fresh and strange, and lots of big, bold close-ups that give the characters a kind of feverish, almost cartoon-like quality.

Watching Val cringe as she listens to Chip boast to Lilimae about how impressed Gary and Abby were when he persuaded Richard to let Ciji sing at the restaurant, we suddenly realise how knotted together all the characters have become - not in the geographical way they used to be when they all lived in the same street, or even via a shared family history like the characters on the other soaps, but through several cleverly stitched together plot contrivances. In fact, KNOTS is probably the most contrived and plot-driven of all the soaps at this point, but when the results are this much fun, who cares?

As the world of KNOTS contracts, becoming tighter and knottier, the world of DALLAS expands. The cartel, Punk and Mavis, Afton and Rebecca, Harve, Clayton, Mickey, Holly … the show’s regular ensemble comprises more than just the Ewings and Cliff these days. For the first time, we start to get a sense of the Dallas oil community as a whole.

With “Capricorn Crude” and “Sam Culver: The Early Years” now available from all good Soap Land bookshops, FALCON CREST’s Maggie finally finishes her screenplay. Like Val’s novel, it is a fictionalised version of “real” events - in this case, her son’s arrest for a murder he didn’t commit. Unlike Gary, Chase has no problem with his wife plundering their family’s personal lives for inspiration and calls the script “darn good". Meanwhile, Val has already completed the first two chapters of her next book, but won’t reveal the subject matter, and Donna fills her free time by renewing her interest in Texas politics. She persuades Miss Ellie to accompany her to one such meeting - only for them to find the main item on the agenda is JR’s variance. No matter how broad DALLAS’s canvas becomes, all roads inevitably lead back to JR.

While Diana invites Chip to dinner at the beach club to spite her mother’s new beau, Miss Ellie shocks her sons by inviting her new friend, Walter Lankershim, aka Frank Crutcher, to dinner at Southfork. Whereas Karen’s attempts to get Diana to talk about her issues with Mack are met with teenage prevarication, Bobby Ewing is more honest with his mother. "It felt strange, seeing you with another man," he admits. "Nobody will ever take your daddy's place,” Miss Ellie assures him.

The DALLAS equivalent of the KNOTS beach club is the nightspot where Afton sings. “It’s getting to be the place in town,” she informs Cliff. “A lot of influential people are dropping in … They’d be good contacts for you, people you should socialise with.” Just don’t let Chip know or he’ll be on the first plane over. However, not everyone in Soap Land is driven by ambition or vengeance or the need to a discover a sense of themselves as a woman. In contrast to Chip “man in the middle” Roberts, his twenty-something DALLAS counterpart Mickey is content to bunk off work and “wax some dumb bar stool,” much to cousin Ray’s disapproval.

On KNOTS, Ciji somehow manages to be both ambitious and passive. Krystle might accuse Blake of treating Fallon "like one of her old dolls,” but it’s actually Ciji who is the most doll-like character in this week’s Soap Land. Kenny and Gary tell her what she should sing and when, Abby picks out her clothes - and Ciji goes along with it all, strangely disengaged. She is spoken of as commodity - “a hot property” and "an important investment”. The only time she truly comes alive is when she’s on stage singing.

For her big debut at Daniel, in front of an audience of regular characters, she sings Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch”, an ultra-conventional romantic ballad. Again, it is gutsily delivered and persuasively filmed. Throughout the song, there are close-ups of the lovers in the restaurant exchanging meaningful looks (or in Lilimae’s case, a forlorn glance at Chip and Diana gazing into each other’s eyes), and these have the same cumulative effect as the musical montages that have since become commonplace in TV drama (including New DALLAS). Within this context - the inward-looking, interconnected world of KNOTS - the standing ovation Ciji receives at the end of the song feels entirely credible. The appearance of an enraptured music critic from Rolling Stone is pushing it a bit, however.

In a nifty bit of foreshadowing, Chip tries to convince Diana that his interest in Ciji is strictly professional: “Diana, business is business. Confuse it with pleasure, it’s certain death.” Cut to Ciji looking longingly at him. (His words are echoed by Lucy Ewing in DALLAS: “I cannot mix business with my personal life ever again,” she tells a pushy client who objectifies her in the same way KNOTS does Ciji.)

Crossover of the week: the grounds of the Carrington mansion have now become those of Michael Tyrone in FLAMINGO ROAD, with Blake and Krystle lunching by the same pool in which Richard Channing and Morgan Fairchild writhed naked just seven months earlier.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are … again, it’s a close one, especially between KNOTS and DALLAS ...

1 (2) DALLAS
2 (-) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) DYNASTY
4 (1) FALCON CREST

 

[James from London]

24/Nov/82: DYNASTY: The Siblings v. 26/Nov/82: DALLAS: Fringe Benefits v. 26/Nov/82: FALCON CREST: Choices

Without being entirely self-contained, all of this week's episodes are quite narrow in focus. For instance, all but two scenes of this week’s DYNASTY are about the Carringtons’ acceptance (or lack thereof) of Adam as a member of the family. Alexis's eagerness and Blake’s reluctance to believe that he is their son makes each of them appear unusually vulnerable. Meanwhile, Fallon’s freaked out reaction to the news that the man she has just kissed passionately is actually her brother is both credible and very funny. (Indeed, this is another DYNASTY episode where all the characters' behaviour seems believable given the bizarre circumstances in which they find themselves. Adam’s Oscar Wilde quotation towards the end of the ep - “I can’t believe anything unless it’s incredible” - kind of sums this up.)

Meanwhile, the fight for Ewing Oil informs every scene of this week’s DALLAS. (Lucy and Mickey, the two characters least involved in the contest, are given the week off.) At the centre of the episode is a stand alone story about JR and Cliff each attempting to buy the same refinery from Gil Thurman.

FALCON CREST is comparatively broader in its focus, but does include a self-contained guest appearance from Tony Cumson, played this time around by Robert Loggia instead of Rashid Ahmed. Loggia delivers a tougher, edgier version of the character. That aside, the plot is essentially a retread of Tony’s last episode, which was in turn a variation on Gary and Val’s first story on DALLAS: estranged husband, wife and child come close to making a new life together only for the same malevolent family members who drove them apart in the first place to do so again.

That isn’t to say the story is a dud. In fact, the repetition works in its favour because it reinforces the idea of the characters (i.e. Julia and Lance) as trapped, doomed to languish at Falcon Crest no matter how many times they try to escape. At least Lance and Tony get to hug out their differences this time, like a macho version of Lucy and Val at the end of “Secrets” (DALLAS, Season 2). And Tony has a great farewell line to his son: “Falcon Crest is a cancer. It contaminates everybody it touches. Get away if you can before it’s too late."

The familiar theme of characters attempting or threatening to leave their families recurs again throughout this week’s Soap Land. In addition to Julia’s doomed bid for freedom, ("I’m gonna leave with him this time, Mother, and you can’t stop me!”) Cole Gioberti almost runs away to sea. (And given that he has been charged with murdering the father of the woman whose dying baby he is secretly the daddy of, who can blame him?) On DYNASTY, no sooner does Adam move into his mother’s swish apartment then he tells her he is “thinking of going back home … I have a good life there,” while on DALLAS, Pam suggests to Bobby that they "take Christopher and move away, just leave."

These latter two scenes, between Adam and Alexis, and Pam and Bobby, are highlights of their respective episodes. "Why did you stop looking for me [as a baby]?” Adam demands, suddenly turning on his mother. "We tried,” she insists, "we tried so hard ... to find you.” "But you gave up,” he replies. “Why - because somebody said, ‘the kid must be dead so forget it'? Tell me, who was it that gave the final edict to forget it - Blake?” Again, Adam’s hostility is believable - and fascinating. So is Alexis’s decision to defend her ex-husband. "Blake was as shattered and heartbroken as I was,” she tells Adam. "Your loss changed everything between us.” There’s a surprising sweetness about Alexis’s sincerity in this scene.

Conversely, Pam, DALLAS’s sweetest and most passive character over the last couple of years, has grown increasingly ballsy this season. And this week, during a conversation with Bobby, she becomes downright rebellious. First, she dares question the judgement of the family patriarch ("Why didn't Jock think of his own wife when he wrote that will?”) before committing blasphemy cursing the family business: “To hell with Ewing Oil!”

The week after Gary and Abby move into their "Taj Mahal by the beach”, Alexis takes occupancy of her impressive new penthouse. It’s far more colourful and contemporary looking than her former studio, but still has kind of an artsy vibe about it. Sue Ellen’s townhouse looks suddenly drab in comparison.

Said townhouse is the setting for one of two disastrous dinner parties in this week’s Soap Land - one between Sue Ellen, JR and Gil Thurman, the other between Blake, Krystle and Adam. While JR deliberately leaves Sue Ellen and Gil alone for the first part of their evening, hoping Sue Ellen will prove sufficiently disarming to Gil for him to then swoop in and clinch the refinery deal, (“It’s called the old Ewing one-two”) Jeff and Fallon fail to appear for Adam’s welcome dinner at all - their initial dealings with him having proven sufficiently off-putting.

Alas, neither Gil nor Adam proves to be the ideal guest. Both make unwelcome references to past characters. "Last I heard was you and Clayton Farlow's kid were off to San Angelo,” slurs Gil in Sue Ellen’s direction. Meanwhile, Adam uses that Oscar Wilde quote to bring up the subject of Steven’s sexuality, just as Jeff did back in the pilot episode - the difference being, Jeff did so inadvertently while Adam knows exactly what he’s doing. “He was gay, wasn’t he?” says Adam of old Oscar as Blake shifts uneasily in his seat. "We don’t have too many of them in Montana.” Blake claims to have little knowledge of the subject. "You should be able to spot them easily,” Adam persists, "what with my brother, Steven.” Sue Ellen and Blake both respond with curt politeness. "That's really none of your business,” Sue Ellen tells Gil. “I’d rather not talk about that now, if you don’t mind,” says Blake through gritted teeth.

Adam and Gil both end up leave the party early. Miffed by Sue Ellen rejection his advances, Gil walks out before the steaks are even served, (“Thank-you for the booze, good-night”) while Adam at least makes it through the duck before storming out (“Don’t worry about dessert - I’ll get that at home!”).

All three of this week’s episodes end strongly. On DYNASTY, Alexis opens the door of her New York hotel room to reveal a brand new character. “Welcome, my good friend Krystle’s first husband!” she beams. Back in Dallas, JR receives a less welcome visitor in his office. "I just closed a deal for the Thurman refinery right underneath your nose,” gloats Cliff, blissfully unaware that Afton has done with Gil what Sue Ellen refused to do in order to clinch the deal. "Now you're alone,” he continues coldly. "You've got nobody. You've got nothin' but your ocean of oil to drown in." JR chuckles, but once Cliff has gone, his face rearranges itself into a scowl.

Meanwhile, in his office at the end of this week’s FALCON CREST, Richard Channing is informed by an angry Tony Cumson that his attempts to manipulate his life have failed: “I don’t know what kind of a game you and Angela are playing, but I don’t like any part of it!” As a parting gesture, Tony upsets Richard’s cherished display of toy soldiers. (As in his former incarnation as Michael Tyrone, Richard has a fondness for vintage toys and artefacts - all the better to offset his cold-hearted villainy.) As Richard tries frantically to reassemble them, Miss Hunter relays the bad news that all charges against Cole for Carlo Agretti’s murder have been dropped. There follows one of those wonderfully abrupt freeze frames that FLAMINGO ROAD and now FALCON CREST seem to specialise in: Richard and the toy soldiers are shot from beneath a glass table as he bangs his fist in anger. “DAMN!” he shouts, his face contorted.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are …

1 (3) DYNASTY
2 (4) FALCON CREST
3 (1) DALLAS

 

[James from London]

01/Dec/82: DYNASTY: Mark v. 02/Dec/82: KNOTS LANDING: The Best Kept Secret v. 03/Dec/82: DALLAS: The Wedding v. 03/Dec/82: FALCON CREST: The Vigil

The last will and testaments of Cecil Colby, Jock Ewing and Joseph Gioberti have resulted in some uneasy business alliances in Soap Land. Colby Co is now owned jointly by Cecil’s widow Alexis and his nephew Jeff. Falcon Crest is currently run by Joseph’s daughter Angela in partnership with her nephew Chase. Ewing Oil has two of Jock’s sons each running half of the same company in direct competition with one another. The conflicts arising from each of these partnerships can be felt in this week’s episodes.

Although Alexis and Jeff actually get along quite well on DYNASTY, problems arise when Alexis allows her son Adam to deputise for her while she is in New York. Jeff is not happy to learn that Adam plans to do business with the controversial Ahmed brothers. (Apparently, the Ahmeds are in London, which would explain why Rashid wasn’t able to assume his alias as Tony Cumson in last week’s FALCON CREST.) Jeff nixes the deal, leading to his and Adam’s first clash. Pretty soon, they’re arguing about everything from Adam’s real identity to the sexual appetite of Jeff’s wife.

To reign Adam in, Jeff announces his intention to resign from his job at Denver Carrington and come over to Colby Co full time. Alexis is delighted, Adam is not. While Alexis toasts to "a wonderful future for the three of us together,” Adam and Jeff glower at each other over the rims of their champagne glasses.

Over in the Tuscany Valley, Angela opposes Chase’s decision to develop an abandoned vineyard, claiming the venture to be too expensive. Chase smells a rat: "Two months ago, Falcon Crest was perfectly solvent and now its capital reserves are nearly drained.” What Angela hasn’t told him is that she has been stealing from the Falcon Crest development fund to buy up shares in the New Globe so she can take it over. "I’m bringing in an independent auditor,” Chase announces.

Meanwhile, in DALLAS, Bobby breaks his promise to stay out of his brother’s half of Ewing Oil when the impact of JR’s variance becomes too great to ignore. While Chase’s auditor is poring over Angela’s business records on FALCON CREST, ("Money doesn’t just disappear, it goes somewhere”) Bobby has his accountants and geologists study the long-term implications of JR’s all-out oil drilling. He then confronts his brother during the Southfork cocktail hour: "Every one of those men thinks that you're tryin' to do is gonna ruin the future of Ewing Oil!” "Bobby," Ellie intervenes, "I'd like it better if you discussed this with JR in private." "I have tried, Mama,” he replies, "and I know how you feel about all this too: 'Let's not argue about business in front of the family', but don't you understand that when we're quiet about things like this, it plays right into his hands? It becomes a cover up for JR!”

While there may not be an overriding family business on KNOTS LANDING for the characters to fight over, the ramifications of Gary’s inheritance provide a source of conflict between the Ewings and the Averys this week. Laura feels betrayed when she discovers Richard has struck a deal giving Abby and Gary a controlling interest in the restaurant. Unlike Jeff Colby, Chase Gioberti or Bobby Ewing, she is not in a position to assume control of the business or call for audits and reports. Instead, she visits Richard’s shrink for one of those circular conversations that leave her (and us) with more questions than answers.

This week’s DYNASTY concludes with a great mother/son snarling match which reminds me a little of a scene from I, CLAUDIUS. “Jeff Colby is the enemy, Mother,” barks Adam, “our enemy - mine and yours … He’ll kill and strangle every plan we’ve talked about for you and me.” “Let me tell you something, Adam,” Alexis snaps back, "and don’t ever forget it. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for the fact that I know who my enemies are and how to destroy them. I’ll decide if Jeff Colby becomes a real threat - not you, I.” This dynamic is reversed on FALCON CREST, where the young pretender affects nonchalance and the elderly dowager issues warnings. “I’m not worried about Chase,” Lance brags. “I can handle him.” “Well, you haven’t handled him so far,” Angela points out. "“Don’t underestimate Chase!"

There’s more business conflict on KNOTS as Abby tries to interest record company mogul Jeff Munson in Ciji's career. Kenny sees Munson’s involvement as a threat to his own position as Ciji's producer. Nonetheless, Munson’s attendance at one of Ciji’s gigs is seen as a big deal by all concerned - all but Ciji herself, that is. “I’ve been excited before,” she shrugs. In contrast to the rest of the KNOTS characters, who are either struggling to overcome their pasts or hungry to build their futures, Ciji seems to exist almost entirely in the present. When she takes a break from rehearsal and looks around to see Chip has disappeared, she is sad. When Gary offers to take her for a ride in his car, she is happy again.

Business isn’t the only source of drama in this week’s Soap Land. Having been goaded by Adam, Jeff argues with Fallon over her alleged attraction to her own brother: “I get the feeling you kind of admire him - in kind of a perverted way.” Under orders from his grandmother “to start acting like a father for a change," Lance visits his wife at Soap Land Memorial Hospital to offer his support … only to find Melissa receiving a comforting embrace from Richard Channing. He immediately jumps to the wrong conclusion (“You never change, do ya?”) and storms off. Meanwhile, on KNOTS, Diana drops by Mack’s apartment in an attempt to bury the hatchet … only to see “the lady who lives across the hall” emerge from his bathroom wearing just a towel. Diana immediately jumps to the right conclusion, makes her excuses and leaves.

Two potential couples get off to an awkward start this week. Fallon meets Mark Jennings on DYNASTY and is on the verge of hiring him as La Mirage’s new tennis coach when she realises he is Krystle’s first husband. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Lucy mistakes Mickey for an intruder when she finds him manhandling JR and Sue Ellen’s wedding present display. (They've certainly acquired more goodies than Mark Jennings and Krystle did for their nuptials. According to a flashback in this week’s DYNASTY, their wedding gifts totalled two hundred dollars cash and an assortment of candy dishes.) Even after Mickey introduces himself, identity remains an obstacle for the couple. “A grubby ranch hand isn’t good enough for Miss Moneybags,” he concludes bitterly after Ray advises him to keep his distance.

Nine weeks after Karen and Mack's first dinner date on KNOTS LANDING, it’s time for Miss Ellie and Clayton Farlow to finally break bread together. For both couples, dead husbands are the main topic of conversation this week, with the widows Fairgate and Ewing comparing Mack and Clayton to Sid and Jock respectively. Clayton measures up quite well, Mack less so. “"You know, you and Jock would have gotten on very well,” smiles Ellie. "You have so many of the same qualities, the same kindness, the same strength. You really remind me of him very much.” “I had the best!” shouts Karen after learning of Mack’s fling with his neighbour. "Sid Fairgate never would have done this to me.” “I’m not Sid Fairgate,” Mack points out. “You’re damn right you’re not,” she replies.

This week’s KNOTS and DALLAS each build up to a significant event at the end of the episode. On KNOTS, it’s Ciji's performance at Daniel’s in front of Jeff Munson. On DALLAS, it's JR and Sue Ellen’s wedding at Southfork. Both gatherings serve to bring all the regular characters together. Well, almost - Laura Avery and Lucy Ewing are both conspicuous by their absence.

There is much silent staring-across-restaurants in the Ewing-verse this week. At Daniel’s, Val watches Abby watching Ciji and Gary laughing together - the triangle unexpectedly becoming a square. The square then becomes a pentagon as guest of honour Jeff Munson arrives and makes a bee line for Val. Abby laughs in spite of herself. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, there is a great reveal at the end of Clayton and Miss Ellie's restaurant scene where we realise Rebecca and Cliff have been sitting at another table the whole time. Rebecca notices Clayton and Ellie just in time to see him reach across the table to take her hand. The camera moves in close on Rebecca's dismayed reaction: the reluctant witness to the birth of a romance.

Back on KNOTS, Ciji's song of the week is Dobie Grey’s "If Love Must Go”, a sweet little ballad about the end of a romance. Again, Ciji sings her heart out. Again, the camera circles round her, elevating her performance. Again, the regular characters are out front mirroring the emotions of the song they’re listening to, which then seem to feed back into the song itself. These elements fuse together until it’s impossible to see where one ends and another begins. During the song, the camera cuts a couple of times to Richard leaning against a wall with a drink, scowling in Ciji’s direction. Is he feeling anger towards her for turning his restaurant into a nightspot or has the song unlocked something inside of him to do with his own relationship with Laura? Meanwhile, Diana stares intensely at Ciji throughout her performance - what is she thinking about? Val too seems mesmerised by Ciji. It’s not until the song is nearly over, however, that we realise it’s not Ciji she’s been looking at all, but Gary and Abby. Karen is the one most clearly affected. Having put on a brave face ever since learning of Mack’s betrayal, she quietly starts to weep while Ciji sings, the song having broken through her defences.

Just three weeks after Cecil and Alexis’s deathbed wedding on DYNASTY, it’s time for JR and Sue Ellen to retie the knot on DALLAS … or is it? It’s interesting to chart how dramatic Soap Land weddings have become over the past couple of years. When Krystle married Blake in the first episode of DYNASTY, her old flame Matthew turned up at the wedding - but only after the ceremony was safely over. During last season’s FALCON CREST, Melissa’s lover Cole showed up at her wedding to Lance in time to witness the exchange of vows - but did so from a discreet vantage point. Now Sue Ellen’s ex-boyfriend Cliff raises the stakes by not only attending the wedding as an invited guest of the groom but then springing to his feet when the minister asks if there are any objections to the wedding.

This week’s FALCON CREST is penned by Scott Hamner, who wrote "The Rose and the Briar” for last season’s KNOTS. Both episodes feature the respective series’ most eccentric character on a greyhound bus. On KNOTS, it was Lilimae, entertaining the little girl in the seat next to her with her autoharp. On FALCON CREST, it's Emma Channing, who bores the old woman next to her with tales from her unlikely life. Just as "The Rose and the Briar” saw Lilimae seeking fame and fortune in Las Vegas, “The Vigil" depicts Maggie trying and make it as a movie writer in Hollywood. At one point, she seems to channel Lilimae when she uncharacteristically bluffs her way into a movie studio by pretending to have attended the Oscars with a passing payroll clerk.

There are a few KNOTSian touches back in the Tuscany Valley as well. Maggie’s family each attempt to cook their own breakfast in her absence, with varying degrees of success. Them there's a scene where Cole turns to his father for advice, only for Chase to completely miss the point, which reminds me of a similar exchange between Sid and Eric in early KNOTS. Meanwhile, Angela secretly persuading a producer to take an interest in Maggie’s script in the hopes of driving a wedge between her and Chase mirrors the helping hand Abby gave Val’s writing career last season.

Outrageous Soap Land outfit of the week: It’s a tie between the space vixen dress Ciji wears on stage and Sue Ellen’s NFL-themed wedding gown. (Shoulder-pads are now so commonplace in Soap Land that Krystle is even wearing them in a flashback to her and Mark’s wedding night sometime in the 1970s.)

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (1) DYNASTY
2 (-) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) DALLAS
4 (2) FALCON CREST

 

[James from London]

08/Dec/82: DYNASTY: Kirby v. 09/Dec/82: KNOTS LANDING: Emergency v. 10/Dec/82: DALLAS: Post Nuptial v. 10/Dec/82: FALCON CREST: Confrontations

The oil surplus that has served as a backdrop to much of the action on this season’s DALLAS now hits DYNASTY, where it also provides a springboard for a new story-line. It’s a little complicated, but from what I can make out, the surplus - or “oil glut” as Blake and co refer to it - means that the government have lost interest in finding alternative sources of fuel - which was what Denver Carrington’s research into oil shale extraction (the very research Cecil Colby had Claudia spy on Jeff for last season) was all about. "The government," grumbles Blake, "beg us to come up with alternative energy answers, we go into hock to accomplish it, and suddenly an oil glut comes along and we’re yesterday’s option.” The upshot is that Denver Carrington is now financially vulnerable.

Meanwhile, on DALLAS, the same surfeit of oil is causing many to wonder what JR could possibly be doing with all the crude he's been pumping since he got his variance. Two OLM members - including KNOTS LANDING record producer Jeff Munson, seen chatting with Abby Cunningham at a polo match in the previous night’s episode - share with Bobby their own theory - that JR is selling the oil to an embargo nation. Bobby spends the rest of the ep investigating this possibility. He’s got his work cut out for him as JR’s machinations are also pretty hard to keep track of. More confusing than either DALLAS's or DYNASTY’s business storylines, however, are FALCON CREST's. At the last moment, Richard Channing foils Angela’s attempt to take over the New Globe by issuing a thousand new shares onto the stock market. I have no idea what the last sentence I typed even means.

So here we have three of the '80s super soaps with complex business plots that they choose not to simplify for the viewer at home. This isn’t necessarily a criticism - given the choice, I’d rather struggle to keep up with the programme I’m watching than be drumming my fingers, waiting for it to come to the point I’ve figured out ten minutes earlier (or worse still, already had spoilt for me online) - but as this is a genre where characters routinely exchange chunks of exposition for our benefit, why are their business stories are so densely complicated? Was the climate of the early '80s such that an average viewer was assumed to have a comprehensive working knowledge of big business, or did the programme makers credit us with being able to juggle such permutations in our heads as we went along, or are all these stories simply MacGuffins - dramatic devices that we at home are simply meant to take on blind faith and follow the consequences of, even if we don’t fully understand how we got there in the first place?

So far as this week’s Soap Land goes, the complexity of the business stories works most favourably for DALLAS. With JR playing everything so close to his chest, we are in the roughly same position as Bobby and the rest of the characters, i.e. trying to figure out what he is up to. We may not be able to keep up with every connection Bobby is making, (I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen this episode, but as soon as the off-screen oil gets to Galveston, I’m lost) but we’re in roughly the same ballpark. The exact source of Blake’s problems on DYNASTY are harder to pin down, but the consequences are so big and bold (poisoned paint, anyone?) that it doesn’t really matter. The New Globe takeover story in FALCON CREST is the most bemusing. Richard’s last-minute manoeuvring might be utterly authentic, but to someone as ignorant about stocks and shares as I am, he might just as well have magicked a thousand shares out of thin air.

Of course, it’s when the characters' business ideals collide with their personal lives that sparks really begin to fly. On DYNASTY, Blake invites Adam to Denver Carrington in the hopes of burying their differences. Having apparently reached an understanding, Blake is called away from his office, giving Adam the opportunity to sneak a peek at the oil shale contract file marked “confidential” left lying conveniently on Blake’s desk. Quick to take advantage of what he reads, Adam then suggests to Jeff that Colby Co bail out Denver Carrington in exchange for the use of their oil shale extraction process. Given that the extraction process is far more valuable than the loan, Jeff dismisses Adam’s proposal as “rotten". “The name of the game is winning,” Adam insists. “There happens to be room for both empires,” argues Jeff, "I mean, do we have to be barracudas to exist in this world?” "There comes a time in this business where you have to decide if you’re gonna make it or play by the rules.” That last quote comes not from Adam but from Abby in this week’s KNOTS as she justifies to Gary her decision to dump their partner Kenny in favour of Jeff Munson as Ciji’s record producer.

Not that Kenny isn’t above a little inter-family betrayal himself. At the beginning of the ep, his wife Ginger hands him a demo of a song she has written with a view to recording herself. She is later stunned to hear Ciji performing it at Daniel’s. The sequence where she silently accuses Kenny of betrayal and we see the guilt on his face as Ciji continues to sing is really powerful.

Ciji’s reaction when Ginger confronts her about the song is really interesting. She does not apologise for singing it without her permission or even thank her for writing it in the first place. "If I like a song and it’s good for me, I’m gonna sing it,” she states matter-of-factly. Instead of empathising with Ginger or indulging her hurt feelings, she acts as a mirror, reflecting Ginger’s own insecurities back at her: “If I’m up there doing something you wanna be doing, that’s your problem, not mine.” And it’s a such a blast to see mousy little Ginger reimagined as the kind of furious, wild-eyed Soap Land character who storms into rooms making ultimatums and swearing revenge: “You don’t care who you use or who you hurt,” she tells Ciji. "I’ll get you for this!"

There’s some unexpected betrayal on FALCON CREST too, where we see Angela’s loyal attorney/lover Phillip Erickson consorting with a mysterious, unnamed blonde of mature years. The fact that Phillip and Angela's personal relationship has been conducted almost entirely off screen provides a kind of space around the character that allows a scene like this to come as a total surprise. Phillip may have been in the series since the first episode, but here we suddenly realise we know very little about him. So when Richard approaches him later in the episode and asks him to come and work for him, (and presumably betray Angela at the same time) we have no idea which way he will jump.

Even more surprising is the scene where FALCON CREST's resident good wife, Maggie Gioberti, passionately kisses film producer Daryl Clayton on a Malibu beach. This transgresses Soap Land's unspoken sense of morality in a similar way to good guy Mack Mackenzie sleeping with his neighbour behind Karen’s back, as revealed in last week’s KNOTS. Sure, previous “good wives” have swooned in other men’s arms before now - Krystle Carrington, Pam Ewing and Karen Fairgate have all teetered on the brink of affairs - but in each case, Soap Land has taken care to show that they had been driven to such a position by a strong sense of unhappiness stemming from their husband’s neglect, or in Krystle’s case, a belief that Blake was already cheating on her. Maggie has no such excuse. She is happily married, fulfilled in her work and the only obstacle between her and Chase has been one of geography, as she has spent the last episode and a half working away from her family in Hollywood (and even then Chase has made at least two visits to see her). Following the kiss, Daryl invites her to join him “upstairs” in his beach house. Left alone to shower, Maggie comes to her senses in the much same way Pam did after kissing Alex Ward in San Serrano (DALLAS, Season 3). While Pam decisively locked the door connecting her and Alex’s hotel rooms, Maggie self-righteously accuses Daryl of "seduction", as if it were a spell he had cast or a mickey he had slipped her. Thus exonerated of any personal responsibility for the kiss, her status as a “good wife” is retained, just as Mack’s explanation that he slept with Patrice because he was frightened by the depth of his feelings for Karen effectively absolves him of his infidelity.

Amidst all this duplicity, DALLAS newlyweds Sue Ellen and JR make a solemn commitment on their honeymoon: "No other women, no games. A total commitment, all the way.” In the best scene of this week’s FALCON CREST, Lance and Melissa also discuss their marital commitments. Having brought her son Joseph home from the hospital, they are watching him sleep when Lance asks for a divorce. “What Angela has joined together, let no man put asunder,” Melissa tells him, adding, "This was never supposed to be a love match. It’s a marriage of state - the joining of two empires.” Like those terrific JR and Sue Ellen nursery scenes in DALLAS Season 2, it’s the juxtaposition between the innocence of the child in his crib and the jaded, cynical adults looking down at him that makes this scene so good. “If that kid knew what was going on around him, he’d sleep with line eye open,” Lance remarks. “He’s the heir that joins Falcon Crest to the Agretti vineyards,” replies Melissa. "Long live the King.”

Melissa’s hospital vigil for her child might be over, but Karen Fairgate’s is just beginning, following Diana's collapse during a weekend away with Abby and Gary. Blake Carrington’s Moneypenny-ish secretary Marcia, seen briefly the night before admitting Adam into his father’s office with a knowing smile, dons a white coat to become the kidney specialist who diagnoses Diana with renal failure.

KNOTS LANDING is in a very interesting place at this point. With most of the characters now in business with each other and all the women wearing lots of eyeshadow, it’s on the cusp of bursting into a full-blown supersoap ... when it is brought sharply down to earth by the semi-realism of Diana’s kidney failure. There's nothing glossy or romantic about chronic dialysis, and it’s safe to say KNOTS is the only one of the soaps that would refer to traces of blood in a major character's urine. (Admittedly, Daryl Clayton makes an unexpected reference to bodily functions on this week’s FALCON CREST. “It’s not our creative juices we’re reacting to,” he lasciviously informs Maggie, who is promptly sick in her mouth.)

Diana’s condition catches the characters, and maybe even KNOTS itself, unawares. Gone is the brave stoicism and quiet dignity with which Val greeted her cancer scare in "The Loudest Word” or Sid his paralysis in Season 3. Post-Sid, the world of KNOTS is off its axis. The scene where Karen frantically tries to stop Diana from pulling the shunt out her arm (“I just wanna die!”) is one of Soap Land’s most emotionally extreme to date. (It reminds me a bit of one of the bedroom scenes in THE EXORCIST.) The same hospital waiting area that was large and well lit when the Fairgates kept vigil for Sid is transformed, under the fevered direction of Larry Elikann, into a place that's claustrophobic and dark, even nightmarish.

Only once does this week’s DALLAS reach a similar level of hysteria - during Cliff’s fight with Afton where they shout the word “emotionality” at each other about four times and she comes dangerously close to admitting that she slept with Gil Thurman before they abruptly start making love on Cliff’s bed. (A fairly raunchy scene at the time, the sight of Afton in her woolly jumper seems suddenly light years away from John Ross and Emma crawling around in their underwear in New DALLAS Season 3’s wowza of an opening scene.)

In stark contrast to Diana, now so ill she appears to have turned silver, her counterpart on FALCON CREST, Vicky Gioberti, this week completes a 10k run in 45.05 minutes. (I can’t even get that on the treadmill - oh, the ignominy of being outrun by a fictional girl.) While DALLAS’s perpetual teenager Lucy breaks into floods of tears after a kiss from a client triggers memories of her recent ordeal, DYNASTY presents its own new ingénue - the major domo’s extraordinarily pretty daughter Kirby, returning from three years' schooling in Paris. At present, her concerns are more lightweight than mystery illnesses or rape flashbacks. She’s mainly focused on tortoises and matchmaking.

The tone of this week’s DALLAS, at least in its first act, is also pretty light. The fight that erupts at JR and Sue Ellen's wedding is the first of Southfork’s bona fide “duels in the pool,” and after umpteen viewings, it still makes me laugh (even if the logic of who punches who and why doesn't hold up to close scrutiny). As well as establishing a DALLAS tradition, the sequence also feels like a response to the infamous catfight at the end of last season’s DYNASTY. Each is a visually comedic set piece that serves as a satisfying climax to an ongoing feud between two characters, (Krystle and Alexis on DYNASTY, JR and Cliff on DALLAS) but without actually furthering the narrative. In other words, one could skip both fights without missing any of the story. However, the differences between the two scenes emphasise the contrasting tones of their respective shows. Alexis and Krystle’s cat fight is campy and glamorous with a kind of knowing, acidic wit to it; the DALLAS punch up is essentially a bar room brawl transposed to a wedding party: masculine, traditional and Western, with just a hint of self-parody. While the Carrington women duke it out, the Ewing ladies are left watching in helpless dismay; they’re there to be fought over, not to do the fighting themselves. The DALLAS sequence fades out on Larry Hagman chuckling in the Southfork pool, implying that JR is somehow in on the joke, whereas the DYNASTY catfight ends with God’s eye view of a dazed and defeated Alexis collapsed in a heap in the corner of her wrecked studio - which seems to suggest that she is the joke.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (2) KNOTS LANDING
2 (1) DYNASTY
3 (4) FALCON CREST
4 (3) DALLAS

 

[James from London]

15/Dec/82: DYNASTY: La Mirage v. 16/Dec/82: KNOTS LANDING: Abby's Choice v. 17/Dec/82: DALLAS: Barbecue Three v. 17/Dec/82: FALCON CREST: United We Stand...

There may be no Christmas in Soap Land this year, but two of this week's shows are nonetheless in a party mood - DYNASTY is celebrating the grand opening of Fallon’s hotel and the Ewings of DALLAS are throwing their annual barbecue. Both gatherings have a dress theme - DYNASTY’s is the roaring twenties (“Those must have been the most wonderful carefree days,” sighs Alexis, "people innocently pursuing their pleasure-filled lives”) while the barbecue guests all show up in traditional Western garb.

DYNASTY is so excited to be throwing a party that fancy dress takes precedence over drama in this week’s ep. For the most part, the results are enjoyably dumb - particularly the scene where Alexis and Krystle show up at the same dress shop at the same time to be fitted for what turns out to be identical party frocks. Their encounter echoes the scene in FLAMINGO ROAD’s first season where nemeses Lane and Constance simultaneously arrive at the beauty parlour for the same appointment with the same hairdresser. Back then, laid back Lane graciously surrendered the appointment to Constance. This time around, competitive Krystle suggests she and Alexis flip a coin to determine who will wear the dress to Fallon’s party. As she did last season’s cat fight, Krystle wins.

The closest DALLAS comes to an equivalent scene is the one where the Ewing women are writing barbecue invitations, (hard to imagine the Carrington/Colby ladies lowering themselves to such a task) and Lucy coolly declines Sue Ellen’s offer of lunch in town. Unlike the dress shop scene in DYNASTY, there are no witty remarks or bitchy putdowns, ("Go on, Krystle, swear - I'd adore to hear you say something colourful and foul”) just earnest bemusement and concern. “Pam, is it me?” Sue Ellen wonders aloud after Lucy has left the room. Pam assures her it isn’t: “The kidnapping really left a lot of scars on Lucy … She’s just not ready to accept help yet.” As adversarial female relationships go, the richest one in this week’s Soap Land takes place between Abby and Karen on KNOTS LANDING.

“Abby’s Choice” is whether or not to donate one of her kidneys to her niece, and Karen’s daughter, Diana. It’s very much her choice to make - everyone is falling over themselves to be nonjudgemental. “You don’t have to be a hero,” Gary tells her. “It’s a very personal decision,” insists Dr Blake Carrington’s Secretary. Even Diana herself, never more sweetly vulnerable, is reluctant to pressure her aunt into helping her. After all, it’s not as if it’s a question of life and death - Diana can survive indefinitely with one kidney - it’s the quality of life that's in question. Factor in the knowledge that Sid, Abby’s brother and Diana’s father, died on the operating table and you’ve got a more complex than average Soap Land dilemma. So it is that Abby is obliged to look within herself in a way that very few Soap Land characters, and certainly not villainous ones, ever are. “I am not a hero, believe me,” she tells Gary, her voice shaking. "A hero is someone with courage, and it’s gonna take a hell of a lot of courage to say no to this. I don’t know if I’ve got that kind of guts.”

This is a story-line that slices, both metaphorically and literally, through Abby’s beautiful blonde exterior and scheming persona to the human being underneath, as burdened by conscience and terrified of death as any average looking schlub in the real world. Crucially, however - and herein lies the cleverness of both the episode and Donna Mills’ performance - it does so without compromising any of the qualities that have made Abby such a terrific Soap Land villain in the first place. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the scene where, having agreed to give Diana her kidney, Abby is visited by Karen in the hospital the night before the operation. When Karen tries to express her gratitude, Abby throws it back in her face: “I’m doing this because I have to, for Diana, for my brother’s child, and for myself so I won’t have to live with the guilt of having refused, but I am not doing it for you ... I don’t want you here. I don’t want us to be civil to each other and I don’t want you to pretend like you like me all of a sudden. If you want to show your gratitude, save a whale in my name, but stay away from me now.” Sure, the “save a whale in my name” quip is cute, but this isn’t simply cattiness for its own sake, the way Alexis and Krystle’s encounter in the dress shop is. It runs deeper than that - there are years of resentment in Abby’s speech, the kind of unarticulated stuff that goes on in real families. There’s also fear, the sort you can only take out on someone who knows you really well. And that’s what Karen and Abby are - reluctant members of the same family - rather than simply rivals for the same man.

All that said, once Abby and Diana are wheeled into the operating theatre, the episode settles into a conventional, if perfectly acceptable, hospital drama where the eventual (i.e. successful) outcome is in little doubt. Meanwhile, the remaining characters all congregate in the hospital waiting area to exchange the same kind of meaningful glances they’d otherwise be giving each other in Richard’s restaurant.

“Barbecue Three” is one of those great pay-off episodes of DALLAS where everything clicks expertly into place and one is reminded why this show is the Daddy of the genre. It’s the one where JR’s latest master plan, a string of cut-rate gas stations, is finally unveiled, setting off a chain of dramatic events. Something similar, albeit on a smaller scale, happens on FALCON CREST when Chase learns that the Douglas Channing Memorial Garden is really just a front for the winery Richard is secretly building. Just as JR’s latest move to beat his brother also spells bad news for the oil community at large, ("He's cutting the throat of every oil man in Texas,” Cliff explains to Afton, “He's gonna force us to cut our profits”) so Richard’s vendetta against Angela has serious implications for the rest of the local populace. “Richard’s already making offers for next year’s harvest at twice the going rate,” Chase informs Angela. "If [he] opens that winery and starts a price war for next year’s harvest, he’ll put the rest of us out of business … He’s declared war on every single winery in this valley.”

While the newly formed Texas Energy Commission initially vote to rescind JR’s oil variance, (only to later rescind that rescission when they hear about his gas stations) Chase announces he is filing an injunction to halt construction on the winery.

It’s interesting to compare the reactions of Miss Ellie and Jacqueline Perrault (Chase’s mother) to the family/business conflict going on around them. Each is worried for her children. While Ellie confides her concerns to Ray, (“I have such a feeling of helplessness ….I have to try and keep this family from flying apart”) Jacqueline is more pro-active. She meets with Richard and offers to join forces with him against Angela, “but I don’t want Chase to get caught in the crossfire … All I want is the promise that no harm will come to my son.” By the end of their respective episodes, Ellie and Jacqueline are singing from almost identical hymn sheets. “I’ve had enough of this insane competition between you two!” Miss Ellie tells JR and Bobby. “I came to put a stop to this madness,” Jacqueline informs Chase and Richard. "You two are the last people in the world who should be fighting one another!”
Back at the grand opening of La Mirage, the shrill '20s musical score and air of self-congratulation begin to grate. Everyone oohs and aahs over what a fabulous/wonderful/beautiful job Fallon has done with the place when it actually looks remarkably tacky.

Three weeks after Afton reluctantly slept with Gil Thurman to secure Cliff’s refinery deal, Alexis gives Congressman Neil McVane a quick knee trembler during the party as an inducement to scupper the government loan Blake so desperately needs to hold onto his company. Blake retaliates by threatening to expose McVane's "private goings on in Washington” unless he continue to play ball. Angela pulls an equivalent move in FALCON CREST, blackmailing Eric Kenderson, Richard’s broker, over his drug problem in order to delay the release of the two million shares Richard needs to hold onto his newspaper. Neither Alexis nor Richard take kindly to having the tables turned on them. “You double-crossing scum!” Alexis seethes at McVane, while Richard promises Kenderson that ”if I find out you’ve backed out of this deal on your own, you’re gonna be the old man sweeping the ticker tape from the stock exchange floor!"

When Adam meets DYNASTY newcomer Kirby at the La Mirage opening, he immediately becomes possessive of her. “She’s with me,” he insists when Jeff asks her for a dance. When Kirby accepts Jeff's invitation, a love triangle is formed. There’s a similar moment at the Ewing barbecue where Bobby is leading Pam to the dance floor only for Holly Harwood to interrupt and ask to take Pam's place. “It’s strictly business,” she assures Pam. Bobby and Holly's Texas two-step might not be quite as intimate as Joaquin and Pamela Rebecca’s at the most recent Southfork barbecue, but Pam’s reaction to the kiss Holly plants on Bobby’s cheek isn’t a million miles from John Ross’s to his wife hip-grinding with another man.

At first glance, Kirby is the anti-Ciji. Where Ciji is distant and remote, Kirby is positively garrulous about her life. Ciji might have made a big impact on the residents of KNOTS LANDING, but after six episodes, we still know next to nothing about her. Kirby, meanwhile, burbles on and on - about the summer she spent nannying on a yacht, (“While the rich, super rich, mommy and daddy pooped out on the poop deck, I took care of Little Poop”) about how wonderful and beautiful the Carringtons are, about what it was like to grow up in their family mansion. As if this were not enough, we also learn that she has been leading a double life, one that somehow involves dancing barefoot on tables in the casinos of Monte Carlo.

However, when one looks a little closer, it turns out Kirby and Ciji do have things in common. This week, as Kirby renews an old friendship with Fallon, Ciji forges a new one with Laura. In different ways, each of these relationships is a first. When Fallon greets Kirby with open-armed excitement, it is the first time we see her regard another woman as anything other than an enemy (her short-lived truce with Alexis notwithstanding). When Ciji shows concern for Laura, whom she has overheard arguing with Richard, it is the first time she has exhibited an active interest in anyone’s life but her own. Ciji and Laura’s friendship hits the ground running - within the space of one episode, they’ve wept at a Bette Davis movie together, had a sleepover, giggled conspiratorially at Richard, and celebrated Ciji’s birthday with a party for two.

It transpires that Kirby and Ciji also share a love of babies, with Kirby fawning over Little Blake to the extent that Fallon hires her as his nurse, and Ciji cooing over Daniel and confiding to Laura that she’d really like a baby of her own. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Holly admits to Bobby that a faithful husband is "exactly what I’d like to have.” For all that they are modern career women, it seems that Ciji and Holly are both old fashioned girls at heart. Somewhat less traditionally, FALCON CREST’s Lance - who has steadfastly disowned Melissa’s child since he learnt of its conception - starts to bond with the little critter this week, almost in spite of himself.

When Kirby attempts to leave La Mirage at the end of the party, Adam grabs her arm and won’t let go. Similarly, in an effort to persuade Lucy to dance with him at the barbecue, Mickey Trotter makes a playful grab towards her. When both women recoil from these advances, Adam proves creepily persistent, whereas Mickey exhibits a heretofore unseen sensitive side. “You’re scared, aren’t you?” he realises. “Lucy, I know what it’s like to be scared."

The parties at La Mirage and Southfork are both disrupted by characters making spectacles of themselves. On DYNASTY, a crowd gathers to watch Fallon charlestoning tipsily on the hotel diving board alongside Mark Jennings, before they tumble fully clothed into the pool and share a kiss. Aside from Jeff pursing his lips in disapproval, the party guests seem happy to indulge their hostess’s folly. The cartel and Cliff angrily confronting JR at the barbecue over his cut-price gas stations is less well received, with Bobby and Ray sticking up for their brother (“If there’s any blood spilled here today, I guarantee you, it won’t just be Ewing blood!”) and Miss Ellie angrily voicing her disapproval: “Go home! Go home, all of you!” In each instance, the characters embody the periods their party outfits are meant to evoke. While Fallon plays the madcap ‘20s heiress - decadent, irresponsible, narcissistic - the Ewings band sternly together on the Southfork patio, looking for all the world like a pioneer family protecting their homestead from outsiders.

This week’s DYNASTY, DALLAS and FALCON CREST all end with a dramatic revelation, each one more exciting than the last. "Our divorce papers were never filed in Mexico - we were never divorced!” is easily topped by “I’m going to court to break Jock’s will - and then I intend to sell Ewing Oil!”, while “I’m your mother - you are both my sons!” is the real shocker.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (4) DALLAS
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) FALCON CREST
4 (2) DYNASTY

 

[James from London]

29/Dec/82: DYNASTY: The Locket v. 30/Dec/82: KNOTS LANDING: The Block Party v. 31/Dec/82: DALLAS: Mama Dearest v. 31/Dec/82: FALCON CREST: ...Divided We Fall

1982 ends as it began in Soap Land. At the start of the year, the Ewing brothers flew to South America to look for their daddy Jock, missing presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Fifty-one weeks later, Blake and Alexis fly to Bali to look for their son Steven, missing presumed dead following an oil rig explosion in the Java Sea.

Back then, Miss Ellie decreed that “the family should pull together when there’s trouble.” Krystle has the same wish now but lacks the matriarchal authority to enforce it. “I guess I’ll just never understand this family,” she tells Fallon sadly. "At a time when most people need to pull together, you go off by yourselves like wounded bears.”

“Don’t shut me out, you need me now,” she pleads as Blake leaves for Bali without her. "I don’t need anybody to help me fight my battles, Krystle,” he replies coldly. This exchange is echoed by other couples in this week’s Soap Land. “Mack, don’t shut me out,” says Karen in KNOTS LANDING as Mack wrestles with parental problems. “I’ll work this out myself - alone!” he shouts back. In this week’s DALLAS, in the wake of a family row following Miss Ellie’s shock decision to break Jock’s will, Bobby elects to take a drive. “I’ll go with you,” offers Pam. "I'd just as soon be by myself,” he replies, more gently than either Blake or Mack, but just as firmly, before driving off into the night. Sue Ellen observes this exchange from the shadows and when she later finds JR deep in thought, is mindful not to impose herself upon him the way Pam did Bobby, Karen did Mack or Krystle did Blake. "Would you rather be alone?" she asks him carefully.

It’s interesting how much angrier and more dysfunctional the Carringtons seem in their time of crisis than the Ewings did a year ago. On their way to South America, the Ewing boys huddled together on a crowded plane, fondly sharing childhood reminiscences and refills of bourbon. Travelling separately on the same flight to Bali, Alexis locates Blake in the first class lounge and first berates then physically attacks him. The contrast continues when both parties reach their destination. While the Ewings, even JR, accepted without question Punk’s assurances that everything was being done to find their precious daddy, Blake immediately pulls rank with Cassidy, Punk’s equivalent: “What are you doing? That’s what I wanna know! It’s been forty-eight hours since the explosion and you don’t have one scrap of information about the survivors?”

And while the Ewing family as a whole (apart from Sue Ellen) remained optimistic about Jock’s chances of survival, the Carringtons (except Blake) all seem resigned to Steven’s death. Ironically, Fallon’s description of Steven as "probably dead somewhere at the bottom of the ocean where nobody will ever find him” will ultimately prove more applicable to Jock.

Things are far less harmonious in DALLAS these days, however. In this week’s instalment, “Mama Dearest", everyone’s turning on everyone. As well as the Ewings fighting amongst themselves, Punk nearly comes to blows with Cliff - and the sight of Ellie turning to ice when Harve Smithfield reluctantly tells her he will be unable to represent her in court is one of the most effective moments in an episode full of effective moments. Meanwhile, Rebecca’s chastisement of her son (“I won’t be a party to any violence!”) takes on fresh resonance in light of Cliff’s actions in New DALLAS. Add to this Miss Ellie’s scolding of her eldest son (“I don’t think you give a damn about your daddy’s wishes - all you care about is yourself!”) and this episode could be renamed, in the parlance of modern day DALLAS, “Mama No Like".

After initially shutting her out, Bobby later unburdens himself to Pam. Over on KNOTS, Mack does the same with Karen. Both men admit that they are the way they are because of how their fathers raised them - the primary difference being that while Bobby always tried to emulate and please Jock - "I wasn't just a road man for Ewing Oil, I was the best road man for any oil company because that's what Daddy expected, and that's what I expect from myself” - Mack’s life has been determined by a doomed attempt not to turn out like his father. “I’m like him, you see?” he explains to Karen. "And that’s the worst part. I hate his lousy guts and yet I’m like him and I know it. That’s probably why I never got married - because I knew I’d be just as crappy a father and husband as he was.” “That's why Daddy turned away from Gary,” Bobby continues. "'The Ewings must succeed' and Gary didn't care about that, but Pam, JR and I do."

On DYNASTY, Blake repeatedly insists that his search for his son is "just between Steven and me.” On KNOTS, the scenes between Mack and his father, Pete, who is terminally ill, also have a life and death intensity to them. Jeff Corey’s performance as Pete brings a fresh layer of authenticity to the show. There aren’t many Soap Land characters whom I genuinely feel I could have met in the real world, but Pete is one of them. (Granted, this might have something to do with Pete’s Scottish brogue, which the character is meant to be faking, but which the actor pretty much nails.)

While the significance of the father/son relationship cannot be underestimated, what of those Soap Land sons who grew up without either a father or a mother - what of Adam Carrington and Richard Channing? This week, Richard confronts Jacqueline Perrault, the mother who abandoned him as a baby. It’s interesting to compare this scene with the equivalent one between Cliff and Rebecca in DALLAS Season 3. Where Cliff invited his mother to his apartment for coffee and cake (not to mention liquorice), this is a much more businesslike arrangement: Richard receives Jacqueline in his office where he makes a point of placing a clock timer on his desk in order to limit their conversation to half an hour.

Both Cliff and Richard are looking for straight answers. "I was barely five years old and you pretended to be dead … why?” asks Cliff. "Why did you put me in an orphanage?” demands Richard. So confronted, both women prevaricate, adopting a similarly martyred tone, as if to suggest that they themselves are the real victims. "It’s so hard to explain,” sighs Rebecca. "Oh Richard,” pleads Jacqueline, "I never wanted to choose between my sons.” Both men then let their mothers have it. While Cliff becomes emotional, ("Do you have any idea what it’s like to be five years old and be told that your mother’s dead only to find out the truth is that she didn’t want you, that she was only thinking about herself?!”) Richard keeps his feelings under control. "I’ve spent my life searching for my mother,” he tells Jacqueline calmly. "As a kid, I always dreamed of greeting her with open arms, but as I got older, my resentment grew to the point where the only excuse I’d accept was death. I wanted my search to lead to my mother’s grave.” Jacqueline gasps in shock, then begs Richard to keep her identity as his mother a secret (much as Rebecca did when she first met Pam).

Meanwhile, on DYNASTY, Adam is put in the strange position of mourning a brother he has never met. "Growing up alone the way I did, I’d have given a lot for a kid brother,” he tells Fallon with apparent sincerity. Then while flirting with Kirby a few minutes later, he blithely dismisses Steven as “just a name to me”. This duality is mirrored by Richard in FALCON CREST. ”I sort of like the idea of having a brother,” he bashfully admits to his newly acquired sibling Chase. "Even more, I like the idea of having you as a brother.” Later in the episode, Miss Hunter asks him if he honestly has any feelings for Chase. “Yes,” he replies coldly. "Hatred.”

Jacqueline Perrault is central to another FALCON CREST scenario that hearkens back to early DALLAS this week. Her consequences-be-damned insistence on visiting her great-grandson Joseph at Falcon Crest echoes Digger Barnes’ determination to peak a sneak at his supposed grandson Baby John in “Rodeo”. In order to see the child, Jacqueline, like Digger, must keep her blood tie to him a secret and instead suffer the humiliation of kowtowing to her nemesis, who smugly believes that she is the child’s direct ascendant. Just as Jock did when Digger cradled John Ross, Angela keeps a beady eye on Jacqueline during her visit with Joseph.

Compared to Jacqueline, Chase and Maggie don’t appear overly concerned about their new grandson - or perhaps it’s just that they are occupied with other story-lines. A possible downside of FALCON CREST's focus being split between multiple plots, each of equal importance, is that it’s hard to keep track of where the characters’ emotional priorities lie. Whereas Digger's pilgrimage to the Southfork nursery was a significant and poignant part of that particular DALLAS episode and had a lasting impact on him, Jacqueline’s equivalent visit is dealt with in a couple of minutes, after which the characters swiftly move on to other stories. This isn’t to say the plot won’t yet resurface and bite us on the ass when we're least expecting it - which is a possible upside of FALCON CREST being such a busy show.

The week before Christmas, there was the La Mirage opening in DYNASTY and the Southfork barbecue in DALLAS. Now it’s party time in FALCON CREST and KNOTS. Like DALLAS, KNOTS’ celebrations are of the daytime, al fresco variety, with a bit of local fundraising thrown in - a “block party”, or what we English might call a fete - with the added bonus of rising rock star Ciji Dunne belting out power pop cover versions on a makeshift stage.

FALCON CREST plays host to no less than two gatherings this week. First, there’s the Founder’s Day Parade which, like the block party and the barbecue, is a wholesome community event (“This whole thing smacks of an office picnic,” observes Miss Hunter drily) and also has a period dress theme. (The exact period I’m a little vague on - somewhere between THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE GREAT GATSBY it appears - with Nick Hogan and Lance both sporting the same style of white Gatsby-esque hat that Mark Jennings wore at La Mirage two weeks ago). This is followed by a more glamorous party at Angela’s house. For a change, there’s no dress code here - but while there are plenty of low cut gowns with spangly sequins, there are, strangely, no shoulder pads.

Soap Land parties are almost always an excuse to bring estranged or feuding characters together in the same environment - see Blake, Alexis and Neil McVane at La Mirage, Cliff, the cartel and the Ewings at Southfork, Angela, Richard and Jacqueline at this week’s party at Falcon Crest - and then watch the sparks fly. Not so at the KNOTS LANDING block party, where Abby and Gary drop Olivia off at the entrance to the cul-de-sac and then disappear off-screen for the rest of the episode. (As a result, Gary is referenced more in DALLAS this week than KNOTS, thanks to Miss Ellie’s controversial decision to sell Ewing Oil “and give half the money to a drunk and a cowboy.”) Consequently, the block party is a somewhat tame affair, the highlight of which is Ciji and Lilimae duetting on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

There’s something dreamlike about the scene at the end of this week’s KNOTS, where Pete Mackenzie comes to Seaview Circle looking to make up with Mack, with whom he has argued. It is dark and the party guests have all left. He finds Lilimae amongst the streamers and other party debris blowing gently around in the cul-de-sac, searching for a random piece of paper. As she roots about, she distractedly imparts unhelpful advice to Pete about how she and Val came to terms with their differences: “We don’t talk about them. All we do is not do them anymore.”

Pete carries with him his own father’s kilt, which he plans to present to Mack as a symbol of reconciliation. This is mirrored by Mark Jennings' gesture towards Krystle on DYNASTY when he returns her grandmother's locket which he stole from her and pawned during their marriage years before. After thirty years, I’ve finally forgiven Mark for not being Matthew Blaisdel and the gradual reconciliation between he and Krystle has actually been quite sweet to watch.

KNOTS closes on an emotional embrace between Pete and Mack, their differences nonetheless unresolved. Angela’s party on FALCON CREST concludes more dramatically. Just like the La Mirage opening and the Southfork barbecue, the celebrations are disrupted, this time by an impromptu toast from Richard “to my mother, Jacqueline Perrault.” Cue a “You bitch!” from Angela, and an if-looks-could-kill freeze frame of Lana Turner. Very funny.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are … wow, this one was close ...

1 (1) DALLAS
2 (4) DYNASTY
3 (3) FALCON CREST
4 (2) KNOTS LANDING

 

[James from London]

05/Jan/83: DYNASTY: The Search v. 06/Jan/83: KNOTS LANDING: Cutting the Ties That Bind v. 07/Jan/83: DALLAS: The Ewing Blues v. 07/Jan/83: FALCON CREST: Pas De Deux

Unlike the Ewings’ search for Jock on DALLAS, Blake and Alexis’s quest to find Steven on DYNASTY spills over into a second episode. There are factors common to both searches - a meeting with an eyewitness to the accident (the pilot of the plane that crashed into Jock’s helicopter, the rig foreman who saw Steven just before the explosion), the discovery of a personal item which serves as evidence of death in lieu of a body (Jock’s medallion, Steven’s bloodstained jacket), and finally, a sole family member who refuses to accept that death - Miss Ellie in DALLAS, Blake on DYNASTY. "I gave up once on Adam,” Blake argues. “Turned out he was alive. I’m not going to give up on Steven.” It occurs to me that, had the DALLAS writers chosen to go there, Miss Ellie could have used the same argument. After all, she gave up on her brother Garrison when he was missing presumed dead, only for him to show up alive forty years later. With that in mind, it would be almost surprising if Ellie didn’t believe that Jock might still be alive.

Where the DYNASTY storyline seriously diverges from its DALLAS equivalent is in the enlistment of a psychic, Dehner, whom Blake brings from California to Denver to help “find” his son. This is Soap Land’s first delve into the supernatural since the final days of FLAMINGO ROAD, but it lacks the exotic atmosphere of Michael Tyrone’s dabblings with voodoo magic. Nor is Dehner overtly eccentric or flamboyant in the way Adrianna the fortune teller was in DYNASTY Season 2. Instead, the character and story-line are played straight (which only serves to make it all the nuttier). In fact, the story seems less concerned with Dehner’s powers than with Blake’s state of mind. “You've cracked, Blake,” states Alexis unequivocally. "The redoubtable Blake Carrington has lost his mind … his tormented mind.” Krystle is rather more tactful, expressing to Blake her “concern for the way you’re driving yourself.” Blake is not the only Soap Land patriarch to have his sanity called into question this week. On DALLAS, Miss Ellie wrestles with the fact that the only way to break Jock’s will is to cast doubt on his mental competence prior to his death. “The Jock we all know is not the man who wrote that codicil,” insists Pam. "Jock was not mentally incompetent,” Ellie replies firmly. "He was a very rational man.” Ironically, the most clearly deranged Soap Land character of the week - Jeff Colby, currently suffering from hallucinations and mood swings - is diagnosed by his doctor merely with fatigue brought on by overwork.

There are some interestingly meta moments in this week’s Soap Land. At times, DYNASTY’s Kirby and KNOTS LANDING’s Val seem able to talk about their lives only by framing them in a fictional context. (That is, a context even more fictional than the one they’re already in.) Kirby, on a visit to Jeff’s office, complains that her father "thinks I'm Sabrina”, the title character from a 1954 film starring Audrey Hepburn. She then goes on to describe an unnamed movie she has just been to see, the plot of which mirrors her and Jeff’s own situation: “There was this girl who loved this man, though she never spoke it. She couldn’t. And the man, needing and deserving love … couldn’t break down the deep, but unnecessary, barriers between them. Actually, it was a pretty dumb movie.” In his mentally altered state, Jeff thinks the plot she is describing is real and that they are the characters in the movie. Even more confusingly, he mistakes Kirby for his estranged wife Fallon. “Why did you never tell me this before?” he asks Kirby/Fallon. “Because I never dared to,” Kirby replies, seizing this opportunity to get close to him. “And you’ve always loved me?” he asks her. “Yes,” she says, "always.” They kiss, but the moment is ruined when Jeff calls Kirby by his wife’s name. Upset, she runs off … and straight into the clutches of Adam. He dries her tears and offers to take her to dinner. Cut to Adam and Kirby eating dinner in Alexis’s penthouse. “You fib so easily,” mock-chides a drunken Kirby, "not happening to mentioning that the restaurant in the sky just happens to be the very apartment where you live ... Isn’t there any music in this tower?” Her choice of the word “tower" conjures up the idea of a fairytale - more fiction.

On KNOTS, Val is similarly surprised to find herself in a high-rise luxury apartment. “Is this really me on the terrace of a penthouse, thirty storeys high above New York City?” she asks Jeff Munson. "Things like this don’t happen to me. It happens in movies, but not in real life.” Just as the only way Kirby can express her feelings for Jeff is to disguise them as a plot from a film, so Val can only contemplate a successful future for herself by describing it in cinematic terms. “To a new life,” she toasts, "starring Valene Ewing and a cast of thousands.” Like Kirby’s Jeff, Val’s Jeff plays along with the movie concept. “To a new life - Act 1 Scene 1,” he replies before moving in for a kiss, just as Kirby's Jeff does. This one ends more successfully, however - more like an old fashioned movie kiss, in fact. (And just like in those old movies, it’s left to our imaginations as to whether or not Val and Jeff M then spend the night together.)

Other “fictional" references in this week’s Soap Land: Kirby bitterly describing Jeff to Adam as "Fallon’s Hamlet of a spouse”, Maggie playfully referring to Angela as the Wicked Witch of the West on FALCON CREST and JR describing himself to John Ross on DALLAS as "the Robin Hood of the oil business - take from the poor and give to the rich. You remember that.” (Thirty-one years later, that advice will be countered by Bobby in New DALLAS episode “Playing Chicken”: “That’s what you get when you threaten to take away a man’s livelihood,” he tells his nephew after the ranch hands on Southfork have turned on John Ross over his decision to drill for oil on the ranch. While we’re on the subject of New DALLAS, it’s also a kick to contrast Tyler Banks’ version of John Ross scampering around the reception area of Ewing Oil in this ep with Josh Henderson’s strutting through the doors of Ewing Global in 2014.) Also this week, Cliff compares Sue Ellen to a historical rather than fictional character when he talks about her standing beside JR “like the Duchess of Windsor” during an appearance on Roy Ralston’s “Texas Talk Time” television programme.

Following Val’s interview with Mike Douglas earlier in the season, this is the second instance of a Ewing guesting on a TV talk show. Interestingly, Ralston’s introduction to JR - “Some call him a saint, some call him a sinner” - chimes with Mike Douglas’s to Val when he told his audience, “If that name Ewing sounds familiar, then it’s who you think it is!” This week at least, DALLAS is in accord with KNOTS LANDING in its portrayal of the Texas Ewings as somewhat notorious - a result of JR courting the media as part of his cut-rate gas scheme perhaps. That the family is of interest to the public is underlined in the last scene of the ep when attorney Brooks Oliver describes Ewing as "a name that sells newspapers.” Sue Ellen telling JR that “it’s nice to be the wife of a celebrity” echoes Lilimae's reminder to Val that “you’re a celebrity” on this week’s KNOTS.

JR’s television appearance, during which he slights his baby brother, (“He does not have the strength to run Ewing Oil”) prompts Bobby to announce his decision to start playing dirty. "My brother doesn't think I can play hardball,” he tells Pam. “Well sweetheart, I'm gonna have the pleasure of stuffin' that ball down his throat!” To that end, he dispatches one of his minions to dig into the small print of a contract Ewing Oil has with the cartel so that he can strong arm them into drilling for oil on the Wellington land. Instead, he learns that he can force them to buy out his interest for five times the market value. Given his fight with JR, this is profit Bobby badly needs. “Great,” Pam tells him sarcastically, "now you can lose a few more friends.”

Over on KNOTS, Gary is the Ewing brother losing friends over a business deal when he fully endorses Abby’s decision to sign over Ciji’s contract to Jeff Munson - leaving partner Kenny out in the cold. While Jordan Lee accuses Bobby of armed robbery, Kenny's accusation of Gary is more personal: “At least I don’t make deals with my friends and then stab them in the back.” In a deliciously soapy move, Abby also mirrors Bobby’s actions when she assigns an attorney - one Jim Westmont - to pore over all of the investment deals she and Gary have made to see if there’s a way of protecting her individual interests in the event of them splitting up. It’s so cool that, even after three years in Soap Land, Abby is still surprising us by showing how ruthless she can be.

Elsewhere on KNOTS, Ciji learns that she is with child. Just as Pam Ewing did in “Barbecue”, she stands in front of a mirror and playfully tries to imagine how she’ll look when heavily pregnant. For both women, it is a stage of pregnancy they are destined never to reach. After Ciji breaks the news to Chip, he orders her to have an abortion: “Get this through your head - no baby!” When she refuses, he becomes aggressive, pulling her hair and grabbing her roughly. “Don’t you know how much is riding on you?” he snarls. “The big time, stardom, everything we ever dreamed about. You and me, all the way to the top … Nothing’s gonna interfere with what I have planned for you.” The picture Chip paints of himself and Ciji as an ambitious couple destined for greatness (“You and me, all the way to the top”) mirrors Adam's description of himself and Kirby on DYNASTY: “Two people who knew what they wanted and how to go after it.”

Just as Chip becomes violent when Ciji asserts control over her own body, so Adam rips Kirby's dress and wrestles her to the floor of the penthouse when she refuses to have sex with him. The most striking moment of Adam's attack is when Kirby stops struggling or protesting and simply lies still as the screen fades to black. This is - I hesitate to use the word sophisticated in such a context - but a comparatively complex depiction of rape in Soap Land. Kirby's passivity reads as reluctant acquiescence as if she believes she is responsible for the situation in which she now finds herself and must take the consequences. This is spelled out in the follow-up scene where she informs Adam coldly: “Your respect for me means less than nothing. My respect for myself, that’s what suffered … I’m not blaming you, I’m blaming myself. I’ve had champagne before, I wasn’t dragged here forcibly.” Here, Kirby could be speaking for Laura Avery in “The Lie” or maybe even Lucy after her rape in DALLAS. Certainly, Pam’s line about Lucy’s attack - “I think she believes she did something to allow it to happen” - resonates here.

When Kirby returns to the Carrington mansion in the early hours of the morning, she keeps quiet about the rape - indeed, the word itself is never used. The closest she comes to speaking out is to drily allude to the events of the evening as “a comedy of errors” - another example of a character reframing their experiences in a fictional context. Back on KNOTS, despite intimate conversations with Laura and Gary, Ciji reveals nothing about Chip’s violent behaviour either. Like Kirby, she seems almost accepting of what has happened to her, as if this is all she can expect or all she deserves. And while neither DYNASTY nor KNOTS endorse this view themselves, they do nothing to really challenge it either. There is no counterargument, no voice to say, “Such behaviour is unacceptable, not to mention illegal.” Maybe the women’s silence, their isolation, is reflective of the real world, and maybe the drama on screen is the stronger for it. Maybe.

There is also more commonplace violence in this week’s Soap Land. Ray Krebbs and Chase Gioberti each take a swing at their respective half-brother, JR Ewing and Richard Channing, for insulting a woman in their presence. While JR has been mocking Donna’s attempts to rescind his oil variance (“I believe the word is inept”), Richard has publicly branded his and Chase’s mother an adulteress. Miss Ellie and Angela Channing both look on in dismay as the punches are thrown in their houses.

While DALLAS’s Donna might have foregone her writing career in favour of committee meetings, the work of Soap Land’s remaining scribes - Val Ewing and Maggie Gioberti - attracts unwelcome attention. While standing on Jeff's New York balcony, Val is blissfully unaware that Chip is stealing pages from her unfinished manuscript in order to impress his new boss. On FALCON CREST, having learnt that Angela was behind Daryl Clayton's interest in her movie script, Maggie tries to extricate herself from their contract, but finds Daryl unwilling to give up so easily.

By now, Maggie has admitted her near-affair with Daryl to husband Chase and he has proved remarkably understanding about it. On DYNASTY, Blake is finding it harder to overlook the continued presence of Krystle’s ex in Denver, and the locket Mark has returned to her has become a symbol of the barrier between them. However, the most overt threat to one of Soap Land's “golden couples” arrives in this week’s DALLAS. Three months after Michael Tyrone showed up in FALCON CREST calling himself Richard Channing, Tyrone’s former adversary Sam Curtis reinvents himself as Mark Graison. Still a wealthy businessman, he again comes to the aid of an older woman - then Lute-Mae, now Miss Ellie - before openly declaring his interest in her younger friend - then Lane Ballou, now Pam. Like Lane, Pam is already involved with another man, but Mark is no more dissuaded by her declaration of fidelity to Bobby (“I’m a married woman and I’m not very modern when it comes to playing around”) than Sam was by Lane’s professions of love for Field.

Other Soap Land marriages are also faltering. On KNOTS, Richard Avery’s memories of his and Laura’s early relationship ("Remember that first year? Morning, noon and night - we were insatiable”) only serve to point up the distance that exists between them now. There is a similar scene in FALCON CREST between Nick Hogan, the older man Vicky Gioberti has fallen for, and his wife Sheila. Again, fond recollections of the past ("Remember that weekend we spent at Mount Shasta, right after we were married?”) contrast with a chilly present.

FALCON CREST’s plot-lines often seem like a compressed variation of what has already occurred on DALLAS. The same arc that took the length of DALLAS’s fourth season to play out between Cliff Barnes and his mother Rebecca, for example, takes place within the space of two episodes for Richard Channing and Jacqueline Perrault (although I’m not sure Cliff and Rebecca ever had a moment quite as dramatically heightened as the one where Richard screams “I WAS BORN DAMNED!” at Jacqueline’s retreating back). Conversely, FALCON CREST also contains moments one can’t imagine taking place anywhere else in Soap Land - for example, the scene in this week’s ep between Chao Li and Lance as they practice their martial art skills. “You are rash, Lance,” chides Chao Li, adopting the same tone of solemn mysticism as Blake’s psychic in DYNASTY. "The secret of t'ai chi chu’an is not for the impetuous … True strength comes only from inner peace."

All four shows end on a relatively low key note this week. DYNASTY and DALLAS each close on an already established plot point being reiterated. On DYNASTY, we see Adam purchasing more of the same poisonous paint compound thingy that he bought at the end of the episode that aired four weeks ago. (In the absence of a confidante for him to explain his dastardly plan to, this serves to remind the viewer who is responsible for Jeff’s increasingly unhinged behaviour.) DALLAS, meanwhile, ends with Miss Ellie restating her intention, first made two episodes ago, to break Jock's will. (The key difference is that she now does so in the knowledge that she will have to besmirch his memory in the process.)

KNOTS closes on an enigmatic note as Val, still on that New York terrace, finally signs the divorce papers that have been burning a hole in her attache case all episode, and then hears Jeff Munson’s voice calling her from off screen. “Are you ready?” he asks. He is referring to their impending shopping trip, but the question carries a wider implication - is Val now ready to leave her past behind her and start a new life? Before she can reply, the producers' credit appears on screen and the episode ends. In terms of plain old soapy intrigue, however, FALCON CREST wins the battle of the cliffhangers once again. Having discovered that Jacqueline sold Richard to Henri Denault when he was a baby - a revelation that has sent Jacqueline scuttling back to Europe - Angela ponders her motive. “I wonder what she got in return?” she muses. “You intend to use this information against her sons?” Phillip asks. “You’re damned right!” she smirks.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (4) KNOTS LANDING
2 (3) FALCON CREST
3 (2) DYNASTY
4 (1) DALLAS

 

[James from London]

12/Jan/83: DYNASTY: Samantha v. 13/Jan/83: KNOTS LANDING: And Teddy Makes Three v. 14/Jan/83: DALLAS: The Reckoning v. 14/Jan/83: FALCON CREST: Above Suspicion

This week’s DYNASTY, DALLAS and FALCON CREST each focus on a character intent on a course of action they believe is in the best interests of their family, but which other members of that family fear may jeopardise it. On DYNASTY, it’s Blake’s use of a psychic to find Steven. On DALLAS, it’s Miss Ellie’s decision to challenge Jock’s will in court. On FALCON CREST, it’s Chase insistence on investigating Carlo Agretti’s murder. "If you don’t believe in the effort I’m making to find my son,” Blake tells Krystle, "that’s fine, that’s all right, that’s your business … but I do believe in it. I intend to keep on doing it despite your feelings and everybody else’s feelings in this house.” "I’m doing this for Cole,” Chase explains to Maggie. "I’ll keep digging, I’ll keep probing and I’ll keep stepping on toes until I get to the truth!” "I don’t know how else to save this family,” Miss Ellie tells her sons. "You’re both so caught up in this battle that neither one of you understand what’s happening!"

While Miss Ellie’s reasons for her actions have already been clearly established, there is more room for interpretation regarding Chase and Blake’s motives. Chase insists that he is trying to clear his son’s name, but Julia - for the first time saying anything negative about her cousin or his family - suggests that his investigation is part of "an obsession to wage war against my mother.” The same word crops up on DYNASTY when Alexis talks about what motivates Blake’s "obsession that Steven is still alive ... He is a guilty man who is responsible for that death and that is why he cannot accept it.”

In a surprising and touchingly acted moment, Blake lets down his guard and admits to Fallon that Alexis is right. "You can’t understand me now, can you?” he says softly to his daughter. "None of you can understand me. That’s because none of you were responsible for driving Steven away. I’m responsible.” John Forsythe is great throughout this episode, showing us a whole different side to Blake. We’ve never seen him quite this weary, humbled or desperate before. He even sounds different - hoarse, husky, spent. Listening to him speak, you can really believe he’s been keeping a round-the-clock vigil in Steven’s room with Dehner the psychic.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen this episode of DYNASTY before - maybe three or four - but for the first time, I found myself touched by the scene, absurdly operatic though it is, where Blake scrambles up the side of Matthew Blaisdel’s old drill site (“the place where Steven was happiest”) and attempts to make contact with his son. There have been Soap Land monologues to the dead before, Karen’s to Sid in KNOTS being the most moving and memorable, but none so pitiful and desperate than this one: “Can you hear me, Steven? … I’m going to find you, I’ll never stop searching for the rest of my life until I find you … Steven, do you hear me? Let me know if you hear me, please!"

Having keyed into John Forsythe’s performance, other parts of the ep also begin to fall into place for me. A scene that I’ve always hated, where Fallon and Krystle heal their differences with an emotional embrace, now makes sense for the first time - with the captain no longer at the helm of his ship, where else can his crew turn in a time of crisis but to each other? And so what Blake has been trying to achieve since Episode 1, (i.e., “put this family together”) finally occurs - but at a time when he is too preoccupied to even notice.

Reconciliation is in the air this week. Taking a leaf out of Fallon’s book, Diana Fairgate also buries the hatchet with a prospective step-parent when she encourages Mack not to give up on Karen after her somewhat vague response to his marriage proposal. Whereas Krystle is initially wary of her step-daughter’s attempt at conciliation, ("Don't be nice to me, Fallon, you'll just turn on me again”) Mack is happily surprised by Diana’s gesture. “Is this the new you?” he asks. “I like it!” Meanwhile on DALLAS, after declaring war on the Ewings at the end of last season, Rebecca Wentworth abruptly decides to make up with Miss Ellie. "Wouldn't it be nice if you and I could show them that the Barneses and the Ewings can be friends?” she sighs wistfully.

The DALLAS equivalent of the Krystle/Fallon relationship is Pam and Sue Ellen's. In both instances, the bride from the wrong side of the tracks is viewed with jealousy and disdain by her snootier rival until the two women eventually find a common bond in their show’s third season. The Ewing wives share a couple of scenes this week which illustrate that although they are now friends, there remain some interesting differences between them. First, Sue Ellen takes Pam out to lunch at JR’s behest, in an attempt to dissuade her from backing Miss Ellie’s court fight. “Shouldn’t a wife stand by her husband?” she ventures. “Of course she should,” Pam replies, “but that doesn’t mean she can’t disagree if she thinks he’s wrong.” Later, when Sue Ellen is speculating as to why Mark Graison should be showing such an overt interest in Pam, Pam loses her temper. “You’re making me angry,” she snaps. “Pam, I’m your friend,” protests Sue Ellen. “Then act like it,” Pam retorts.

If Mark G popping up at Pam’s place of work on the lame pretext of enquiring about Miss Ellie’s court case feels a tad inappropriate, it's nothing to Mark J gatecrashing Steven's memorial service on DYNASTY to complain that Krystle hasn’t called him lately. Pam and Krystle both feel the need to clarify their positions. “I really appreciate what you did for me and Miss Ellie, but that’s as far as it goes,” Pam tells Mark G, "I am a married woman.” “Mark, we are friends and I appreciate your co-operation with the divorce,” Krystle tells Mark J, "but I have another life now.” Completing the triumvirate of pushy would-be suitors in this week’s Soap Land, Karen’s old flame on KNOTS, Teddy Becker, makes an unwanted advance the day after Mack’s proposal - leading to a very awkward (and funny) dinner between the three of them and Karen’s kids.

Teddy is one of two returning characters this week. The other is DYNASTY’s Sammy Jo. Loosely speaking, one could say that both Teddy and Sammy Jo work in the media, but that’s where the similarities end. Teddy is in town to cover a conference on bilateral nuclear disarmament, while Sammy Jo is recognised at a gas station for her photo spread “in one of those girly girly jobs - you were laying on the beach after being shipwrecked, all your clothes lost at sea.” Teddy and Sammy Jo each attempt a change of image upon their return to Soap Land. Teddy has been recast with a sleeker, younger looking actor, but remains just as needy (if not more so). Meanwhile, Sammy Jo now insists on being called Samantha - only everyone keeps forgetting, which is quite funny.

Each of this week’s shows contains a quote that reaches back to the beginning of its respective series in order to make a point about a character or relationship in the present. “I’ve been fighting you all the way, all this time, for his love - I’m so sorry,” Fallon tells Krystle in their conciliation scene. “How long have I known you - three, maybe four years? Nothing in that time has prepared me for this,” says Ginger to Gary on KNOTS LANDING, referring to his betrayal of Kenny. “Ever since you’ve moved into this family, you’ve been trouble. Now stay out of it, this is not your fight!” JR barks at Pam on DALLAS as he accuses her of manipulating Miss Ellie to her own ends. “When we first moved out here from New York,” Vicky recalls in FALCON CREST, "it was supposed to be for the good of our family, to bring us closer together, but in all the time we’ve been out here, I don’t think that my father and I have had a single meaningful conversation, not one.”

How much of Vicky’s speech is sincere and how much is part of a ploy to seduce Nick Hogan (“You’re really the only one who understands me,” she coos) is hard to say, but no sooner does Nick begin to comfort her than they’re making out on the front seat of his Packard truck. Another affair begins in similar circumstances on DYNASTY when an unusually contrite Alexis visits Mark Jennings to apologise for luring him to Denver under false pretences, but then breaks down over the loss of her son. “I’m not an evil person in spite of what you might think,” she weeps. "If I were, I wouldn’t be in so much pain.” Just as Nick did Vicky, Mark takes Alexis in his arms (“When a woman cries and begins to tremble, that’s what a man does,” he explains helpfully). Inevitably, one thing then leads to another. (“In moments of grief, we need to be held, held close,” Mark continues.)

On this week’s KNOTS, the fall out from Mack’s proposal to Karen results in some charmingly funny, Hepburn-and-Tracy-style bickering between them for much of the ep. Elsewhere, the excitement surrounding Ciji’s first recording session is marred by Kenny’s anger at being excluded from it, while the optimism of her song of the week, “New Romance (It’s A Mystery)”, contrasts with the bitter conflict she seems to unintentionally trigger wherever she goes (between Gary and Kenny, Richard and Laura, herself and Chip). Lance Rubin’s score for the ep is the one he will also use on “Swan Song”, the DALLAS Season 7 finale. The same eerie piano notes that anticipate Katherine’s murderous attack on Bobby evoke a similarly ominous feeling on KNOTS.

"One day Abby will do it to you, just like she’s doing it to us,” prophesies Ginger during her scene with Gary. There are other doom laden predictions in this week’s Soap Land. “That battle is really gonna hurt somebody, really hurt somebody,” foretells Pam in DALLAS, referring to the fight for Ewing Oil. “If you persist in pursuing this murder investigation, I just feel it’s gonna do us more harm than good,” Maggie warns Chase in FALCON CREST - a prediction that appears to come true in the final scene of the episode where a mysteriously gloved someone knocks Cole unconscious and then shuts him in the family garage with his car engine still running.

By this point, Chase has already around to Maggie’s way of thinking. “No more dime store Dick Tracy,” he promises her. Similarly on DYNASTY, the news that Sammy Jo has given birth to Steven’s son allows Blake to finally accept his death. “He lives on in this beautiful child,” Blake declares, looking down at his new grandson. Meanwhile on DALLAS, Miss Ellie’s determination to break Jock’s will come what may is unwavering - right up to the point where she has to testify on the witness stand as to Jock’s mental competence. Even then she persists, albeit falteringly and through tears: “If that’s the legal term you need to break the will, then yes, Jock was not mentally competent.” In the event, the judge rules against her, but unlike Blake and Chase, Ellie does not then return to the bosom of her family. Instead, she exits the courtroom without acknowledging any of them.

Line of the week: On FALCON CREST, Richard is on the brink of an affair with Melissa when a jealous Miss Hunter accuses him of prostituting himself for the Agretti land. “Diana, my dear, for these stakes, I will gladly turn an occasional trick,” he replies. That has a kind of New DALLAS ring to it.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are … boy, it's a really tough call - each show stands out in a different way - but ...

1 (4) DALLAS
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) DYNASTY
4 (2) FALCON CREST

 

[James from London]

19/Jan/83: DYNASTY: Danny v. 21/Jan/83: KNOTS LANDING: To Have and To Hold v. 21/Jan/83: FALCON CREST: Broken Promises

There's a great scene in this week’s KNOTS LANDING where Gary pays a visit to Kenny Ward in an attempt to patch up their friendship. Kenny and wife Ginger are among Soap Land's least explored characters. We’ve been given more psychological insight into Kirby Anders in half a dozen episodes of DYNASTY than we have the Wards in over three and a half years of KNOTS. Kenny and Gary's relationship itself has only been introduced to the story as a way of keeping Gary connected to the cul-de-sac after his break up with Val. As a result, Kenny’s primary function in the scene is to act as Gary’s conscience, recounting his past sins. “You got Sid Fairgate involved in selling stolen auto parts and now he’s dead,” he reminds him. "Val stands by you, you run out on her. Now you’re just doing the same thing to me … It’s time somebody told you the truth about yourself … Congratulations, Gary. You’ve finally learned to be a true Ewing.”

Looked at another way, as a result of being left alone by the writers, the Wards are now the most stable couple in the cul-de-sac. Kenny is the only character in the same profession as he was at the beginning of the series (even he is somewhat unemployed at this point) and of the original couples, theirs is the one marriage that has both survived and is blossoming. Quite a turnaround, given that Kenny was the least sympathetically depicted cul-de-sac resident when KNOTS began.

There’s an equally good scene over on FALCON CREST between Richard Channing and his adoptive father Henri Denault. The actors portraying these two cold and ruthless businessmen play against the aggression of their dialogue, which is full of ultimatums and accusations, imbuing it instead with emotion and vulnerability, even affection. The results are fascinating - it feels like the characters are trying to reach out to each other, but the words they’ve been scripted to say won’t allow them to.

Denault wants Richard to return to the company fold in New York. “This isn’t a request,” he clarifies. "It comes from someone above me.” “Suppose I refuse?” asks Richard. “You’d simply become another competitor,” Denault tells him, "an adversary to be vanquished … Come home with me now before you do something foolish.” “My dear father,” replies Richard, "I work for myself and neither you nor your mysterious superior will tell me when to turn tail and run from the enemy.”

Richard might be determined to stay in his soap opera, but DYNASTY's Sammy Jo can’t wait to leave hers. “I really hoped I’d never see this place again or anybody in it,” she tells Krystle. Sure, she wants the Carrington money, but not the lifestyle that accompanies it. Instead, she wants to become a model in New York - the same city Richard is refusing to return to. Unlike Sammy Jo, fellow DYNASTY character Kirby’s ambition is to be accepted by the Carringtons as an equal, “not to be the downstairs girl that you try and take to bed, but the upstairs girl you marry.” This desire for social acceptance echoes Lane Ballou’s vow that she would eventually "make it" onto Flamingo Road.

Kirby’s line, "The upstairs world, I tasted it in Paris,” is echoed by Kenny on KNOTS LANDING: “I wanted it so bad I could taste it. Gary, you dangled a dream in front of my face and then you snatched it away.” Whereas Kenny craves success but only on his own terms, Kirby is prepared to prostitute herself to get what she wants: "I have something some men want,” she says, referring in part to her rape by Adam, "and next time, I’m going to make sure that I get what I want in return - respectability."

Kirby speaks about her body as if it were a bargaining tool, and Sammy Jo and FALCON CREST’s Melissa view their newborn children in the same way. Sammy Jo even offers to sell her son, Danny, to Blake to finance her independence in New York. “What’s important is me,” she tells the Carringtons. "I have one life and one body and I wanna use it for me.” Melissa, conversely, uses her son, Joseph, to further entrench herself at Falcon Crest. “That baby guarantees me a place here,” she tells Lance. "It’s all gonna be mine one day.”

Baby buying is not a new concept in Soap Land. Only two weeks ago on FALCON CREST, Angela discovered that Jacqueline Perrault had sold Richard to Henri Denault when he was a baby. Over on DALLAS, Jeff Faraday sold his child to Bobby and Sue Ellen tried to buy Rita Briggs’. However, when Sammy Jo makes her proposition, Blake draws a line in the sand, decrying the selling of a child as "morally repulsive”. He instead offers her $100,000 to keep the baby. When she declines, Blake and Krystle agree to look after the child until such time as she is ready to assume responsibility for him. The fact that they will be sending her monthly cheques in the interim means, in effect, that they will be renting Danny instead - a slightly less morally repulsive arrangement, it would seem.

That pages from Val’s manuscript should end up on the front page of Global Gossip under the headline "BOOZE AND WOMEN MADE MY LIFE HELL — EWING EX TELLS ALL” makes Brooks Oliver’s line to Miss Ellie in DALLAS two weeks ago - "Ewing is a name that sells newspapers” - seem somewhat prophetic. In contrast to this gross violation of Val’s privacy, Richard Channing assures brother Chase he will keep Cole's apparent suicide note/murder confession out of the New Globe in this week’s FALCON CREST - quite a concession, given the aggressive smear campaign he launched against Cole earlier in the season.

Elsewhere on this week’s KNOTS, Laura and Ginger argue over their differing perceptions of Ciji. To Laura, Ciji is "a nice girl ... a good friend”, while Ginger describes her as "the most conniving woman I've ever met.” Here again, Ciji is a blank canvas, becoming whatever these characters require of her: Laura needs a best friend, someone who will side with her unquestioningly against Richard (in a way Karen never would), whereas Ginger wants someone to blame for all her dissatisfactions. In each case, that’s who Ciji becomes.

Karen and Mack elope to Vegas for the third Soap Land wedding of the season - but this time the groom neither dies immediately after the ceremony nor gets pushed into a swimming pool. Instead, the nuptials are played for laughs as the happy couple are married by an eccentric old couple in a ticky-tacky, rinky-dink ceremony. The “any objections to this wedding?” section - which led to a dramatic freeze frame at JR and Sue Ellen’s wedding in DALLAS - provides the funniest moment, with the spaced out officiator waiting so long for someone to object (in spite of there being only two witnesses in attendance) that Mack has to prompt him to continue with the service. The comedy is possibly a little overdone, but it’s charming enough and contrasts effectively with the scenes of a despondent Gary teetering on the verge of an alcoholic relapse. Like Sue Ellen’s drunken moments in New DALLAS, there's a deep sadness, a profound loneliness, about these scenes. We don’t see Gary actually take that first drink. Standing on the terrace of his beach house, glass in hand, gazing out to sea, (I’m reminded of Val looking at the view from Jeff Munson’s New York balcony two weeks ago) he turns his back to the camera before lifting the glass to his mouth. We then cut to a long shot of the beach house in which he becomes just a tiny figure in the distance. The camera then pans discreetly away from the house towards the ocean, which in KNOTS always seems to somehow evoke a sense of inevitability: it was always going to turn out this way.

The week after embarking on their clandestine affairs, DYNASTY’s Alexis and FALCON CREST's Vicky both surprise their respective lovers with an afternoon visit. Alexis and Mark narrowly avoid discovery when Fallon comes calling while they are between the sheets. Vicky and Nick aren’t so lucky. When Nick’s wife Sheila walks in them, they are merely planning a picnic, but that’s enough for her to realise what’s been going on between them.

“Broken Promises” is FALCON CREST at its dark, mysterious best. This is a bit of a ridiculous comparison, but I'm kind of reminded of the 1946 movie THE BIG SLEEP. It’s nowhere near as smart or witty as that, but it has a similarly pulpy appeal, with its multiple mysteries, double and triple crosses, hardboiled characters and a labyrinth of supporting players that are hard to keep track of but all of whom have a part to play in the plot. There are no less than three as-yet-unseen figures lurking in the shadows at this point - Henri Denault’s anonymous all-powerful boss who has ordered Richard back to New York, Cole’s unknown attacker who is presumably also Carlo Agretti’s killer, and the elusive Mr Fong, an apparent witness to Carlo’s murder. And if Melissa Cumson is FALCON CREST's film noir femme fatale, then Diana Hunter is its ice cool Hitchcock blonde. This week, she proves to be more than Richard Channing’s enigmatic assistant when she offers to spy on him for his father. (Denault makes a point of letting her how dispensable she is: “If you lose Richard’s trust, you’ll be absolutely of no value … Things of no value are usually discarded, Miss Hunter.”) Chase even hires a private eye, disgraced DALLAS senator "Wild Bill” Orloff, last seen running a diner on FLAMINGO ROAD, to help navigate a way through the murkiness of the story-line.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are …

1 (4) FALCON CREST
2 (2) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) DYNASTY

 

[James from London]

26/Jan/83: DYNASTY: Madness v. 27/Jan/83: KNOTS LANDING: A New Family v. 28/Jan/83: DALLAS: A Ewing is a Ewing v. 28/Jan/83: FALCON CREST: Deliberate Disclosure

“When you do things I don’t know about or hide things from me, I get crazy,” Gary tells Abby. Indeed he does - almost as crazy as Jeff Colby when he’s high on toxic fumes. This week, DYNASTY’s Jeff and KNOTS LANDING’s Gary are both in meltdown - the former as the result of being maliciously poisoned by Adam, the latter because he’s back on the booze.

Jeff is suffering from a bad case of paranoia. He believes his teething son is dreadfully ill, that his father-in-law holds him accountable for his late uncle’s crimes and that his wife is sleeping around. Gary is having similar fears about Abby conniving behind his back - the difference is Gary's concerns are based in reality. For instance, Abby really has exploited their friendship with the Averys to gain a controlling interest in their restaurant. (Gary learns this when he pays a drunken visit to Richard in his restaurant kitchen. Interesting that Gary's first port of call while on a binge should be to see his old drinking buddy from “Bottom of the Bottle".)

A few drinks later, Gary disrupts Ciji’s recording session where several regular characters, including Abby, are in attendance. His inability to get through to Abby is neatly underlined by the glass of the recording booth separating them as he yells at her: “We’ve got to stop this! We’re hurting people! We’re ruining LIVES!!!” (It also anticipates a different kind of glass that will seal him off from Val at the end of the season.) Pam has similar difficulty in reaching Bobby with her warning at the end of this week’s DALLAS - “Everybody’s going to get hurt, especially you. Can’t you see that, Bobby?” In Bobby and Pam's case, there is no physical barrier between them - they are sitting opposite each other in a restaurant - but what keeps them apart is Bobby’s preoccupation with what’s going on at the bar, where the prostitute he has hired to set up George Hicks, JR’s inside man on the Texas Energy Commission, has just made her first move.

When Gary trips over some recording equipment, most of the other characters in attendance - Laura, Diana, Ciji, Jeff Munson - rush to his aid. Abby is the exception. She doesn’t move from the raised seating area where she has been watching Ciji sing. Instead, she looks down at Gary as if from a throne - regal, imperious, steely. It’s a very powerful image. It’s repeated later in the ep when a dishevelled Gary returns to the beach house from his binge and half-collapses on the staircase. Abby stands above him at the top of the stairs, dressed for bed but still immaculately made up. As she scowls contemptuously at him, she could be Cersei Lannister in an '80s Lorimar version of GAME OF THRONES - but instead of ordering his beheading, she tosses a blanket at him and issues the following edict: “Don’t you come near me. I mean it."

“The money was supposed to give us pleasure,” Gary tells her despairingly the next morning. “Instead, it’s a wedge between us." Viewed in this context, JR encouraging Lucy "to toast the fact that your daddy’s gonna keep his inheritance” at the beginning of this week’s DALLAS feels ironic in more ways than one.

Jeff Colby and Gary Ewing are also caught up in imaginary affairs this week. Jeff thinks Fallon is having an affair with Mark Jennings, while Chip Roberts has everyone believing that Gary is cheating on Abby with Ciji. (Tracking the journey of this little rumour round the cul-de-sac and beyond is one of the pleasures of this tightly woven episode of KNOTS.)

Adding to the confusion, Ciji is also involved, with Laura, in what one might term “a phantom affair”. Theirs is a unique relationship in Soap Land. It sprang to life six episodes ago as an immediately intense, if somewhat contrived, friendship. Straightaway, it became part of a triangle, with poor old Richard left increasingly on the outside looking in. As the Avery marriage has deteriorated, it’s been clear that Laura prefers the company of her new best friend to that of her husband. Along the way, there have been jokey, throwaway references - to Ciji "licking the bowl", to Ciji and Laura sharing hot tubs and watching dirty movies - that seem innocuous individually, but which collectively could be interpreted as hinting at something else. To that, one might add Laura’s shorter, slightly masculine haircut, which makes its debut this week.

“I just don’t understand why so many people are mad at me,” weeps Ciji to a sympathetic Laura after the recording studio debacle. "It just feels like every time I turn around, someone’s coming down on me for something. Kenny and Ginger and Richard, now Abby.” She has a point - things are getting so out of control in KNOTS, it’s as if nearly every character is inhaling the same mind-altering fumes as Jeff Colby. “You’re the only person I can turn to,” she continues. At this point, Laura's and Ciji's eyes meet and you get the feeling that if they were going to kiss, it would be now. There is a close exchange of another kind instead, as Ciji confides her pregnancy and Laura then comforts her. However, if one were to interpret Ciji taking Laura into her confidence as a substitution for a more sapphic expression of intimacy (this being CBS in 1983 and not TNT in 2014), then Laura's behaviour from this point onwards takes on new significance. When we next see her talking to Richard, she behaves evasively, even guiltily. When he touches her, she recoils.

The climax of Jeff’s breakdown on DYNASTY (at least in this episode) comes when he discovers Fallon in Mark Jennings’ hotel room and tries to strangle her, calling her “rotten as a person and worse as a wife and a mother” as he does so. In the equivalent scene in KNOTS, it is a jealous Richard who loses control when Laura rejects him in bed yet again. “You are my wife!” he insists. "You can stay up all night with Ciji, comforting her … I could use a little comforting too!” His outburst isn’t as violent as Jeff’s - he only grabs Laura by the arm to stop her from walking away - and he does not require a punch like the one Jeff receives from Mark Jennings in order to stop. Just the sight of his bewildered son Jason at the bedroom door is enough to bring him to his senses. (Significantly, Jason appears just as Richard is about to ask Laura precisely what is going on between her and Ciji.)

There is no such outburst from JR when he decides to “get Miss Harwood” in this week’s DALLAS. He remains very much in control, his actions clearly premeditated, as he lures Holly into his office after hours, locking the door behind them, and then coerces her into sex. There is no threat of violence, but the dialogue between them is very much the language of rape: “I don’t want this.” “You have no choice.” “You won’t enjoy it.” “You better make damn sure I do."

"I have something some men want,” concluded Kirby after her rape by Adam on DYNASTY two weeks ago, "and next time, I’m going to make sure that I get what I want in return.” Holly does precisely that following her encounter with JR - and what she wants is to regain control of her own body. Later in the episode, she entices JR to her bedroom with the promise of more sex. When he touches her, she pulls a gun on him. The words she then uses to describe him are almost an exact match for those spoken by Kirby last week to compare Adam with her ex-lover, Jean Paul. "You’re both so sure of yourselves, so arrogant,” Kirby told Adam. “You arrogant pig,” Holly tells JR, "you’re so full of yourself, so damn sure of everything … You ever touch me again, you're a dead man. Now get out!” Aside from Lute-Mae pressing charges against Peter Horton’s character in FLAMINGO ROAD, this is the first instance of a Soap Land rape victim (or "unwilling sex partner", if that’s too specific a term) taking a stand against her attacker.

I was reminded of this confrontation after watching the remarkable scene in the mid-season finale of New DALLAS Season 3 where Pamela Rebecca finds John Ross with Emma. In each case, the viewer’s expectations, and those of the male character involved, are toyed with and then overturned. When JR finds Holly reclining provocatively on a bed in her negligee, champagne chilling in an ice bucket, he anticipates a seduction - instead, he gets a gun in his face. In the New DALLAS scene, when Pamela Rebecca reaches into her coat, John Ross think she’s going to produce a gun - instead, she takes him, and us, somewhere very different. In each instance, the woman plays the man at his own game, using his appetites and instincts to blindside him. (That these women are operating by men’s rules to begin with means, inevitably, that both DALLAS series get to have their cake and eat it too - sure, the gals get to turn the tables, but they do so while posing provocatively on a bed in not very many clothes.) After JR leaves Holly’s bedroom, it is his face the camera lingers on rather than hers. It is his mask of bravado we see slip, revealing him shaken and vulnerable - humanised if you will. We are not privy to an equivalent moment with Holly because, ultimately, Holly’s feelings - aside from the need to avenge herself on JR - are not germane to the story. By contrast, in the New DALLAS scene, Pamela Rebecca’s feelings are the story.

“You have to let me out of the marriage,” Fallon tells her father following Jeff's attack on her. “It’s over!” Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Lance defies his grandmother by filing for divorce against Melissa. While Blake offers Fallon a sympathetic shoulder. Angela responds by throwing Lance out of the house with a promise to disinherit him.

Just as his former FLAMINGO ROAD self, Michael Tyrone, had an affair with devious married heiress Constance as part of a much bigger scheme, so Richard Channing has finally slept with Constance’s FALCON CREST equivalent Melissa as part of an attempt to get his hands on the Agretti vineyards (and subsequently the entire California wine industry). But whereas Michael was the one who deceived and betrayed Constance, here it’s Melissa who double crosses Richard when she reneges on her promise to sell him her father’s land. Richard’s revenge proves swift and effective.

Although “Ewing" continues to be a name that sells newspapers - while the story of Val’s leaked manuscript is still front page news, JR makes it onto the cover of Tempo Magazine - the headline of the week belongs to the New Globe which screams ACCUSED MURDERER FATHERS FALCON CREST HEIR - a story alleging that Cole Gioberti is the real father of Melissa’s baby.

All of this press coverage in Soap Land has major repercussions. The tabloid scandal surrounding Val’s manuscript has already contributed to Gary falling off the wagon in KNOTS, and when Val hears that he is drinking again, it sends her into a kind of equivalent emotional relapse. Meanwhile, Abby considers suing Val for libel and defamation of character but is persuaded that the resulting publicity would only make matters worse. On FALCON CREST, Melissa is given the same advice when she threatens to take legal action against the Globe for their story. Unlike Abby, however, she is undeterred and slaps Richard with a $20,000,000 lawsuit. This, in turn, serves to further strain Richard’s relationship with his father, Henri Denault. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, JR’s huge media profile gives Cliff the idea to lure him out of the oil business and into politics.

Angela Channing’s reaction to a newspaper headline questioning her great-grandson’s legitimacy is intriguing. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of Jock Ewing’s when the equivalent story about his grandson made the front page in “Paternity Suit” (DALLAS Season 2). Whereas Jock demanded legal action be taken to defend the Ewing family honour, Angela simply dismisses the story. “That article means nothing,” she insists, even though Lance has supplied the Globe with paternity test results proving the child is not his.

This week’s Soap Land also contains its fair share of romantic gestures, albeit of an unsolicited nature. Mark J surprises Alexis with the gift of an expensive brooch. She is touched but makes it clear that she has nothing to offer him in return but "love in the afternoon”, as she is otherwise occupied with destroying her ex-husband. "Hate is as strong a passion as love,” she explains. Mark G, meanwhile, shows up at Pam’s workplace again, this time, laden with champagne, roses and commiserations over Miss Ellie’s courtroom defeat. Like Alexis, Pam is impressed by the gesture. “Mark, what you did was really sweet and thoughtful and lovely,” she tells him, "but I don't want you to do it again.” We can tell she’s softening towards him, though. The most extravagant, and least welcome, romantic gesture of the week comes in FALCON CREST. At first, Maggie is thrilled to learn that her script is to be turned into a Hollywood movie, even more so when she is offered the role of associate producer. (Her fee? $100,000 - the same amount Blake offered Sammy Jo to keep her baby in last week’s DYNASTY.) The snag comes when she learns that the offer comes courtesy of sleazy Daryl Clayton and that he will be directing the film. Reluctantly, she accepts the job anyway. Chase is not happy.

There’s a fab (and at nearly seven minutes, unusually long) scene at the end of this week’s DYNASTY. When Alexis, concerned that Jeff has been overworked, decides to take over his office at Colby Co, Adam is obliged to tell her how he has been poisoning Jeff via the toxic panelling in that office. At first, she is appalled, but then Adam drops the other shoe: Alexis is now in a position take over Denver-Carrington, “if Jeff is disorientated enough to sign over control of all those shares [his own and his son’s], leaving Blake Carrington out in the cold - on his knees, begging.” Alexis is clearly tempted by this idea but refuses to go along with Adam’s plan to keep messing with Jeff’s mind. So Adam resorts to blackmail. If she doesn’t cooperate, he tells his mother, “I’ll have to tell everyone concerned that I was simply following your instructions, how the whole thing was your idea in the first place. Think of it, Mother. How would it feel to run the Colby empire from a prison cell?" “What kind of a monster are you?” she whispers in horror.

Over on KNOTS, Lilimae also learns an unwholesome truth about a young man living under her roof: it was Chip who stole Val’s manuscript. When she tells him to pack his bags and move out, Chip - like Adam - uses blackmail, but this time of the emotional variety. “Val and you are my family now,” he tells Lilimae tearfully. "You’re the only family I've ever known.” She relents enough to let him stay, but with a warning: “You do anything to hurt Val again, just one little thing, and the jig is up."

Like DYNASTY, FALCON CREST ends with a young buck blackmailing an older female relative: “You don’t dare cut me out of your will because I know enough to ruin Falcon Crest!” shouts Lance at his grandmother. “Get out!” barks Angela in reply.

Adam’s proposal to Alexis that they take advantage of Jeff’s condition in order to gain control of an empire is mirrored by the proposition Abby’s attorney, James Westmont, comes up in this week’s KNOTS: “You asked me to find you a way to protect yourself,” he reminds her. "I thought up some contingency plans for Gary Ewing Enterprises, a corporation with you and Mr. Ewing as full and equal partners.” Like Alexis and Adam with Jeff’s shares, all they need is Gary’s signature for Abby to have full access to his fortune - but no sooner does Abby gets Gary to Westmont's office for a meeting than he walks out in search of another drink.

Amidst all the melodrama in this week’s Soap Land, there is still room for two smaller stories of a more domestic nature, each involving a nineteen-year-old and one of their parents. "You were a kid for a lot of years. Now you’re an adult. I have to learn how to think of you as an adult and treat you as one. It won’t be easy, but I promise I’ll try,” Karen tells Eric on KNOTS in a touching scene where he admits how excluded he felt by her elopement with Mack. “You’re a young adult who doesn’t seem to have any direction in life,” frets Chase on FALCON CREST after learning of Vicky’s affair with an older married man. Instead of the kind of heated confrontation one might have expected, Chase struggles manfully to understand where his daughter is coming from. It's a tender father/daughter scene of the kind one might more readily expect to see on KNOTS, or maybe even THE WALTONS.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (2) KNOTS LANDING
2 (1) FALCON CREST
3 (3) DYNASTY
4 (-) DALLAS

 

[James from London]

02/Feb/83: DYNASTY: Two Flights to Haiti v. 03/Feb/83: KNOTS LANDING: The Morning After v. 04/Feb/83 DALLAS: Crash of '83 v. 04/Feb/83: FALCON CREST: Love, Honor and Obey

As the mental states of Jeff Colby and Gary Ewing continue to deteriorate on this week’s DYNASTY and KNOTS, the reactions of those closest to them are interesting to observe.

Following Jeff’s attack on her, Fallon wants out of their marriage - and fast. In spite of Blake following her from scene to scene, pleading with her to reconsider, she is adamant: “I’ve already made up my mind … I have to have that divorce … He’s insane!” Conversely on KNOTS, now that Gary’s drinking again, Val struggles to keep her distance from him. “I intend to stay angry,” she explains to Karen. "I am holding onto that, because if I don’t, I’m gonna start to care again and then I’m gonna be right back where I started.” Her attitude is contrasted with Abby’s. “I’m not like Val,” she tells Gary coldly. “I’m not gonna count your drinks or hide your bottles or run around town checking up on you. If you wanna kill yourself, fine. Just don’t expect me to watch."

Things aren’t quite that simple, however. Abby’s apparent indifference belies both her instinct for self-preservation ("Gary is no condition to make intelligent business decisions for himself right now and I have to do everything I can to protect my investment”) and the fact that she does genuinely care for him. Similarly on DYNASTY, Alexis is torn between worry over Jeff’s condition (“He could die!”), fear that she will be blamed for it ("They’ll diagnose what’s wrong with him and they’ll trace it back to that miserable paint!”) and like Abby, her own self-interests. Ultimately, both women are willing to take advantage of a sick man in order to acquire his signature on a document that will realise their own ambitions.

As for the sick men themselves, there are moments of calm and introspection amidst the madness. We see Jeff gloomily cuddling his son in the Carrington nursery (“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll even be alive when you’re old enough to throw a softball"), while a more optimistic Gary takes a run on the beach and talks about getting his life back on track (“Oh Abby, I can beat it, I know I can!"). Both interludes prove fleeting, however. The sound of Mark Jennings’ voice on the phone is sufficient to send Jeff off the deep end again, and he collapses on the La Mirage tennis courts. Meanwhile, all it takes for Gary is a few hours holed up at the beach house without any booze to send him out on yet another binge. While Jeff is hospitalised, Gary winds up at the police station on a drunk and disorderly charge.

Both situations lead to some wonderfully juicy scenes as assorted Carringtons and Colbys, and Cunninghams and Ewings, convene at Denver Memorial Hospital and the Knots Landing Police Station respectively. Having been alerted to Jeff’s collapse, Alexis turns up at the hospital to find Krystle already there, awaiting Jeff's test results. Val, meanwhile, receives a tip-off from a nosy reporter and makes an impulsive dash to the police station. She arrives in time to see Abby bailing out Gary. Just as Gary was separated from Abby by the glass of the recording booth in last week’s ep, so he and Val are removed from each other by two sets of windows at the station, with Abby in-between. They see each other but cannot connect. (In fact, Val and Gary have spoken to each other freely only twice since Val kicked him out of the house in the season opener: once in the underground parking lot and once outside the hospital during Abby's operation. Every other time they have come into contact, there has been some kind of physical obstacle between them.)

Back at Denver Memorial, Adam arrives to find Alexis in a blind panic (“Tests?? What do they need to make tests for??”). He hastily bundles her into an elevator before her behaviour can make Krystle even more suspicious than she already is. Whereas Krystle and Alexis’s conversation in this scene has been full of lies and evasion, the interaction between Val and Abby at the police station is all about home truths. The two women haven't spoken frankly since Abby’s affair with Gary began, but this time around there's no dignified silences, no archly clever “I’m not saying we’re having an affair and I’m not saying we’re not” double talk. “With every fibre of my body, when I look at Gary and see what he’s become, I blame you,” Val tells Abby earnestly. "Whatever failings he had, at least he was strong, he was healthy and he knew who he was.” “And he left you,” Abby replies simply. “I loved him and I cared for him and I never did one thing to hurt him,” Val continues. “But still he left you,” maintains Abby.

“Which one gets to be the man?” Richard asks Ciji elsewhere in this week’s KNOTS, thereby making Soap Land's first ever overt lesbian reference. (There won’t be any others until a casual remark from Vanessa Hunt regarding her bisexuality in KNOTS nine years later, followed by a certain New DALLAS scene twenty-three years after that.) By verbalising the possibility of such a relationship, Richard somehow breaks whatever romantic or sexual spell may have existed between Ciji and Laura. In fact, we later see the two women giggling at the very idea of them sleeping together. Alas for Richard, the idea has now taken up residence inside his own head instead.

Throughout this week’s Soap Land, we see characters bringing up each others’ past sins. "I've seen the hours you spend weeping over costing Krystle Carrington her child,” mocks Adam when Alexis self-righteously scolds him over his lack of remorse regarding Jeff’s condition. On DALLAS, Bobby confronts George Hicks over both his cocaine habit and his sneaky little arrangement with JR, only for Pam to then present him with a list of his own recent misdemeanours: "The Bobby I love would rather be dead than blackmail Hicks or anybody else, double cross the cartel or force his own mother into court.” And on KNOTS, Ciji wipes the smile off Chip’s face when she unmasks his true identity - Tony Fenice, a man wanted by the police for beating up "some rich old lady” he was previously involved with. "That guy doesn’t exist anymore,” Chip insists.

There’s an interesting parallel on KNOTS and DYNASTY between the former Tony Fenice and Michael Torrance, each of whom talks about the difficulties of adjusting to a new identity. “You know how hard it is to start over, really start over?” Chip asks Ciji. “New name, new city, new history. I thought I finally outran this.” “Up until a few months ago, the word mother was just that to me - a word,” Adam tells Alexis, "and then it became a reality - you - a beautiful reality. Along with that joy came a great deal of bitterness ... I was deprived for so long. You can say that you and Blake did everything, turned over every rock to find me after I was kidnapped … but somehow and somewhere along the line, you didn’t look hard enough, did you?” At this, Alexis closes her eyes in weary despair. "I have told you a hundred times, Adam, that I never wanted to give up the search. I begged your father, I pleaded with him …” At such times, Alexis becomes Joan Crawford in MILDRED PIERCE, a maternal martyr figure, doomed to be forever punished by her first born for events over which she had no control. In other scenes, she and Adam seem like forerunners of Judith and Harris Ryland in New DALLAS - a bizarre mother/son double act competing over who is the more twisted. "You and I are two of a kind - it's just that I'm more honest about it,” Adam concludes. Either way, each of the scenes between him and Alexis in this week’s episode is a blast.

As Bobby Ewing puts the screws to JR’s inside man on the Texas Energy Commission, FALCON CREST’s Richard bribes his inside man on the County Board of Supervisors into supporting him on something confusing to do with right-of-ways and easements. It’s notable that these two committees are made up of the same types of characters: the self-righteously heroic one (Donna Krebbs/Chase Gioberti), the corrupted one (George Hicks/Nick Hogan), the neutral one (in each case, the committee chairman) and the token Hispanic who has no real voice (Mr Figuerroa/Supervisor Herrera).

While Chase has spent the last few episodes of FALCON CREST searching for the elusive Mr. Fong, the gardener who may hold the key to Carlo Agretti’s murder, DYNASTY has been showing us occasional scenes set in a Hong Kong hospital where a Dr. Ling has performed life-saving surgery on a man whose face remains mysteriously swathed in bandages. When Mr. Fong appears, briefly, in this week’s FALCON CREST, we realise that these two men, the gardener and the doctor, are one and the same.

On last week’s DALLAS, Clayton ran into Miss Ellie in Galveston (where she had gone to recover from her courtroom defeat) and proved to be just the supportive friend she needed. On this week’s DYNASTY, Mark Jennings follows Fallon to Haiti (where she has gone to divorce Jeff) in the hopes of providing a similar function. He is offended when she misconstrues his motives. “Don’t colour me as a dude on the make and take, Fallon … I’m not a tennis bum!” he huffs. Clayton, meanwhile, is also obliged to clarify his intentions this week when he invites Miss Ellie to accompany him on a farewell visit to the Southern Cross Ranch but manages to do so with more dignity than Mark.

As one Soap Land marriage-as-business-merger draws to a close, (Fallon and Jeff’s) another gets an unexpected reprieve as Lance and Melissa step back from the brink of divorce and finally consummate their marriage. As with recent encounters between Holly and JR, and Kirby and Adam, there is an element of coercion involved. During a heated argument at Richard’s housewarming party, Lance forcibly drags Melissa into a secluded area and kisses her against her will. She then slaps him, he slaps her back, she slaps him again and he kisses her again. “I hate you!” she yells before being kissed yet again. This time, she responds in kind, and the camera pans discreetly away. Clearly, this is a case of he-kissed-her-till-she-liked-it, (see also: JR and Julie in “Spy In the House”, JR and Sue Ellen in “Black Market Baby”, James Bond and Pussy Galore in GOLDFINGER) as opposed to a-rape-by-any-other-name. It’s also quite a funny scene, in a ludicrously overheated sort of a way.

The final scene of this week’s FALCON CREST is yet another that strongly resembles a moment from early DALLAS. In “Second Thoughts” (DALLAS Season 2) there’s an after-dinner drinks scene at Southfork where Sue Ellen is unusually affectionate towards JR - so much so that they hastily excuse themselves and retire upstairs to bed. Lucy makes some crack about them suffering from sleeping sickness, and far from being offended by the sexual implication, Jock and Ellie laugh - the fact that their eldest son and his wife are apparently about to have intercourse being a cause for celebration. In FALCON CREST, Angela’s late evening chat with Lance (who has moved back into the house) is interrupted by Melissa wearing a dressing gown. She bids Angela good-night. “You’re going to sleep so early?” Angela asks in surprise. “No - just to bed,” Melissa replies, before heading for the stairs with Lance’s arm around her waist. Angela looks on, an approving smirk on her lips.

Bill Duke directs this week’s DALLAS but finds little opportunity to exhibit the kind of visual flair he did when helming last week’s episode of KNOTS. There's nothing to match the dynamism of the scene where Gary drunkenly disrupts Ciji’s recording session, for instance. In fact, the ep’s first striking visual image doesn’t arrive until nearly the end of the episode when Bobby returns to a darkened Southfork after blackmailing George Hicks, and fixes himself a drink while looking ruefully up at his father’s portrait. Nonetheless, the final third of this week’s DALLAS is pretty much irresistible as various plot strands - Afton’s one-night stand with Gil Thurman, Rebecca and Cliff's determination to stop JR buying a refinery, Bobby blackmailing Hicks, his problems with Pam - start to intersect, building inexorably towards … something.

Back on KNOTS, Mack’s presence as an outside observer (“I only know what I see") adds an extra dimension to the ongoing crisis surrounding Gary’s alcoholism. The scene at the end of the episode where he finds a distraught Val on the beach and makes a clumsy attempt to comfort her is one of those unexpectedly moving moments where KNOTS seems to transcend the Soap Land genre.

This scene and the one between Bobby and Pam in their bedroom where they argue over his blackmail of Hicks fulfil a similar function, with Val and Pam each looking back to the beginning of their marriages and wondering how they got to where they are now. Surprisingly, there is no equivalent moment of soul searching for Maggie on FALCON CREST, who this week walks out on Chase in protest at him resuming his investigation into the Agretti murder. One gets the feeling she is leaving solely as a reaction to his current storyline rather because of any inherent problems in their relationship.

Of the parallel KNOTS and DALLAS scenes, the one between Val and Mack offers more complexity and genuine emotion. There’s a sense of the characters developing organically almost in front of our eyes as if the writers are discovering new depths to them at the same time we are. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, the programme makers anticipating this speech of Val’s when she and Gary first arrived in the cul-de-sac, much less when she debuted in that diner on DALLAS:

“He’s a weakness,” she says, explaining her feelings about Gary to Mack. "He is to me what alcohol is to him. I don’t know why we all find it so appalling in him and not so in me. You know, we’re the same, Gary and me. I wrote this big bestseller, I changed my whole life, I think I’ve finally grown up, but I’m still the same. Might as well put my hair back braids for all the changing I’ve done.”

The episode ends with an exhausted Val being led along the beach by Karen, Mack’s jacket around her shoulders, all three of them with their arms around each other. The weather is blustery, and the shot feels like a wintery, melancholic counterpoint to the freeze frame at the end of “Home is for Healing” (Season 1) where Gary, Lucy and Val are running happily, hand in hand, through the sunlit ocean. With Gary and Lucy essentially out of her life, Karen and Mack are Val’s makeshift family now.

If the characters on KNOTS feel like they’re continually evolving, then there’s something entrenched and inflexible, but no less satisfying, about Bobby and Pam in their bedroom scene on DALLAS: Pam is angry that Bobby is not exactly the same as when she married him, while Bobby is still rigidly obsessed with winning the company. Whatever the end of this week’s DALLAS lacks in emotional complexity, however, it makes up for in melodrama as Bobby and Pam are called away from their argument by a surprise visitor, Afton, who brings news of an air collision involving the Wentworth jet. Pam assumes Cliff was onboard, but an extra twist comes in the final seconds of the episode - Rebecca took his place at the last minute. Mothers paying the price for their sons’ actions: first Alexis is in the frame for Adam’s crime, and now it's Rebecca’s turn to sacrifice herself for Cliff.

Also on this week’s FALCON CREST: as well as leaving her husband, Maggie begins work as Associate Producer on the film based on her screenplay. Soap Land’s previous foray into the movie world, the KNOTS episode “Silver Shadows”, concerned itself with a bygone era of Hollywood and used SUNSET BOULEVARD - the classic '50s flick about a faded silent film star living in the past - as its point of reference. The name of Maggie’s leading actress, Gloria Marlowe, also evokes an earlier era: half Gloria Swanson, half Philip Marlowe. When we meet Gloria, her demeanour - aloof, jaded, believing herself to be younger than she is - echoes that of Norma Desmond, the role Swanson played in SUNSET BLVD. The plot of Maggie’s film might be set in the present day, but glamorous, fifty-something Marlowe isn’t the kind of actress who was headlining movies in the real life early '80s. Rather than a contemporary movie star, she more resembles the kind of old-fashioned film actress who at this point was getting work in prime time soap operas like … FALCON CREST (which, given that Maggie’s script is based on events that she has experienced as a character in FALCON CREST, makes a confusing kind of sense.)

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (4) DALLAS
3 (3) DYNASTY
4 (2) FALCON CREST

 

[James from London]

10/Feb/83: KNOTS LANDING: Celebration v. 11/Feb/83 DALLAS: Requiem v. 11/Feb/83: FALCON CREST: Separate Hearts

Death stalks the women of Soap Land this week, claiming the lives of Rebecca Wentworth on DALLAS, Ciji Dunne on KNOTS LANDING and maybe even Julia on FALCON CREST. Despite this common theme, this week’s DALLAS and KNOTS start off very differently. When DALLAS begins, Rebecca is already undergoing emergency surgery, bells tolling ominously on the soundtrack, whereas KNOTS opens to the optimistic sound of Ciji’s “New Romance (It’s A Mystery)” while Ciji herself cycles along the street, a big smile on her face.

Back on DALLAS, Pam and assorted Ewings wait anxiously at the hospital while Afton tries to track down Cliff, who is out on a Gary-like bender, oblivious to his mother’s condition. "I've left messages for him everywhere,” she frets. Afton isn’t the only blonde woman in the Ewing-verse searching for a drunken man. Both Abby and Val spend much of this week’s KNOTS searching for Gary, each separately winding up at Ciji’s apartment where a bitter shouting match ensues.

With the whole of “Celebration" building up to the reveal of Ciji’s body, the ep follows the Soap Land convention that began with “Who shot JR?” on DALLAS, (and continued with the shooting of Michael Tyrone in FLAMINGO ROAD, the kidnapping of Little Blake on DYNASTY and the killing of Carlo Agretti on FALCON CREST) whereby several characters are positioned as potential murder (or kidnapping) suspects. By KNOTS’ own standards, this feels a tad schematic, but it’s still pretty exciting. Both Richard Avery and Val are seen physically attacking Ciji, while Abby threatens her verbally: “You don’t wanna make me angry ..." “What are you gonna do, Abby, kill me?” responds Ciji mockingly. Ciji also does some threatening of her own. “I’m gonna tell the whole world how Tony Fenice goes around beating up old ladies,” she promises Chip.

There aren’t as many threats in this week’s DALLAS - with Rebecca dying a third of the way through the episode, the characters are understandably subdued - at least not until Katherine Wentworth shows up. “You’re the one who caused Mama’s death and I’ll make you pay for it!” she vows to brother Cliff.

Katherine isn’t the only Soap Land returnee. FALCON CREST’s Emma is fresh back from Houston, (the same place Rebecca was headed when her plane was hit) and likewise shares a scene with her half-brother, Richard Channing. Their meeting is less acrimonious than Katherine’s was with Cliff, however. She thanks him for the flowers he sent during her stay at the Soap Land Sanatarium (one likes to imagine fellow inmate Claudia Blaisdel stopping by her room to admire them) and he offers her a job as the New Globe’s troubleshooter. The way Richard is able to empathise so soulfully with Emma’s fragility one minute, before casually explaining to Miss Hunter that he will simply be using her to spy on the goings on at Falcon Crest the next, is one of those 180-degree shifts that make him such a great character.

The titles of this week’s Ewing-verse episodes, “Celebration” and “Requiem”, refer to two contrasting events - a party at Daniel’s to mark the launch of Ciji's debut album and a funeral to commemorate Rebecca. While Gary, Richard and Ciji herself are all conspicuously absent from the party, the turnout for the funeral is quite impressive, with everyone who’s anyone in the Texas oil community gathering to pay their respects. (There is one notable exception: “At least JR had the decency to stay away from Rebecca's funeral,” notes Clayton.) The two events do have something in common, however - an unexpected sense of religiosity. Prior to the party, Richard surveys his restaurant, where a large blown up image of Ciji's face now takes pride of place. “Looks like some damn cathedral to her - Santa Ciji,” he says bitterly. This celestial theme carries over into FALCON CREST where Cole hears Linda Caproni playing Chopin on a music store piano and describes it as "a religious experience.”

A sense of disillusionment creeps into Soap Land this week as various characters start to realise that the price for the success they have been craving all season is too high. When Richard complains about Ciji turning his restaurant into a nightclub on KNOTS, Abby reminds him that without her, "this place would have been bankrupt a long time ago.” "And I would have been better off," he retorts, “and you know something? So would you.” Later on, he tells Abby flatly: “I don’t care about business. You can foreclose, you can burn me up, you can sue me.” His words are echoed by Nick Hogan in FALCON CREST when he decides he cannot accept Richard Channing’s bribe: “I have to live with myself. That’s more important than your job."

Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Bobby’s blackmail of George Hicks pays off when JR’s variance is rescinded, but as he points out to Donna, “it came one day too late to save Rebecca.” Donna is in no mood to celebrate the victory either. “It’s kind of hard to get too excited about anything. I keep thinking about Rebecca.” The one Ewingverse character who doesn’t appear to have gotten the memo that power and money are no longer the be all and end all is Sue Ellen, who behaves as if the loss of JR's variance were on a par with Rebecca’s death. This prompts Miss Ellie to deliver the speech which seems so eerily prophetic now: "Think ahead, Sue Ellen. Think twenty-five or thirty years ahead. I won't be here then and the fight won't be between JR and Bobby, it'll be between John Ross and Christopher … Where will this all end?” (At the time of writing, when it will end is the more pressing question. Waiting to hear whether or not New DALLAS is to have a fourth season, I feel like Pam and Bobby while Rebecca is in surgery, hoping for the best while bracing themselves for the worst.)

Away from business, Pam also gets what she’s been after for a long time. Not only does Bobby show that he’s willing to put their marriage first by taking time off work to be with her, he even tells her that he’s prepared to leave Southfork if that’s what she wants - but again, it all comes too late. "I want to leave alone,” she tells him at the end of the episode. Pam isn’t the only character with itchy feet. “It looks like Chip is gonna be moving to New York pretty soon and when he does, I’m gonna go with him,” Diana informs her mother on KNOTS. From the grim expressions on their faces, it’s hard to tell who is the more dismayed: Bobby or Karen.

Having left her husband a week ago, FALCON CREST’s Maggie is an episode ahead of Pam. While Katherine immediately becomes Pam’s confidante, Julia is quick to offer support to both Maggie and Chase, even offering to assist the latter with his enquiries in Carlo Agretti’s death. In hindsight, both Katherine's and Julia’s “support” is ironic, given how much of a vested interest they have in the respective outcomes of Pam and Bobby’s marriage problems and Chase’s murder investigation.

KNOTS LANDING’s Karen and FALCON CREST’s Julia each invoke the wisdom of a significant cultural figure of the twentieth-century this week - Pablo Picasso and Agatha Christie respectively. "He was a very intelligent man, Picasso,” Karen informs Val. “Once a painting was finished, he never went back to it, no matter what anybody else said ... He was so consumed with life and the seeking of fresh horizons that he simply never looked back. The past was dead even before his paints were dry.” This is Karen’s not very subtle of way of telling Val to move on from Gary. Julia, meanwhile, earnestly informs Chase that “in every one of these Agatha Christie mysteries, the murderer is someone in plain sight, someone practically asking the world to discover them, but no one would listen.” Chase is polite but clearly fails to see how Julia’s observation can aid his investigation. In retrospect, Julia’s little speech is a deliciously brazen move, both on the part of the character and FALCON CREST itself.

Two other couples reaching the end of the road this week: the Averys on KNOTS LANDING and the Hogans on FALCON CREST. In very similar bedroom scenes, Laura and Nick urge their respective spouses to face the sad truth. “It's over … why don’t you just admit it?” Laura asks Richard. “I don’t wanna keep pretending everything’s all right between us … Deep down we both want this divorce,” Nick tells Sheila. Neither Richard nor Sheila agrees. “I’ve given everything I have to this marriage!” Richard protests. "You’d throw away everything we have, just like that?” echoes Sheila. "We tried and we failed,” Laura insists, standing firm. “There’s nothing left,” agrees Nick.

Scenes between Nick and Sheila Hogan have been few and far between on FALCON CREST, but whenever we do check in with them, they feel like such fully realised couple that it’s not hard to imagine the scenes from their marriage taking place on Seaview Circle, just a couple of doors down from the Mackenzies and Ewings. For some reason, their disharmonious relationship strikes the same melancholic chord for me as the couples in Abba’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You” video - maybe it’s something to do with Sheila’s remote, chilly (even Scandinavian?) persona or the fact that we rarely see them together outside their marital home (“Walking through an empty house … In these old familiar rooms …” etc.)

Nick Hogan aside, the folk on FALCON CREST haven’t lost their appetite for scheming the way some in the Ewing-verse have. This week, Phillip Erickson double-crosses Angela by joining forces with Richard Channing, while Lance and Melissa form an alliance against both his mother and grandmother. Sensing Lance might be having second thoughts about executing whatever plan they’ve devised, Melissa drips poison in his ear, urging him on. “We’ll never get what we want if we wallow in sentiment," she hisses. "Don’t let petty guilt hang you up.” The femme fatale is becoming Lady Macbeth. It’s all very juicy.

Watching this week’s episode of KNOTS, I’m struck for the first time by the way the Wards’ story comes full circle. When the series began, Ginger resented how preoccupied with the music business Kenny was. Now she’s the one who urges him to return to it: “You have a life to live and a family to take care of and a gigantic talent you’re letting go to waste."

Similarly, when Ciji fails to show up for her party, we see Kenny’s face as Ginger takes her place on stage and he realises what’s been under his nose all this time. After four years of playing second fiddle to the rest of the women on KNOTS, this is Ginger's (and Kim Lankford’s) big moment and she makes the most of it, tearing into an unremarkable ballad and elevating it by the strength of her performance. Among all the disillusionment and cynicism in this week’s Soap Land, this a touching, validating moment for the Wards ... but where does it leave Ciji?

Rebecca Wentworth’s deathbed farewell is the second such scene of the season. Where Cecil Colby ranted to his new bride about his hatred for Blake and his wish for her to continue their feud, Rebecca tearfully bids adieu to her “good girl” and makes Pam promise to take care of Cliff. However dramatic and poignant it might be, Rebecca’s death scene also has a traditional Hollywood glow about it. Despite enduring a plane crash and major surgery, her makeup is still intact, and she manages to exchange “I love you”s with Pam just before flatlining. What happens to Ciji on KNOTS feels a lot stranger and more disorientating.

As Ginger sings, the enlarged photo of Ciji serving as a backdrop, one is reminded of Richard’s crack about the restaurant being a cathedral to Ciji. Indeed, there is something symbolic about her blue eyes watching solemnly over the proceedings, as if this were already her funeral and she had been transformed into a sort of guardian angel.

From this image of Ciji, the screen cuts abruptly to a shaky shot of the tide rolling in on the beach, Ginger’s voice still singing on the soundtrack. It’s night, the shot is very dark and it takes a moment for us to adjust - what exactly are we meant to be seeing? Before we can get our bearings, we cut back to Ginger, her face now obscuring the image of Ciji as she builds up to the climax of the song, Kenny’s proud face watching. We cut back to the ocean again - there’s a glimpse of something bobbing in the water - then back to Ginger singing the heck out of that song and various reaction shots from the rest of the characters in attendance. Then as the song concludes, the camera moves past Ginger to rest once more on the still image of Ciji behind her. There’s a slow cross-fade back to the ocean, the sound of waves crashing against the rocks, and the same eerie “Swan Song” music that played over Afton’s mystery phone call near the end of last week’s DALLAS. As the camera pans across the shore, the screen goes very dark, almost black, for a few seconds before picking out the wet, blue-tinged face of a young woman. Is that …? And is she … ? Yes and yes - it's Ciji, not as a rock angel in a photo this time, but a corpse washed up by an ocean full of danger and mystery.

To me, it feels there's a direct line between Ciji’s death on KNOTS, Laura Palmer's on TWIN PEAKS and now Lucy Beale’s in EASTENDERS - a lineage of slain soap girls - all pretty, all blonde, all ultimately unknowable, just out of our reach. (The only three biographical facts we ever learn about Ciji - that she was twenty-six, came from Kentucky and left home at fifteen after falling out with her parents - were finally revealed in the episode before this one.) Nonetheless, all three fictional deaths have a strange power to move - as if each girl is more an avatar of loss, a conduit for grief, than a real, knowable person.

There’s yet more death - possibly - at the end of this week’s FALCON CREST, with the discovery of Julia’s car at the bottom of a cliff. Like Rebecca’s midair collision at the end of last week’s DALLAS, the crash itself happens offscreen, but here at least we get to see the fiery aftermath as the car bursts into flames in front of Chase and Cole.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are …

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (4) FALCON CREST
3 (2) DALLAS

 

[James from London]

16/Feb/83: DYNASTY: The Mirror v 17/Feb/83: KNOTS LANDING: The Loss of Innocence v. 18/Feb/83 DALLAS: Legacy v. 18/Feb/83: FALCON CREST: The Odyssey

Declarations of war abound in this week’s Soap Land. On DYNASTY, Blake issues the following decree with regard to Alexis: “If she does anything to hurt Jeff, anything, there’s gonna be war between her and me, all-out-war, no holds barred." “Bobby wants all-out-war and believe me, he’s gonna get it,” JR tells his mama at the end of this week’s DALLAS. “Angela Channing declared war on me before I ever set foot in this town,” recalls Richard Channing on FALCON CREST. "I want her head - and Chase’s alongside it!"

For the first time in Soap Land’s history, two “whodunnit?“ story-lines are running concurrently as the mystery surrounding Carlo Agretti’s death on FALCON CREST is joined by the question of “Who Killed Ciji?” on KNOTS LANDING. While the Carlo story has spanned almost an entire year, KNOTS introduces the Ciji plot just five weeks before the end of the season. As a result, it’s neither fish nor fowl: it lacks both the urgency of a season finale and the bombast of a season opener. Instead, there’s a strange stillness to this week's episode as we wait for the characters to discover what we at home already know, i.e. that Ciji is dead. The instalment weaves the same hypnotic spell as the two episodes of EASTENDERS that recently followed Lucy Beale’s murder, when you almost had to remind yourself to blink.

Central to this feeling of stillness is an entire absence of a musical score. Watching this ep alongside the latest instalment of DYNASTY, with its majestically ridiculous background music continually driving the momentum forward, one becomes aware of what a pivotal role music plays in Soap Land, especially at the end of a scene where it often serves to absorb - or drown out - any ambiguity, lack of logic or absence in detail. As well as adding atmosphere, the music functions as a kind of shorthand, indicating how we and/or the characters are meant to be feeling before instantly transporting us from one scenario to another. In its absence, as in this week’s KNOTS, everything feels starker, more exposed. No music means there's one less layer of artifice between us and the characters on screen, giving the action an almost documentary feel. (I’m thinking particularly of the scene where a dishevelled, traumatised Gary staggers up the steps of the beach house after seeing Ciji’s body washed up on the shore.) This is as close to Soap Land vérité as the genre allows.

In place of a melodramatic score sweeping us along, the kind of details that might ordinarily be forgotten instead rise to the surface: technicalities about police procedure, the perception of Ciji’s death as an accidental drowning gradually shifting to murder, the impact of autopsy results that reveal she was pregnant when she died. All these dramatic beats are acknowledged, unpacked and explored, rather than brushed over.

In this regard, one of my favourite scenes in all of Soap Land (and beyond) is where Mack is called to the morgue to identify a body that fits Ciji’s description. There, he finds an attractive woman waiting, whom he recognises and addresses as Janet. He asks her what the body looks like. “Dead," she jokes. He laughs - at this point, it’s just another body, just another Jane Doe. Then the sheet obscuring the dead woman's face is removed and Mack receives the same jolt we did at the end of last week’s episode. Seeing his expression, Janet asks the dead woman's name. “Ciji,” he murmurs in reply, “Ciji Dunne. She sang." Janet makes a note of this. “I heard you got married,” she says. “What are you doing here?” Mack asks, staring at the body. Janet, still looking down at her notebook, assumes he’s talking to her. “I was in the neighbourhood,” she replies, a tad girlishly. “What?” he asks, suddenly looking at Janet as if registering her presence for the first time. She repeats her reply, but he turns to the coroner instead. “You said the girl drowned. She’s a homicide cop,” he says, indicating Janet. “What are you doing here?” he asks again, but this time he is talking to Janet. “I’m just taking a look,” she tells him coyly, but he sees past this. He asks the coroner to fast track the autopsy “for Janet - she thinks the girl was murdered."

There are lots of small, subtle shifts in this scene, some or all of which might have been smothered or obscured by a musical score.

The scene concludes with Mack asking the coroner to keep him informed of the autopsy results, not as a professional duty, but as a favour. “It’s personal,” he explains, and with those words, he relinquishes his self-appointed role as KNOTS LANDING's objective outsider. That title is immediately adopted by Janet, aka Detective, Baines. The final shot of the scene is of her watching Mack quizzically as he walks away, and it is through her eyes that we then view the regular characters' reactions to Ciji’s death as she goes from house to house questioning them.

“People like us don’t get involved in murders,” Karen insists later in the episode. “People like us do and are,” counters Mack. This is KNOTS’ USP in a nutshell - ordinary (or at least identifiable) people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances. (It’s also a mite disingenuous - in its bid to depict Karen as “people like us”, the show conveniently overlooks the Jessica Fletcher style master plan she singlehandedly devised and executed to put the men responsible for her own husband’s murder behind bars earlier in the season.)

Towards the end of the ep, KNOTS moves into more conventional territory as various characters are interrogated at the police station. It’s fun to see Kenny, Ginger, Richard and Gary put through their detective show paces by Baines and her enjoyably cynical partner, Lieutenant Morrison. An alcohol induced blackout means that Gary is unable to remember whether or not he killed Ciji, and he is subsequently arrested for the crime. This, of course, is exactly what happened to both Sue Ellen after the shooting of JR in DALLAS and (minus the alcohol) Lute Mae following the apparent killing of Michael Tyrone in FLAMINGO ROAD. More recently, the very same soap trope has recurred as part of the Lucy Beale murder storyline on EASTENDERS.

The scene in the police station where Richard Avery complains about having to wait alongside “all this scum" (“They’re probably thinking the same thing about you,” suggests Laura) echoes both JR’s discomfort at sitting amongst the hoi polloi in the doctor’s waiting room in "Paternity Suit” (DALLAS Season 2) and Blake’s disdain for the people he was obliged to queue up alongside when visiting his parole officer in "Alexis’ Secret” (DYNASTY Season 2).

There’s a lot of controversial suitcase packing in this week’s Soap Land. On KNOTS, Karen is alarmed to find Diana preparing to move to New York with her boyfriend, while on FALCON CREST, Chase is unhappy when Vicky moves out of the Gioberti house to shack up with her lover. Both daughters are calm but firm in the face of parental disapproval. “Chip and I are in love … and I wanna be with him,” Diana informs her mother. “I’m making a choice, a choice to be with Nick,” Vicky tells her father. “The way to make sure she goes is to forbid her to go,” Mack advises Karen. Maggie adopts a similarly pragmatic approach. “I’m not gonna try to stop you,” she tells Vicky. "Not that I could anyway … I think the time has come for you to make your own decisions.”

This week’s DALLAS, meanwhile, opens with Pam loading her car full of luggage before driving away from Southfork. Reaction to her departure is mixed. “Bobby’s out there, moping in her dust,” reports JR with a smile on his face. “How can you be so happy at a time like this?” scolds Sue Ellen. Miss Ellie blames Pam’s departure on Bobby himself: “You just don’t understand what’s happening to you!”

While Miss Ellie describes Bobby as "obsessed with beating JR”, Chase is, according to estranged wife Maggie, “possessed” by the Carlo Agretti murder investigation. Pam and Maggie both feel they have no choice but to stay away until their husbands come to their senses, and each has moved into a hotel. Pam's suite at the Fairview might be more spacious than Maggie’s modest room at the Tuscany Valley Inn, but has far less character. Both couples meet to discuss their problems this week - Pam and Bobby at a restaurant, Chase and Maggie in the latter’s hotel room. In each case, the discussion swiftly becomes an argument and the husband storms off in a huff before any differences can be resolved.

Back on KNOTS, during an argument with Mack over Diana, Karen accidentally calls him Sid, thereby becoming the third Soap Land character of the season to commit the cardinal error of referring to a current (or prospective) love interest by a previous partner’s name. First Cliff Barnes mis-identified Afton as Sue Ellen when he emerged from his coma, and then Jeff Colby upset Kirby when he declared his love for her thinking she was Fallon. This led to Kirby accepting Adam’s dinner invitation and subsequently to her rape. The same pattern recurs this week when Kirby bares her soul to Jeff again, this time in hospital, only for him to fall asleep on her. Feeling rejected once more, she impulsively decides to quit her job as the Carrington nanny and accept Adam’s offer to work as a translator for Colby Co. Given the rarified world of Carringtons and Colbys she is caught up in, there’s something about Kirby’s self destructive behaviour that rings intriguingly and psychologically true.

Most of the rest of this week’s DYNASTY is dumb, clunky fun - from Mark Jennings’ solemn speech about the hardships of looking good in tennis shorts to Dr Ling's mysterious patient seeing his new face for the first time. His verdict is grudgingly favourable: “Thank-you for giving me a face I can live with,” he says.

In a season that has already seen major inheritances for the Ewing brothers, Holly Harwood, Melissa Cumson, Richard Channing and Jeff and Alexis Colby, it is now time for Cliff Barnes, Pam Ewing and Katherine Wentworth to each receive a share of their mother’s empire. While Cliff is bequeathed full ownership of Barnes Wentworth Oil, Pam and Katherine inherit their mother’s shares of Wentworth Industries (or what has since been renamed on New DALLAS as Ewing Global). However, no Soap Land will would be complete unless it spawned an uneasy business alliance between family members (such as those existing between JR and Bobby at Ewing Oil, Angela and Chase at Falcon Crest, and Alexis and Jeff at Colby Co). Rebecca’s decision to divvy up the voting shares in Wentworth Tool and Die between Cliff and his two half-sisters exactly parallels what Douglas Channing did with the New Globe on FALCON CREST, where Richard Channing and his half sisters, Julia and Emma, are the three major shareholders.

The New Globe is where Soap Land’s first ever use of a computer as a plot point takes place this week when Emma cracks Richard’s access code and discovers several secret payments made to Carlo Agretti shortly before his death. Chase’s theory that Carlo was blackmailing Richard gains credibility when Angela learns that Richard’s adoptive father, Henri Denault, was a Nazi collaborator during World War II - and that Carlo knew about it!

So it is that this week’s KNOTS LANDING ends with Gary Ewing being arrested as part of one "whodunnit?" story-line, and FALCON CREST with Richard Channing emerging as a primary suspect in the other.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (2) FALCON CREST
3 (3) DALLAS
4 (-) DYNASTY

 

[James from London]

23/Feb/83: DYNASTY: Battle Lines v 24/Feb/83: KNOTS LANDING: The Fatal Blow v. 25/Feb/83: DALLAS: Brothers and Sisters v. 25/Feb/83: FALCON CREST: Ultimatums

A week after Emma Channing's demands for a corner office and a male secretary at the New Globe are met on FALCON CREST, DYNASTY’s Alexis finally gets her own office - and an assistant called David - at Colby Co. In the female boss/male underling stakes, both women have already pipped to the post by Holly Harwood on DALLAS, but while Holly might boast the most unconventional workplace arrangements in Soap Land, (so far this season, we’ve seen her conduct business meetings aboard her yacht, beside her pool and in her bedroom) Alexis’s new headquarters are arguably the most extravagant. Previously hubby Cecil’s office then nephew Jeff’s, it’s been so extensively made over, (the desk now balances on what appear to be elephant tusks) that it might as well be a new set. It’s also filmed very impressively - the shots from outside the window looking in are particularly striking in this week’s ep.

Once again, the power of the media makes itself felt in this week’s Soap Land. For JR in DALLAS, it is a welcome presence as he receives 143 pieces of fan mail prompted by his appearances on Roy Ralston's TV talk show. "If you ever decide to run for political office, those people would vote for you,” Ralston tells him. For sister-in-law Val on KNOTS LANDING, the press has now become the enemy. A small army of reporters and photographers have set up camp outside her front door, hungry for her reaction to Gary’s arrest for Ciji’s murder. “I feel like I’m in my own prison,” she frets, essentially under house arrest for almost the entire episode. Over on FALCON CREST, Angela uses the press as a weapon as she threatens to expose Henri Denault’s Nazi past. “You get Richard out of my way,” she orders him, "because if you don’t, I’ll have you on the front page of every newspaper in the Western world.”

Travel is very much in the air this week, with characters to-ing and fro-ing all over the US and beyond. On DYNASTY, a freshly divorced Fallon returns from Haiti accompanied by Mark J while on DALLAS, Mark G flies Pam to El Paso on his private jet and Miss Ellie accompanies Clayton to San Angelo to bid farewell to the Southern Cross. Angela begins this week’s FALCON CREST in Paris before detouring to New York on her way home in order to blackmail Henri Denault. At the end of this week’s DYNASTY, Blake receives a call from Dan Cassidy in Hong Kong, declaring that he may have just seen Steven alive in a local hospital.

There are just as many trips aborted as taken in this week’s eps. Blake prevents Alexis from whisking Jeff away from his hospital bed to a private clinic in Switzerland (in the hope that she can keep the cause of his collapse a secret). On KNOTS, Laura declining Richard’s suggestion of a Mexican vacation snuffs out his last hope that their marriage might be saved. Two doors down, Val tearfully refuses Jeff Munson’s offer of a return trip to New York, thereby ending their relationship. NY is similarly a no-no for both Chip Roberts, who postpones his fresh start in the Big Apple, (“I can’t desert my friends now, they need me”) and Richard Channing on FALCON CREST, whose defiance of Henri Denault’s summons to New York leads to a deadly confrontation on the Gorman Bridge.

The parallels between Bobby and Pam’s estrangement on DALLAS and Chase and Maggie’s on FALCON CREST continue. Whereas Pam has lunch with Mark Graison to discuss a deal on her brother’s behalf, Maggie dines with Daryl Clayton to review the latest amendments to her screenplay. Both meetings are strictly business, but neither man can resist undermining his dining companion’s marital status. "It seems to me that your commitment to Chase is not as strong as you led me to believe,” suggests Daryl. “You're already a single lady, you just haven't made it legal yet,” maintains Mark. Pam’s sister Katherine and Chase’s cousin Emma each volunteer their services as an intermediary for the unhappy couple, but neither get very far. The difference between the two women, of course, is that Katherine is secretly trying to sabotage Bobby and Pam’s marriage. To this end, she arranges for Bobby to see Pam and Mark lunching together. Similarly, on FALCON CREST, Chase discovers Maggie and Daryl having drinks in the bar of the Tuscany Inn. Neither husband is exactly pleased by what he sees. Bobby’s subsequent visit to Pam’s hotel suite lasts three minutes before he loses his temper and storms out, which is a full sixty seconds longer than Maggie manages when she drops by the Gioberti house to see Chase.

For all the similarities that now exist between the soaps - and let’s not forget the two whodunits running concurrently on KNOTS and FALCON CREST, where Mack Mackenzie and Chase Gioberti continue to second guess the investigations being run by Sheriff Robbins and Detective Baines respectively - each of this week’s episodes includes at least one scene that somehow encapsulates the flavour of that particular soap - i.e., a scene you could only imagine seeing on that specific show and not any of the others.

On DYNASTY, it comes just after Blake has discovered Alexis in Jeff’s hospital room, about to spirit him away to the Swiss Alps. With wondrous DYNASTY logic, Alexis is already dressed entirely in white, from fluffy hat to kinky boot, as if she were planning to ski herself all the way from Denver to Gstaad. Having forbidden the trip, Blake drags a furious Alexis into the hospital corridor where she lashes out at him physically and he raises an arm to ward her off. Teeth bared in anger, she delivers the thrillingly nonsensical line, "God, how I hate to see you choke on your own bloody arrogance!”

KNOTS’ defining moment comes at the end of the episode. Having learned that Ciji was actually killed by a blow to head in her apartment and that her body was only later dumped in the ocean, Val has concluded that she must be responsible for the fatal blow and that Gary then moved the body to protect her. She decides to give herself up to the police. Emerging from her house for the first time in the ep, a handheld camera then tracks her journey as she struggles through the media scrum to get to her car, Lilimae following behind, helplessly pleading with her to change her mind. Here, I’m reminded of two religious icons at the same time: Val is Joan of Arc, beyond all earthly reason and answering only to a higher calling, while Lilimae is Jesus’s mother weeping at the crucifixion. A trashy whodunnit evoking such emotive imagery? This can only be KNOTS LANDING.

The end of this week’s DALLAS is classic JR. Having summoned dogsbody Walt Driscoll to his darkened office, he reveals his latest plan - to sell one million barrels of oil to Cuba. Highly illegal but hugely profitable, this is JR’s most outrageous scheme since … well, his last most outrageous scheme.

The scene unique to FALCON CREST is the confrontation between Richard Channing and Henri Denault which results in Denault's demise. The circumstance of the death itself - a struggle between two men over a gun, resulting in one of them inadvertently falling from a great height - is hardly unique. From Julie Grey to Jason Gioberti to Joshua Rush to Marta Del Sol, a succession of Soap Land characters have met their destinies in quite a similar way. However, the events leading up to the death - the twisted, Frankenstein-like relationship between adoptive father and son ("You were nothing but a blank slate when I adopted you ... I created you!”), the sinister European backdrop - feel particular to FALCON CREST - not that there isn’t also a significant debt owed to MARATHON MAN in the climactic showdown between an unrepentant Nazi collaborator (“The opportunities were too great for me to allow archaic notions of morality and patriotism to stand in my way”) and a younger man, with E.G. Marshall and David Selby proving ideal Soap Land substitutes for Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman.

Following Ciji’s murder and Rebecca’s crash, Denault’s plummet is the third Soap Land death in as many weeks. Each is commemorated by a touching scene this week. The best of these is the chance encounter between Ciji’s mother and the Averys in KNOTS. When Mrs. Dunne (we never learn her first name) starts recounting a story from Ciji's childhood, it sounds like the beginning of an epitaph ("When she was six years old, I enrolled her in Carolyn Dewbarry’s Tap & Ballet School above the Odeon Theatre on the seventh floor. It was Carolyn Dewbarry who changed Ciji’s life …”) before turning into something much darker (“She dissipated her life away! ... She was a tramp!”). With exquisite irony, it’s left to Richard Avery, of all people, to pay tribute to Ciji. (“She worked hard, long hours because she wanted to be the best, the best for the people she sang for … She touched us all in a very special way.”) I’ve always thought this was a really good scene that, while doing nothing to advance the plot, provided fresh and unexpected insights into Richard's and Ciji’s characters. This time around, however, I realise it does advance the plot, at least in regard to the Avery marriage. By defending Ciji so gallantly, Richard partially redeems himself in Laura’s eyes. This, in turn, gives him fresh hope they can start again - a hope that is swiftly dashed. “I just want to be alone,” she tells him.

This sentiment is echoed in the final scene of this week’s FALCON CREST when Diana Hunter tries to assure Richard Channing of her loyalty in the aftermath of his father’s death. “Leave me alone,” he snaps, bitter and grieving. This leaves Diana, like KNOTS’ Richard, another soon-to-depart character, on the outside looking in.

DALLAS’s equivalent grief-related scene is between Pam and Cliff, in which Pam attempts to assuage her brother’s guilt over their mother's death: “She didn’t blame you. All she ever did was love you ... She asked me to take care of you and I’m trying if you’ll just let me.” In contrast to the scenes of estrangement between the Averys on KNOTS, and Richard Channing and Miss Hunter on FC, this exchange serves to reestablish the bond between Pam and Cliff.

While Jeff Colby’s sanity has apparently been restored on DYNASTY - having been discharged from Soap Land Memorial Hospital, he returns to the Carrington mansion to begin a romance with Kirby - Gary Ewing’s mental and physical health take a turn for the worse as he undergoes alcohol withdrawal in jail. This leads to Soap Land’s grimmest scene to date as a repulsed Abby witnesses him fitting and retching during detox. (Throughout this prolonged sequence, Ted Shackelford manages to look even older than he will when Gary returns to DALLAS in 2014.) By comparison, Phyllis's discovery of Bobby asleep on his office couch after tying one on at the Cattleman’s Club seems pretty mild.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (2) FALCON CREST
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) DALLAS
4 (4) DYNASTY