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

[James from London]

02/Mar/83: DYNASTY: Reunions in Singapore v 03/Mar/83: KNOTS LANDING: The Burden of Proof v. 04/Mar/83: DALLAS: Caribbean Connection v. 04/Mar/83: FALCON CREST: Maelstrom

There's an Asian element to both DYNASTY and FALCON CREST this week. While Blake Carrington travels to Singapore to find out if Steven really is alive, the key to unravelling Carlo Agretti's death appears to lie in San Francisco's Chinatown. Characters central to both stories are played by the same actor, James Hong. As Dr. Chen on DYNASTY, he is the one is asking the questions as he determines to uncover the true identity of the patient upon whom he has performed extensive plastic surgery. He is so persistent that the reluctant patient tries to abscond from the hospital. As humble gardener Charles Fong on FALCON CREST, meanwhile, he is the character with the secret who is running away. After his fingerprints are discovered on the door of a hidden tunnel on the Agretti estate, Chase concludes that he must have opened it for Carlo’s killer. The police then put out an APB on Fong, who promptly goes into hiding.

Before the name of Dr. Chen’s patient has been even revealed, Alexis has begun positioning her sons as Soap Land's next Cain and Abel, extolling Steven's many virtues to a clearly jealous Adam. “His decency, his sensitivity, his capacity for love ..." “His perversion, you mean?” Adam counters. Soap Land's other sibling rivalries are bubbling along nicely too. “Be sure to tell Jacqueline that you’re trying to prove her other son guilty of murder - she’s gonna get a big kick out of that!” Maggie tells Chase with reference to his campaign against half-brother Richard on FALCON CREST. Meanwhile, the conflict between FC's warring cousins reaches a climax of sorts with a terrifically staged fight between Cole and Lance in the winery. In spite of Lance's sneaky martial arts moves, Cole eventually gets the better of him, prompting some very convincing punch drunk acting from Lorenzo Lamas. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Bobby spends the episode first piecing together, then trying to prevent his brother's plan to sell oil to the Cubans. The two only really interact at the very end of the ep when they pass each other in the Ewing Oil reception and exchange a few fake pleasantries. As Bobby steps into the elevator, a smug JR has no idea that he is on his way to ... well, actually we don't have much idea of where Bobby's going either, but we know it involves Ray, Walt Driscoll and a phoney briefcase. As a smiling JR turns away from him, the elevator door begins to close on Bobby, staring grimly at his brother, and the frame freezes on one of DALLAS's coolest end-of-episode shots ever. So cool, in fact, it was echoed at the end of a second season ep of New DALLAS, only that time it's a slow motion Bobby walking away from Cliff with a sly smile on his face.

The predominant prime time TV genre in the US, prior to the ‘80s Soap Land boom, was (I assume) the cop/detective show, and it often seems as if the characters in soaps have inherited some of their time slot antecedents' crime-busting instincts. How else to explain Karen “Ordinary" Fairgate's ability to single-handedly put her husband's killers behind bars as she did earlier this season, or airline pilot-turned-vintner Chase Gioberti's innate sleuthing skills or the way Texas cowboys Bobby and Ray can this week transform themselves into Starsky and Hutch - effortlessly infiltrating Walt Driscoll's motel room, prying open his locked briefcase and accessing the false bottom therein, before devising whatever intricate plan it is they’re about to put into action?

Back on DYNASTY, the identity of the man in the hospital is confirmed for the viewer when Blake, en route to Hong Kong, flashes back to Steven's final scene at the end of last season, only this time re-staged with Steven's face hidden from the camera. His voice, however, now matches that of the mystery patient. Ergo, the patient is Steven. As played by Al Corley, Steven's original farewell ranks as the most poignant Soap Land exit thus far - excluding those that ended in death (Sid Fairgate), took place off screen (Matthew Blaisdel) or both (Jock Ewing). However, this week's KNOTS LANDING sees an even sadder departure as Richard Avery pulls up stakes and drives out of the cul-de-sac for the last time. Like Steven a year ago, he's headed for Destination Unknown (i.e., disappearing into thin air).

In Steven’s farewell scene, we saw him tell his assembled family exactly how he felt about them. What’s so achingly poignant about Richard's exit on KNOTS is that he denies himself such an opportunity. With only the viewer at home in on his plan to leave, his good-byes must be veiled. "How do you like being married again?" he asks best friend Karen at the end of their final conversation. "The best is yet to come," he assures son Jason in their last scene together. Jason remains oblivious to the significance of the hug his father then gives him. That's what's so wrenching - watching Richard speaking to people for what he knows and we know, but they don't know, is the last time.

Driving quietly out of the cul-de-sac at the end of the ep, Richard stops briefly and allows himself a final look back at what he is leaving behind. A small but haunting moment, it reminds me of similarly understated farewells in long-running British dramas - Sarah Jane Smith's in DOCTOR WHO, Heather Haversham's in BROOKSIDE.

As Richard Avery departs, Steven Carrington returns. This, of course, is not the first time a Soap Land character has been brought back from the dead. In its first few years, DALLAS resurrected a couple of figures who were believed to have died during the show's prehistory - Miss Ellie's brother, Pam and Cliff's mother. However, Dusty Farlow was the first person to be both introduced and killed off on screen before staging a miraculous, if reluctant, return. For Dusty and now Steven, resurrection comes at a steep physical price - paralysis and impotence for Dusty, a new face for Steven. And just as Dusty rejected Sue Ellen's attempts to revive their relationship, so Steven turns his back on Blake's invitation to return to the bosom of his family. Unlike Sue Ellen, however, Blake has a trump card that stops Steven in his tracks. "Can you walk out on your own infant son?” he asks him.

Elsewhere on this week’s DYNASTY, Adam lures Kirby to a motel under a false pretext and when she rejects his advances, tries to rape her again. This time, however, Jeff rides to the rescue and saves the damsel in distress. Adam's bitterness, frustration and delusions of grandeur are all convincingly depicted. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, JR forces himself on Holly again - only not sexually this time. In a great scene in Holly's bedroom, he coerces her into participating in the Cuban deal. With no gun to aim at him, all she can do is narrow her eyes in hatred. "You are the most despicable human being," she tells him. "Maybe so," he replies calmly, "but I'm also in a hurry. Now, this deal could win me Ewing Oil. If I lose it because you won't sign, I'll see you lose far more."

There are two Soap Land proposals this week: an episode after his divorce from Fallon, Jeff pops the question to Kirby. Marrying in even more haste, FALCON CREST's Nick and Vicky set a wedding date before Nick's divorce has even been finalised. What could possibly go wrong?

This week's KNOTS is in kind of a strange place, with much of the episode taken up with the consequences of Val confessing to a murder she cannot possibly have committed. At certain points, the lack of credibility surrounding her story is incorporated into the script: the detectives' bemused reactions, Abby’s ill-advised fit of the giggles when she hears the news. At others, the episode seems to flirt with self-parody. The scene where Gary and Val start screaming at each other in Ciji's apartment and have to be restrained by two different sets of cops as the screen fades knowingly to black is just as outrageous - and laugh out loud funny - as Blake and Krystle’s storm-lashed mountainside reunion in the opening episode of this season's DYNASTY.

Having been arrested, there is a prolonged sequence where we see Val undergo booking procedure at the police station - her mug shot and fingerprints are taken, her jewellery is removed, etc. These are the exact same indignities we saw Sue Ellen subjected to after she was charged with shooting JR almost three years ago. The enjoyment derived from both sequences is the same: it's the incongruity of seeing Mrs. Ewing herself - first glamorous but bewildered Sue Ellen, now sensitive but bewildered Val - receiving the same treatment as any common criminal in the real world. "This country has strange notions of justice, Chao Li Chi,” observes a minor character in this week’s FALCON CREST, but here we’re shown that not even a Ewing wife is above the law.

Val’s confession aside, we’re no closer to finding out who really did kill Ciji. During a conversation with Karen, Mack comes up with a list of suspects consisting of nearly every character on the show. There’s also an enjoyably contrived set-piece where Lilimae loudly and publicly accuses Abby of the murder. Over on FALCON CREST, all fingers are pointing at Richard Channing for the killing of Carlo Agretti. To further complicate matters, Richard then finds himself suspected of a second murder, that of his father, Henri Denault, who fell off a bridge in last week's episode.

Also on FALCON CREST, Maggie ditches her career as a screenwriter in order to return to the bosom of her family. Curiously, her decision is depicted as a kind of emancipation - trading the phoniness of a glamorous career for the realness of being a wife and mother. From her KNOTS LANDING jail cell, it's a safe bet that fellow writer Val would give anything to make the same exchange. "The thing that I just can't let go of," she whispers, still harbouring the illusion that it was she who killed Ciji and that Gary then moved the body to protect her, "when I first thought that I might have killed her, that she really could have died by my hands, I never ever thought, 'You killed somebody. You actually took somebody's life.' I thought, 'He tried to protect me! He must still love me!'" Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Sue Ellen nobly agrees to go public about her infidelities and alcoholism if it means helping her husband's political career. For all the female boss/male secretary gimmickry we've seen in recent weeks, it still seems that what most Soap Land women really want is a man to stand by. The exception is Abby on KNOTS, who decides that for the time being, she's better off with Gary behind bars - especially now that he's signed over his power of attorney in Gary Ewing Enterprises to her. To this end, we see her on the phone to an off-screen Miss Ellie, discouraging her from visiting Gary (and presumably bailing him out of jail). Her clever excuse is that Ellie's presence in California would only attract unwelcome media attention for what is essentially "a misunderstanding". Miss Ellie doesn’t seem to need too much convincing. Besides, she currently has her hands full helping Clayton look for a new house.

Like Gary, FALCON CREST’s Julia also signs over her shares this week, transferring her New Globe proxy to Lance so that she can leave town and make a fresh start with long lost husband Tony. However, when Tony's pregnant girlfriend opens the door to her in San Diego, she realises that there is no new life - it was just a trick on Lance's part to get her out of the way. A son destroying his mother - and so casually too? This is truly a Soap Land first. The fact that it comes almost out of nowhere - Lance and Julia have shared some tender scenes during the past couple of years - does not detract from the impact of his treachery. Quite the opposite, in fact. Just one question: before burning all her bridges at Falcon Crest to begin a new life with a notoriously unreliable ex, why wouldn't Julia think to speak to him first, if only on the phone? The answer: when the results of Lance’s plan are so deliciously cruel, who cares?

Chip Roberts and Mickey Trotter, male twenty-somethings who arrived in the Ewingverse at the beginning of this season, each find themselves on the receiving end of a stern talking to from an older woman this week. "When I see you, I see what a foolish woman I've become, blinded by flattery and lies," Lilimae tells Chip on KNOTS. "You are a cocky, snotty little kid," Donna scolds Mickey on DALLAS. While Lilimae reflects on the past, ("This all started with you,” she reminds Chip) Donna is more concerned about the future. "Ray happens to think the world of you,” she informs Mickey. "He has a great big emotional investment in you, and, y'know, I just keep thinkin' that, one of these days, you are gonna let him down with a great big thud!" Mickey, who starts off this scene making wisecracks about the size of the Krebbs house, ends up almost in tears as he insists he has changed and won't let Ray down. "Maybe I am the one that's wrong. I hope so," Donna concedes grudgingly. There are no such second chances for Chip, however. "I want you out of this house,” Lilimae tells him.

Another season-long relationship comes to an end this week as Richard Channing excommunicates Diana Hunter for spying on him for his late father. There's something brilliantly exciting about the controlled Miss Hunter suddenly becoming a loose cannon, even as Shannon Tweed's acting abilities are stretched to the limit. I love the moment where she watches from the shadows as Richard is abducted by two thugs in an underground car park.

This is the penultimate episode of the season for both FALCON CREST and KNOTS. In FC in particular, there’s an intangible sense of a noose tightening, especially with regard to Richard. Grieving for his father, a suspect in two murders, betrayed by his lover and under pressure from his unknown boss to return to New York, watching a character this powerful come unglued is riveting stuff. With David Selby (arguably Soap Land's most compelling actor at this point) taking such a central role, the ep’s sinister atmosphere is not dissimilar to that of FLAMINGO ROAD’s final instalments a year earlier, but with the supernatural element replaced by one of violence. Even the episode's one bonafide happy moment, Chase and Maggie's reconciliation in the winery is interrupted by someone's attempt to crush them to death by dropping a bunch of wine barrels on top of them.

Richard Channing’s KNOTS equivalent is Abby. Angered by her rival’s murder confession ("This is so Val, I could just scream!”), rattled by Lilimae’s accusations ("Shut up! Just shut up!”) and still trying to keep things together for her kids, there’s just one moment (alone in a bathroom) where she allows herself to lose control, hurl a perfume bottle at the wall and give into tears.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are ... it's a close run thing …

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

 

[James from London]

09/Mar/83: DYNASTY: Fathers and Sons v 10/Mar/83: KNOTS LANDING: Willing Victims v. 11/Mar/83: DALLAS: The Sting v. 11/Mar/83: FALCON CREST: Climax

This week's KNOTS LANDING and FALCON CREST make for contrasting season finales, as indicated by their episode titles. While “Climax” pretty much does what it says on the tin, (even if there is an awful lot of pre-wedding happy family foreplay to get through before we reach the really juicy stuff) “Willing Victims” is a more unusual title for a more unusual finale. Indeed, this instalment of KNOTS is really in a league of its own. Most of the ep feels more psychological than plot driven, as it focuses on Gary's state of mind in the two days leading up to his preliminary court hearing. “Gary’s his own worst enemy,” says Mack, neatly articulating the situation. "He’s gotta open up and help defend himself.” But who will be able to get through to him in time - Abby or Val?

This week’s DYNASTY, meanwhile, which concentrates chiefly on Steven’s homecoming, is pretty much irresistible. A big, swirly episode full of big, swirly emotions and driven along by a big, swirly score, it’s as touching as it is daft. There are some unusually sweet moments - Krystle breaking the news of Steven’s resurrection to a grateful Alexis marks the first time the two women have been anything but hostile to one another, while Krystle's scene with Jeanette the maid, in which she allows her mixed feelings about Steven’s return to surface - now that he is alive, she can no longer adopt his child - is unexpectedly moving. (Linda Evans is really great here.)

This is one of several times this season where Krystle’s situation echoes that of Soap Land’s original bride from the wrong side of the tracks, Pam Ewing. Her accidental bigamy coming back to haunt her is a spin on Pam’s predicament in the early DALLAS stand alone ep “Double Wedding”, while the story of her and Blake’s efforts to adopt the son of a deceased family member starts off mirroring Bobby and Pam’s adoption of Christopher, before morphing this week into the Season 2 episode where Pam tearfully surrenders her attachment to Baby John when Sue Ellen decides to assume her maternal responsibilities.

There two Soap Land weddings this week, bringing the season’s total up to five. On DYNASTY, Jeff and Kirby elope to Reno where they are married by the same judge who previously declared Jock Ewing dead and ordered Val and Gary to take in Lilimae. Like Mack and Karen’s Vegas wedding on KNOTS, the ceremony is a tad eccentric, but where the Mackenzies’ nuptials were knowingly comedic (and maybe even a little smug), the Colbys’ are more naturally sweet and fumbly. Nick Hogan and Vicky Gioberti’s wedding at Falcon Crest is comparatively formal, more in the vein of JR and Sue Ellen’s remarriage at Southfork. As that celebration did, this one ends in violence, but instead of a poolside punch up, there is a fatal shooting. Yes, just as the first Soap Land wedding of the season - Alexis and Cecil’s on DYNASTY - ended in death, so does the last one. (But who’s in the coffin? Tune in next season to find out!)

New York continues to be a controversial Soap Land hotspot. Steven’s announcement that he is “going to New York!”, followed by Blake’s unhappy reaction shot, ends this week’s DYNASTY. Meanwhile, on KNOTS, our final glimpse of Karen MacKenzie for the season is her hysterical response to the news that Diana has left for New York with Chip, aka violent felon Tony Fenice. (In the KNOTS finale's one blatant plot contrivance, no sooner do Chip and Diana drive away from the cul-de-sac than private eye Ronald Mackey - a possible cousin to John Mackey, the PI who helped Pam track down Rebecca in DALLAS two years ago - shows up brandishing a wanted poster of Chip under his real name.)

Over on FALCON CREST, Richard Channing has already been held captive in New York for a week when this episode begins. (The disappearances of Richards Channing and Avery in this week’s Soap Land are viewed by various parties as an indication of their guilt of the respective murders for which they have been suspected.) Eventually, Richard C is ushered into an office to meet the real head of the complex organisation he has been working for his whole adult life. As “the chair spins round to reveal …" moments go, this one beats Logan Rhinewood turning out to be Cecil Colby in DYNASTY hands down. It’s also Soap Land’s biggest “My God, that’s my mother!” moment since Fallon and Steven looked on as Alexis took the stand at Blake’s trial. In fact, the discovery that Chase and Richard’s ditzy mother Jacqueline is the secret CEO of a ruthless international cartel is one of most joyously absurd moments in all of Soap Land. “Haven’t you heard? Women are coming into their own,” she coos, wielding a cigarette holder as if that explains everything. For some reason, more than Angela Channing or Alexis Colby or Rebecca Wentworth, Jacqueline Perrault feels like the true progenitor of New DALLAS’s Judith Ryland - even if Judith would most likely snort Jacqueline for breakfast.

The murder investigations in KNOTS and FALCON CREST each run aground this week. Laura Avery might be convinced that her husband Richard killed Ciji before taking off, but she can’t get anyone else to take her claim seriously. “With Gary’s arrest and him not willing to defend himself, it takes the energy right out of the investigation,” Mack explains to Karen. Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Sheriff Robbins tells Chase that the search for Charles Fong, the key witness in the Agretti murder case, is over following the death of Fong’s uncle, who was the only solid link they had to him. (Following Gus Nuneoz, Carlo Agretti and Henri Denault, Fong Senior becomes FALCON CREST’s fourth dead patriarch of the season.)

In this week’s Ewingverse, Miss Ellie and Lilimae each find themselves caught between one of their children and an estranged spouse. On DALLAS, Miss Ellie has an awkward encounter when she bumps into daughter-in-law Pam lunching with Mark Graison. After she fails to report the meeting to Bobby and he finds out about it anyway, he asks her why she kept quiet. "It's not my business," she squirms. "I don't want to get in the middle of it.” Lilimae does not exercise the same restraint regarding her daughter’s marriage on KNOTS, however. "Gary Ewing kills people!” she yells at Val, who is still obsessed with helping her ex. "He’s killing you now, Valene!”

“JR’s and Gary’s marriages have always been so troubled,” reflects Miss Ellie during her scene with Bobby. Notably, this observation comes a week after her off-screen phone conversation with Abby on KNOTS and is as close as DALLAS will ever get to acknowledging Gary and Val’s split. Lilimae apologises to Val for her outburst, meanwhile, in an exquisitely written scene between the two women. “I’m sorry for the pain love has caused you,” she tells her movingly.

While Gary and Val are emotionally broken on KNOTS, their daughter Lucy is slowly coming back to life on DALLAS. So sweetly tentative has Mickey’s courtship of her been (“I never asked a girl if I could kiss her before …") that she really is like a virgin, touched for the very first time. Meanwhile, Mickey’s KNOTS LANDING counterpart, Chip Roberts, makes love - strictly in the old fashioned sense - to Lucy’s grandmother one last time before leaving for New York. “I don’t know why but whenever I see a butterfly, I think of you,” he tells her. "I leave with you in my heart, Lilimae, and if I failed you, forgive me, and trust that my failures are not yours. Good-bye, butterfly.” For all that Chip is a deceitful, violent sociopath, you still can't help hoping that a part of him means what he is saying. His parting gift to Lilimae is a butterfly brooch. Over on DYNASTY, Mark Jennings notices Alexis wearing the pin with a bee on it that he gave her during their brief affair some weeks ago. They share a très sophisticated post-break up drink at La Mirage this week - all smiles and no-hard-feelings on the surface, while resentment and jealousy seethe underneath.

On last week’s DYNASTY, Kirby found herself in a motel room, fending off the man who had raped her earlier in the season. On this week’s DALLAS, Lucy Ewing is also in a motel room, recounting her ordeal at the hands of Roger Larsen to Mickey. With that out of the way, they are free to take their relationship to the next level. “It’s not a suite at the Fairview or anything,” says Mickey apologetically, with regard to their surroundings. It’s not a suite at La Mirage either, which is where Fallon and Mark have also decided to seal the deal. Just as the scene between Lucy and Mickey is very tender, DYNASTY seems equally keen to emphasise that, in contrast to Mark’s fling with Alexis, his coupling with Fallon is about more than just animal lust. Alas, the intimacy of the moment is somewhat undermined by the '80s saxophone wailing on the soundtrack.

The big story in DALLAS this week is the successful derailing of JR’s Cuban deal by Bobby and Ray, which results in Walt Driscoll landing in jail on a gun smuggling charge. Even though Walt's $2,500 bail is a fraction of the $5,000,000 required to secure Gary’s bond on KNOTS LANDING, JR has no intention of paying it (“I wouldn’t give you the dust off my car!”). Willing victim Gary might be indifferent to his own fate, (“Pleading not guilty means acting not guilty,” Abby tells him. “I will never be 'not guilty',” he shrugs) Walt is not. “I swear I'll get back at you!" he yells after JR washes his hands of him.

JR and Walt's situation is reversed on KNOTS. Determined to save Gary, Val spends much of the episode trying to find a way to gain access to him in jail. When she finally succeeds, Gary couldn’t be less happy to see her. “Get out of here! Get out of my life! Leave me alone!” he shouts, but she is insistent. "No one here needs a martyr,” she tells him. "Someone out there is getting away with murder while you play this pathetic game. If you had any respect for Ciji, you’d be doing everything in your power to put the real killer in here.” On FALCON CREST, Chase makes a similar eleventh-hour appeal to Charles Fong, whom he eventually tracks down at his uncle’s funeral (or the Chinese equivalent thereof). “He was an old man, a man of honour and pride,” weeps Charles for his uncle. "I have shamed him.” “You have a chance to correct that,” Chases points out.

This week’s DALLAS is helmed by Larry Elikann. A veteran of each of the other Lorimar soaps, he is probably Soap Land's most visually distinctive director. DALLAS’s traditional house style, however, provides him with little opportunity for him to do his customary looming, cartoony, low-camera-angle thing. The scenes where he does get an opportunity to spread his wings, the two jail sequences and a great face-to-face confrontation between the Ewing boys in JR’s bedroom, are the episode’s highlights. (There’s also a scene where he has Pam and Katherine sitting on the floor of Pam’s hotel suite for no discernible reason, like a couple of high heeled hippies. It’s a little weird.)

David Jacobs himself, meanwhile, directs this week’s KNOTS and does some interesting visual stuff, particularly during a couple of pivotal mother and daughter encounters. In a scene where Karen comes to Diana’s room to tell her that Chip was sleeping with Ciji before her death, one can pinpoint the exact moment where Diana begins to block out reality and where Karen starts coming unglued. Crudely put, it’s the start of both mother and daughter going individually nuts. For most of the scene, the camera hovers in the doorway, as if reluctant to intrude any closer.

Meanwhile, at the beach house, Gary’s lawyer Mitch Casey confidently assures Abby that Gary will be freed after his preliminary hearing. Abby looks pleased, then waits until Mitch has left before calling her own attorney, Jim Westmont, and asking him first to fire Mitch and then to represent Gary himself in court (even though he is not a criminal lawyer). It’s a breathtaking moment - does Abby actually want Gary to be found guilty of murder? In addition, Olivia has been listening from another room the whole time. How much she has understood is unclear, but this is her first glimpse (at least on screen) of her mother's more calculating side - Abby is not just the carefree mom who takes her kids to Chick-O-Rama for dinner, or into her bed at night when they’ve had bad dreams. During this sequence, Jacobs has both mother and daughter framed separately, again through doorways, and viewed from a distance, as if to emphasise their isolation from one another.

Another visually striking scene is Laura’s meltdown in the restaurant kitchen. Coming eleven months after Miss Ellie’s plate-smashing breakdown in the Southfork kitchen when the realisation of her husband’s death finally hit her, the acknowledgement of her husband’s desertion prompts a similar outburst from Laura. Whilst effective, the DALLAS scene has always seemed to me a neatly choreographed visual set piece. The KNOTS equivalent feels more spontaneous and real. There is no musical score accompanying Laura as she sets about the kitchen equipment with a frying pan, and the camera work is such that it really feels as if we are intruding on someone's raw, private distress. (Again, it’s something to do with the respectful distance the camera keeps from the actor.)

From the sublime to … the denouement of FALCON CREST’s season long murder mystery. The scene where Charles Fong identifies Carlo’s killer in a room full of wedding guests is both stilted and thrilling, in much the same way that the “Who shot JR?” revelation on DALLAS was. Whereas his role of Dr. Chen on DYNASTY required him to unveil an entirely new face for Steven Carrington, James Hong’s part as Fong has him reveal an entirely new personality for Julia Cumson when he exposes her as the murderer. Julia’s subsequent speech, in which she hurriedly explains not only why she killed a man with whom she had no previous on-screen connection, but also why she then tried to bump off three of her closest friends, has a whiff of SCOOBY DOO about it. But while it might be ludicrous, it is also immensely exciting to discover that, all this time, the killer has been hiding not just in plain sight, but in the show’s opening titles.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are … again, it’s really close, they were all great ...

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

 

[James from London]

26/Sep/83: EMERALD POINT NAS: Pilot v. 28/Sep/83: DYNASTY: The Arrest v. 29/Sep/83: KNOTS LANDING: The People vs. Gary Ewing v. 30/Sep/83: DALLAS: The Road Back v. 30/Sep/83: FALCON CREST: Cimmerean Dawn

Soap Land’s 1983/4 season gets off a cracking start with each of the returning soaps at the top of their game, plus a brand new one to boot. EMERALD POINT NAS is about a family steeped in the US Navy for seven generations. (That’s three more generations than the Giobertis have been at Falcon Crest.) There's an awful lot of scene setting in the double-length pilot, but the American naval world is a dense one to penetrate for a first-time viewer (especially an English one). Dennis Weaver takes the archetypal Soap Land role of stern but family oriented patriarch, but unlike self-made, self-aggrandising men like Jock Ewing and Blake Carrington, (“I studied and I sweat and I broke my back to learn the oil business, the oil business that this country can’t afford to do without!” declaimed Blake in a recent ep of DYNASTY) his character, Rear Admiral Thomas Mallory, is presented as a man of humility and service. Given that he is a fictional representative of the real life American military, this characterisation means the show avoids falling prey to heavy-handed jingoism or empty rhetoric - at least for now.

Cuba, the unseen, unknowable enemy, is referred to in only the most respectful terms. The Tom Mallory we see in this ep wouldn't dream of describing that country’s population the way JR Ewing did at the end of last season’s DALLAS, as “a bunch of cigar chompers”.

It’s through the show’s more dissenting voices that the drama slowly comes into focus and some familiar Soap Land themes start to emerge. “You know how I serve my country? By turning a profit and paying my taxes,” says rich businessman Harlan Adams, a lifelong frenemy of Tom’s in the mould of Cecil Colby. "I hate the Navy, I’ve always hated it,” says Celia, the most outspoken of Tom's three daughters, played by Laurie Partridge. "Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one Mallory, sometime, just once, decided to grow up and be something landlocked and earthbound like a farmer or a coal miner?” “I like being a lawyer in the Navy,” counters her husband Jack. "It’s one of the few places left where corruption isn’t a way of life, where judges can’t be bought.” “And you get to wear a nice, snappy looking uniform with shiny gold buttons,” Celia snaps back.

Celia goes so far as threatening to have an abortion if Jack doesn’t quit his job in the navy: “If you think I’m going to raise yet another generation of Mallory navy brat, I won’t … I swear to God, I’ll find the strength to kill it.” This idea is taken a step further by Kirby on the new season of DYNASTY. Having learnt that she’s pregnant not by husband Jeff but by rapist Adam, (the same predicament Lucy Ewing found herself in at the beginning of last year’s DALLAS) she attempts to induce a miscarriage by deliberately falling from her horse.

This season’s DYNASTY and DALLAS open almost identically, with Mark Jennings dragging Alexis and Krystle out of one burning building, and Bobby Ewing rescuing JR, Sue Ellen, Ray and John Ross from another. Both sequences are sort of exciting and anti-climactic at the same time, with all the characters making it to safety with relative ease. Of the two, the Southfork fire offers more spectacle owing to its location, while the confinement of the cabin on DYNASTY gives that blaze more intensity. In the immediate aftermath of each rescue comes a dramatic revelation. “The cabin door was locked from the outside,” Mark announces on DYNASTY. “Somebody deliberately set that fire!” “Ray tried to kill me,” accuses JR on DALLAS. “The fire started during the fight!” (Ray at least partially redeems himself when he rescues a calf from a stream later in the same episode.)

The funeral scene that opens this week’s FALCON CREST provides the most satisfying cliffhanger resolution of the new season as we learn that the body in the coffin belongs to Jacqueline Perrault. This news is immediately followed by the introduction of Chase’s cousin, Dr. Michael Ranson, whom we quickly learn is a brilliant neurosurgeon who hasn’t wielded a scalpel in several years for a reason shrouded in mystery … just like DYNASTY’s Nick Toscanni two years ago.

In contrast to all the other cliff-hanger and whodunnit denouements, the reveal of Ciji’s murderer on KNOTS goes almost unnoticed. There is no Charles Fong-style “It was you!” finger-pointing moment for Chip Roberts, who isn’t even in this week’s episode. Once his true identity as woman-beating Tony Fenice has been exposed, his guilt seems to be a foregone conclusion (for everyone but Laura, this is). The closest we get to a defining moment of revelation is during a hurried doorstep conversation between Mack and Lieutenant Baines. “You know that Chip Roberts is the killer, don’t you?” Mack asks impatiently, but Baines evades the question. In a way, KNOTS has already moved on from the mystery of Ciji’s murder. There are more immediate questions to be answered - where are Diana and Chip now? And how much danger is Diana in?

In case we were in any doubt as to the importance of Chip and Diana’s whereabouts, it is literally shoved in our faces with the most extreme close-ups in Soap Land’s history. As Karen erupts with frustration over the DA’s reluctance to drop the charges against Gary and launch a full-scale search for Chip, a shot of her eyes staring at Mack fills the screen. We then cut to an equivalent shot of Mack’s looking back at hers, and then back to Karen’s again. That’s how intense things are now. Heck, when the KNOTS LANDING Everywoman screams at Laura and is visibly irritated by Lilimae, you know you’re in uncharted territory. She hasn’t even noticed Kenny and Ginger have left the series.

Fashion trend of the week: Sue Ellen, Alexis and Krystle all rock the oxygen mask/nightdress/full eye make-up look in the wake of their respective infernos. Even though Sue Ellen refuses to be hospitalised, the beds at Soap Land Memorial are pretty full. Blake is at Krystle’s side when she comes round and misidentifies him as ex-husband Mark, just Cliff mistook Afton for ex-lover Sue Ellen a year ago. Like Cliff did then, FALCON CREST’s Chase Gioberti and DALLAS’s Mickey Trotter both start off the season in comas before waking to find themselves paralysed at the end of their respective episodes.

Following the DYNASTY fire, Blake hopes that Krystle’s anger towards him will fade and they can reconcile. Meanwhile, Mark Graison frets that the Southfork fire might have a similar effect on Pam and Bobby’s marriage. (“All the plans your mother and I had may have just gone up in smoke,” he informs Christopher.) In the event, Krystle tells Blake that she isn’t ready to come back to him while Mark’s concerns seem justified when Pam admits she has decided to postpone divorce proceedings against Bobby.

“Who started the cabin fire?” replaces “Who killed Carlo Agretti?” as Soap Land’s latest whodunit. Almost as a reflex, Alexis tries to pin the blame on Blake who, in turn, relishes the opportunity to remind her that the real would-be killer is still out there. “If that unknown somebody didn’t succeed last night, when does he try again?” he taunts. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, JR worries that Ray still wants to kill him. “Am I gonna have to walk around with an armed guard for the rest of my life?” he asks Bobby, who is assigned the role of peacekeeper between his two brothers. This leads to a great showdown where the three Ewing boys thrash out who is truly responsible for the crash that left Mickey paralysed. “If JR hadn’t double-crossed Driscoll,” Ray argues, "it never would have happened … If Mickey dies, it’s the same as if you killed him!” “Maybe I am guilty,” concedes JR, “but you and Bobby share that guilt because if that boy dies, we’re all responsible.” He goes on to remind them of the trap they set for Driscoll last season that landed him in jail. "None of us have clean hands, boys. None of us.” This theme of moral culpability is also touched on in FALCON CREST. “My mother is a murderer,” laments Lance. “Well, Lance, in a strange way, so is mine,” replies Emma matter-of-factly.

There are now three ongoing murder cases in Soap Land, all at different stages of investigation and all subject to legal complications and bureaucracy. Tangling the characters up in this kind of procedural red tape gives a feeling of a world that is bigger than they are, and helps ground the more far-fetched elements of the various dramas in some sort of reality. On EMERALD POINT, Sela Ward’s bad girl has been two-timing her fiancé Glenn, aka the future Casey Denault from DALLAS, with Lute Mae’s toy-boy lover Tony from FLAMINGO ROAD. This leads to Casey being arrested for Tony’s murder. (The fact that Casey is Lute Mae’s real life son adds an extra Oedipal layer to the incident.) Dennis Weaver then battles to have Casey tried for murder under military rather than civil law so that he can face a court martial. On KNOTS, both Mack and Laura are convinced that someone other than Gary killed Ciji, but struggle to get Janet Baines to take any action. “The DA is not going to undercut his case against Gary,” she insists. Meanwhile, Gary challenges Abby’s right to appoint new counsel on his behalf, which results in the judge calling a recess before Gary’s hearing has even begun. Over on FALCON CREST, another judge denies Phillip Erickson’s application for bail on Julia’s behalf on the grounds that she is a danger to society.

While we’re on the subject, to quote Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, “it is time to speak of Julia". What are we to make of not only her retroactive transformation into a dangerous, unrepentant killer, but also the discovery that she was having a wildly passionate affair with Carlo Agretti before she murdered him - an affair that we are now shown through flashbacks, yet were given no on-screen indication of when it was actually happening? Or are these sequences just the fantasies of a deranged woman? Certainly, the flashback scenes have a similarly delirious, swoony quality to Kirby’s dream sequence in this week’s DYNASTY, in which her relationship with Adam is reimagined in a kind of 18th century DARK SHADOWS context, all high-necked collars, candlesticks and billowing curtains.

While Kirby’s dream is filmed in gothic darkness, Julia’s flashback takes place in bright California sunlight. However, each comprises a single, unbroken shot of a couple facing each other while strange music plays eerily in the background. Both scenes ooze with florid dialogue and bodice-ripping passion with an undercurrent of violence. “Oh Kirby,” declares Adam, “I want a thousand nights with you, the two of us together making love, deep beautiful love!” “No, let go!” Kirby protests. “We could have it all, Julia!” booms Carlo. “I would do anything for you!” “I won’t deny you anything if you just stop talking!” Julia pants. “Carlo was an irresistibly attractive man,” she continues in the present, “capable of enormous love and awesome hatred. His power was frightening and attractive … He could have destroyed all of us.”

From a narrative standpoint, Kirby’s dream exists as a way to convey her secret dilemma to us viewers, (“The baby inside you is mine,” says Adam) but why should we believe what a dream tells us any more than the flashbacks of a murderously deranged woman? What are the rules of storytelling in Soap Land anyhow - especially in those pre-VCR, pre-internet days, before we could review old episodes and state categorically that Julia could not have killed Carlo Agretti because she was in a different scene wearing a different sweater either just before or just after his death? (True, people had video recorders in 1983, but it’s probably safe to say the vast majority did not use them to watch and re-watch prime time American soaps.) In such circumstances, what is continuity but memory? And what is memory if not subjective?

With that in mind, it’s ironic that this should be the week when KNOTS’ Karen finally asks Val about her relationship with DALLAS daughter Lucy: “It’s been a while since you’ve seen her, huh? Do you ever hear from her?” Val replies that she spoke to Lucy “a few days ago … she sounds real happy.” This doesn’t exactly chime with what’s been going on in DALLAS where Lucy is keeping a bedside vigil for her comatose boyfriend. But then comes the kicker at the end of the scene: “Val, how long has it really been since you talked with Lucy?” Karen persists, the two women walking down the beach away from the camera, their backs to us. “Not long,” comes Val’s reply, before adding sadly, “Seven or eight months.” This poignantly understated moment finally acknowledges the impossibility of sustaining an ongoing mother/daughter relationship when both characters are in different shows. Whatever crucial development has or hasn’t occurred between Val and Lucy has taken place away from the viewer’s gaze - and so we are left to fill the gap with our own imaginations.

Julia Cumson and Karen Mackenzie aren’t the only characters presently teetering on the edge. On FALCON CREST, Lance describes Richard Channing as “close to going off the deep end” while on DALLAS, Miss Ellie is “real close to a nervous breakdown” according to Bobby. In addition, Sue Ellen admits to Clayton that John Ross “has been terribly hurt by JR and me. He's going to need help to become emotionally strong.” Opposite ends of the age range they may be, but Ewing grandma and grandson are both psychological casualties of the fight for Ewing Oil. But again, whatever traumas they have suffered have largely taken place off screen. Like Julia’s affair with Carlo and Val’s relationship with Lucy, we only have the characters’ words for what has occurred. (Speaking of events that we are not witness to, I imagine that Miss Ellie’s vacation at the Takapa resort is what New DALLAS will eventually translate into “a stay at a mental institution after Jock’s death”.)

If FALCON CREST’s Richard really is “close to going off the deep end” then it’s understandable. Jacqueline’s death means he’s just lost his third parent in little over a year. As Laura did in the restaurant kitchen at the end of last season’s KNOTS, he suddenly erupts in his office, pulling down bookcases and trashing furniture in a grief-fuelled rage. Like Laura’s, there’s something very naked and moving about his outburst, and once again the camera keeps a respectful distance from him during the scene.

“I know a lot of powerful and successful men in this country, JR Ewing for one, and they all have a very rare characteristic in common. They all have a sense of destiny about themselves. Crises, challenges - they are opportunities for them. They succeed because they won’t let themselves fail.” Abby’s little speech seems ironic given that JR has just surrendered the fight for Ewing Oil and reached an agreement with Bobby to share the company. Nor is theirs the only the only truce between two feuding Ewings this week. After a year of acrimony, Gary and Val share a silent smile of friendship when he is acquitted of Ciji’s murder at the end of this week’s KNOTS.

And just as the second Gary Ewing (Ted Shackelford) is cleared of any involvement in one Soap Land murder mystery, the first Gary Ewing (David Ackroyd) shows up to investigate another. By the end of this week’s DYNASTY, Gary #1 has arrested Mark Jennings, essentially for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, just as Gary #2 and Cole Gioberti were before him.

Gary and Sue Ellen’s alcoholism patterns continue to mirror each other. Accepting that he did not kill Ciji gives Gary the resolve he needs to quit drinking, while placing all the blame on Walt Driscoll for the crash that “destroyed Mickey Trotter’s life” enables Sue Ellen to climb back on the wagon too. Both take positive steps towards rebuilding their lives - Gary plans to go back to AA and Sue Ellen intends to focus on her son who, thanks to a sneaky recast, (no Steven Carrington-style plastic surgery for John Ross Ewing III) has suddenly acquired a personality and the gift of speech.

Now that Gary is a free man, FALCON CREST’s Julia replaces him as Soap Land’s most nihilistic jailbird. “The food is cold, the cells are hot and this place stinks of humanity,” is how she describes her present surroundings. Nevertheless, she assures her mother that, “if it’s a choice between staying in jail and living with you, I’ll stay in jail.”

While visiting her sister, Emma suggests that Julia considers getting psychiatric help. Julia laughs at the idea. “I am the only member of this family who has ever gotten in touch with their feelings, who’s ever really gotten to know themselves,” she boasts. And in the topsy-turvy world that Soap Land has now become, who’s to say she’s wrong?

And this week’s Top 5 are …

1 (1) DALLAS
2 (-) KNOTS LANDING
3 (2) DYNASTY
4 (-) FALCON CREST
5 (-) EMERALD POINT NAS

 

[James from London]

02/Oct/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Pilot v. 03/Oct/83: EMERALD POINT NAS: Episode 3 v. 05/Oct/83 DYNASTY: The Bungalow v. 06/Oct/83: KNOTS LANDING: Fugitives v. 07/Oct/83: DALLAS: The Long Goodbye v. 07/Oct/83 FALCON CREST: Penumbra

“I don’t wanna see no damn iron rocking horses on land God intended for cattle!” That's the line that made me realise I could love THE YELLOW ROSE, the latest addition to Soap Land’s weekly line-up. A saga set on a twenty-thousand-acre Texas ranch owned and run by the Champion family, the feel, unsurprisingly, is very much early DALLAS - dusty and earthy, full of Stetsons and cattle - but with more emphasis on ranch hands than businessmen. It may lack the glamour of the other soaps, (where the hair is getting bigger by the week, most notably on KNOTS LANDING) but it’s rich with atmosphere and a feeling of authenticity.

In the opening ep, we learn that the Yellow Rose Ranch has fallen on hard times - but guess what? There’s oil underneath the land! But guess what else? The family patriarch’s dying wish was for the land to be preserved, no matter what! This leads to a lively argument between two of his sons over what their next step should be. Such scenes give me a warm glow of familiarity. There’s something mythic about the whole oil-versus-land theme when it's set against a Texas backdrop and I just can’t get enough of it. It’s part of what first drew me to DALLAS, both the original series and the Lee Raintree novelisation, and more recently to New DALLAS. (At one point in THE YELLOW ROSE pilot, someone actually says the line, “That land is my birthright!” I could have cheered.) The theme is present in this week's episode of DALLAS too: “You’re the only one who understands Miss Ellie's love of this land,” Clayton tells Bobby, "land that your great-grandfather staked out.”

Acting on Miss Ellie’s behalf, Clayton appoints Bobby as Southfork’s “guardian, until she can take over”, which chimes neatly with how Bobby's responsibilities are depicted on New DALLAS, where he is more the custodian of the family’s legacy than its patriarch. During the same scene, Clayton mentions that Miss Ellie “feels that Gary’s out of her life forever”. It’s interesting that this comment should come so soon after Val’s acknowledgment on KNOTS of how far apart she and Lucy have grown. Put the statements together and it feels like a pretty conclusive parting of the ways for the two shows.

Like Jock Ewing on DALLAS, the dead patriarch of THE YELLOW ROSE - a sort of cross between Jock and Aaron Southworth - casts a long shadow over his many children (I counted three sons and a daughter in the first ep, though there may be more) and his widow Colleen. Colleen is not, as one might have imagined, a homely Miss Ellie type, or even an Angela Channing style dowager. Instead, she's young and sexy and played by Cybill Shepherd. Naturally, the various familial relationships are tangled and complicated - so much so that Colleen manages to sleep with her own stepson without realising it.

David Soul plays Roy Champion who, in the absence of his dead father, has become the de-facto head of the family. He’s the protector of the Yellow Rose in much the same way that Bobby is of Southfork. Roy is surrounded by faces from Soap Land’s future: Josh Harris from DYNASTY Season 7 is his son, Jeff Wainwright from FALCON CREST Season 5 is his brother and Nancy Scotfield from DALLAS Season 9 plays his ex-wife. All give very appealing performances. In fact, the whole cast is great. Over on EMERALD POINT NAS, given its producer credits for Richard and Esther Shapiro (from DYNASTY) and Michael Filerman (from everything else), it’s unsurprising to find traces of Soap Land’s past in its DNA. Most conspicuously, the Mallory house is the same as the Weldons’ on FLAMINGO ROAD.

Larry “Big Close Ups” Elikann pulls off a Soap Land first by directing two different shows in the same week, EMERALD POINT and KNOTS LANDING. The EMERALD POINT instalment is ploddy and unremarkable, but this week’s KNOTS is slick, taut and gripping. Diana Fairgate and Chip Roberts play out a variation on a scenario we’ve seen a hundred times before - girl meets boy, girl takes cross country road trip with boy, girl sees boy’s picture on the TV news and realises he is wanted for murder, girl tries to raise the alarm without raising boy’s suspicions, boy becomes increasingly possessive of girl (“Now that we’re together, I’m never gonna let you go”). All of this is played out in a succession of nerve-wracking scenes set in motels, diners and gas stations, involving pay phones, traffic cops and frantic, shaky-handed fumblings for car keys. From being one-half of love’s young dream, Diana becomes as trapped as Lucy Ewing was in “Runaway”, that cack-handed ep from DALLAS’s first season where a demented trucker takes her hostage. In fact, this story is “Runaway” as if directed by Nicholas Ray.

Soap Land’s other starry-eyed child-woman redhead, FALCON CREST's Vicky, gets almost as big a shock this week when she finds new husband Nick in bed with his ex-wife Sheila. The moment is similar to Sue Ellen's discovery of JR and Holly together, except that Vicky pauses long enough to toss her wedding ring on the bed before running off. Sheila then tries the ring for size, just for laughs. “I’ve got to get out of my marriage,” Vicky informs Cole - thus making the Hogans’ marriage Soap Land's shortest since Cecil Colby dropped dead on his wedding day.

This week’s DYNASTY is pretty much by-the-numbers, with all the usual characters having all the usual confrontations, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless. Blake follows Chase Gioberti’s lead by taking the cabin fire investigation into his own hands and interrogating the likeliest suspects. Similarly, on KNOTS, Mack more or less wrests control of the search operation to find Chip and Diana from Janet Baines, pulling strings and calling in favours to get the story on the TV news and a wire tap on the Mackenzies’ home phone.

The latter development leads to one of two key scenes in this week’s Soap Land that involves an aborted phone call. On KNOTS, a frightened Diana calls her mother from a pay phone only for Chip to intercept the call and cut it short - too short for the police to even begin to trace it. This causes Karen, already tightly wound, to lose control and knock the phone tapping equipment to the floor. It’s a very tense, dramatic scene. Not so that of the second aborted call, also from a pay phone, that takes place between Joseph and Blake on DYNASTY. Without making any sense at all, Joseph is required to both intimate his suicidal state of mind and provide sufficient clues to his whereabouts to enable Blake to get to his side just in time to have his old friend die in his arms. Suffice it to say, the whole sequence is as clunkily contrived as Soap Land gets.

"Diana honey, I'm sorry I wouldn't let you talk to your mother," Chip explains. "I was afraid of what she was going to say to you ... I can't afford to lose you." Diana nods meekly, but the most striking thing about this scene is its setting - a rain-lashed car at night, windshield wipers running, Chip at the wheel. The only light in the scene comes from within the car itself in order to conceal the fact that it’s being shot in a studio rather than on location, and that the car isn't really moving. It's the same way similar scenes in countless on-the-lam film noirs of the 40s and 50s would have had been filmed and evokes that same claustrophobic feeling (they're on the move, but they're not getting anywhere). DYNASTY pays homage to the same movie era when Blake, as part of his one-man investigation, visits private eye Morgan Hess at his down at heel office, and finds him sporting the same kind of injuries - a black eye, an arm in a sling - that Humphrey Bogart regularly sustained in his roles as Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe in those hard-boiled detective flicks. Hess’s explanation for his wounds - "I got worked over by a couple of unfriendly types I owed" - is typically Chandler-esque. As always, Hess gives good sleaze, offering to sell Blake information about his wife’s relationship with her ex-husband. "I'm not buying," Blake snaps, "I don't traffic with slime like you!" This archetype of the private detective as an unsavoury species is also perpetuated in this week's FALCON CREST when Phillip Erickson's "rather distasteful employment of two seedy private investigators" turns up some dirt he and Angela can use against Chase's doctor at Soap Land Memorial Hospital.

For the first time since walking out on their respective husbands, Soap Land’s estranged wives, DYNASTY’s Krystle and DALLAS’s Pam, make brief returns to their marital homes this week. Fallon summons Krystle to the Carrington mansion to sit with Kirby after her fall and sympathises with the “mixed emotions” she must feel being there. Pam, meanwhile, pays a visit to Southfork in the aftermath of the fire, but declines to go inside the house for fear “it would be too painful to see what happened.” Bobby suggests she take Christopher over to the stables instead - the same stables where Christopher will have it off with pretty cowgirl Heather three decades later - which is kind of weird to think about when you’re looking at his little coochie face in this scene.

On the subject of Soap Land’s kids, a week after John Ross’s recast in DALLAS, Melissa's son Joseph is suddenly walking, talking and giggling away on FALCON CREST. He’s a hell of a lot chirpier than either of the Ewing cousins - which is impressive when one considers the company he keeps (as Melissa lists them to Lance this week: “your crafty grandmother, your daffy Aunt Emma and your homicidal mother"). Conversely, there's an interesting little scene on this week's KNOTS where Gary apologises to Abby's children, Brian and Olivia, for what they've been subjected to during his alcoholic jailbird period.

In the biggest bail-related plot twist since Sue Ellen’s unknown benefactor turned to be a not-so-dead Dusty Farlow in DALLAS Season 3, Blake pays Mark Jennings' $100,000 bail in this week’s DYNASTY, in an attempt to curry favour with Krystle. Bobby makes a similarly grand gesture towards Pam when he offers to give up Southfork and even Ewing Oil for her. “If I could have you back it wouldn’t mean anything,” he tells her during a dinner date almost romantic as the one between Val and Soap Land newcomer Ben Gibson on KNOTS. Alas, both Ewing wives are brought down to earth with a bump. First Val discovers Ben has kept his profession a secret from her ("He's a newsman, Mama!"), and then Pam receives an ultimatum from JR. "If you return to Bobby,” he tells her in the final scene of this week’s DALLAS, "all hell is going to break loose. I’ll call off this truce that exists between him and me. We’ll be in a dogfight that will make what went on before look like a love match." (Don’t tell Victoria Principal, but the rather fetching purple and blue kaftan she wears for this scene looks identical to one Donna Mills can be seen in during the current opening credits of KNOTS LANDING.) “I’ve despised you ever since Bobby first brought you to Southfork,” JR reminds Pam, slicing straight to the heart of the DALLAS saga. There is an equivalent moment in this week’s FALCON CREST when Maggie stands up to Angela. "I know how you feel about our being here," she tells her. "Right from the start, you've treated the Giobertis like they were carrying some kind of a plague." Both lines serve as a reminder of where all this drama originally sprang from.

Just two episodes in and Ben Gibson is already a great character. He and DALLAS's Mark Graison display a similar combination of gee-shucks self-deprecation and cocky swagger as they talk about their pasts this week. Both actors play against the soapiness of their dialogue so that they're kind of laughing at themselves for saying such cheesy things. When Mark declares his feelings for Pam, (“"Until I met you, I was very sure of who I was and where I was going, but you've changed all of that - I’ve, er, fallen in love you”) he manages to sound sincere, embarrassed and ironic all at the same time. So does Ben when he talks to Val about putting down roots in Knots Landing. (“All through my twenties, I knocked around the world, searching for something, I guess - for adventure, for experience, for fun ... Right now I’m in what you would call a state of transition.") In each case, the effect is disarming.

The highlight of this week’s DYNASTY is the sequence where an unknown someone steals into Alexis’s hospital room at night and tries to smother her with a pillow. Even though it is not presented as a dream, the camera work is strange and heightened and there are no witnesses to the attack. So did it really happen? Certainly, everyone but Alexis seems to think she imagined the incident. As a viewer, one is left with the same ambivalent feeling as after the Julia Cumson/Carlo Agretti flashbacks in last week’s FALCON CREST, where we’re not entirely sure we can trust what we’re seeing with our own eyes (which isn’t necessarily a criticism).

There is a fair bit of relocating in Soap Land this week. Having had enough of Alexis, (first she disinherits him, then accuses him of starting the fire that nearly killed her) Adam packs his bags and moves out of her penthouse, leaving her alone and defenceless with an apparent attacker on the loose. Meanwhile, as part of their respective sober new starts, Gary tells Abby that they're moving out of the beach house and onto a ranch he’s just bought, and Sue Ellen informs JR that she’ll be moving into her own bedroom when they return to Southfork. Alexis, Abby and JR aren’t happy about these developments, but for once there’s nothing they can do to prevent them.

Just as JR effectively forfeited his connubial rights by sleeping with Holly, (“Your sex life is your affair from now on, you just stay away from me,” Sue Ellen decrees this week) so the discovery at the end of last season's FALCON CREST that his mother murdered her father has put a dampener on Lance and Melissa’s conjugal relations. ("Just leave me alone," Melissa orders Lance.) But whereas Sue Ellen has “no desire to be with other men”, Melissa is spending her afternoons in swanky hotel rooms with Richard Channing.

On DALLAS and FALCON CREST, Mickey and Chase both struggle to come to terms with their paralysis. Donna and Maggie insist on straight answers from Drs Blakely and Lantry respectively, neither of whom are very forthcoming. "You don't sound very optimistic," persists Donna. "I have no reason to be," Dr. Blakely admits. "In my clinical experience, patients with wounds such as those your husband has suffered don't often regain full use of their limbs," Dr. Lantry tells Maggie. "Then he'll never walk again?" she asks. Both doctors offer up the tiniest sliver of hope. "There's a possibility, but it's very slight," says Dr. L on FALCON CREST. "I don't want to say that it's absolutely impossible that something can change his condition," says Dr. B on DALLAS, "but I surely don't want you to get your hopes up." Speaking of hope, Mickey and Chase are both determined to look on the bright side. "I am gonna lick this," Mickey tells Lucy. "I'm gonna beat this thing, Maggie," vows Chase. Towards the end of this week’s DALLAS, however, tests confirm the permanence of Mickey's condition and he closes himself off from his loved ones. Meanwhile, Chase’s lowest point comes when Angela stops by Soap Land Memorial for a visit and accidentally-on-purpose lets slip about his mother’s death, news the rest of the Giobertis had been keeping from him for fear of jeopardising his recovery. Faced with Chase’s tortured reaction, Angela is unable to suppress a smirk. "I'd like to be alone," Mickey tells his family tearfully, "just let me be by myself." "Leave me alone," Chase tells Maggie angrily, "just leave me alone."

Drugs prove a useful plot device this week. On FALCON CREST. Angela, Phillip and Lance all conspire in a plot to have Chase declared incompetent so that Angela can once again assume total control of Falcon Crest. To that end, they blackmail Chase’s doctor over his shady dealings in prescription drugs. What’s really striking is how much pleasure the three characters take in setting up both Chase and Dr. Lantry. “You can be quite vicious, can’t you?” Angela says to Phillip admiringly, which kind of says it all. Meanwhile on THE YELLOW ROSE, Roy Champion wrongly accuses mysterious newcomer, Chance McKenzie, of helping a group of bad guys smuggle drugs across his ranch (or something like that). The allegation provides Chance with an opportunity to show what a stand-up guy he is by bringing in the real culprit - a ranch hand played by the Indian chief from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, no less. This leads to a really good hillside brawl between Chance and the ranch hand. Both men are past their physical prime and neither really wants to fight the other. Both are quickly tired by their exertions but continue slugging it out even though their hearts aren’t in it. There may have been more dramatic punch-ups in Soap Land’s history (Nick Toscanni and Blake on Skycrest Mountain, JR and Ray at the end of last season's DALLAS) and certainly funnier ones (anything involving Alexis and Krystle or the Southfork pool) but this fight, alongside Lance and Cole’s set-to in the winery last season, ranks as the most realistic so far.

DYNASTY and KNOTS each end on a confession - kind of. Joseph leaves a note for Blake before shooting himself, but we’re not yet privy to its contents. Meanwhile, Chip breaks down and admits to Diana that he killed Ciji - but even as he’s coming clean he can’t help but twist the facts. “I did it for you,” he tells her, "I killed Ciji so that we could be together.” And out of that comes a brilliant twist: by the time Chip’s finished his big emotional speech, Diana's fallen under his spell again. Anyone who doubts Claudia Lonow’s acting abilities should watch her performance in this episode, particularly her wordless transformation in this final scene from girl in peril to willing accomplice.

While one Joseph dies, the life of another hangs in the balance. At the end of this week's FALCON CREST, cute little Joseph Agretti/Gioberti/Cumson (delete where necessary) is rushed to Soap Land Memorial, having mistaken one of Dr. Lantry's illegal prescriptions for sweeties.

And this week’s Top 6 are …

1 (2) KNOTS LANDING
2 (1) DALLAS
3 (4) FALCON CREST
4 (-) THE YELLOW ROSE
5 (3) DYNASTY
6 (5) EMERALD POINT NAS

 

[James from London]

13/Oct/83: KNOTS LANDING: Nowhere to Run v. 14/Oct/83: DALLAS: The Letter v. 14/Oct/83 FALCON CREST: Conspiracy v. 15/Oct/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Divided We Fall

“Seems like two lifetimes ago,” says Pam Ewing as she and Bobby recall the early days of their marriage in this week’s DALLAS. While the soaps have always drawn upon their own back stories, embellishing them as they’ve gone along to give their sagas a sense of dramatic weight, this line of Pam’s is the first time that events shown on screen - and that are part of the viewers’ memories as well as the characters' - have been enshrined in the same way. It serves to remind us of how long these shows have been on the air, how much history they now have to draw on.

"There's a calm in the air,” Pam notes in another scene. “It's the first calm I've known since I married into that family.” In other words, it’s the first calm since DALLAS - and by extension, Soap Land itself - began. Indeed, following the sense of tragic inevitability leading up to the Southfork fire, and to a lesser extent Ciji’s murder, at the end of the 82/3 season, there’s now a sense of DALLAS and KNOTS reawakening, emerging blinking into the sunlight, growing in confidence and opening up to new horizons, both narratively and visually.

“A calm in the air" isn’t the only thing we’re experiencing for the first time. At the end of this week’s DALLAS, when Pam and Bobby have failed to see through Katherine’s latest scheme to keep them apart, it dawns on us for the first time that, wow, maybe they're really not going to reconcile at the eleventh hour the way they, Blake and Krystle, and Chase and Maggie, always have in the past. When the frame freezes on Pam walking tearfully away from Bobby, she is heading towards the unknown - the same unknown this week’s Soap Land is full of.

Somehow this sense of newness is embodied by Peter Richards, John Ross’s new camp counsellor, making his DALLAS debut this week. Golden-haired, open-faced, maybe a little dorky, he radiates health, youth and hope in a way no DALLAS character has before. Even JR refers to him, without a trace of cynicism, as "a fine young man”. If one were watching this episode for the first time without any prior knowledge of the character it would be hard to predict how he will fit into the Ewings’ story.

There’s always been something cinematic about Gary’s ranch on KNOTS LANDING. I guess it’s the way it’s photographed, but one really gets a sense of its beauty and vastness the way one rarely did with Southfork - for all the talk of what a special place it is - before New DALLAS. (There’s also a vicarious pleasure to be had from seeing the former residents of Seaview Circle adjusting to their beautiful new surroundings.) In its own modest way, DALLAS also expands visually this week ... by showing us the Ewings’ upstairs hallway and John Ross's bedroom for the first time (those brief glimpses before the fire notwithstanding). While THE YELLOW ROSE is now the most authentic looking of all the soaps - both eps thus far appear to have been shot entirely on location - FALCON CREST remains the most visually sumptuous. In one striking shot, we see Julia standing in the prison yard gazing through a wire fence at the lush vineyards beyond.

This week’s KNOTS and DALLAS include equivalent scenes of “new” affluence. In her capacity as realtor, Laura drops by Gary’s new ranch in the middle of a work day to find he and Abby basking by the pool. Similarly, Mark Graison treats Pam, Cliff and Afton to an afternoon by his pool. Sure, Abby had a backyard pool in the cul-de-sac, but this is on a whole different level. “I must say, this is the most fantastic place I’ve ever sold,” says Laura taking in her surroundings. And while Pam may already be accustomed to being a rich man’s wife, Mark’s way of life is far grander than anything Cliff and Afton are used to. ("Mark, this is wonderful!" Afton gushes.) Besides, the Ewings never laid on clowns, balloons and a lawn full toys for Christopher’s amusement the way Mark does here - even if Christopher remains steadfastly unimpressed by the gesture. (Christopher aside, there is strong competition for the happiest Soap Land kid of the week. On KNOTS, Olivia and Brian embrace ranch life and horse riding as eagerly as John Ross takes to Peter Richards and trampolining on DALLAS, while not even a pumped stomach or a spell at Soap Land Memorial can wipe the smile off Joseph's chubby little chops on FALCON CREST.)

In spite of their surroundings, Cliff and Gary both keep on eye on business in these scenes. While Cliff badgers Pam to form a consortium with he and Mark, Gary offers Laura a job working alongside Abby at Gary Ewing Enterprises. Given Laura’s personal history with Abby and Cliff’s unending obsession with the Ewings, Pam and Laura are understandably dubious about forming these alliances, but in each case, the dramatic potential is clearly too juicy for the writers to allow considerations of mere logic to stand in their way.

This is also the week that Abby finally joins the rest of Soap Land's movers and shakers by getting her own office - and it’s a sexy one. With an en-suite conference room and upstairs apartment thrown in, it combines the coolest aspects of both Alexis’s office at Colby Co and her penthouse in the sky. And again, there’s the secondary thrill of seeing Abby, after all her years of cul-de-sac scheming, finally getting what she wants. Well, almost. “Gary has taken a sudden interest in the business,” she complains to her confidante James Westmont. "I believe he’s bent on wasting his fortune. I want to prevent him doing that - for his own good.” Once more, there is a parallel here between Gary and Sue Ellen’s respective new starts. Neither is willing to go back to the way things were before they started drinking. As Sue Ellen puts it this week, "There are a lot of things that are gonna on that you're not gonna like, JR, but guess what? I'm gonna be doing them anyway.”

Both Gary and Sue Ellen’s sober-eyed perspectives include a pragmatic view of their relationships. “On my own, I don’t amount to much," Sue Ellen told Pam last week, “so I guess I’ll just have to lead a married life without a husband.” This week, Gary admits to Laura that although he loves Abby, he doesn't trust her. While Sue Ellen plays it safe, ploughing all her energies into helping her son, Gary is still attracted to danger. “Being with Abby is like high-speed auto racing,” he laughs. "It’s risky, but man - what a kick!"

FALCON CREST may not have the same “fresh start” feeling as KNOTS and DALLAS - if anything, the show is getting darker - but there is still a sense of moving into uncharted waters. A leading character who is also a self-confessed murderer behind bars? There is no Soap Land precedent, no generic narrative blueprint for how Julia’s story will resolve itself. Just as we don’t quite understand how the story got here, we have no idea what will come next.

The scenes where Richard and Melissa visit Julia in jail are the most compelling of the Soap Land week. Her reasons for killing Carlo seem to change from scene to scene. Her motives, whom she was trying to protect then and whom she is trying to destroy now, are almost impossible to keep track of. Further layers of confusion are added by Richard and Melissa, each of whom has had a parent murdered by Julia, feigning forgiveness for her crimes as part of some as yet unspecified revenge. Lies, fantasy, insanity, writers’ revisionism … add to this the lurid yet abstract nature of the dialogue (“I’ve always felt you would be the key to the destruction of Angela Channing!”) and it’s as if the scenes themselves are unhinged.

During Melissa's visit, Julia has a flashback montage, which seems to echo moments, not just from her own life, but all of Soap Land’s history. First, we see her watching Carlo in bed with another woman - he doesn't realise she’s there but the woman does (just as JR failed to notice Sue Ellen’s presence when he was in bed with Holly Harwood). Then we see her lurking behind a tree with a gun which she intends to use on Carlo (the same way Alexis did with the rifle she then fired to startle Krystle’s horse). This is followed by previously-seen footage of Carlo’s death scene, with inserted shots of Julia wielding the murder weapon, just as the reveal of JR’s would-be assassin combined the shooting we had already seen with a fresh close-up of Kristin pulling the trigger.

Julia’s fellow killer on KNOTS LANDING, Chip Roberts, is no longer in a position to make a fresh start either. As the police search closes in on him and Diana, the dynamic between them shifts. While Chip grows increasingly despondent - at one point sitting in the middle of the road in tears - Diana emerges as the dominant partner in their relationship, essentially becoming the brains of the outfit. When the shack they have taken refuge in is surrounded by police, it is her idea to make it look as if Chip is holding her hostage with a gun.

This week's DALLAS and KNOTS both save their best moments for last. While the settings of their final scenes are very different - Bobby and Pam meet for a heart-to-heart in a busy square in downtown Dallas whereas Chip and Diana are at the centre of a quasi-siege situation in an Oklahoman field - each of the women involved approaches her predicament with a similar “love conquers all” mentality. "If Bobby and I have a love that's strong enough, we can fight JR and anybody else who thinks that my marriage is over,” declares Pam. “We were meant to be, Chip ...We love each other and that’s all that matters,” Diana insists. Both, however, are in for a rude awakening. On DALLAS, Pam has the emotional rug pulled from under her when Bobby tells her that their love is “just yesterday’s memories” and that “I'm letting you go”. Meanwhile on KNOTS, Mack's well-intentioned - not to mention heroic - rescue attempt completely screws up Diana’s plan for her and Chip's quick getaway. However, even as Chip is arrested and taken away by the police, it is Diana who has the last word. When an intrusive TV news crew approach and ask “Miss Fairgate” for a comment, Diana looks down their camera lens and announces: "It's not Miss Fairgate, it's Mrs Tony Fenice!” Thus the circumstances of the first Soap Land wedding of this season - murderer marries his hostage-cum-accomplice whilst on the lam - turn out to be as unconventional as the first such ceremony of last season - ailing billionaire marries ex-wife of his nemesis from his hospital bed then immediately dies.

This week’s YELLOW ROSE takes over when KNOTS LANDING left off, with a suspect in a killing being led away by police amidst a flurry of pushy reporters. Where KNOTS’ TV newsman demonstrates his insensitivity by loudly hoping for a shootout in time for the evening news, the YELLOW ROSE press gang do their bit by repeatedly referring to the accused man as “the Indian” instead of his name, John Stronghart. (Stronghart is the ranch hand who last week took money to let some bad people onto the Yellow Rose Ranch, not realising they were drug runners. In a subsequent shoot out with the police, an officer was killed. The cops are now keen to pin the shooting on Stronghart.)

The theme of casual racism continues throughout in the episode. “I don’t like my client being harassed because his ancestors didn’t land at Plymouth Rock,” Quisto Champion complains to the local sheriff. (As on EMERALD POINT NAS, the show’s central family includes a lawyer among its number - all the more convenient for participating in murder-related story lines.) “You gonna carry that cross your whole life, boy?” asks the sheriff mockingly, referring to Quisto’s own half-Mexican origins. "I run a clean department,” he adds. “You never gave a Mexican a problem he wouldn’t have had if he was white?” Quisto persists. "Or an Indian?” (This is the first time the issue of race has been raised in Soap Land since Gus Nunuoz left the Tuscany Valley “to help my people” at the beginning of last season’s FALCON CREST.)

THE YELLOW ROSE also offers the most enjoyably ornate dialogue of the week. “Doggone, woman,” exclaims Quisto to Colleen, "here it is, a day hotter than high school love, and you look like fresh-cut flowers. How do you do it?” “Just hard work and horse manure,” comes the reply.

It’s pretty much a four-way tie, but this week's Soap Land Top 4 are …

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (3) FALCON CREST
3 (2) DALLAS
4 (4) THE YELLOW ROSE

 

[James from London]

17/Oct/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S: Episode 4 v. 19/Oct/83: DYNASTY: The Note v. 20/Oct/83: KNOTS LANDING: Marital Privileges v. 21/Oct/83: DALLAS: My Brother's Keeper v. 21/Oct/83 FALCON CREST: Partners v. 22/Oct/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: When Honor Dies

The original Tony Cumson in FALCON CREST went on to play Soap Land’s first Middle Eastern character, Rashid Ahmed in DYNASTY. The second Tony Cumson now becomes Soap Land’s first Russian, Admiral Yuri Bukharin, who arrives in EMERALD POINT N.A.S. on a diplomatic mission. Where Rashid was outrageous, devious and funny ("a naughty little Arab boy,” as old flame Alexis described him), Admiral Bukharin is a predictable TV Russian - strategic, enigmatic and patriotic. "I don’t think that either one of us is going to outmanoeuvre the other,” concludes Admiral Tom Mallory, his American equivalent, during their inevitable, metaphor-laden chess game. And so a dramatic stalemate is reached.

At the end of DYNASTY's most recent episode, Blake read a suicide note from Joseph who then shot himself. In last week’s DALLAS, Katherine read Bobby a letter supposedly written by Pam which led to Bobby conclusively ending their marriage. The ramifications of both missives continue to be felt throughout this week’s episodes.

The circumstances leading up to Joseph’s death have much in common with those of Soap Land’s last suicide, Walt Driscoll. Both were subservient men pushed too far (Joseph by Alexis, Walt by the Ewing brothers) who then resorted to attempted murder - Walt by ramming JR’s car, Joseph by setting fire to the cabin with Alexis inside it. In both instances, innocent people were caught in the crossfire. While Walt’s guilt over Mickey is what caused him to take his own life, the fact that Joseph nearly killed Krystle is glossed over in this week’s ep. Instead, the reason for his suicide, his note explains, was an attempt to stop Alexis from telling Kirby the terrible truth about her mother (“The attic nympho, wasn’t that her soubriquet?” Alexis recalls mockingly.)

FALCON CREST has also come up with a variation on the “little man pushed to homicidal extremes” scenario. Having been blackmailed by Angela into falsely declaring Chase physically and mentally incompetent, Dr Lantry decides that the only way to cover his tracks is to kill Chase on the operating table. Whereas JR and Alexis only learnt of Walt and Joseph’s murderous intentions in hindsight, Angela is privy to Dr Lantry’s plan ahead of time. "What you're suggesting is murder!” she protested at the end of last week’s episode. "That's right,” he replied, "and you're in this with me."

It’s interesting to compare the responses of JR, Alexis and Angela to these men’s actions. In last week’s DALLAS, a semi-remorseful JR listed some of his recent wrongdoings, including Walt’s death: “I’m responsible for so much damage and although I recognise it, I feel the pain, something tells me deep down inside that I’d do it all again.” By contrast, when the original Gary Ewing reads out Joseph’s confession in this week’s DYNASTY, (“It was I who set the fire. I tried to stop that evil woman from ruining another life. I pray my death will satisfy her need for vengeance”) Alexis refuses to accept any responsibility whatsoever. “Are you accusing me of being the evil one in that note?” she asks indignantly. "There were two women in that cabin, you know."

And what of Angela? Well, her shocked reaction to Dr Lantry’s plan would suggest that, however cruel and sadistic she might be, there is a moral line she will not cross when it comes to taking someone’s life. Although Chase is a perpetual thorn in her side, she is not prepared collude in his murder the way Titus and Constance were Lane Ballou’s when her would-be executioner came looking for her in FLAMINGO ROAD. However, when one looks at this week’s episode a little closer, that moral line is not so clear after all. While Angela might wring her hands in anxiety, she actually does nothing to help Chase. Instead, she heeds her attorney's advice: “We can’t get involved, Angela.” It becomes apparent that her concern over her nephew's survival is guided more by self preservation than any moral considerations. "If Chase doesn’t make it, our problems are solved,” shrugs Lance. “If Chase dies, our problems are just beginning,” she snaps back. In the event, it’s only the intervention of Dr Michael Ranson that saves Chase's life.

A week after Julia's flashback to the murder of Carlo Agretti, KNOTS LANDING presents us with an equivalent sequence of Chip killing Ciji and then dumping her body in the ocean. However, instead of showing events from the killer’s point of view, this time it's Lieutenant Morrison putting forward his theory of what must have happened. “You’re just guessing, pal. You don’t have a case against me,” Chip responds. However, this flashback sequence doesn’t have the same aura of unreality that Julia’s had - save for the actual killing itself, which is played out as shadows on a wall, like a piece of German Expressionism.

Jail cells and hospital rooms figure largely in this week’s Soap Land. On THE YELLOW ROSE, where Big John is behind bars awaiting his arraignment hearing, there is concern amongst the Champion family that he might not survive in jail very long - that he would sooner kill himself rather than remain caged. (I think this is related to him being an American Indian, but I’m not sure.) This is expressed in a sweet scene between Chance and Colleen’s young daughter LC, who keeps lightning bugs in a jar. “Bottle something up like this,” says Chance looking at the bugs, "take away its freedom … life doesn’t have much meaning.” This sentiment is echoed by Mickey Trotter on DALLAS. “The thought of living like a vegetable,” he tells Ray, "hooked up to some damn machine, disgusts me ... I hope and pray nobody will make me live that way.”

There’s also a parallel between bedridden Mickey and his new fiancée Lucy, and incarcerated Chip and his new wife Diana. “I can’t hold you,” laments Mickey, "I can’t touch you. I’ll never make love to you again.” Police regulations mean that Chip and Diana can’t make physical contact either. “I wish we could be together again,” Chip murmurs, sitting across a table from her. "I’d let you know how much I love you.” For now, they make do with brushing the tips of their fingers together.

The respective Lils in Mickey and Chip’s lives, Aunt Lil in DALLAS and Lilimae on KNOTS, have each spent the season thus far putting on a brave face. Lil has been chortling away at Mickey’s bad jokes ever since he came of his coma, while Lilimae has busied herself cooking for the Mackenzies, poking her nose into Val’s love life and occasionally muttering that Chip would never murder anyone. This week, however, the truth catches up with them both. “I want to believe you,” Lil tells Ray when he insists that Mickey can still make a full recovery, "but I cannot deny what I see with my own two eyes.” “Just tell me you’re not a murderer,” pleads Lilimae on a visit to Chip. The moment where he laughs in her face is truly chilling, like an alien peeling off its face to reveal the horrible truth underneath. “You killed Ciji,” Lilimae suddenly realises. "You got her pregnant and then you killed her!” Appalled, she pulls off the butterfly brooch she has been wearing since Chip gave it to her and flings it at him.

FALCON CREST’s Richard Channing has a more welcome gift for Julia when he visits her in jail in this week - an orchid. “Carlo,” he explains, "was carrying on one night about you to me, and he compared you to an orchid - refined, exotic.” (It goes without saying that such an exchange never took place on screen. So is Richard simply colluding with Julia’s fantasy that her affair with Carlo ever took place? It’s impossible to be sure.)

Ben Gibson also uses an orchid-as-woman metaphor on this week’s KNOTS: “The hardest part about raising orchids is that they are so delicate. The slightest change in their atmosphere or their culture can be the difference between success and failure.” This is his roundabout way of explaining to Val why he didn’t tell her the truth about his job as a journalist when they first met. “We’re not all the scum of the earth, you know,” he says, calling her on her “prejudices against newsmen". (He could just as easily be addressing the prejudices of Soap Land itself, referring not only to the tabloid reporters who hounded Val last season, but also the depictions of the New Globe’s Richard Channing and the Denver Chronicle’s Clare Maynard, amongst others, as ruthless scandalmongers.)

On the same theme, THE YELLOW ROSE’s Roy Champion barges into the offices of the San Antonio Morning Star to complain about an editorial accusing him of “tampering with the law”. And who should he find sitting in the editor’s chair but a charmingly miscast Mandy Winger from Future DALLAS? He accuses her of being a mouthpiece for her father Jeb Hollister, the show’s main villain, but Mandy insists that, like Ben Gibson’s, her aim is true. “If this paper plays any part at all in urging law enforcement to do its duty, then it’s doing the job I want it to,” she declares earnestly. Mandy and Ben are Soap Land's first positive representations of the Fourth Estate since the days when Elmo Tyson ran the Clarion on FLAMINGO ROAD and Douglas Channing the Globe on FALCON CREST.

“The large landowners in this state have always had special treatment,” Mandy asserts. "That results in their manipulation of beef prices, oil drilling regulations and every other kind of injustice that’s bred and fed through political corruption.” Her strong sense of social inequality is matched by Mack’s on KNOTS LANDING. “I get to prosecute the bad guys, but it’s the little guys who pay the price,’ he complains. "The big guys, they stay behind their palatial gates.” He receives a sympathetic hearing from an old pal named Greg Sumner (“We worked on Wall Street together after law school”) who is about to announce his candidacy to the United States senate. (DALLAS’s Donna also has a politically connected reunion this week, when she runs into Paul Morgan, former assistant legal counsel in the reelection campaign of Senator Sam Culver.)

“I don’t know how yet, but I want you as part of my team,” Greg tells Mack. That Greg is a new breed of soap character is underlined by him making this offer whilst standing in a locker room in just his shirt and socks - truly, a Soap Land fashion first. However, Greg’s knees pale into insignificance next to Peter Richards’ wincingly tight speedos on this week’s DALLAS. It’s safe to say this is the most revealing outfit in all of Soap Land’s history - at least until that swimsuit of Emma’s in New DALLAS Season 3. And might there possibly be a formative connection between John Ross’s exposure to Peter’s let-it-all-hang-out attitude to swimwear in this ep and some of the more scrotum-hugging underwear he will grow up to sport on TNT?

On both this week’s KNOTS and DYNASTY, a child/parent relationship hits an all time low. Steven Carrington is shocked when his father threatens to sue him for custody of his own son and Diana Fairgate-Fenice feels equally betrayed when her mother tells the police that Chip admitted to killing Ciji. “I’ll see you in court!” Steven snarls Blake. “I never want to see you again!” Diana shouts at Karen before moving onto Gary and Abby’s ranch. (This leads to a terrifically charged final scene where Mack tries and fails to get Diana to return home with him.) Over on FALCON CREST, Vicky bids a more amicable farewell to her parents before moving back to New York, while on DYNASTY, Adam starts saying his farewells as he too prepares to return from whence he came.

To this week’s Pregnancy Watch, where neither EMERALD POINT’s Celia nor DYNASTY’s Kirby are exactly radiant mothers-to-be. Celia continues to drink like a fish (“Do you think you should?” “It’s just some white wine”) and is discovered unconscious at the end of the episode. Meanwhile Kirby, still reeling from her father’s suicide, breaks down after his funeral and admits to Krystle that Adam is the father of her unborn child and that he raped her. This is the first time the “r” word has been used in relation to this story-line. (Actually, it looks as if the line “he raped me” was added after the scene was shot - it plays over a close up of Krystle and isn't referred to for the rest of the scene.) On FALCON CREST, Melissa is also pregnant, and encourages both Lance and Richard to think that they are the father. Richard plays along before revealing to new assistant Pamela Lynch that he has had a vasectomy. Miss Lynch, with her crisp English accent and femullet-cum-quiff, feels like a response to DYNASTY’s Alexis - albeit a younger, more low status one.

Another possible “homage" to DYNASTY is DALLAS’s decision to name a none-too-bright oil-rig saboteur Clarence Colby. Could this possibly be a subtle retaliation for DYNASTY’s DALLAS-on-the-cover-of-the-National-Enquirer gag from last season? A bit of a stretch perhaps, but how else to explain the prolonged introduction given to such a minor character, whereby he announces his arrival at Ewing Oil to receptionist Kendall who then announces it to Sly who in turn announces it to JR, thus ensuring the name “Colby” is spoken four times in quick succession?

Just when I thought KNOTS and DALLAS had severed the ties between them, Abby hears from an off screen JR that "this contest between JR and Bobby, or whatever it is" will be over in fifteen days. This is confirmed on the following night’s DALLAS, when we are told there is exactly two weeks to go until the battle officially ends. Time-wise, the two shows are perfectly in sync for once. There are anomalies elsewhere, however: Abby is surprised (and delighted) to learn that Gary is about to inherit 10% of Ewing Oil. “Does Gary know about this?” asks her confidante Jim Westmont. “According to JR, he doesn’t,” she replies - except Gary does know about it as he was present at the reading of Jock’s will on DALLAS almost a year earlier.

Gary’s ignorance works story-wise because it gives Abby a window of five days between the completion of Gary and Val’s divorce and his inheritance coming through for her to marry him and claim his share of Ewing Oil as community property. While Abby schemes to make Gary want to marry her, JR and Katherine scheme to keep Bobby and Pam apart until their divorce. Part of Abby’s strategy is a steamy moonlight seduction which leaves Gary gasping for breath. The raunchiness of this scene contrasts sharply with the sight in this week’s DALLAS of a hungover JR waking up at Serena the hooker’s place having failed to get it up the night before.

Another comparison that makes KNOTS suddenly seem like a slicker, more glamorous soap than its parent - the news of Gary’s Ewing Oil inheritance prompt Abby and Westmont to fantasise about the possibilities: “With that kind of financial base, we could create one of the powerful corporations in the country.” Back on DALLAS, JR’s vision remains steadfastly parochial. “The Ewing brothers working together is gonna make this little old town sit up and take notice,” he tells Bobby.

With its beautiful ranch, luxury offices and ever increasing glamour, KNOTS no longer looks like the odd soap out. That position has now been taken by THE YELLOW ROSE, where the entire Champion family may congregate for dinner like the Ewings and Carringtons, but they do so in the kitchen. What’s more, the ranch hands eat alongside them. However, the KNOTS crowd are still sufficiently “down to earth" to comment about the trappings of success that other soap characters take for granted - hence Laura’s gag about renting out Abby’s reception area as a trailer park, Gary comparing an elaborate light-fitting to a waffle iron, and Lilimae remarking on how fancily dressed Val is for her property settlement meeting: “Used to be people got dressed up for weddings, not divorces."

In a perfect instance of Soap Land synchronicity, this week sees the pre-divorce property settlement meetings of two Ewing couples - Gary and Val, and Bobby and Pam. On DALLAS, the attorneys run the show while Pam and Bobby sit mutely by. On KNOTS, the lawyers attempt to do the same, but Val is voluble in her insistence that she wants none of the Ewing fortune as a settlement - all she’s interested in is her house and car. Pam isn’t seeking alimony either, all she wants are her personal belongings. (This doesn’t stop Abby and JR thinking the worst of their respective nemeses. "How much did she soak you for?” Abby asks Gary. "Pam come up with some last minute demands?” JR asks Bobby). As soon as their meeting is over, Bobby heads for the door without so much as a glance in Pam’s direction. "I guess it’s all been said,” says Pam sadly. In stark contrast, after their meeting, Gary and Val share what Gary later describes as “one of the best conversations I’ve ever had” where Val credits Abby and Gary’s betrayal with making her a stronger, better person.

Equivalent to Abby’s discovery of Gary’s inheritance is Colleen Champion’s revelation to her late husband’s illegitimate son (and her present lover) Chance on THE YELLOW ROSE: “He left you an equal share in the Yellow Rose,” she tells him. "It’s in his will … ‘An additional share to be held by my eldest living son.’ We always thought that was Roy, but Chance, it’s you.” So far, so conventionally soapy, but what really fascinates is Chance’s reaction. “I don’t want it,” he snaps, addressing the portrait of the father he never knew. "You can’t do that to a man’s life. You can’t just pawn him off when he’s born and then jerk him around like a poor dumb calf at the end of a rope. I’m not the bastard, old man - you are!"

While this week's KNOTS and DALLAS are both very handsomely shot, (Larry Elikann working his crazy magic on the former and DoP Bradford May ensuring the latter has never felt so cinematic) THE YELLOW ROSE looks great too. It particularly excels in its action sequences - most notably a jaw-dropping scene where Chance rides a bucking bronco into a honky tonk bar.

Three episodes in, I’m starting to think THE YELLOW ROSE is something quite special. Sometimes it feels as much of a western or action series as it does a primetime soap, but there’s a deep soulfulness about it, and a melancholic quality reminiscent of DYNASTY’s first season. It has a similar love centipede too, whereby almost everyone quietly longs for someone they can never truly have - or so it seems.

This week’s DALLAS and FALCON CREST both end with a court hearing. The good guys prevail at one but not the other. Katherine Wentworth can barely contain her excitement when a forlorn Pam’s divorce is granted at the Dallas County Courthouse while Chase Gioberti makes a last minute appearance at the hearing where Angela has petitioned to have him declared incompetent. Having delivered an impassioned speech from his wheelchair in which he compares himself to Franklin D Roosevelt, he then slowly but defiantly gets to his feet to stand unaided. “Case dismissed,” rules the judge.

And this week’s Top 6 are ...

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (3) DALLAS
3 (4) THE YELLOW ROSE
4 (2) FALCON CREST
5 (-) DYNASTY
6 (-) EMERALD POINT

 

[James from London]

24/Oct/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S: Episode 5 v. 26/Oct/83: DYNASTY: The Hearing (1) v. 27/Oct/83: KNOTS LANDING: One Kind of Justice v. 28/Oct/83: DALLAS: The Quality of Mercy v. 28/Oct/83 FALCON CREST: Judge and Jury v. 29/Oct/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Walls of Fear

This week, Soap Land goes courtroom crazy. There’s a court martial in EMERALD POINT, a custody battle on DYNASTY, Julia’s preliminary hearing on FALCON CREST and Big John's arraignment on THE YELLOW ROSE.

Subpoenas fly and witness tampering abounds, with some of the most outrageous behaviour taking place on EMERALD POINT, which has perked up considerably in the lead-up to Casey Denault’s murder trial. When Casey’s fiancee, spoilt princess Hilary Adams, is called as a witness for the prosecution, her daddy Harlan suggests to Casey that he change his plea to guilty - just to spare her the ordeal of taking the stand. Then Hilary herself emotionally blackmails wholesome Kay Mallory into testifying to a non-existent affair with the murder victim in order to cover her own tracks.

Over on FALCON CREST, while Angela orders Phillip to “influence" the judge presiding over Julia’s trial, Melissa manipulates Julia into representing herself in court and pleading guilty to both counts of murder. On DYNASTY, Blake’s lawyer Andrew Laird tries to dissuade Krystle from testifying on Steven’s behalf so that he himself won’t have to discredit her good name in court. In the event, Krystle does take to the stand, allowing Blake the opportunity to gallantly prohibit Andrew from cross-examining her.

It’s about eight years since I last watched this period of DYNASTY and it’s remarkable how dated this particular story-line - Blake sues for custody of his grandson in order to prevent Steven and his gay lover from raising him - has become in that time. The case itself now feels like a Maguffin - merely a dramatic device to put the characters’ existing conflicts under the courtroom spotlight.

That Blake is actually mistaken in his belief that Steven and Chris Deegan are lovers when they are in fact roommates always seemed to me like a cop out on the part of the network or whomever (and perhaps it was). This time around, however, the misunderstanding seems to add a further level of dramatic complication. Even though Steven could presumably bring proceedings to a halt just by explaining the true nature of the relationship, he chooses to gamble custody of his son for the sake of a principle - or possibly just to spite Blake. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re fighting to keep your son or simply to defeat your father,” Chris tells him.

Again, it's John Forsythe’s performance that I find myself drawn to. He is totally believable as man utterly convinced in the rightness of what he is doing regardless of the damage it may cause along the way, and it’s that conviction - both on the part of the actor and character - that really drives the story. Forsythe is such a good but un-showy actor that it’s easy to take him for granted and forget that he’s even acting at all. The other witnesses called to the stand in this ep are also given the opportunity to do what they do best - Krystle to be sad and lovely (during her speech beginning “When I was married to Mr Carrington …”, she and Blake suddenly seem as divorced as Bobby and Pam) and Alexis to be vengeful and funny whilst wearing a wide-brimmed hat.

Her witness-stand accusations ("He banished me from my own children, he deprived them of my guidance!”) prompt Blake to spring to his feet. "You had seven years to turn him into what he is!” he shouts across the courtroom, referring to Steven, "I’ve been fighting to make him into a man ever since!” “You hate me,” Steven tells his father when the hearing is subsequently adjourned. "You always have.” This father/son dynamic is reversed on KNOTS LANDING when Laura tries to explain to son Jason that his daddy Richard has most likely gone for good. “I hate him, I hate him!” shouts Jason over and over. However, by far the most dramatic parent/child altercation in this week’s Soap Land takes place as part of a brilliant three-way showdown between Karen, Diana and Abby on Gary’s ranch, which is fast becoming the setting for KNOTS’ most emotionally volatile scenes.

An intense week leads to violent eruptions from some unexpected quarters. Tiny Kirby makes a grab for Alexis’s throat on DYNASTY, gentle Eric smacks his sister Diana hard across the face in KNOTS, and sweet old Lilimae mows down Chip Roberts with her car. Less uncharacteristic but just as juicy: a frustrated Detective Morrison sticking his gum in Chip’s hair during an interrogation scene on KNOTS, and the mere sight of Maggie Gioberti in the visitors room causing Julia to lose it with a prison guard on FALCON CREST. This week’s YELLOW ROSE, meanwhile, is more action-packed than ever, boasting two murders, a barroom brawl and an ambush.

While Kirby and Alexis have to be prised apart on DYNASTY, Lucy and Sue Ellen (whom one could argue is as culpable in Mickey’s paralysis as Alexis was in Joseph’s suicide) enjoy an unexpected Fallon-and-Krystle-style rapprochement on DALLAS. “I know we’ve never been friends, but I just want you to know that I care,” Sue Ellen tells her niece, which is enough melt six years of ice between them and for Lucy to open her heart as never before.

This week’s KNOTS is both written and directed by David Jacobs himself, and he certainly pulls out all the stops. There's a big sense of scale to the ep, both visually and emotionally. Once again, the ranch sequences look terrific, and even the scenes outside the police station, set against a backdrop of Californian hills and whirring helicopters, have a kind of grandeur about them. Having lavished so much care and attention elsewhere, it’s possible Jacobs had over-extended himself by the time it came to staging Greg Sumner’s fundraising party. As the first social event of the season, one would assume it was envisioned as a somewhat grand affair. As it is, it takes place on the cardboard Southfork patio, ineffectually disguised by some clumsily draped canopies. It’s hard to get a sense of exactly where the scene is meant to be taking place - inside or outside? A banqueting hall or a tent? And why does the fake Southfork roof keep peeking into view?

"Gary Ewing and JR Ewing are two different breeds of contributor," says Greg to Abby after the fundraiser, but a more salient comparison this week can be made between Gary and Bobby. With Bobby's divorce now finalised and Gary's not far behind, the two brothers appear to have swapped roles. Bobby may not have sunk quite as low as Gary did at the end of last season’s KNOTS, but while Gary is already moving forward, with a new ranch, a new business and a new family, Bobby finds himself “very much alone in the world”. As he whiles away his solitary hours in all night burger joints ("just so I could be near people”) and mourns his role as a full time father, Gary throws himself into environmental causes - hence that handsome donation to Greg’s campaign - and develops an ever strengthening bond with Abby’s daughter Olivia.

There’s an especially striking moment where we see Abby climbing up a small hill at the ranch looking for Gary and Olivia, who are sitting at the top talking about her. Olivia suspects her mother of enjoying the fact that Karen and Diana have fallen out. When Abby gets close enough, she hears Olivia saying, “She likes seeing Aunt Karen miserable." Instead of alerting Gary and Olivia to her presence, Abby walks sadly away. It’s as if she is the outsider, the odd one out on the ranch. Out of earshot, she fails to hear Gary’s response: “Olivia, your mother’s human. Don’t be too hard on her for that." Mack says the same thing to Janet Baines later in the ep when she admits to “a twinge of satisfaction” at seeing the Mackenzie family fall apart. “You’re human,” he tells her. “No, I’m not,” she replies. "I’m a cop.” The same sentiment is echoed yet again by Sue Ellen in DALLAS when Lucy confesses to feeling relieved that Mickey has broken off their engagement. “There must be something wrong with me,” Lucy frets. “There is nothing wrong with you,” Sue Ellen assures her. "You’re young and you’re about to make the biggest commitment of your life.” In other words, she’s human. (Still on the subject of human frailty, David Jacobs uses Janet Baines in her final scene to provide Richard Avery’s epitaph: “He was just a poor unloved guy who just couldn't cope.”)

A week after Laura started working for Abby at Gary Ewing Enterprises, other employment posts are filled. Claudia Blaisdel, recently released from the Soap Land Sanatarium, becomes Fallon’s assistant at La Mirage, Adam begins work at Denver Carrington, Greg Sumner invites Mack Mackenzie to head his new crime commission and Pam Ewing not only agrees to join Cliff at Barnes Wentworth, but poaches old pal Jackie from The Store to work with her.

With hindsight, it’s kind of ironic that in the same week that Pam moves into her late mother’s house on DALLAS - the driveway of which will be the setting for one of Soap Land's most iconic scenes - this week’s KNOTS should end with an angry woman driving her car straight at a happily reunited couple, colliding with the guy and sending him over the hood of the car. As the action turns to slow motion, the girl rushes to her man's side, calling his name as she kneels over his unmoving body … Remind you of anything?

A more immediate parallel is between Chip’s story on KNOTS and Mickey Trotter’s on DALLAS. With Diana refusing to implicate her husband in Ciji’s death, the case against Chip collapses. “Just you me, kid, on the road to who knows where,” he smiles, contemplating his imminent release from jail. (He then serenades Diana with a line or two from “What I Did For Love”. Given his claim that he killed Ciji so they could be together, this must constitute Soap Land's blackest use of a show tune since “If My Friends Could See Me Now” played over Sid’s arrest for attempted rape back in “Hitchhike”.) Meanwhile, all Mickey can see ahead of him is darkness. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he weeps. "I just want it all to end.” He breaks off his engagement to Lucy, only for her to then rally his spirits and for them to renew their marriage plans. It’s then (as Phillip Erickson puts it in another context in another soap) that the world caves in - Mickey suffers a cardiac arrest and lapses back into a coma, one from which he has scant chance of ever awakening.

While DALLAS’s Lil Trotter keeps vigil for her son at the hospital, Lilimae spends most of this week’s KNOTS at the police station, waiting for an opportunity to see Chip so she can make him confess to killing Ciji. “He’s gotta pay for what he’s done,” she insists. "Who’s gonna make sure he pays?“ But her efforts are in vain - Chip is released. Meanwhile, DALLAS’s Lil comes to a decision of her own. “That’s not my boy,” she declares, "and after today, I’m not gonna come over here anymore and watch that machine breathe for him.” Lilimae knows Chip is guilty; Lil knows Mickey is dead, but in each case, the workings of the legal system refuse to acknowledge that fact. Both women are seeking a sense of justice, or at least closure, that the law is unable to provide.

So Lilimae runs down Chip, and Ray and/or Lil pulls the plug on Mickey’s life support system. Having arrived in Soap Land in the same week almost exactly a year earlier, it looks as if Chip and Mickey are now dying alongside each other too. We can’t be certain in Chip’s case because all the dialogue spoken after Lilimae’s car hits him is drowned out by the musical score. Conversely on DALLAS, while the camera stays on Ray, we hear the disembodied voices of the medical team attending to Mickey, ending with with the grave pronouncement, “We’ve done all we can”. The episode concludes with Ray huddled by the door of Mickey’s room, Lil’s hand on his shoulder - a silent acknowledgement of their complicity. At the end of KNOTS, it’s a wordless look rather than a touch that Karen shares with Lilimae, and in their case its one of shock and disbelief.

With Chip’s release, Janet Baines quits both the investigation and her position as KNOTS’ impartial observer, which she inherited from Mack when Ciji died. “I'm too close to this, Mack” she now admits. And so, with KNOTS’ focus shifting from Ciji to Sumner, it falls to Ben Gibson to assume the role of the show's objective outsider. While Greg’s combination of liberal idealism and determined ambition wows everyone else, from Mack and Karen to Gary and Abby, Ben is left asking the tricky questions. "He was locked in the state legislature for years,” he says of Greg. "He couldn’t raise a nickel to run even for congress and now in one fell swoop, he’s going for the senate and he seems to have the wherewithal to do it. Just makes me wonder, that’s all." In other words, who is Sheriff Titus to Greg's Fielding Carlyle? Who is the Office of Land Management to his Cliff Barnes?

Interestingly, just as Chase did during his court appearance at the end of last week’s FALCON CREST, Greg concludes his speech at the fundraiser by invoking the spirit of America’s thirty-second president: “Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we’re gonna put a greater premium on trying, on action, rather than on being right all the time.” Cue enthusiastic applause. (Val, meanwhile, is as equally won over by the party decorations as she is Greg’s rhetoric. Forget the ocean, it’s like she’s never seen a balloon before.)

JR and John Ross have their first of many bedside chats in this week’s DALLAS. Back in the day, these scenes, sweetly amusing though they often were, didn’t mean an awful lot to me. In light of New DALLAS, however, they take on fresh significance. “Ewing Oil and Southfork should be yours and I’m gonna get ‘em for you,” JR promises his son. Likewise, the scene where Cliff smugly blackmails Sly into spying on JR for him chimes perfectly with the ruthless Cliff of New DALLAS. And with Miss Ellie away, JR and Sue Ellen become de facto heads of the household, creating a slightly different atmosphere at the ranch - one that’s perhaps a halfway stage between the Southfork of Jock and Ellie’s era and that of Bobby and Ann’s.

Following straight on from Mickey’s death in DALLAS, Chase hobbles back to work on FALCON CREST. It’s an oddly touching juxtaposition. While JR and Dusty Farlow's equivalent struggles to regain the use of their legs were given relatively little screen time, and Constance’s short-lived paralysis on FLAMINGO ROAD was played mainly for sexy laughs, far more dramatic emphasis is given to Chase’s attempts to walk again. Last week, he was given the full-on montage treatment, complete with a score as rousingly militaristic as the EMERALD POINT theme. This week, there’s more of the same as, determined to walk unaided, he throws down his crutches in the vineyard and pulls himself along by holding onto the vines, sweating and grimacing with the effort. There’s something almost Christ-like about his suffering.

While KNOTS and DALLAS conclude with the deaths, apparent or otherwise, of Chip and Mickey, the remaining soaps each end with a court-related cliff-hanger - EMERALD POINT with the commencement of the court martial itself, and DYNASTY with Sammy Jo calling Blake from New York: “Just put me on that stand, Mr Carrington, and I guarantee you’ll get Danny back!” Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, as a result of her guilty plea, Julia now faces the possibility of the death penalty. Whether Melissa intended this all along is unclear, but there’s no mistaking her smile in the freeze frame after she hears the news.

To raise Big John's $600,000 bail on THE YELLOW ROSE, Roy Champion puts up the oil rights under his family's land as collateral - the same oil that’s coveted by arch enemy Jeb Hollister (a sort of cross between Cecil Colby and Judith Ryland). Roy justifies his actions with a really great speech where he speaks more eloquently about his ranch than any Ewing ever has about Southfork:

“Just what is it we’re trying to protect here, anyway? What is the Yellow Rose - two hundred thousand acres of land behind a barbed wire fence? Is it oil leases and a couple of thousand head of cattle? Is it more than that? Dammit, I love this place and not just because it’s home sweet home, but because it’s a part of the past and it’s a way into the future that I want to be a part of. And if we’re more worried about oil and cows and real estate than we are about people, then I don’t think that the Yellow Rose is worth having in the first place.“

In any case, the chances of the Champions holding on to their land and their oil aren’t looking good after Sanchez, the cop-killing, drug-running crazy man who works for the Hollisters, lures Big John and Chance into a trap at the end of the ep.

And this week’s Top 6 are …

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (2) DALLAS
3 (5) DYNASTY
4 (3) THE YELLOW ROSE
5 (4) FALCON CREST
6 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S

 

[James from London]

31/Oct/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S: Episode 6 v. 02/Nov/83: DYNASTY: The Hearing (2) v. 03/Nov/83: KNOTS LANDING: ...And Never Brought to Mind v. 04/Nov/83: DALLAS: Check and Mate v. 04/Nov/83: FALCON CREST: The Wages of Sin v. 05/Nov/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Sins of the Father

Minor Trend of the Week #1: Girls committing perjury. At Casey Denault's court martial on EMERALD POINT, his fiancée Hilary pretends not to have had an affair with the murder victim, while Kay Mallory claims that she (Kay) has. Over at the Carrington custody hearing on DYNASTY, Sammy Jo bears false witness against ex-husband Steven, claiming that he was having all kinds of affairs with men while they were married.

While bad girls Hilary and Sammy Jo acquit themselves convincingly, good girl Kay copes less well. In fact, not since Claudia Blaisdel at Blake’s murder trial has anyone in Soap Land fallen apart so completely on the witness stand. Whereas Claudia’s plight was genuinely moving, watching Kay cave in so easily under cross-examination - not only does she admit to lying under oath, she also blurts out that Hilary was the one having the affair and that she herself is secretly in love with Casey Denault - is laugh out loud funny. (In fact, this week’s EMERALD POINT is its most enjoyable ep so far.)

Towards the end of this week’s DYNASTY and FALCON CREST, Judge Kendall gets ready to deliver his ruling in Danny Carrington's custody case and Judge Leeds prepares to pass sentence on Julia Cumson. The night before the respective hearings, whilst Danny’s father Steven and Julia’s son Lance anxiously await the verdicts, the women in their lives prove to be more pro-active. Claudia shows up at Steven’s door with a suitcase and an excited smile on her face. “I’m not going to let you lose your son, Steven,” she announces. "I can stop Blake. I’ve got the answer!” Lance, meanwhile, lies awake next to his wife Melissa. “I’d rather be anywhere than in that courtroom tomorrow,” he broods, unaware that Melissa has secretly been visiting his mother in jail, encouraging her to seek the death penalty.

Soap Land's legal issues don’t end there. Only five weeks after Gary Ewing was acquitted of killing Ciji, his half-brother Ray and mother-in-law Lilimae are both arrested, more or less simultaneously - Ray for the murder of Mickey Trotter on DALLAS, Lilimae for the attempted murder of Chip Roberts on KNOTS LANDING.

Whilst Ray’s wife Donna has to fight her way through a swarm of reporters outside the DALLAS hospital, Ben Gibson is on hand to shield Val from the press at the KNOTS LANDING police station. In the midst of the chaos surrounding them, Lilimae and Ray both remain calm, apparently indifferent to the consequences of their actions. As far as they are concerned, running down Chip and pulling the plug on Mickey’s life support system were the right things to do, irrespective of the law. “Chip is a killer,” Lilimae insists. “I only did what needed to be done.” “What mattered was Mickey and all the pain he was going through,” declares Ray. “I did what I had to do.” Val and Donna are as shocked by their loved ones’ attitudes as much as by their actions. “Who appointed you judge and jury?” Val asks her mama. "Nobody has the right to play God!” despairs Donna.

Meanwhile, it’s all JR and Abby can do to keep a straight face. In fact, they don't even try. “That half-breed Ray Krebbs got himself arrested,” JR gloats over drinks with Katherine Wentworth. "With any luck, he’ll be in jail for ten to fifteen years.” “I’ve always known that beneath that 'batty little old lady' exterior there beat the heart of a killer,” laughs Abby when Laura tells her about Lilimae.

The reactions of Pam and Gary Ewing are also interesting. Gary receives notification of his divorce from Val in the same scene that he hears about Lilimae’s arrest, but still feels compelled to rush to Val's side. Pam, divorced from Bobby an episode and a half ago, has a similar urge to be with the Ewings following Ray’s arrest. Neither of their current partners approves. "Gary, you’ve gotta stop jumping every time these people snap their fingers,” insists Abby. “Why is it every time I feel you’re free of the Ewing family something happens that pulls you right back?” Mark Graison asks Pam impatiently. While Pam resists the urge to visit Southfork, Gary heads straight for the police station where he finds himself surplus to requirements and is left making awkward conversation with Ben.

Where Lilimae and Ray both seem resigned to their fates, FALCON CREST’s Julia is practically suicidal. “My whole life is turning into one enormous nightmare,” she sobs. "I don’t even want to live.” She seizes upon Melissa’s suggestion of the death penalty as if it were a light at the end of the tunnel. Has any Soap Land character ever been in such a grim place? Indeed, the death penalty element means there’s a much darker vibe to Julia’s story than there is to any of the other current murder cases in Soap Land, of which there are five. (DYNASTY is the only show where no one is presently charged with either murder or attempted murder.)

Paradoxically, FALCON CREST also provides the most tender courtroom moment of the week. When Angela Channing - ordinarily one of Soap Land’s most devious characters - is asked at Julia’s sentencing hearing why her daughter should be shown leniency, she is surprisingly sincere. “I'm her mother,” she replies simply. "It wasn’t too many years ago that I held her in my arms. She isn’t evil and terrifying - she’s ill."

The moment where Julia asks to be sentenced to death is chilling. When she is instead condemned to life imprisonment in a maximum security prison "without the possibility of parole" it really does feel like a fate worse than death. Angela’s anguished reaction underlines the awfulness of it all. That we should find ourselves caring at all, either about Julia - whose identity as a killer still doesn't really make sense - or Angela - arguably the coldest, most consistently cruel character in all of Soap Land - is a testimony to the pulpy potency of the genre, FALCON CREST in particular.

The dysfunctional relationships between Steven and Blake in DYNASTY and Julia and Angela in FALCON CREST aren’t the only parent/child conflicts to spill over into the courtroom. On this week’s YELLOW ROSE, having already been viciously beaten by his father Jeb’s cane earlier in the ep, coke-addicted buffoon Lenny Hollister is arrested for both murder and the importation of illegal drugs. This leads to a public outburst at his indictment. “I’m here because I wanted a way out,” Lenny shouts at his father’s retreating back. "I wanted a way out from all of your tender lovin’ care!"

Minor Trend of the Week #2: Divorced couples winding up in bed together. On DYNASTY, Fallon and Jeff fly to Montana to investigate Adam’s past. Plane trouble obliges them to spend the night in a hotel. Over dinner, the wine flows, one thing leads to another and they end up in each other’s arms. On KNOTS LANDING, a disturbed Lilimae turns up at Gary’s ranch in the middle of the night looking for Diana. Gary drives her back to the cul-de-sac. He then stays to comfort Val, one thing leads to another and they end up in each other’s arms.

While Kirby waits patiently at home for Jeff, whiling away the hours playing Beethoven’s "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano, Abby packs a suitcase and walks out on Gary. Her secret hope is that by forcing the issue, he will ask her to marry him before his Ewing Oil inheritance comes through. This episode of KNOTS concludes with a week still to go until the battle for Ewing Oil finishes. On the following night’s DALLAS, however, that same fight is over by the end of the ep. The disparity can be explained away by the narrative time jump that followed Mickey’s relapse on last week’s DALLAS.

On FALCON CREST, Richard Channing is in a parallel situation to Abby. Just as JR tipped Abby off about Gary’s inheritance, Richard has had a sneak preview of his mother’s will. In a reverse of the situation set up by Jock’s will on DALLAS, Richard's inheritance is contingent on him and half-brother Chase becoming friends. While Abby only has a week to get Gary to marry her, Richard has the same length of time to convince Chase of his sincere desire to call a truce between them.

As well as helping Abby to land Gary, JR also gives his blessing to Katherine Wentworth in her perusal of Bobby. (“Pretty soon you’ll have him all to yourself,” he assures her.) If he’s not careful, he'll end up with two ruthless sisters-in-law.

Richard Channing’s efforts to impress his brother (first he writes a sensitive article about Julia, then he offers Maggie a job at the Globe) pay off as Chase grudgingly agrees to bury the hatchet just in time for the reading of the will. At the end of this week’s DALLAS, an equally reluctant Bobby agrees to his father’s posthumous request that he and JR “put your arms around each other and work that company like brothers.” On THE YELLOW ROSE, Colleen makes a similar appeal for sibling conciliation, urging Chance to tell Roy that he is his half-brother. “There’s no way me and Roy are ever gonna wear the same harness,” insists Chance. “OK, so you got the short end of the stick,” Colleen acknowledges. "You did the hard time - you got left on a doorstep while your brother came home in a blue blanket, worked with your hands while your brother went to college. So what? Maybe Roy did it have it better, but he didn’t have it any easier."

In the same week that JR and Bobby agree to run Ewing Oil together, and Pam and Cliff join forces at Barnes-Wentworth, another long-term business partnership commences, as Karen and Abby discover on this week’s KNOTS that they are co-owners in “a fourplex on the coast near Lotus Point”, left to them by Abby’s uncle. While JR initially uses Bobby’s post-divorce depression to try and trick him out of his rightful share (“When he comes out of that funk of his, he’ll find that I have fifty-one percent of Ewing Oil”), Abby attempts to take advantage of Karen’s preoccupied state to buy her off. However, Bobby ends up trumping JR in the contest while Karen sees through Abby’s ruse. She then gives Abby's emissary, Laura, a blistering telling off that puts the final nail in their friendship.

There's also some bittersweet reminiscing in this week’s Soap Land. “I was fifteen when I met her,” recalls Gary of Val on KNOTS. "When she smiles or turns her head a certain way, I get a glimpse of exactly the way she used to be.” While Jeff describes Fallon as “the first girl I ever loved” on DYNASTY, he also thinks she’s changed for the better. "I’m really impressed with the way you’ve turned out,” he tells her, "a lot different to the girl-woman I married.” Conversely, for Sue Ellen on DALLAS, the Bobby Ewing of today doesn’t quite measure up to the one she first met. "JR’s kid brother - you were so sweet and dashing and handsome,” she tells him. “You’re still quite handsome, only the sweetness has gone - and the naiveté. I see a sadness in you now.” She goes on to compare him to young Peter Richards. “Life is important to him, Bobby - not business, not deals, but life … If he doesn’t look for the things that are important to you, then maybe he’ll grow up to be as wholesome as he is right now.” The same theme is touched upon elsewhere in this week’s Soap Land. “If this is what Falcon Crest does to people, I say we get out,” Lance tells his grandmother. A more pragmatic note is sounded by Greg Sumner on KNOTS. “Power not only corrupts, it also gets things done!” he insists.

“It’s hard to fall out of love,” laments Holly Harwood as she and Bobby say their goodbyes on this week’s DALLAS. “You know what hurts? There’s someone out there who’s gonna end up with you - and it won’t be me.” This rueful admission echoes Janet Baines’ to Mack in last week’s KNOTS: “Some stupid part of me thought that it was OK for us not to be right, as long as you weren’t right with someone else.” Janet and Holly manage to walk away from Mack and Bobby with their feelings hurt but their dignity intact. Each is a rare example of a Soap Land woman who can experience unrequited feelings for a man without needing to strike back in some way, e.g. commit perjury or murder, or destroy his marriage or business empire.

Chip Roberts follows in the wake of Mickey Trotter and Chase Gioberti to become Soap Land Memorial Hospital’s third coma patient of the season. Eerily, he loses consciousness without warning, without even closing his eyes, midway through a conversation with Diana. They’re discussing their idealised future in New York - the fantasy destination of so many Soap Land dreamers - when he begins muttering about “the trees on the mountain … I thought there were trees”. He then abruptly lapses into a trancelike state. The image of a tree as a kind of final resting place recurs on both DALLAS, when Ray suggests to Lil that Mickey be buried on Southfork ("There’s this corner up above the meadow beneath this big old tree. He used to go up there whenever he wanted to be by himself. I just keep thinkin’ how much he might have liked it if we laid him to rest up there”), and on THE YELLOW ROSE where Big John, having taken a bullet in the gut from the bad guys, suddenly dies in Chance’s arms following their horseback escape. Chance’s eyes fill with angry tears, before the final shot of the scene shows the two men from a distance, slumped in the shade of a tree, horse munching quietly on the grass beside them. John’s unexpected demise seems to break the rules of TV grammar in a similar way to Sid’s on KNOTS LANDING: He can’t die now - they’ve already eluded the bad guys! They’ve just been quipping and laughing! It’s not even the end of the episode!

As gorgeous as KNOTS LANDING and DALLAS often appear this season, they don’t look anywhere near as striking as this week’s YELLOW ROSE. Some of the cinematography is quite unique. Viewing THE YELLOW ROSE, I get the same excited can-this-really-be-as-good-as-I-think-it-is? feeling as I sometimes do when watching New DALLAS, or as I did when I first stumbled upon other hidden (at least to me) gems of the soap genre: PEYTON PLACE, KNOTS LANDING Season 11, the final year of FALCON CREST.

The end of this YELLOW ROSE instalment, its fifth, has an air of tentative resolution about it, strongly reminiscent of the end of DALLAS’s fifth episode, “Barbecue”. Back then, Bobby and Pam decided to leave Southfork in the wake of a tragedy, Pam’s miscarriage, and it was only an appeal from an unlikely source, Jock, that persuaded them to stay on. An uneasy truce between Pam and the Ewings was forged, which paved the way for the rest of the series. Following Big John’s death on THE YELLOW ROSE, Chance announces that he too is planning to leave. This time, it’s Roy, who has been openly suspicious of Chance since Episode 1, who asks him to stay. Turns out he has already intuited that he and Chance share the same daddy: “Man should take what God gave him, Chance ... You and me have got the same blood in us, the same damn stubborn streak … This is your range too.” "I figured you knew,” Chance replies. "Seems like there oughta be more to this somehow.” Damn straight there oughta be. Roy merely sensing the truth about something so significant robs THE YELLOW ROSE of the kind of Big Revelation Scene on which the primetime soap genre traditionally thrives. However, it is also another instance of THE YELLOW ROSE subverting Soap Land convention and being all the stronger for it.

And this week’s Top 6 are … man, it’s a close one ...

1 (4) THE YELLOW ROSE
2 (5) FALCON CREST
3 (1) KNOTS LANDING
4 (2) DALLAS
5 (3) DYNASTY
6 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S

 

[James from London]

07/Nov/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S: Episode 7 v. 09/Nov/83: DYNASTY: Tender Comrades v. 10/Nov/83: KNOTS LANDING: Sacred Vows v. 11/Nov/83: DALLAS: Ray's Trial v. 11/Nov/83: FALCON CREST: The Last Laugh v. 12/Nov/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Breaking Trail

This week marks Soap Land’s first ever miscarriage of justice when the court-martial on EMERALD POINT finds Casey Denault responsible for the death of Tony from FLAMINGO ROAD. While there have been false accusations and subsequent arrests aplenty, this is the first time anyone has been found guilty of a crime they didn’t commit. That such an error should be committed by the US navy - an institution so revered on EMERALD POINT that the only characters to criticise it are depicted as neurotically unhappy women, unscrupulous businessmen or mercenaries for hire - is all the more unexpected.

Casey is found guilty of voluntary manslaughter instead of murder which means he doesn’t have to go to jail. He is, however, dismissed from the navy which for him is just as bad. “My whole life is gonna be a prison from now on,” he states. Lilimae Clements, meanwhile, is subject to another kind of symbolic sentence on this week’s KNOTS LANDING when a very reluctant Val commits her to a short stay at the Soap Land Sanitarium. It's a legal manoeuvre to help her avoid a longer jail sentence for running down Chip, but Lilimae is nevertheless devastated. Still, at least her room has cable TV and she receives a warm welcome upon her arrival. “Lake Vale is going to be just like your home, Mrs Clements,” she is courteously informed. That’s more than can be said for Julia's new abode on FALCON CREST. "End of the line, sister. Garden party's over!” she is told when she arrives at the state penitentiary to begin her life sentence for murder. There follows the customary removal of jewellery - previously undergone by Val and Sue Ellen Ewing after their arrests - a ritual to symbolise the stripping away of any remaining vestiges of Soap Land glamour or privilege.

On a more celebratory note, there are no less than three weddings in Soap Land this week. First Steven and Claudia do the deed on DYNASTY, then Gary and Abby tie the knot on KNOTS, and finally Cole and Linda are fused together on FALCON CREST. The first two couples have known each other for three whole seasons - quite a feat in Soap Land's fasting moving world. While neither union is exactly a cold-hearted business transaction (“I’ve loved you for such a long time,” says Steven, in bed with his new bride. “From the first minute I ever saw you I wanted you,” says Abby, in bed with her new groom) there are ulterior motives at play in both cases. By marrying Claudia, Steven gets to keep custody of his son (the suit over Danny is dismissed when the happy couple show up in court waving their marriage certificate) while Gary’s marriage to Abby ensures that she’ll keep a share of his Ewing Oil inheritance in the event of a break up.

Unlike last season’s elopements - Karen and Mack’s on KNOTS, Kirby and Jeff’s on DYNASTY - Steven and Claudia’s is played entirely straight. There's no wackily eccentric Justice of the Peace or nervously fumbling bride. Abby and Gary’s ceremony at the ranch is a slightly grander affair, while still modest by Soap Land standards, with only Abby’s kids, Laura and Jim Westmont in attendance. Cole and Linda’s on Lake Tahoe is the prettiest of the three. Again it’s a low-key ceremony, with Chase and Maggie the only guests. In another Soap Land first, Cole and Linda recite their own wedding vows - all “nurturing" this and “spiritual" that. Steven, meanwhile, erring on the side of tradition, quotes Robert Louis Stevenson to Claudia: "Teacher, tender comrade, wife.” On KNOTS, the romance of Gary and Abby’s nuptials is undercut by some clever crosscutting between their ceremony and Val’s tearful farewell to Lilimae at the sanatarium. Back and forth we go until you can’t tell where the emotion of one story ends and the other begins - an appropriately ambiguous response to Abby marrying a man she seems to love half an episode after we saw her smooching Greg Sumner.

On the night of Steven and Claudia’s elopement, Alexis wakes up in her penthouse, thinking she’s heard an intruder. Frightened and alone, she calls Steven’s apartment, unaware that he is Reno marrying Claudia. There is a parallel scene in KNOTS when Val returns home to an empty house after placing Lilimae in the sanitarium. Upset and alone, she calls Gary’s ranch, unaware - until she speaks to Olivia - that he and Abby are on their honeymoon, having just got married.

Also on this week’s DYNASTY, Krystle accepts Blake’s offer of a job as Head of Public Relations at Denver Carrington. Following in the high heels of Pam Ewing, Laura Avery, Claudia Blaisdel and Maggie Gioberti, she is now the season’s fifth working girl to land an executive position in one of her show’s biggest businesses. It goes without saying that none of these women had to apply for these positions. Heck, most of them aren’t even qualified for the job in hand. ("It's all instinctive with you," Blake assures Krystle.) In the Soap Land job market, it’s all about who you know (in these cases, an ex-husband, a brother, a former neighbour and a couple of in-laws respectively). As well as a way for Soap Land to pay lip service to sexual equality, this trend is also an opportunity for the women to start power dressing - plus it makes dramatic sense for a soap to have several of its characters working in the same business. Certainly, Laura’s screen time on KNOTS is now entirely dependent upon her proximity to Gary and Abby.

After learning that Jeff and Fallon are digging into his past to see if he can be linked to Jeff’s poisoning, Adam tricks Alexis into signing a phoney document - much the same way Katherine did Pam on DALLAS four weeks ago. And just as Katherine delivered a cryptic for-our-ears-only clue as to what she was really up to (“You may have just signed away your marriage, sister dear”), so Adam does the same thing: (“Alexis Colby - this’ll put an end to mercuric oxide”). But while this week’s DYNASTY ends before we can get to the bottom of Adam’s plan, we still get equivalent scenes of Katherine reading Bobby Pam’s fake letter and his subsequent doomed meeting with Pam - they just take place on KNOTS LANDING instead.

In place of Katherine’s fake concern for Bobby and Pam, we get Laura’s genuine concern for Gary and Val. Sincere she may be, but Laura's advice to Gary is the essentially the same as Katherine’s was to Bobby: that he should let go of the woman he loves for her own good. “Don’t you see? You are Val’s obsession,” she tells him. "If you were to start up with her again, it would be the cruellest thing you could ever do - unless you plan on going back with her again." Laura’s words also resonate with what she herself was told by Richard’s therapist at the end of Season 3, counsel she failed to heed.

The KNOTS' equivalent of Thanksgiving Square, the place where Pam met up with Bobby on DALLAS, is a coffee shop where Val has arranged to meet Gary. Like Pam in that earlier scene, Val arrives optimistic about a reconciliation. The two women are dressed similarly too. Each in sleeveless summer dresses, they both look girlish and vulnerable. While Bobby breaks Pam’s heart in person, Gary lets Val down from a distance, watching her inside the shop from his car parked across the street, then driving away. By sacrificing this opportunity to declare his true feelings to the woman he loves, each Ewing brother is creating a situation that will run and run (lovers destined to be together yet kept apart by words unspoken). Both then seal the deal with a definitive legal action - Bobby divorces Pam and Gary marries Abby.

In the meantime, there’s a new generation of star cross’d lovers emerging. As well Mr. Caproni’s vocal disapproval of his daughter Linda’s involvement with a Gioberti on FALCON CREST, there’s also the first date between Mandy Winger and Roy Champion on this week’s YELLOW ROSE. “Here we are - a Montague and a Capulet,” jokes Mandy.

Another long standing grudge is revealed in this week's FALCON CREST when, rather brilliantly, it turns out that prison guard Corinne Powers has a score or two to settle with Julia and her family. "I’ve known you and that royal family of yours for a long time,” she informs her. "You never noticed me in school. I was the fat kid in the hand me downs that you and the other rich kids made fun of ... My daddy Ben used to work at the vineyards up at Falcon Crest - that is, until he had his first heart attack ... After he recovered, your mommy didn’t hire him back so he died broke.” The episode ends with a classic Soap Land threat from Corinne to Julia: “By the time I get through with you, you’re gonna wish you’d gotten the gas chamber!” The shadow of the death penalty also looms in this week’s DALLAS as Ray goes on trial for his cousin Mickey’s murder. “I do not believe a prison sentence is punishment enough. This crime cries out for the maximum penalty that the law allows!” declaims the prosecuting attorney in his opening statement.

This Soap Land season is only six weeks old, but already we’ve seen Laura Avery, Alexis Colby, Angela Channing, five Carringtons and a couple of girls from EMERALD POINT testify in court. This week, it’s the turn of the Ewings - Bobby and Lucy - to take to the witness stand. “I didn’t wanna hurt Ray,” Lucy insists after admitting under oath that "Mickey wanted to live, he really did". Her courtroom conflict - she is torn between her loyalties to her family and to the man she loved - mirror Diana’s on KNOTS LANDING. As Chip lies in a coma, both the police and her brother Eric pressure her to come forward with what she knows about Ciji’s death, for the sake of her family and friends (“A lot of people are paying a pretty heavy price for your silence”). Meanwhile on DALLAS, defence attorney Paul Morgan puts pressure on Ray to allow Mickey’s fragile mother to testify to what about she knows about Mickey’s death.

Towards the end of this week's KNOTS, with Chip’s condition now looking as hopeless as Mickey’s did two weeks ago, Diana makes the painful decision to testify against him. But while she is turning herself into the police, Chip - displaying a perfect sense of Soap Land timing - starts to show signs of life. Meanwhile, as Mickey’s mother Lil is called to the stand on DALLAS, Ray springs to his feet in protest. “No you can’t! You can’t do that!” he shouts as the music swells, the camera zooms in on his face and the frame freezes - thereby providing Soap Land with its most dramatic courtroom moment since Alexis made her entrance at Blake’s trial on DYNASTY.

By contrast, the final scene of this week’s KNOTS has a laugh-out-loud audaciousness about it that reminded me of Bobby Ewing's return from the dead in DALLAS Season 8. In the same way that Pam wakes the morning after her wedding to Mark to see her dead first husband alive and well in the shower, Gary is in the honeymoon suite the night of his wedding to Abby when he sees … well, at first he doesn’t notice anything unusual when the maid arrives with the room service dinner tray. He doesn’t even look at her - she’s just the maid - just as Gary himself (well, not this Gary, the first Gary) was just the bell boy when he surprised Bobby in his Vegas hotel room back in “Reunion” (DALLAS Season 1). Actually, something similar happens to Bobby again in this week’s DALLAS - there’s a waitress he orders a beer from whom he fails to recognise until she turns to him and says, “Hello, Bobby.” “Jenna,” he murmurs in surprise, “Jenna Wade.” In fairness, we had also failed to recognise the waitress as Jenna - that’s because she’s played by a different actress now. Conversely, we do recognise the maid in Gary’s hotel room before he does - that’s because she’s played by the same actress who played the now dead Ciji. But while New Jenna recognises Bobby, Former Ciji doesn’t seem to know Gary, even as he stares at her, open-mouthed. “What’s a nice girl like me doing waiting on tables?” says Jenna, anticipating Bobby’s question upon seeing her in a cowboy bar. “What’s a dead girl like Ciji doing anywhere?” seems to be the question on Gary’s mind, judging by his bewildered expression at the end of this week’s KNOTS.

Minor trend of the week #1: Nicholas Sgarro, who directs both EMERALD POINT and KNOTS LANDING. The only distinctive visual link I noticed between the two eps was a couple of gratuitous shirts-off scenes of Casey Denault and Gary Ewing respectively. Meanwhile, on THE YELLOW ROSE, Colleen peeks on Chance taking an early morning skinny dip in the lake. “You’d make some centrefold,” she says admiringly, which leads us to ...

Minor trend of the week #2: Poolside lust. When Peter Richards and his blue speedos execute a perfect dive into the Southfork pool on this week’s DALLAS, Sue Ellen’s appreciative glance lingers for just a little longer than necessary. In a later scene, after observing JR's amusingly unsuccessful attempts to teach John Ross to swim, Sue Ellen stands provocatively by the water’s edge in a red bathing suit, taunting her husband by showing him what he cannot have. Over on FALCON CREST, Lance is the one in the water, watching as Melissa vamps by the pool in just a pair of stilettos and the tightest of swimsuits. Unlike Sue Ellen, this isn’t just for show. After uttering the immortal line, "Early morning swims are like tangos - they don't count unless you do them with someone”, Melissa joins her husband in the pool, and ends the sexual drought that has existed between them since the small matter of his mother murdering her father was revealed.

The last will and testament of Julia’s other victim, Jacqueline Perrault, is read on this week’s FALCON CREST. Jacqueline’s death serves the same dramatic function here that Rebecca Wentworth’s did on DALLAS. Just as the fight for Ewing Oil required a few significant fatalities to give it gravitas, so Julia’s shoot-out at the end of last season wouldn't have had the same impact without the death of an important character. In each case, Rebecca and Jacqueline were the ideal choices. Each a supporting figure with blood ties to two of the main characters, not to mention a legacy to bequeath, they are significant enough for their deaths to have an impact, but not so essential that their absence would create logistical problems for their respective show as a whole. Ultimately, from a dramatic standpoint, Jacqueline and Rebecca are worth more dead than alive.

As with Jock and Rebecca on DALLAS and Cecil Colby on DYNASTY, the most lasting impact of Jacqueline's death is the huge wealth and power it leaves the members of her immediate family. Chase, Maggie and Cole Gioberti now join the list of Soap Land characters - which includes Alexis, Pam, Cliff, Gary and (by extension) Abby - that have all become incredibly rich in the past year or so. As with the recent outbreak of lady executives, this pattern seems to be part of an ongoing homogenisation in Soap Land, whereby nearly all the characters in all the shows are slowly becoming equally wealthy (give or take a few million bucks) and equally glamorous.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Soap Land will reading without someone's nose getting put out of joint. The vast share of Richard’s inheritance ($25,000,000) won’t be made available to him for another year, and even then only with Chase’s approval. To add insult to injury, the will also obliges him to vacate the fancy house he has occupied since last season. Not surprising then, that his post-will rant to Melissa (“My mother gave with one hand and took away with the other! … My mother chose Chase over me!”) sounds a lot like the one Gary made to Abby after the reading of Jock’s will (“All my life my father made me feel worthless. Now that he's dead, I'm still feeling it!”). In addition, Jacqueline makes like Holly Harwood from beyond the grave when she bequeaths Angela a key to a hotel room. There, Angela finds a note on the pillow from Jacqueline stating that this was where "Phillip Erickson and I last made love.” (So is this another affair retroactively created by the writers, like Carlo and Julia's, or as Phillip insists, the fantasy of "an evil deranged woman” - also like Carlo and Julia?)

Meanwhile, THE YELLOW ROSE continues to wend its own idiosyncratic way. Above and beyond the striking visuals - which this week includes an excitingly filmed cattle stampede (if DALLAS had had the wherewithal to make its action scenes look this good, the Season 11 range war could have been amazing) - it’s the series’ combination of grit and warmth that continues to give it its own distinct flavour.

And this week’s Top 6 are …

1 (3) KNOTS LANDING
2 (1) THE YELLOW ROSE
3 (2) FALCON CREST
4 (4) DALLAS
5 (5) DYNASTY
6 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.

 

[James from London]

14/Nov/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S: Episode 8 v. 16/Nov/83: DYNASTY: Tracy v. 17/Nov/83: KNOTS LANDING: A Change of Heart v. 18/Nov/83: DALLAS: The Oil Baron's Ball v. 18/Nov/83: FALCON CREST: Solitary Confinement v. 19/Nov/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Moving Targets

This week’s KNOTS and DALLAS begin similarly, with Diana making a statement to the police about Chip killing Ciji and Lil testifying in court as to the circumstances surrounding Mickey’s death. “For the record,” surly Lieutenant Morrison instructs his typist, "list her as Diana Fairgate Roberts aka Fenice - don’t ask.” Meanwhile, on the witness stand, Lil is asked to state her name and address, also “for the record." "Lilian May Trotter, 16 Briar Lane, Emporia, Kansas,” she replies carefully, "or the Krebbs house in Braddock.” Then she becomes anxious. "I-I don’t know the number,” she stammers. It’s the kind of detail no one else in Soap Land would concern themselves with. So in one corner, there’s Diana's melodramatic teen romance unravelling in a grimy police interview room and in the other, a plain country widow cast as the star witness in a big city murder trial. Despite their differences, both women are a long way from home.

In the course of their testimonies, Diana and Lil attempt to absorb responsibility for Chip and Ray’s crimes. “He did it because he loved me,” Diana insists, explaining that Chip killed Ciji because she was threatening to expose her pregnancy. "This all happened so we could be together.” “If anyone’s responsible for Michael’s death, it’s me,” Lil asserts, explaining that it was she who talked Ray into ending Mickey’s life. "All Raymond did is to keep me from having to find the strength myself.”

In the KNOTS scene, there’s an effective use of a two-way mirror through which a ghost-like Mack silently observes Diana giving evidence. As she sobs for Chip, he weeps for her. Lil’s testimony on DALLAS, meanwhile, impacts everyone in the courtroom. Lucy cries, the Krebbses blink back tears and even the judge and district attorney are moved.

The night following Lil’s testimony, Donna admonishes Ray for keeping the exact circumstances of Mickey’s death secret from her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks. "You didn’t have enough to faith in me to tell me the truth.” Echoes of her indignation are detectable three decades later in “Hurt”, the extraordinary New DALLAS episode in which the truth about JR’s death finally comes to light and Ann rounds on Bobby for keeping her in the dark while Sue Ellen is furious that she didn’t know about JR’s illness before he died. "JR was my husband!” she cries. Seems the wife is always the last to know. That’s certainly the case on this week’s DYNASTY where Kirby realises Jeff and Fallon are keeping something from her (Blake has sworn them to secrecy over Adam’s suspected involvement in Jeff’s poisoning). When she accuses them of having slept together, they both vehemently deny it - even though it’s true. Val is more honest with Ben on KNOTS when she admits to her brief reconciliation with Gary. Ben turns away from her, but Jenna Wade stands her ground with Bobby on DALLAS. “Lots of people who are divorced love each other,” she says, looking him in the eye. "Are you one of them?” Bobby evades the question, but of course, he is - along with Pam, Val, Gary, Jeff and maybe even Fallon.

In the event, Lil’s evidence helps ensure Ray a suspended sentence, thereby bringing this storyline to a close. Conversely, Diana’s statement to the police only serves to further complicate matters for Chip. When she returns to his hospital bedside, she is shocked to find he has emerged from his coma. He greets her cheerily (“Hi, hon!”), unaware that she has just implicated him in a murder. He is subsequently placed under arrest and handcuffed to his hospital bed. By the end of the episode, however, he has miraculously slipped his chains and escaped.

While Ray is now a free man and Chip is nowhere to be seen, KNOTS’ Lilimae and FALCON CREST’s Julia still languish in the Soap Land Sanatarium and state penitentiary respectively. Julia’s storyline continues to go where no other Soap Land plot has gone before. This is the first time we’ve gone behind bars with an imprisoned character to see how they interact with other inmates. The closest we’ve gotten previously is a conversation between Lane Ballou and her cellmate in the pilot episode of FLAMINGO ROAD. Like Lane, Julia’s only ally on the inside is a young black girl. Everyone else is trying to beat her or drown her - or worse.

This week sees the Soap Land debuts of Tracy Kendall and Terry Hartford, the new girls on the DYNASTY and FALCON CREST blocks respectively. Along with the newcomers we met last week, Jenna Mk 3 on DALLAS and Ciji lookalike Cathy Geary on KNOTS, these are Soap Land’s new breed of female characters, all somewhat lower down the social scale than the shows' existing leading ladies, most of whom are getting richer by the week (“We’re millionaires a hundred times over!” exclaims Abby when Gary receives his Ewing Oil inheritance on this week’s KNOTS). All four are working girls - in one way or another. “I’m keeping the ring. I've earned it,” Terry tells the elderly man she walks out on in her first scene.

As a low-level publicist hungry to climb the ladder of success whilst sexually involved with her immediate (and somewhat older) superior, DYNASTY’s Tracy occupies the same position that Chip Roberts did when he arrived in Soap Land just over a year ago. Like Chip, Tracy is faced with a serious career setback almost immediately. Where Bess Riker fired Chip for getting ideas above his station, Bill Rockwell’s promise to Tracy that she will succeed him as Denver Carrington’s Head of Public Relations is overruled by Blake’s decision to appoint Krystle to the position instead.

Tracy masks her resentment at this display of nepotism behind a sycophantic veneer. "I know this may sound corny and a bit cliché,” she gushes at Krystle, "but I can't tell you how happy I was when I found out I'd be working for you!” When Maggie Gioberti starts work as a features writer at the Globe on FALCON CREST, her new boss Ralph Delaney is rather more open in his disdain. "It took me thirty years to break out of the sports department and into feature writing,” he tells her. "Now you walk in here with no experience and I’m supposed to drop everything and train you?” If anyone has a problem with Eric Fairgate working at Knots Landing Motors, meanwhile, they’re keeping it to themselves. “The guys on the floor love him!” beams mother Karen. Maybe the guys on the floor are as philosophical as DYNASTY’s Bill Rockwell. “Nepotism is a fact of business life,” he shrugs.

Terry, FALCON CREST’s newcomer, is Maggie’s younger sister. We first meet her in the New York bedroom of a guy even older and less desirable than the one who was keeping Sammy Jo in her New York apartment last year. (In fact, the actor appeared in last season’s DALLAS as a contemporary of Jock Ewing.) Terry's reaction to the news of brother-in-law Chase's inheritance (“Suddenly life is just ripe with possibilities!") and her description of Maggie as "a real soft touch" as she packs her bags and heads for San Francisco tell us all we need to know. Cast from the same mould as Kristin on DALLAS, Sammy Jo on DYNASTY and Christie Kovacks on FLAMINGO ROAD, Terry is another slutty young gold digger with familial ties to an established female character. Tracy might get a DYNASTY episode named after her, but it’s Terry’s “I think I’m gonna like it here” grin upon arriving in the Tuscany Valley that's deemed worthy of a FALCON CREST freeze frame.

If KNOTS LANDING’s Cathy or DALLAS’s Jenna, both waitresses, share either Tracy’s ambition or Terry’s opportunistic tendencies, they have yet to be revealed. Both are approached in their place of work this week by a rich Ewing brother who asks them out on a date. Neither is overly keen, but each eventually agrees. Cathy promises to meet Gary for lunch but then stands him up just as he did Val in last week’s KNOTS. Jenna, meanwhile, having stood Bobby up at an Oil Barons’ Ball thirteen years earlier, has the good grace to show up as his date this time around.

Given that this week’s DALLAS is written and directed by its mastermind, Leonard Katzman, it’s perhaps surprising that it should start to resemble some of its neighbouring soaps. Lil’s flash back to Mickey’s death, with its shaky hand-held camera moves, has a verisimilitude far more in keeping with KNOTS than with traditional DALLAS. It certainly feels more authentic than Julia’s dreamlike flashbacks on FALCON CREST or KNOTS' expressionist representation of Ciji’s murder. At the other end of the scale, the five-way powder room bitch-fest at the Oil Barons’ Ball is extremely DYNASTY - in fact, it recalls a similarly situated encounter between Krystle and Alexis just three episodes ago - only on a bigger, more glamorous scale. Sue Ellen, Katherine and Pam, all dressed to the nines, line up to take pot shots at working girl Jenna - who holds her ground with admirable restraint and good humour - before Katherine and Afton then turn on each other.

The Oil Barons’ Ball itself, with its oil-rig shaped champagne fountain, tuxedos and designer ball gowns, is certainly a lot grander than last season’s affair, which had a kind of “works outing” feel about it. This version - part charity fundraiser, part awards ceremony - is Soap Land’s biggest display of opulence since Blake and Krystle’s wedding on DYNASTY.

Another curio in this week’s DALLAS is the scene where Sue Ellen watches a group of young men playing touch football in a park. As she ogles the men, all of whom are clad in only the shortest of shorts, so does the camera, relaying the sight in fetishistic slow motion. It’s certainly like nothing we’ve seen in Soap Land before, least of all on DALLAS, and that Katzman himself should be at the helm of the ep makes it all the more interesting. Add to this Casey Denault's house-arrest on EMERALD POINT, which seemed to necessitate him wearing as little clothing as possible at all times, and Peter Richards' blue speedos, which make another appearance this week, and it would appear that Soap Land is developing a new found interest in the male form.

In the same week that Cliff Barnes is named Oil Baron of the Year in DALLAS, Jeb Hollister receives the Oil Man of the Year award on THE YELLOW ROSE. Jeb's ceremony is more of a lunchtime rubber chicken affair than the Oil Barons’ Ball, but both have the same miniature oil rigs as table decorations. While receiving his award means the world to Cliff (“You are looking at the next king of Dallas,” he crows), for Jeb, its principal function is to serve as an alibi. If he’s receiving his award in San Antonio then he can’t be responsible for the explosion that’s about to sabotage the Champions’ cross-country cattle drive, can he? Trouble is, like a certain explosion Cliff himself would order thirty years later, he is unaware that his daughter (Mandy Winger) has joined the cattle drive. Unlike Cliff, he doesn’t find out she’s there until the precise moment the explosives are discharged. The subsequent explosions and mayhem that follows (an avalanche of rocks, a stampede of cattle) is by far the most ambitious and heart-in-mouth exciting set piece Soap Land has ever staged. When it comes to these sorts of scenes, THE YELLOW ROSE is in a league of its own.

DYNASTY’s Claudia and KNOTS LANDING’s Chip share contrasting but equally juicy scenes with their recently acquired mothers-in-law, Alexis Colby and Karen Mackenzie, this week. Both exchanges become battles for control, with Chip and Alexis emerging as clear winners. Interestingly, the DYNASTY scene is the more subtle of the two with Alexis amusingly undermining Claudia's tactful-to-the-point-of-abstract request for her not to further the rift between Steven and Blake. Alexis pretends not to know what she’s talking about. "I like specifics, darling," she tells her crisply. "Be specific.” Meanwhile, Karen visits Chip in the hospital and alternately flatters, cajoles, threatens and pleads with him to persuade Diana to return to her family. Chip’s bland smile gives nothing back. His automated politeness (“It was really nice of you to come and see me, I’ll tell Diana you were here”) finally pushes Karen over the edge. “I hope you rot in hell,” she tells him coldly.

Of the three couples who tied the knot in last week’s Soap Land, only FALCON CREST’S Linda and Cole get to enjoy a proper honeymoon. (Exchanging pieces of jewellery engraved with their marriage vows, they really are the most lovey-dovey of newlyweds. They’re living the kind of idyllic married life Chip and Diana can only daydream about in-between disasters.) The day after marrying on KNOTS, Abby is back at the office while Gary is on the trail of the girl who looks like Ciji. Following his elopement with Claudia on DYNASTY, Steven at least gets to spend the night in a hotel - with his mother. Alexis lures him to San Francisco on the pretext of a business meeting, then engineers a delay so they are obliged to stay overnight. It’s not quite as incestuous as it sounds. Or maybe it is.

As Abby savours her new title of Mrs Ewing (“It does have a nice ring to it”), JR refers to Jenna as "the next Mrs Ewing” on DALLAS. “Nothing would make me happier,” he grins. With hindsight, of course, we know that this prediction won’t come true, but Jenna nonetheless meets the man she’ll eventually marry this week when she is introduced to Ray at the Oil Barons’ Ball. So does Laura Avery on KNOTS when she enters Abby’s office and catches the blushing bride about to kiss Greg Sumner.

And this week’s Top 6 are …

1 (2) THE YELLOW ROSE
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (4) DALLAS
4 (3) FALCON CREST
5 (5) DYNASTY
6 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.

 

[James from London]

21/Nov/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S: Episode 9 v. 23/Nov/83: DYNASTY: Dex v. 24/Nov/83: KNOTS LANDING: Money Talks v. 25/Nov/83: DALLAS: Morning After v. 25/Nov/83: FALCON CREST: Chameleon Charades v. 26/Nov/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Trail's End

“It’s not so unusual for a young man to be attracted to an older woman,” says Sue Ellen in this week’s DALLAS, and she’s right. There have been occasional such couplings, or near-couplings, throughout Soap Land’s history: David Crane and Karen Fairgate in “Let Me Count the Ways", Bess Riker and Chip Roberts in last season’s KNOTS, Lute-Mae and Tony in FLAMINGO ROAD, Steven and Claudia on DYNASTY … one might even count - if one remembers Abby’s wisecrack to Mack last season, “Then it’s true, older women really are more attractive” - the Mackenzies themselves. More recently, there has been a delicate May/December romance burgeoning on THE YELLOW ROSE, ever since nineteen-year-old Whit Champion laid his cowboy hat at the trailer door of Grace, the ranch cook, in the first episode of the series. Like Lute-Mae, Grace is a single woman of a certain age with a chequered past - but where Stella Stevens floundered on FLAMINGO ROAD, Susan Anspach gives a really lovely performance as Grace - earthy, soulful and fragile. Alas, Grace abruptly exits THE YELLOW ROSE midway through this week’s episode with little explanation.

Meanwhile, this week’s DALLAS and DYNASTY each end with a close up of “an older woman" looking somewhat taken aback after being kissed on the mouth by a younger man. While Dex Dexter - all big teeth and hands-on-hips macho swagger - grabs Alexis and plants a decisive smacker on her lips, Peter Richards - all sensitive yearning and exposed midriff - kisses Sue Ellen tentatively, maybe even a little sadly, as he opens her car door for her. The age difference is addressed on DALLAS, but not on DYNASTY. (Given that the show has thus far carefully avoided any direct reference to Alexis’s status as a grandmother, this is unsurprising.) Dex’s comparative youth, however, is a factor in his interaction with Blake earlier in the episode when they disagree over a business matter. “I know my company, young man,” Blake tells him. “My name is Dex!” he snaps in reply. "There may be age between us, not experience or knowledge.” Peter Richards is no happier when he hears himself described by JR as "a schoolboy with a crush on my wife.”

Age aside, there is an interesting parallel between Alexis’s encounter with Dex on DYNASTY and the relationship developing between Greg and Abby on KNOTS LANDING. Both men show up uninvited at the respective woman’s office. “Don’t bother to announce me - we’re old friends and we both love surprises,” Dex tells Alexis’s secretary (male) before walking right in. Greg marches straight into Abby’s office too. “Hold all of Mrs. Ewing’s calls - no exceptions,” he instructs Abby’s secretary (female) as he ushers her out. “What are you doing here?” Alexis asks Dex, whom she met for the first time earlier the same day, at the Denver Carrington board meeting. “Unfinished business,” he replies, immediately pulling her towards him and kissing her. She responds in kind then coolly inquires, “Is that the start or the finish of your business?” While business and passion are interconnected on DYNASTY, Abby and Greg argue about the connection between business and politics on KNOTS. “If you’re gonna hang around, you’re gonna have to understand politics,” Greg tells Abby. “I understand money,” she counters. “They’re not the same thing,” he insists. “Since when?” she retorts. Then it’s Greg’s turn to grab Abby and kiss her - and so begins their affair. (Suddenly Holly Harwood turning down JR’s little pass aboard her yacht seems to belong to a much less complicated time.)

Following these outbursts of ardour, Dex and Abby both get down to business, each making similar pitches to Alexis and Greg. Both start by talking about how compatible they are. “I think we’re pretty evenly matched,” Dex tells Alexis. "Now that we know we have something in common, we can do business together.” “You’re a politician on the rise,” Abby tells Greg, "I’m a businesswoman on the rise. You’re heading for national politics, I’m heading for national business.” Each then reveals the scope of their ambition. "You spoke of an empire,” says Dex to Alexis. "I'm forming one … Tar Sands, Canada ... There's believed to be more oil locked under those sands than there is under all of Saudi Arabia … Together we’ll reap a profit beyond your imagination.” "If things go according to plan,” Abby tells Greg, "you’ll be in the White House in eight years, which is exactly where we both want you - you for the thrill of it, me for the profits.” Whereas Alexis declines Dex’s offer, (“You overestimate your appeal”) Greg gives Abby what she’s been after for the whole episode - help with a building variance (now there’s a word we haven’t heard since last season’s DALLAS) from the coastal commission. Business concluded, for the time being, it’s time for the bottom line. "You’re a fantastic woman to kiss,” Dex informs Alexis before making his exit, while Abby assures Greg that, "if I ever have to make a choice between love and money - money’s gonna win every time.” KNOTS ends on a shot of Abby smiling away, while DYNASTY freezes on Alexis looking quizzical and intrigued.

As Dex spins tales of Canadian fortunes and Abby dreams of power in the White House, New York remains the place that looms largest in the minds of Soap Land’s characters. In last week’s KNOTS, in-between waking from his coma and getting re-arrested for Ciji’s murder, Chip resumed his fantasy of starting a new life there with Diana. In this week’s DALLAS, Donna reminds Ray that New York was where they were headed a year earlier before the news of Amos Krebbs’s death took their lives in a different direction. Now she insists they take the trip they had planned then as a way of recapturing their former optimism. Over on DYNASTY, we learn that newcomer Tracy Kendall has recently come from New York (as has FALCON CREST’s new girl Terry), but doesn’t share Chip and Donna's positive view of the city: “Kind of a hassle, and the competition - talk about a jungle” - whereas people in Denver, she assures Krystle, “are so down to earth, just nice!"

Tracy’s demeanour towards Krystle mirrors Katherine Wentworth’s towards Pam on DALLAS - she’s as nice as pie to her face, then glowers in her direction whenever her back is turned. Thus far, however, Tracy is more a disgruntled employee than a fiendish mastermind. Katherine, meanwhile, is currently less concerned with Pam than with the fact that Jenna Wade has found her way back into Bobby’s life. This leads Katherine to drop her guard for the very first time. “Bobby, don’t you realise I’m in love with you?” she asks. "I’ve been in love with you from the first time I ever saw you.” Bobby rejects her as kindly as he can. “Your Pam’s sister,” he replies. "I could never think of you in any other way."

This is just one of several declarations from the heart in this week’s Soap Land. As well as Peter confessing to Sue Ellen that “I have these feelings every time I’m around you” (“It really can’t be,” she tells him gently), Jeff lays it on the line to Fallon on DYNASTY. "No matter how hard we fight it, tell me we don't belong together,” he implores. Her response is no more encouraging than Bobby’s. "I can't belong,” she replies. "I need somebody who doesn't need me.” Even Paul Morgan, the lawyer who defended Ray Krebbs in his DALLAS murder trial, declares his intentions to Donna, albeit in a roundabout way. “One of these days, you’re gonna wake up and leave that guy,” he predicts, "and I’m gonna be there when you do.” Donna, less tactful than Bobby, Fallon or Sue Ellen, briskly informs him of the healthy state of her marriage. In fact, the only Soap Land suitor not to be rejected this week is KNOTS LANDING’s Ben. “This world traveller is falling in love,” he announces to Val, who responds with a kiss.

Don’t ask me why, but there’s something great about seeing Val do things with Ben that she never did Gary, even if it’s just sitting barefoot on the floor of his beach house to eat dinner, or emerge shyly from his bedroom the next morning wearing just a sheet. This may not count as "taking the world by storm” the way Jeff Munson encouraged her to last season, but it’s nonetheless pleasing to see her emerge from her domestic cocoon in such a way. (Conversely, the last time Pam Ewing sat on a floor it just seemed a bit weird.)

On the business front, Pam and Krystle both begin their PR duties this week, at Denver Carrington and Barnes Wentworth respectively. For Krystle, this involves attending meetings and drawing up press releases. For Pam, it means dinner with Cliff and Ben Kesey, a man whose service company Cliff wants to buy before JR does, while “wearing the sexiest thing you got”. Cliff deliberately shows up late to the restaurant, leaving Kesey to stare at Pam’s décolletage for an hour. Yes, it’s Cliff's version of “the old Ewing one two” that JR tried to pull off with Sue Ellen and Gil Thurman exactly a year earlier - only this time it works. While DYNASTY’s might be the slightly more realistic depiction of what someone in public relations actually does, Pam's entrée in the oil business is a lot more entertaining. With her playing the exasperated-but-sexy straight woman to Cliff’s incorrigible schemer, (Mindy to his Mork, if you will) they're really fun to watch - as good a double act as Greg and Abby are on this week’s KNOTS.

Krystle has dinner with her boss this week too, but business is strictly off the menu. Instead, she and Blake reminisce about their very first date which took place in the very same restaurant. ("I fell in love with Blake Carrington that night,” she sighs.) Following the Oil Barons’ Ball on DALLAS, Bobby and Jenna step even further back in time to a high school dance where Bobby got into a fight with another boy over Jenna. It’s slightly disconcerting to think that more time has passed - about ten years more - between Bobby and Tracey MacKay’s pool hustling encounter in DALLAS Season 11 and their recollection of it in New DALLAS Season 3 than between Bobby and Jenna’s teenage misadventures and their account of them in this ep. (We also meet Jenna Wade’s twelve-year-old daughter Charlie this week, as well as Greg Sumner's slightly older offspring Mary Frances on KNOTS.)

Seeing Cliff first revelling in his success as he is crowned Oil Baron of the Year and then watching him moulder in his Mexican jail cell on New DALLAS makes for quite a contrast. And it feels like there is a direct line between his acceptance speech on the podium, which in effect resurrects the Barnes/Ewing feud, ("My daddy is the one that found the oil the Ewings have been sucking out of the ground for all these years!”) and the one his daughter Pamela makes thirty-one years later when she visits him in jail to hand over the deed to that same oil Digger found and lost all those years before. "It’s over now,” she tells him. "You avenged the wrongs done to your father, and I’ve avenged the wrongs done to me by mine.”

More father/daughter parallels: Just like Pamela on New DALLAS, Mandy Winger struggles to come to terms with the knowledge that her father was behind the explosion that put her in hospital on THE YELLOW ROSE. And now that she is romantically involved with Roy Champion, she finds herself caught between her father and the family he despises - just like Cole’s new bride Linda on FALCON CREST. While there is scant explanation for Mr. Caproni’s resentment towards the Giobertis, Jeb Hollister has a great speech where he attempts to justify his actions to his daughter: “The Yellow Rose is our birthright. In my time, a man fought for what belonged to him … I’m living the only way I know how. You call it war, I call it life.” Both fathers end up accusing their daughters of betrayal. "You were all I had,” Mr. Caproni tells Linda. "You turned your back on me.” "You were the one I was doing it all for,” Jeb tells Mandy. "You made your choice.”

Following Cliff's speech at the Ball, a punch up ensues as the Ewing brothers unite against him, with Mark Graison, Peter Richards and a few extras drafted in to make up the numbers. In the same way that the lily pond catfight between Alexis and Krystle at the end of last season’s DYNASTY was a sequel to their studio contretemps of the year before, so this brawl serves as a follow-up to the duel in the pool at JR and Sue Ellen’s wedding. As with the lily-pond, half the fun comes from seeing a good old fashioned scrap take place in such elegant surroundings. Pam is almost, but not quite, as primly disapproving of Mark trading punches with Bobby as Blake was of Krystle and Alexis doing the same thing. (Where she compares Mark and Bobby to children, he compared his two wives to female mud wrestlers.)

Punches are thrown elsewhere in this week’s Soap Land. Lance gets into a barroom brawl over Terry on FALCON CREST, and pretty soon finds himself outnumbered by bit players in Stetsons. Instead of tending to his injuries like the ladies of DALLAS do their men's after the Ball, Terry waltzes off into the night with Michael Ranson.

There’s fighting too on THE YELLOW ROSE, but here every blow carries an emotional wallop as well as a physical one: Chance blindsiding his brother to save him from himself; good guy Roy being driven to hit a frail but vicious old man as his daughter watches on. The climax is a fist-fight between Roy and Chance: “You wanna be top dog! You want it all!” “I want nothin' but a piece of you right now!” It’s been a long time coming and the rest of the family gather solemnly to watch, but no one was expecting the two men to come to blows inside a cattle pen or to end up rolling around in the mud amongst the livestock.

This week’s KNOTS is really exceptional (especially the scenes between Greg and Abby which are just so smart and unpredictable) while DALLAS is first class - but I tell ya, THE YELLOW ROSE has them both beat. Visually, aside from that cattle pen fight, there’s Mandy Winger zipping around the countryside in a helicopter (and not just faking it like they do on DALLAS - she’s really in that thing while it's flying), the surreal sight of a herd of cattle being led across an airstrip, and a whole bunch of other great stuff. Plus there’s Jackson Mobley, Lilimae’s loveable conman from KNOTS Season 3, who shows up as a loveable rancher and lets slip about the woman who came between Jeb Hollister and Wade Champion years before, thus igniting the feud between the two families. Jeb’s sister who mysteriously ran away to have Wade’s illegitimate baby and then abandoned that child too, she sounds like a cross between Ellie Southworth, Margaret Hunter and Rebecca Barnes. I feel like I’m repeating myself but this show combines the sweep of a classic Western, the epic scale of a family saga, lots of deliciously familiar soap tropes and characters that are compelling and organic and deeply touching. I cried twice without fully understanding why.

And this week’s Top 6 are …

1 (1) THE YELLOW ROSE
2 (2) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) DALLAS
4 (4) FALCON CREST
5 (5) DYNASTY
6 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.

 

[James from London]

30/Nov/83: DYNASTY: Peter De Vilbis v. 01/Dec/83 KNOTS LANDING: Homecoming v. 02/Dec/83: DALLAS: The Buck Stops Here v. 02/Dec/83: FALCON CREST: The Double Dealing

While Soap Land’s quartet of female newcomers can be loosely grouped together as everyday "working girls" (in fact, Angela uses that precise term to describe Terry’s chequered past in this week’s FALCON CREST) this season's male arrivals are a more disparate bunch. Dr Michael Ranson has been established as a morally upstanding authority figure on FALCON CREST, but is possibly too avuncular (i.e., old) to fit the mould of dashing romantic hero. That is a role more suited to Ben Gibson on KNOTS or Dex Dexter on DYNASTY, who are as different from each other as they are from the women they have fallen for, Val and Alexis respectively. Where Ben is solemn and thoughtful, Dex is quick tempered and cocksure. If Ben had invited himself into Val’s home after their first meeting and then kissed her without warning before complimenting her on her fantastic mouth — as Dex does Alexis in this week’s DYNASTY - she would mostly likely have run a mile (barefoot along a beach, obviously).

Dex is closer in personality type to KNOTS’ other newcomer, Greg Sumner, but Greg is really in a category of his own. Striding through every scene with a phalanx of advisers and minders, he regards the KNOTS regulars with amused irreverence. “What’s with this Ewing character?!” he asks of Gary. “You’re nuts!” he says to Abby. What makes him so much fun, and such a different sort of character, is that he gives no indication of being in somebody else’s soap opera. As far as he’s concerned, this is THE GREG SUMNER SHOW and all the Mackenzies and Ewings merely supporting players.

This leaves the two Peters - Peter Richards on DALLAS and Peter de Vilbis, the latest addition to DYNASTY’s opening titles. At first glance, the two could not be more different. DALLAS's Peter is the embodiment of the All American Boy: young, wholesome, athletic. DYNASTY’s Peter is archetypal Eurotrash: dead-eyed, decadent and drug-taking. In their opposing ways, each feels like a Soap Land anomaly. Neither is rugged or manly in the traditional sense. Peter Richards’ boyish innocence, the contrast between his lack of sexual awareness and his eagerness to display as much of his hairless young body as he can get away with, renders him, by DALLAS standards, somewhat effete. Peter de Vilbis’s exotic (i.e., unAmerican) dissoluteness, thick foreign accent and silken smoking jacket create a similar effect. Two sides of the same coin, it’s not hard to imagine Helmut Berger raping and murdering Christopher Atkins (not necessarily in that order) in one of those disturbing Nazi-themed flicks he used to make with Luciano Visconti. As it is, both Peters make unlikely love interests for the women they have been cast opposite, Sue Ellen and Fallon respectively. On DALLAS, this incompatibility is addressed and explored; on DYNASTY, it remains unacknowledged. Admittedly, Fallon has yet to be exposed to the seamier side of de Vilbis's character.

That is revealed to the audience in a scene between Peter and his lawyer (Jeff Munson from KNOTS, who presumably crossed over to the dark side after being dumped by Val). We see De Vilbis racking up lines of coke and learn that he is in debt for six million dollars. His solution to the latter, it transpires, is Fallon herself, aka "a fascinating girl whose father has millions”. In an equivalent scene in this week’s KNOTS, between Greg Sumner and an as yet unnamed associate, we discover that Greg is not who he appears to be either. He is involved with mysterious off screen figures referred to only as “they".

“They know about Mackenzie - we talked it out on the phone,” he assures his unknown acquaintance enigmatically. “They didn’t know he’d get this close this fast,” the acquaintance replies. “They’re overreacting … What do they want me to do?” Greg asks. “Get rid of him … The feeling is very strong about this, Greg,” the associate instructs him. Greg promises to resolve the “situation”.

Greg’s circumstances are paralleled on FALCON CREST where Richard Channing has his own share of mysterious off screen figures to contend with. “Your debt to the company did not die with Henri Denault,” his attorney/emissary John Osborne informs him this week. “You’re not free until they say you’re free ... They want absolute control of the race track … These people are ruthless. They’re accustomed to getting what they want.” Richard is less acquiescent than Greg, however. “Nobody pulls my strings,” he snarls. “Power belongs to those who take it!” he adds for good measure, sounding just like Jock Ewing.

Another connection between Soap Land’s new men: the oldest and youngest of the bunch, Michael Ranson and Peter Richards, are each at the centre of a hopeless crush. Michael finds himself the object of Emma’s wide-eyed adoration in FALCON CREST and when Terry flirts outrageously with him in front of her, Emma is as crushed as Peter is by Sue Ellen’s rejection of him on this week’s DALLAS. (“The way you feel about me is a complication I don’t need in my life,” she tells him sternly.) When confronted by Maggie, Terry denies any interest in Michael (“He’s old enough to be my father,” she protests - providing a gender variation on Sue Ellen and Peter's May/December story-line). However, later Terry seduces Michael in a beautifully shot vineyard scene where Michael's self doubt and vulnerability — could this gorgeous young thing really desire him? — are touchingly conveyed.

While Sue Ellen has already likened Peter (Richards) to a young Bobby Ewing, Fallon tells Peter (de Vilbis) that he reminds her of her father in this week’s DYNASTY. Over on KNOTS LANDING, there is no doubt as to who Cathy Geary reminds Gary of. This results in one of two attempted make-overs in this week’s Soap Land. The first comes in DYNASTY where Claudia takes offence at Alexis going through her wardrobe “like a tornado” and offering to buy her "a few new chic things” — in other words, to make Claudia over in her own image. "You have to accept that the world and society judges us by the way we act and dress,” Alexis lectures her new daughter-in-law. An unsuspecting Cathy, meanwhile, is more than happy for Gary to treat her to a new dress and hairstyle. (Gary’s half-brother Ray also delves into the world of women’s clothing this week when as he surprises Donna with a fur coat he purchased from “a cute little sales girl” in New York. The snooty saleswoman Gary and Cathy encounter, meanwhile, is cut from the same designer cloth as the one Sue Ellen and Pam dealt with in the first episode of this season’s DALLAS.)

Pretty soon, Cathy is looking more like Ciji than Ciji did. As Gary encourages her to mime along to one of Ciji’s old songs, he simultaneously flashes back to Ciji singing the same song — and KNOTS reaches a whole new level of strangeness. Factor in the replica of Ciji’s space vixen dress that Cathy is now wearing and it almost feels like we’re in science fiction territory — albeit intriguing, emotionally-fuelled science fiction. What’s most interesting is the tension between the characters and the plot — especially when Laura walks in on Gary and Cathy/Ciji and we see the weirdness of the situation through her eyes (“What a scene, huh? … Like something out of wax museum!”) Clearly the writers came up with the idea of a Ciji lookalike first and then worked backwards to explain it. In the same way, the characters on screen are struggling to make sense of the situation they’re in (“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Gary admits). As a result, the story feels somehow contrived and organic at the same time. It’s a heady mix.

As KNOTS takes a turn for the fantastic, this week’s DALLAS feels almost … well, one hesitates to use the word “realistic” in relation to DALLAS, but this ep, which focuses almost exclusively on the Ewings in their leisure time (the scenes of JR trying to root out the company mole being the exception), might just be the closest the series has come to depicting the characters as real people. (Miss Ellie’s continued absence, which frees the rest of the Ewings to behave more like adults, helps in this regard, as does the source lighting, which adds a subtle sense of — OK, I’ll say it — realism to the interior scenes.)

The motivations and ambitions of Soap Land’s new girls come under scrutiny this week, as well how far they are willing to go to achieve their goals. On KNOTS, Laura questions Cathy’s reasons for hanging around Gary. “Nobody’s ever taken care of me before,” she replies simply. "It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me and he hasn’t even asked for anything in return, but if he did I’d probably go along with it.” Jenna Wade isn't so easily bought, however. “I’ve had offers to marry rich, but I’d never trade my self respect for that,” she tells Bobby on DALLAS. Nor is she impressed by Katherine Wentworth’s attempt to pay her to dump Bobby and move to Houston. Over on FALCON CREST, Richard playfully offers to turn the New Globe over to his assistant Pamela "in return for the intimate favours you guard so closely.” “Is that an offer?” she asks gamely. “So you can be bought! Well, now we’ve established our marketplace, why can’t we haggle the price?” he replies, this time channeling Donna Krebbs. Meanwhile Angela summons Terry to tea and threatens to expose her sordid past: “You’ll do as I say or you’ll find yourself back in the Park Avenue hotel lobby you came from”. When Terry agrees to do her bidding, Angela laughs and calls her an opportunist.

From an ex-Park Avenue girl to a former Madison Avenue one: “Ambition is not a dirty word in my dictionary,” says Tracy Kendall on DYNASTY before kissing the boss’s son. It doesn’t seem to be for Laura Avery either, who justifies her betrayal of Karen and Gary to Abby on KNOTS thusly: “Gary’s got his millions. You’ll get yours if you haven’t already. Karen’s husband died and she’s happily remarried. Val’s husband left her — she’s got a bestseller, new boyfriend, more money than she’s ever had before. Well, my husband left me too and the little I’ve got is five percent of Lotus Point. I think I’m entitled to that small piece of the pie, don’t you?" (It’s kind of cool to know that said husband was on set during this infamous speech, Richard Avery having directed this week's KNOTS.)

Two bizarre job appointments in Soap Land this week: On DYNASTY, Alexis hires Mark Jennings, the man who was arrested for her attempted murder only two months ago, as her personal bodyguard. On KNOTS LANDING, Gary hires Cathy, a lookalike of the woman he was in jail for murdering only two months ago, as a ranch hand. As part of their respective new working arrangements, Mark moves into Alexis’s penthouse and Cathy onto Gary’s ranch. At this, Alexis’s suitor Dex raises an eyebrow while Gary’s wife Abby looks stunned. (Even knowing what we do in hindsight, I'd like to think Abby is genuinely taken aback when she sees Cathy and Gary together for the first time — it’s more interesting that way.)

“Lucky horses,” murmurs Abby upon hearing that that the Ciji lookalike is going to be working the ranch. Horses and/or gambling provide a loose theme that runs through the week’s soaps. Fallon, Blake and Krystle have a day at the races during a visit to Los Angeles, it’s the annual Good Ole Boys Charity Rodeo at Billy Bob’s on DALLAS and on FALCON CREST, Richard reveals his plans to build a racetrack: “An endeavour that will soon tear the Tuscany Valley apart like carrion being savaged by packs of hyaenas.” This scheme sounds remarkably similar to the plan his previous self, Michael Tyrone, had to build a casino on FLAMINGO ROAD, even down to the shadowy gangster types lurking in the background. Then it was a sinister syndicate of investors, now it’s the cartel wanting in on the action.

Peter de Vilbis’s horse Allegree wins the DYNASTY race while the Krebbses are the victors at the DALLAS rodeo. Pam puts on an impressive show as Donna’s runner up in the ladies’ mechanical bull competition — especially when one remembers that the last time there was a rodeo on DALLAS, she was too timid even to watch Bobby compete. Jenna #3 fares less well, but her performance brings back memories of the last woman to ride a mechanical bull in Soap Land - Jenna #1, aka Constance Carlyle, on FLAMINGO ROAD. Back then, her display won her some unwanted attention from some cowboys which led to Mark Graison’s former self, Sam Curtis, coming to her rescue. Subsequently, Jenna #1 and Mark - I mean, Sam - adjourned to a nearby motel room for the rest of the afternoon. This time around, Jenna #3 and Bobby put on a public display of affection which prompts Pam to take Sam - I mean, Mark - back to her place for the night. (This makes Pam also the runner-up in the Former Ewing Wives Getting On With Their Lives Competition, Val having embarked upon her first post-divorce sexual relationship - with Ben - on last week’s KNOTS.)

Another Soap Land trend: drugs. Peter de Vilbis is on cocaine, Karen Mackenzie and Julia Cumson are spaced out on pills and the FALCON CREST sheriff is snacking on some unspecified medication which leads to him collapsing on a tennis court, Jeff Colby-style.

While Mark carries Pam upstairs at the end of this week’s DALLAS and we learn that Diana hiding is Chip on Gary’s ranch at the end of KNOTS, DYNASTY and FALCON CREST both close with a discovery of “Oh my God!” proportions. “Oh my God, you’re carrying Adam’s baby!” realises Jeff on DYNASTY. “My God, why would anyone want to do this?” exclaims Richard on FALCON CREST, kneeling over the slain body of John Osborne.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

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

 

[James from London]

05/Dec/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: Episode 10 v. 07/Dec/83: DYNASTY: The Proposal v. 08/Dec/83 KNOTS LANDING: I’ll Tell You No Lies v. 09/Dec/83: DALLAS: To Catch a Sly v. 09/Dec/83: FALCON CREST: The Betrayal v. 10/Dec/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: A Question of Love

Two of EMERALD POINT’s principle females are played by ex-Bond girls, Tiffany Case from DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, and Octopussy from, um, OCTOPUSSY. So far, Tiffany’s come on like a flakier version of DYNASTY’s Alexis - more scheming busybody than evil bitch - while Octopussy resembles a romantically unavailable Krystle (her husband is a navy pilot missing in action). The most significant departure from their DYNASTY counterparts is that Tiffany and Octopussy don’t hate each other (at least not yet). Just as last season’s DALLAS gave Holly Harwood (aka Holly Goodhead from MOONRAKER) a line where she compared Bobby to James Bond so EMERALD POINT can’t resist making a self-conscious 007 reference this week. “This is real life, not some James Bond movie,” Tiffany informs Harlan Adams. (Adding to the 60s secret agent vibe, the role of Harlan has now been taken over by Napoleon Solo from THE MAN FROM UNCLE.)

Elsewhere on EMERALD POINT, Casey Denault and Good Girl Kay become the fourth Soap Land couple of the season to elope. Like Cole and Linda on FALCON CREST, they recite their own vows, full of slightly embarrassing therapy-speak. When the couple later return home to face the music in true Pam-and-Bobby fashion, Kay’s father Tom questions the wisdom of young people marrying in such haste. His concerns are borne out in this week’s DYNASTY as Jeff and Kirby, one of last season’s eloping couples, decide to end their marriage. “We never really belonged to each other,” Kirby tells Jeff sadly. "The first time you kissed me, you closed your eyes and called me Fallon ... The fact that you held me and said you loved me was enough, but it isn’t anymore.”

Bobby sounds some equally plaintive notes on this week’s DALLAS, whilst talking both to Pam (“I feel like I’m in the back of a train looking out, seeing everything I had in my whole life disappear”) and to Jenna ("Maybe if we hadn't tried to set the world on fire, if we'd taken it a little slower, we might not have split up”). Suddenly, these glamorous, somewhat unreal characters - Kirby and Bobby - are imbued with human flaws and past regrets.

Minor trend of the week #1: Troublesome secretaries. Alexis and Abby each have one who unintentionally, but repeatedly, undermines them. On this week’s DYNASTY, Alexis reprimands her latest male assistant Perry for entering her office without knocking, only for him to point out that his name is actually Terry. (This is a gag that will run and run.) Over on KNOTS, Abby’s secretary Elizabeth has an unerring knack of blurting confidential information at the most inopportune times. Also on KNOTS, Mack’s assistant Barbara (who is about a generation older than all the other Soap Land secretaries) inadvertently reveals that all his crime commission reports are being forwarded to Greg Sumner’s office without his knowledge. However, all of these misdemeanours pale next to JR’s discovery on this week’s DALLAS that his loyal secretary Sly has been spying on him for Cliff Barnes. When he confronts her, Sly tearfully explains that Cliff threatened to use his influence with the parole board keep her brother in prison indefinitely if she didn’t comply. Mack tries a similar manoeuvre on KNOTS. Having used his influence with the parole board to get crooked lawyer Tom Jesick out of jail, he now threatens to send him back there unless Tom agrees to infiltrate a organised crime syndicate known as the Wolfbridge Group.

Jeff’s discovery that Adam is not only the father of Kirby’s baby but also her rapist leads to great showdown between the two men on this week’s DYNASTY. Like the fight between half-brothers Roy and Chase in last week’s YELLOW ROSE, this quasi-sibling confrontation has been a long time coming. Where the Champion boys got down in the mud, Adam and Jeff come face to face on the roof of the Carrington Plaza. This being DYNASTY, their fight feels a lot more consciously choreographed than the YELLOW ROSE one, but it’s exciting nonetheless.

Interestingly, in spite of its reputation as the most male-driven soap, the majority of DALLAS’s mano-a-mano fights have been either played for laughs or interrupted as soon as they've gotten started. The closest DALLAS has come to the kind of physical confrontation we see between Roy and Chase or Jeff and Adam is the Ray/JR fight that led to the Southfork fire, but in terms of spectacle, both the YELLOW ROSE and DYNASTY scenes have the edge.

Speaking of edge, the strange climax of this week's fight, which has Jeff on top of Adam, his hand between his legs as he levers him by the crotch towards the edge of the roof, is particularly eye-watering. “If Kirby’s child is a girl, I hope she never has to meet scum like her father!” seethes Jeff through gritted teeth. Adam’s reaction to this is just great: “I didn’t know. Oh my God, I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was my baby.” “I didn’t know,” he repeats pleadingly throughout the episode, thereby usurping Lilimae Clements' “I only did what need to be done” as Soap Land latest mantra.

There’s more unexpectedly exciting violence on FALCON CREST when Chase slams a wrench into Lance's gut and then treads on his hand. Lance might be the younger, fitter and meaner of the two, but both actors totally sell the scene.

Minor trend of the week #2: Harboring fugitives. KNOTS LANDING’s Diana is hiding husband Chip on Gary's ranch while FALCON CREST’s Angela has Dr Lantry holed up at the Hideaway Motel against his will. The plan is to get both men out of the country before the police catch up with them. Angela wants Lantry shipped to Brazil before he can turn state’s evidence and testify against her, while Diana and Chip intend to start a new life in some unspecified location. (At least that’s Diana’s plan. Once Chip gets hold of his passport and her savings, he secretly intends to take off on his own. Conversely, Lantry doesn’t want to leave his wife and children behind, but Angela and Phillip insist he has no choice.)

Both schemes go tragically awry. On FALCON CREST, Lance reveals Lantry’s whereabouts to Chase who then alerts the cops, prompting Lantry to do a runner. On KNOTS, Detective Morrison intercepts Diana as she is about to rendezvous with Chip, while Chip seeks refuge in a nearby barn. Chase tracks Lantry down to his lakeside cabin (the same location where Lute-Mae fought off her rapist in FLAMINGO ROAD) only to watch helplessly as Lantry kills himself with an overdose of morphine. But that’s nothing compared to what happens to Chip ...

"The first time you kissed me, you closed your eyes and called me Fallon,” remembers Kirby on this week’s DYNASTY. And the last thing Chip Roberts ever does — well, before falling over backwards and impaling himself on a rake — is lay eyes on Cathy Geary and call her Ciji (“Ciji?? Oh my God!”). Yes, having given Soap Land its most unconventionally “real” death with Sid Fairgate, KNOTS now goes to the other extreme with Chip’s freaky demise. He may not have intentionally killed himself in the same way as Walt Driscoll and Joseph Anders, but all three have now paid the ultimate price for the crimes they committed at the end of last season. In a different way, Dr Lantry also follows in the footsteps of Walt and Joseph as another little man pushed too far who ends up taking his own life.

This week’s FALCON CREST lives up to its episode title by having Lance first betray his grandmother by revealing Dr Lantry’s whereabouts to Chase then blackmail her over her dealings with him. “You wanna know why I betrayed you?” he asks her towards the end of the ep. "Because you betrayed me time after time … If I’ve turned against you, it’s your fault." Angela then barks at Lance to get out her office. There’s a similar exchange at the beginning of this week’s YELLOW ROSE. “You betrayed me,” Jeb Hollister accuses daughter Mandy Winger. “You betrayed yourself,” she replies, "your greed, your immorality, your obsession with the Yellow Rose.” She then orders Jeb to get out of her office.

DYNASTY and DALLAS’s new PR executives, Krystle and Pam, both throw themselves into their work this week. While Krystle proposes “a full page ad in every newspaper in the country” extolling the virtues of Denver Carrington, Pam immerses herself in drilling reports and thick-looking books about oil exploration in the South West. Whereas Krystle’s efforts are motivated by a genuine enthusiasm for the company, Pam’s are prompted, at least in part, by a need to distract herself from Bobby and Jenna’s burgeoning romance. Blake and Cliff, meanwhile, regard these efforts somewhat condescendingly. Blake nuzzles up to Krystle and admires “that little vein on your neck that throbs when you get excited” while Cliff chuckles at Pam's “heavy duty reading” assignment. Pam’s insistence that “I’m not going to be just window dressing for this company” is echoed by another pretty woman eager to be taken seriously in business. “I won’t be a puppet for you, a wind-up doll, an echo,” Mandy Winger tells her father during that same confrontation scene on THE YELLOW ROSE.

The latest on Soap Land’s May/December romances: While Alexis and Sue Ellen each admits to being attracted to her respective young admirer, they both continue to keep them at bay. Having been outwitted by Dex in business and obliged to enter into a partnership with him at a lesser percentage, Alexis shows up at his hotel suite, kisses him passionately — and then walks out on him. “Nobody takes me to the cleaners and to bed on the same day,” she purrs. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Sue Ellen confesses to feeling jealous when Lucy shows an interest in Peter. Peter reacts by kissing Sue Ellen through the window of her car. She responds briefly, but then breaks away. “It’s wrong,” she gasps. “Can’t you see that it’s wrong?” While Dex laughs off Alexis’s rejection, Peter is left standing helpless as Sue Ellen drives away. Over on FALCON CREST, Terry is already cheating on her older lover, standing Michael up at a restaurant to have sex in a sauna with Lance. If anything, Michael is even more hurt than Peter. Abby gets stood up on KNOTS this week too when Greg chooses his daughter Mary Frances over her. One might expect Abby to react as nonchalantly as Dex does, but instead she is genuinely rattled.

Greg gets back in Abby’s good graces by presenting her with the building variance she needs to proceed with her plans for Lotus Point. On FALCON CREST, Richard needs similar permission in order to proceed with his plans for the racetrack. To that end, he travels to San Diego to give John Sharp from the State Racing Commission the same treatment JR gave Harve Smithfield’s son-in-law at the beginning of last season’s DALLAS, when he wanted to sneak a peek at his daddy’s will. So he takes Sharp to lunch, invites a nubile young associate (Miss Perkins) to join them, then uses a pre-arranged call from his assistant as an excuse to leave them alone together and for Miss Perkins to do her thing. Instead of later walking in on the couple in flagrante as JR did, Richard has their assignation filmed. Having Miss Perkins procured by Richard’s assistant Pamela is also a nice touch. ("She's a world-class professional,” Pamela informs Richard. "When I worked at European headquarters, your mother hired her to blackmail a prime minister.” I don’t think even Serena, DALLAS hooker extraordinaire, could lay claim to that.)

While Abby and Richard may face obstacles in developing their properties, they are both fully determined to succeed. The struggles Roy Champion faces over his land on THE YELLOW ROSE are more internal. "Two hundred thousand acres,” he says, surveying the land he inherited from his father. “Looked just like this before any man laid eyes on her. Could stay this way as long as we live or it could change. Depends on us. I had never known I was big enough to have that kind of power.” Ah, the age old question: to drill for oil or not to drill for oil? In an inversion of the Soap Land norm, he asks his half-brother to share the responsibility with him (“We’re facing some hard, hard decisions, brother … I want your help. I need it”), but Chase is reluctant to get involved. “You’re a cowboy,” Roy tells him, "a nineteenth century man trying to hold on to things the way they used to be. Part of me wants the same thing, but I just got an overdose of twentieth century problems I got to deal with whether I like it or not.” Chase and Roy are utterly convincing as men of the soil to whom conversations like this don’t come easily, yet when they do speak it’s with a depth and an eloquence one is unlikely to find anywhere else in Soap Land.

In last week’s Soap Land, rich businessman Peter de Vilbis and upstanding politician Greg Sumner both turned out to be something other, i.e., more sinister than they first appeared. That trend continues this week. First, ditzy Tiffany Case on EMERALD POINT is revealed to be — outrageously — a secret Russian agent. She’s after some military Maguffin or other, which explains her reasons for becoming sexually involved with Napoleon Solo/Harlan Adams. Then on THE YELLOW ROSE, we are introduced to Jeb Hollister’s personal assistant Caryn Carbera, who is cast from the same coldly efficient, crisply flirtatious mold as Richard Channing’s sidekicks, Diana Hunter and Pamela Lynch. She is thrust abruptly into the centre of the action almost immediately when Jeb, sitting next to her in the back of his limousine, is shot by a sniper’s bullet. This is the first of two genuinely gasp-out-loud moments in this week’s YELLOW ROSE. The second takes place later at the hospital when Caryn suddenly slaps an emotional Mandy Winger across the face before informing her she has precisely fifteen minutes to compose herself so they can discuss business. (“You must assume the power! That is your father’s wish and it is your responsibility!”) It is only at the very end of the ep that we discover that Caryn - like Peter de Vilbis, Greg Sumner and Tiffany Case before her - is something other than we have been led to believe. “I despise your brother as much as you do,” she informs Rose, Jeb’s as-yet-unseen sister over the phone. (This was such a deliciously soapy reveal that I actually clapped.)

And this week’s Top 6 are …

1 (2) KNOTS LANDING
2 (-) THE YELLOW ROSE
3 (1) DALLAS
4 (3) FALCON CREST
5 (4) DYNASTY
6 (-) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.

 

[James from London]

12/Dec/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: Episode 11 v. 15/Dec/83: KNOTS LANDING: Denials v. 16/Dec/83: DALLAS: Barbecue Four v. 16/Dec/83: FALCON CREST: Coup d'Etat v. 17/Dec/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Only the Proud

Turns out I was somewhat premature in pronouncing Dr Lantry dead at the end of last week’s FALCON CREST. He hangs on through most of this week’s instalment, off screen but on life support, before eventually expiring towards the end of the ep. Meanwhile, word comes through early in this week’s YELLOW ROSE that Jeb Hollister's shooting was not fatal.

There are still two Soap Land funerals in this week - Chip Roberts’ in KNOTS LANDING and Captain Martin Farrell's in EMERALD POINT. “He was a louse but he deserves a decent funeral,” says Chip’s estranged sister Angie Fenice, while there is no question that Captain Farrell — whose body is finally returned from Vietnam eight years after he went missing in action — warrants a hero's send off.

Before both burials, a woman visits the departed to pay her respects in private. On EMERALD POINT, the grieving widow, Octopussy, renders a tearful speech over her husband's flag-draped coffin. (“Oh Martin, how am I going to live without you?”) On KNOTS, Lilimae delivers an emotional monologue to Chip in his open casket. "That smile of yours hides the hardest heart I’ve ever known,” she tells him. “I pity the angels in Heaven if you ever decide to get something you want from them … I wish I could talk you.”

In parting, Octopussy takes off her wedding ring and places it on the coffin (a gesture reminiscent of Karen’s at Sid’s graveside) while Lilimae takes a single rose and places it on Chip’s chest. This might be the season where relationships between older women and younger men came into vogue, but I’m not sure Alexis’s desire for Dex or Sue Ellen’s for Peter will ever equal the intensity or depth of feeling Lilimae has towards Chip - an intensity all the stronger for never being fully articulated. (“I knew you needed love and I wanted to be the one to give it to you, me and so many others.”)

Captain Farrell’s funeral is a solemn, dignified affair with the military out in full force. The same cannot be said for Chip’s. “What a load of bull!” snaps Angie Fenice at the graveside in response to the poetic eulogy delivered by the minister (moonlighting from his day job as Maggie Gioberti’s curmudgeonly boss on FALCON CREST). She continues to mouth off until Diana finally slaps her face. For all their differences, however, both funerals look as though they could have been filmed at the same location — but then as far as I can tell nearly all Soap Land funerals seem to take place under the same tree on the same hillside in the same picturesque cemetery, with what looks like the Colby mausoleum from the end of DYNASTY Season 2 looming in the background.

Over on DALLAS, Mark Graison invites Pam to spend a couple of days on a private island he’s thinking of buying. Preoccupied with business, she declines. On EMERALD POINT, good girl Kay asks if she can tag along with new husband Casey Denault on a business trip he is making to an equally small and secluded island. He turns her down. “It’s just a crummy little island in the middle of nowhere,” he explains, "nothing but a ground station for the Adams Industries communication satellite." Bad girl Hilary doesn’t wait for permission — she stows away on Casey’s plane, much to his annoyance. Inevitably, they end up stranded on the island overnight during a storm. They shelter in a bar, where, to Casey’s disapproval, Hilary does her own version of the Soap Land bad girl boogie (previously performed by Sammy Jo on DYNASTY and Christie Kovacks on FLAMINGO ROAD), as a bunch of horny workers look on appreciatively.

Given that everything else about the scene looks like it could be from a colorised version of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, the choice of music to accompany Hilary’s dance — a soundalike version of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” — feels incongruously contemporary. There’s more ‘80s music in this week’s KNOTS when Cathy Geary gets up to sing with the band at the Cattle Club. To have Cathy not only look like Ciji but sing like her too is a brazen move. And just as Ciji’s debut song was a Journey cover — “Open Arms” — so is Cathy’s - “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)”. Moreover, Gary happens upon her performance the same way he did Ciji’s, and is just as impressed now as he was then. The show makes at least some attempt to ring the changes by presenting Cathy’s number in a far less magical way than Ciji's. The song itself is rockier, more generically ‘80s, as are the band she’s singing with (cue close ups of fingerless leather gloves playing the keyboards) and the whole performance is filmed in a much more perfunctory fashion than any of Ciji’s ever were. There are no pretensions to artistic greatness here.

Still, it represents a victory of sorts for Gary, who, as part of his attempt to turn Cathy into Ciji, has been urging her to try singing for the last couple of episodes. And just as Gary persuaded Cathy to give up her waitressing job a few weeks ago so Bobby tries to do the same thing to Jenna on this week’s DALLAS after seeing her hassled by some customers (among them — irony of ironies — one Harris Ryland, back when he still had hair and Mother would let him out to play in cowboy bars). Again, Jenna is depicted as less malleable and more worldly wise than her KNOTS counterpart. “I don’t know who I am anymore!” wails Cathy this week, while Jenna stands firm when a Ewing man attempts to take over her life. “Finally I’m making my own way,” she tells Bobby. "I don’t owe anyone anything and I don’t wanna start now.” Over on FALCON CREST, Angela gives Terry no choice about her new job — to use her position as the Giobertis’ house guest to spy on Maggie and Chase. A problem arises, however, when Maggie throws Terry out of the house after discovering that she has wheedled $25,000 out of their father.

Where KNOTS now has the Cattle Club, DALLAS has jettisoned its equivalent, the Cattleman’s Club, in favour of the altogether smarter Oil Baron's Club. In a heartening example of the American Dream in action, one of Lute Mae’s nameless hookers from FLAMINGO ROAD has been transformed into Dora Mae, the sleekly sophisticated manageress at the Oil Baron’s. The subject of the American Dream comes up in this week’s KNOTS as well. "Tony always wanted the American Dream,” says Angie Fenice, referring to Chip by his real name. "I guess pretending to be someone else was the only way he thought he could get it." It’s very interesting to me that whenever the American Dream is referred to in Soap Land it’s presented in the most cynical terms, as an empty illusion or corrupted ideal. Again it begs the question — is the Soap Land genre celebrating or critiquing the abundance and excesses of '80s wealth it depicts?

That said, a more idealistic perspective is given voice by a new arrival in DALLAS this week, Edgar Randolph. When asked by Ray why he gave up a lucrative law career to take on a lower paid job with the government, he solemnly explains “it was something that Sam Culver said to me years ago. He said, 'Son, you have to give something back to the country that gave you so much.'” With hindsight, however, we know that Edgar’s sense of honour is a crucial part of what leads to his downfall as another doomed Soap Land patsy, following in the footsteps of FALCON CREST’s Dr Lantry, DALLAS’s Walt Driscoll and DYNASTY’s Joseph Anders and Neil McVane. Everyone, Soap Land seems to be saying, even a man as principled and patriotic as Edgar, can be corrupted.

But while the American dream might be an intangible enough concept to undermine without Soap Land needing to nail its political colours to the mast, the American military is something else. It is, after all, a reality; it exists in the real world. For EMERALD POINT to critique the military the way the rest of Soap Land routinely debunks any notion of fair play in corporate business, politics or the media would be tantamount to televisual treason. Yet there the military stands, a monolith draped in a stars and stripes flag, right at the centre of EMERALD POINT. Whatever dramatic machinations the show can provide — at least of the twisted, devious, corrupt kind we’re accustomed to seeing in Soap Land — must necessarily happen around its edges. This can make for some interestingly contorted storylines, Tiffany Case’s unlikely transformation into a Russian spy being a case in point.

In this week’s FALCON CREST, the same psychiatrist who declared Julia sane enough to stand trial now diagnoses her as psychotic — suggesting it is prison itself that has driven her mad. Meanwhile on THE YELLOW ROSE, Whit Champion follows in the footsteps of Cole Gioberti and Gary Ewing to become the latest wrongly accused blond when he is arrested for Jeb Hollister’s shooting by the most crooked sheriff this side of FLAMINGO ROAD. But Whit is the first Soap Land inmate to find himself a target for unwanted male attention behind bars. The sequence where his fellow prisoners holler appreciative comments at him from their cells is like a scene from SILENCE OF THE LAMBS crossed with Todd Browning’s FREAKS.

Last week’s DYNASTY ended with a romance novel of a scene in which Blake proposed marriage to Krystle on a hearthside rug in front of an open fire, umpteen candles twinkling in the background. Needless to say, she accepted. “I have asked this beautiful lady at my side for her hand in marriage and she has graciously accepted,” announces Clayton Farlow at the end of this week’s DALLAS as he and Ellie gather the family together on the cardboard patio. This week’s KNOTS, meanwhile, finishes with Karen staring blankly at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror having just been confronted by Mack, Val and Eric about her drug use.

Set against the novelty of the Seaview Circle matriarch coming unglued, there’s a vague sense of the other soaps turning the clock back: Blake and Krystle are reunited, there’s a white-haired man at the head of the Ewing dinner table once again, and FALCON CREST resurrects the plot of its very first episode when Chase invokes the terms of his grandfather’s will in order to cut Angela out of Falcon Crest once and for all. “When I’m through with him, Chase Gioberti’s gonna wish he’d died and gone to Hell!” vows Angela just as the frame freezes. Finally, the gloves are off.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (2) THE YELLOW ROSE
3 (4) FALCON CREST
4 (3) DALLAS
5 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.

 

[James from London]

19/Dec/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: The Rescue/Hide and Seek v. 21/Dec/83: DYNASTY: Carousel v. 22/Dec/83: KNOTS LANDING: Witness v. 23/Dec/83: DALLAS: Past Imperfect v. 23/Dec/83: FALCON CREST: No Trespassing

For the second Christmas in a row, none of the soaps acknowledge the festive season but find an excuse to throw a party anyway. A year ago there was the La Mirage opening, the Ewing barbecue, the Seaview Circle block party and the Tuscany Valley Founders Day Parade. This year we had the annual barbecue on last week’s DALLAS, and this week there's the Carousel Ball on DYNASTY, a soiree on FALCON CREST to mark Chase acquiring sole ownership of the winery, and a slightly less glamorous press reception at Sumner campaign headquarters on KNOTS LANDING.

The grandest of these events is easily the Carousel Ball which incorporates DYNASTY's fictional characters into a real-life social event ("the party of parties, Denver's night of nights”). The closest Soap Land has previously gotten to combining the unreal with the actual was Val’s appearance on THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW during last season’s KNOTS. Then the intention was to show how successful Val was becoming within the fictional world of KNOTS. The unspoken message on this week’s DYNASTY, however, seems to be “look how popular the Carringtons, and therefore DYNASTY itself, have become in the real world.” To that end, we see Blake, Krystle and Alexis cheered by a real life crowd as they arrive at the party as if they were, well, Hollywood TV stars arriving at a charity ball. Where Val and Lilimae were thrilled to encounter Zsa Zsa Gabor and an ex-Munchkin in Mike Douglas's green room, Blake and Alexis are shown to be on an equal footing with President Gerald Ford and Dr Henry Kissinger. Kissinger’s rabbit in the headlights response to Alexis’s ad-lib, "I haven’t seen you since Portofino - it was fun", is still laugh out loud funny. As he wanders uncertainly out of shot, he actually seems smaller and less believable than the fictional Carringtons and Colbys. Strange to think this is the same man whom Greg Sumner quotes on the following night’s KNOTS. “What was it Henry Kissinger said?” he asks Abby. "‘Power is the greatest aphrodisiac.'"

There’s also a parallel between the Carousel Ball on DYNASTY and the American military on EMERALD POINT. Both are venerable real life institutions - the Ball, we discover through carefully placed dialogue, raises money for the Children’s Diabetes Foundation - whose reputations must not be tarnished in the on screen pursuit of soapy sensationalism. While the recent Oil Baron’s Ball and Good Ol' Boys rodeo on DALLAS were also established as fundraising events, we neither knew nor cared what charities they were supposedly affiliated with and so the characters were free to behave as disreputably as they wished. It’s safe to say there’ll be no Barnes/Ewing style punch-ups — or Krystle/Alexis cat fights, for that matter — at the Carousel Ball.

In fact, almost everyone is on their best behaviour. There are even familial reconciliations during the party, between Blake and Steven, and Alexis and Adam. Viewed in a Christmassy context, these take on a sentimental sweetness. To leaven the sugary taste, the Ball also marks the return to DYNASTY of former senator Neil McVane, as consumed by hatred towards Alexis ("that witch!”) as ever. Nice to know the sick kiddies ain’t too proud to accept donations from a disgraced (and borderline deranged) politician.

There’s also a powder room scene equivalent to the one at the Oil Baron’s Ball, where Fallon and Krystle encounter Alexis at the make-up mirror just as Pam, Katherine and Afton did Jenna and Sue Ellen. The DYNASTY ladies are as glittery as their DALLAS counterparts were but far less bitchy. Krystle telling Alexis she’s not invited to her and Blake’s nuptials is as cutting as it gets. There are icier glares between the ladies at Soap Land's other parties this week. On FALCON CREST, Maggie encounters estranged sister Terry, who was pointedly not invited to the Gioberti shindig but arrives on Michael’s arm anyway. "Don’t let me keep you from circulating,” says Maggie. “You do that so well". The main purpose of the press reception on KNOTS, meanwhile, is to bring Abby face to face with Jane Sumner, Greg’s wife. While their exchange is oh-so-civilised, Jane seems to immediately sense the true nature of Abby and Greg's relationship. (Given the original “scenes from a marriage” premise of KNOTS, it’s always interesting when the show gives us a glimpse into the lives of a married couple who exist outside the environs of the cul-de-sac. So far we’ve seen Earl and Judy Trent in action and now the Sumners. While Greg and Jane behave with far more dignity and restraint than the volatile Trents, they don’t seem to be much happier.)

There are no parties on EMERALD POINT, but in the second of this week’s double bill of episodes a delightfully bonkers story develops involving a sex tape, a blackmailer, the murder of said blackmailer and a pair of lovers blackmailing each other over said murder — with an evil Russian agent, a dose of espionage and an attempted rape thrown in for good measure. It's the “Bobby finds Jeff Farraday dead in his apartment” story-line on steroids.

Minor Soap Land trend of the week: Grown children disapproving of their parents’ new partners. Chief among them is JR on DALLAS who finds the prospect of Clayton marrying his mama and replacing his daddy on Southfork utterly unacceptable. On EMERALD POINT, Tiffany Case moves into the family home of lover Harlan Adams (partially as a result of that insane blackmail/murder plot) to the vocal disapproval of Harlan's daughter Hilary. “Well, you certainly deserve the blue ribbon for getting what you want,” she scowls at Tiffany. Hilary is a spoiled, willful princess reminiscent of a young Fallon Carrington minus the wit, but with a brittle poise similar to that of early Sue Ellen. Over on DYNASTY, it’s contempt at first sight when Alexis introduces son Steven to new boyfriend Dex Dexter. And while no one in the Carrington household actually disapproves of Blake remarrying Krystle, the family's reaction to their reengagement is somewhat muted — understandably so given the complicated dynamic that now exists between Jeff, Kirby and Adam, all of whom continue to live under the Carrington roof, even though Kirby is divorcing Jeff whilst carrying the baby conceived when Adam raped her.

On KNOTS the shoe is on the other foot as Lilimae continues to convey her distaste for Val’s beau Ben. Val goes some way to soothing her mama’s feelings when she dedicates her new novel, “Nashville Junction”, to her. Lilimae is delighted — even more so when she reads the book and finds it is based on her own life. Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Maggie Gioberti starts researching a series of articles about her mother-in-law Jacqueline Perrault. And on DALLAS, JR begins digging into his stepfather-to-be's past and uncovers a long-lost sister. While Lilimae is deeply touched by Val’s interest in her story (“Nobody’s ever written a book about me, no one’s ever done anything like that for me”), Clayton is incensed by JR’s in his. (“What the hell do you mean, poking around in my life?!”)

On this week's DYNASTY, Krystle admits to her doctor that she hasn’t given up on her dream of having a child, in spite of the medical odds stacked against her. She might take heart from KNOTS LANDING's Val, who finds out this week she is finally pregnant after failing to conceive during her second marriage to Gary.

Val’s delighted reaction parallels Kirby’s in last season’s DYNASTY. Both mothers-to-be initially assume that the prospective father is the man they’re currently involved with — boyfriend Ben and husband Jeff respectively. Then comes the bombshell, casually delivered by the unwitting doctor — in Val’s case in the same scene, but in Kirby's several episodes later — that the pregnancy is much further along than they initially thought. This means Kirby’s rapist and Val’s ex-husband are the real fathers of their respective children. On DYNASTY, Kirby looked to her father Joseph for support in her hour of need but settled for Krystle when he proved unavailable. On KNOTS, Val’s first instinct is to turn to Karen, but her escalating pill problem means that it’s down to Mack to fulfill the duties of best girlfriend. This he turns out to be touchingly, if incongruously, good at.

The final scene of this week’s DYNASTY echoes the end of last week’s EMERALD POINT. Both involve a small private plane erratically piloted by a male character and carrying one female passenger. On EMERALD POINT ex-lovers Casey Denault and bad girl Hilary struggled to stay airborne during a storm; on DYNASTY Peter de Vilbis shows off his loop-the-loop skills to Fallon as Jeff watches in dismay from the ground below. The final shot of the ep is Jeff walking away from his ex-wife and her boyfriend, having accused Peter of endangering “the mother of my child" with his reckless behaviour. KNOTS ends similarly with Gary walking away from his ex-wife after a chance meeting in a parking lot, during which Val neglects to mention she is now carrying his child.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

1 (4) DALLAS
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) FALCON CREST
4 (5) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.
5 (-) DYNASTY

 

[James from London]

04/Jan/84: DYNASTY: The Ring v. 05/Jan/84: KNOTS LANDING: Forsaking All Others v. 06/Jan/84: DALLAS: Peter’s Principles v. 06/Jan/84: FALCON CREST: Sport of Kings v. 07/Jan/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Divide and Conquer

Construction-related corruption is all the rage in this week’s Soap Land. On DYNASTY, Fallon does business with an architect friend of Peter de Vilbis whom Adam tries to warn her is up to no good. She won’t listen but the deal does seem to be in some way connected to Peter’s debt and drug problems. Over on FALCON CREST, Richard announces his intention to have the official groundbreaking ceremony of the Tuscany Valley racetrack on Falcon Crest property, which will destroy ten acres of vines in the process. "He has perverted the intent of eminent domain principles to get his way, to take what he wanted!” fumes Chase. “That land has been in our family for three generations. It’s nothing less than rape!” protests Angela.

Chase calls a meeting of the county supervisors in an attempt to get permission for Richard’s racetrack overturned. "The people of this valley have more at stake than money,” he insists. "Most have lived here for generations because this is their home. You don't just come strolling into the Tuscany Valley, whip out your cheque book and buy a heritage. You work for it. It becomes part of you.” This stirring speech resonates with what Mr and Mrs Marcus, an elderly couple refusing to sell their Lotus Point property to Abby’s company, told Laura in last week’s KNOTS LANDING. “It’s not the money we want. We have lived here for forty years. We know what happens when developers move in … Dammit, this is our home!” This week, the Wolfbridge Group eliminate the problem by simply burning down the Marcuses’ home.

While Chase tries to derail the racetrack, Mack Mackenzie attempts to bring down the Wolfbridge Group. In retaliation, both men are subject to almost identical accusations. “Supervisor Gioberti is caught in a conflict of interest,” states Richard Channing publicly. "His is the voice of Falcon Crest and he is concerned for his personal welfare to the exclusion of the rights of the people of this valley and his voting rights should be suspended.” “Commissioner Mackenzie may be a party to a grave conflict of interest,” declares Greg Sumner during a televised press conference. "MacKenzie has used his influence as a public official for his own personal gain … I have … been forced to ask Mack Mackenzie for his resignation.” Richard and Greg both prevail - Chase loses his voting rights and Mack loses his job.

It seems like we’re headed for some sort of climax on this week’s KNOTS LANDING. The hemmed-in, handheld camera work during the scenes at Sumner campaign headquarters makes it feel like we’re on a boat that’s about to capsize. Elsewhere, the sight of a hospitalised Karen watching Mack’s downfall on television suggests a doomy end-of-season gravitas. Surprisingly, we’re only three-fifths of the way through the season. The pace of this week’s DALLAS is almost leisurely in comparison. This is a show very confident in its storytelling — there’s something effortless about it. The scene where Afton returns home to find Cliff in an apparently compromising position with Marilee Stone is a variation on a by now familiar Soap Land scenario. However, Cliff and Marilee's matter-of-fact response to Afton’s anger (“Does she storm out like that often?” “She’s done it before”) and the small detail of Afton's headscarf ("there was a flood at the club") give the scene a lightness and wit without compromising its credibility, or its dramatic repercussions.

One of those is a great confrontation between Pam and Cliff where she bursts into his office. "What the hell are you doing to Afton?” she demands to know. They end up having the same argument they've been having for the past six years (Cliff: "I've been kicked and kicked hard." Pam: "You mean by the Ewings? You're still singing that old song??”), but it somehow feels fresh, significant and resonant. Similarly, on FALCON CREST, Angela's umpteenth speech about the importance of the land is unexpectedly powerful and even touching. "Richard's gonna tear these vines out of the ground before the day is finished," she tells Chase. "My grandfather planted most of these vines and every generation has tended them and kept them alive. Something terribly important is going to die today."

In fact, this entire episode of FALCON CREST is one that, without warning and for no specific reason (except perhaps the bold direction of Larry Elikkan), feels potent and exhilarating. Plot points that have been lying dormant or unexplored for weeks now rise to the surface. Suddenly everything seems to matter. “My marriage is a farce!” yells Melissa when confronted with evidence of her and Lance’s affairs at the deposition hearing over Joseph’s custody. It’s a very self-destructive, exciting moment — all the more so for being so unexpected. There’s also an excruciating scene where Emma visits Dr Ranson at his office and declares her feelings for him, only for him to gently turn her down. It’s an incident that scarcely impacts the rest of the ep, but is one of the most emotionally involving of the Soap Land week — topped only by a blisteringly good break-up scene between Chance and Colleen on THE YELLOW ROSE. (“When it comes down to feelin’, you break and run out to your big lonesome,” says Colleen sadly. God I love the dialogue on this show.)

Following harsh words with Alexis and Sue Ellen, Dex Dexter and Peter Richards disappear for much of this week’s DYNASTY and DALLAS. When Dex finally shows up, having spent a fortnight in Australia, ("I needed that two weeks to think about my life: where it's been, where it's going and with whom. It always came down to one woman — you”) Alexis feigns indifference. "Sorry, you're dealing with a disinterested party,” she sniffs. By contrast, Sue Ellen wears her concern for Peter on her sleeve. “I was frantic — nobody knew where you were, if you were all right,” she tells him when she eventually tracks him down to the dingy apartment he had rented for them both. Dex gains Alexis’s attention with a necklace of precious jewels. “It's breathtaking!” she gasps — but is still hesitant about becoming emotionally involved with him. "It's not a collar, Alexis, it's a tribute,” he assures her. She puts the necklace on and they both stare admiringly at her reflection. Meanwhile, Sue Ellen caresses Peter’s youthful face as if it were just as precious. “You are so young and so sweet,” she whispers. “This is just a moment for us. It can’t last.” “That’s not the way I feel … not ever!” Peter insists. Both Alexis and Sue Ellen then submit to their younger men — ultimately because they want to, I guess.

As this week’s DYNASTY ends so this week’s KNOTS LANDING begins — with a medical emergency. We leave Kirby staring at a close-up of her suddenly swollen hands and join KNOTS for an extreme close up of Karen’s eyes as she is admitted to a chemical dependency unit. Karen isn’t the first Soap Land character to develop a problem with pills — Lucy Ewing and Eudora Weldon both got there before her — but inasmuch as she has essentially been committed by her husband against her will, a closer comparison might be made with Sue Ellen at the end of DALLAS’s first season. “There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m fine,” Sue Ellen protested back then. “I don’t belong here. I’m not like those people,” Karen insists now. Miss Ellie’s line, “Sue Ellen’s the last person I thought this kind of thing would happen to” is echoed by her son Gary: “Pills - Karen’s the last person you’d expect.” But whereas there was a sense of inevitability about Sue Ellen’s alcoholism, some essential weakness or flaw in her personality or upbringing that meant she was always destined to end up in the Soap Land Sanitarium, there’s more of a "this could happen to anyone” vibe about Karen’s situation, hence her — and Mack’s — bewilderment that it should be happening to them.

Like Julia in the FALCON CREST penitentiary, Lane Ballou in her FLAMINGO ROAD jail cell and Gary Ewing when he was hospitalised for alcoholism at the end of KNOTS’ first season, it’s interesting that Karen’s closest ally in the unit, her roommate, should be a person of colour. Like Julia, Lane and Gary, this is the first time Karen has had any meaningful on-screen interaction with a black person — a sign of how far she's fallen perhaps? “I’m not like those people,” she insists, with a sidelong glance at her new roomie. Said roomie later delivers a simple but effective speech on the subject. “There’s a lot of difference between you and me,” she tells Karen. "The drugs I use are illegal. I gotta go to the street to cop. You get yours from a doctor, for now. I can get arrested for mine and you deduct yours from your taxes. You're the lead in a TV series. My character doesn’t even have a name."

As Karen gradually adjusts to life in the chemical dependency unit, FALCON CREST’s Julia is transferred to the Institute for the Criminally Insane. There she receives a visit from half-brother Richard who elects to tell her in the most callous way possible that the baby Melissa is carrying, whom Julia believes to be her grandchild through Lance, is really his own: "Aren't you going to congratulate me?” He then smirks as Julia goes berserk with rage. Such thrillingly wanton cruelty is FALCON CREST’s speciality.

On DALLAS, Pam’s concern that Cliff is about to reignite the Barnes/Ewing feud provides her with a reason to meet with Bobby so they can discuss the best way to prevent it. Similarly, on KNOTS, Val takes Karen’s collapse as an opportunity to visit Gary’s ranch, ostensibly to break the news to Diana in person. Instead, it’s Gary she ends up spending time with. Despite all the unresolved emotions floating around, both sets of Ewing divorcees broach the topic of their exes’ new partners as maturely as they can. “We do have to get one thing out of the way first — how’s Mark?” says Bobby as he and Pam sit down to dinner together. He then gestures for her to do likewise. Pam laughs. “How's Jenna?” she asks. Over on KNOTS, Gary inquires about Ben and expresses concern when Val admits they’re no longer seeing each other. Val then bravely requests that he “say hi to Abby for me,” before driving away at the end of the scene.

When Gary tells Laura that he will oppose the development of Lotus Point by an unknown company ("I’m not gonna give up without a fight”) it looks as if we’re in for a variation on the DALLAS Season 3 plot where Miss Ellie vowed to stop the Takapa project without realising Jock was behind it. This time, Gary takes his mama’s role, Abby substitutes for Jock and Laura is a more morally compromised version of the caught-in-the-middle Krebbses. However, by the end of this week's episode Gary is sufficiently suspicious of his wife’s involvement to order a company audit. Abby and Laura are left looking as shifty as Angela and Philip did when Chase ordered the same thing at Falcon Crest last year, or JR when Jock insisted the Ewing Oil accounts be inspected back in DALLAS Season 2.

Another trend of the week: unknown enemies lurking without. On DYNASTY, Steven’s son Danny is approached by a nameless man in the park whom his nanny is later convinced has followed them home. On FALCON CREST, Maggie has no idea she too is being followed by an anonymous man as she continues her research on Jacqueline Perrault. On KNOTS LANDING, Mark St Clare discusses Mack’s fate with Greg over the phone as a group of unidentified men, their faces shrouded in darkness, look on in silence. On DALLAS, another unknown man observes Donna lunching with Edgar Randolph at the Oil Barons Club before sidling up to JR at the bar. “He’s the one. No doubt about it,” he tells him.

Random coincidence of the week: DYNASTY’s Steven Carrington and DALLAS’s Steven “Dusty" Farlow both celebrate a birthday. The latter’s big day take place off screen but is referred to by his father, thereby providing JR with an opportunity to pry a little further into the Farlow family’s past, specifically Clayton’s mysterious sister Jessica. This week he learns that she is the widow of an English lord. Interesting stuff — but nothing compared to the dirt FALCON CREST's Maggie digs up on the Giobertis’ own Europe-based relative, the late Jacqueline Perrault. "Her second husband was a Nazi sympathiser who made his fortune by looting the French art museums during the Occupation,” she tells Chase. "He was murdered and she inherited everything."

The YELLOW ROSE equivalent of Jessica Montford and Jacqueline Perrault makes her on-screen debut this week. The bitterly estranged sister of Jeb Hollister and the secret mother of Chance McKenzie, Rose Hollister is as controversial a character as they come - a kind of Jacqueline Perrault and Rebecca Wentworth rolled into one. Rose harbours a secret similar to the one Jacqueline did when she arrived in FALCON CREST: “If Jeb ever learns that I had a child by Wade Champion and that child is in line to inherit everything Jeb stole from me and more, it’s that boy who’ll be destroyed." And in the same way that Lana Turner’s reputation for glamour and scandal overlapped with Jacqueline’s on FALCON CREST, the casting of legendary Hollywood star Jane Russell as Rose complements both her character’s status and no-nonsense attitude. (What other female in Soap Land could deliver the line, “Flattery don’t cut cow flop”?) While Soap Land has been full of veteran movie actors from the beginning - Barbara Bel Geddes, Jane Wyman, Howard Keel, Julie Harris - none of them brought with them the star wattage or iconic “baggage" of Jane Russell or Lana Turner. Rose’s introductory scene takes place in a saloon bar where she first observes and then flirts with Chance without letting him know she’s his mother. This certainly puts Adam and Fallon's inadvertently incestuous kiss in last season’s DYNASTY into perspective.

THE YELLOW ROSE ends with a really terrific family meeting where the Champions vote on whether or not to allow Jeb Hollister to drill for oil on the ranch — a decision that would secure their future but also go against the promise Roy to made to his late father. “Choosing between a land covered in oil wells and no land at all because we can’t afford to hold onto it isn’t a choice at all,” says Chance. "I’m sorry, Roy. This isn’t the 1940s, it’s the 1980s.” It’s as tense and dramatic as equivalent scenes on the original DALLAS, but there’s an additional component too — an emotional complexity of the kind often found in New DALLAS, which also makes it genuinely moving.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

1 (-) THE YELLOW ROSE
2 (-) FALCON CREST
3 (-) DALLAS
4 (1) KNOTS LANDING
5 (2) DYNASTY

 

[James from London]

09/Jan/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: The Assignment v. 11/Jan/84: DYNASTY: Lancelot v. 12/Jan/84: KNOTS LANDING: Reconcilable Differences v. 13/Jan/84: DALLAS: Offshore Crude v. 13/Jan/84: FALCON CREST: Queen’s Gambit v. 14/Jan/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Hell Hath No Fury

On this week’s DYNASTY and KNOTS LANDING, Blake Carrington and Lilimae Clements are equally bemused by the respective break-ups of Kirby & Jeff and Val & Ben. "There is a child involved,” Blake reminds Jeff, "an unborn child to whom you and Kirby have a tremendous responsibility.” "It’s not just you and Valene now,” Lilimae chides Ben. "You have your child to think about.”

Much to Ben’s frustration, Val continues to keep the reason for their break-up, the fact that she is really pregnant by Gary, a secret from both Lilimae and Gary himself. “You have a separate set of lies for each of us,” he tells her angrily. Conversely, on DYNASTY, Adam finally admits to Blake that he raped and impregnated Kirby. "In another time, they'd have dragged you out to the centre of the square and horse-whipped you, branded you an animal!” Blake shouts, appalled. There is a juicy paradox at work here. Earlier in the same episode, Jeanette the maid happens upon Adam looking at Little Blake and Danny. "The Carrington heirs,” she sighs. "How your father loves them. He'd give their parents the world for what they've given him." "Yes, the world,” he murmurs in agreement. So by incurring his father’s wrath, even offering to move back to Montana with Kirby and the baby, Adam is actually securing his place in the Carrington dynasty. "You're my son and dammit, you're gonna stay right here in this house and you're gonna learn what it is to behave like a man, like a Carrington!” bellows Blake.

Blake’s disgust is notable for another reason. His description of what Adam did to Kirby — “it's an act of violence, it's an act of abuse and violence” — is the first time a Soap Land character has defined and condemned rape so unequivocally. (I may be overlooking the FLAMINGO ROAD episode “Victim”, which I disliked so much I’ve erased most of it from my memory.) It’s ironic that it should fall to Blake to take such a stand. Like JR on DALLAS, he is a former rapist himself but has never been characterised as such. The “r” word crops up on this week’s FALCON CREST too, when Maggie brands Richard’s racetrack development as "the rape of the Tuscany Valley”. There’s also "an act of abuse and violence” between a male and female in this week's EMERALD POINT where the Russian Rashid Ahmed abruptly punches Tiffany Case in the face sending her sprawling onto some handily situated trash cans. This, however, was a moment so unexpected and absurd it made me laugh out loud.

As part of her complicated espionage plan, Tiffany does a Claudia Blaisdel and seduces the guy with access to the information she needs, then rummages through his pockets while he’s otherwise occupied. Her Jeff Colby equivalent is Lucy Ewing’s former English professor/lover, Greg Forrester, who is still the same good looking bespectacled nerd with a wife and kids that he was in DALLAS Seasons 2 and 3. Tiffany isn’t the only Soap Land redhead mixing business and pleasure this week as Laura Avery winds up in bed with Greg Sumner in KNOTS. Their getting together is depicted with such tantalising economy one can only speculate at what has motivated such a union: an attempt by Greg to keep Laura on side, an opportunity for Laura to exact some long-awaited revenge on Abby, or just good old fashioned physical desire. Most likely it's a combination of all three.

Random Soap Land trend of the week: minor characters in mortal jeopardy. FALCON CREST's recurring law enforcer Sheriff Robbins collapses with an aneurysm and refuses to let anyone but Michael Ranson operate on him. Michael, however, hasn’t performed surgery since losing a patient on the operating table years earlier. So far so Nick Toscanni, but whereas Nick rose to the challenge when faced with a similar crisis on DYNASTY, Michael freezes in the operating theatre and has to be replaced by another surgeon. Meanwhile, almost exactly two years after Jock Ewing’s fatal helicopter crash in DALLAS, a plane malfunctions on EMERALD POINT and a character we’ve never seen or heard of before, but whom we learn was a surrogate son to Harlan Adams, is killed. We learn of a similar bond on this week's YELLOW ROSE between Chance and the elderly Toat Gilmore who looked out for each other when they shared a prison cell for five years. Toat is still behind bars but now dying of a heart condition so Chance devises a convoluted scheme to get him out of jail and reunite him with his long-lost grandson.

Having introduced Jane Russell as the controversial Rose Hollister in last week’s YELLOW ROSE, this week’s ep doesn’t even refer to her. Instead, we have a wacky prison break plot involving rodeo clowns and identity-swaps. Soap Land hasn’t been this schizo since the story of Gary and Abby’s affair kept getting interrupted by tales of haunted houses, silent movie stars and Lilimae’s cross country trek with Jackson Mobeley in KNOTS Season 3. (Speaking of Jackson Mobeley, he makes his second Soap Land appearance of the season in the guise of a horse trainer on this week's DYNASTY.) But however implausible the YELLOW ROSE story, we buy into it because we believe in the characters.

Just as KNOTS LANDING’s Abby began this season by describing herself to Jim Westmont as “the next Mrs. Gary Ewing” before she had even been proposed to so Terry confidently informs Angela she is to be “the next Mrs. Michael Ranson” on this week's FALCON CREST. Like Westmont, Angela is skeptical, but blonde ambition will out. By the end of this week’s ep, Michael has confided to Terry that the patient he lost on the operating table ten years earlier was his own wife.

Other characters have their secrets too. Gary learns in this week's KNOTS that Cathy spent four years in prison. On THE YELLOW ROSE, Caryn Careiba, Jeb Hollister’s tightly wound personal assistant, lets her hair and her guard down to reveal to Roy Champion that she is the girl whose virginity he took when they were teenagers and she’s been obsessed with him ever since (it’s Jenna Wade's back story mixed with Katherine Wentworth's psychological profile). Even Michael Ranson’s DALLAS counterpart, the incorruptible Edgar Randolph, turns out to be susceptible to blackmail when JR unearths something unimaginably heinous from his past.

This week's DYNASTY and KNOTS each ends with a married couple in an emotional embrace, one partner supporting the other who has collapsed in tears. In both cases, there's a bit of a role reversal going on. Claudia Carrington and Mack Mackenzie may each have been the stronger, more dependable spouse in their relationship so far this season — Claudia helping Steven retain custody of his son and then reconcile with his father, Mack supporting Karen through her estrangement from Diana and problem with pills — but now they are the ones in need. While Claudia is in shock after receiving a bouquet of violets apparently from her dead husband Matthew, Karen eavesdrops on a phone conversation between Mack and his father. “I’m OK, I’m gonna get through this … Karen’s like the rock of Gibraltar … She’s the one that’s getting me through this,” Mack is saying bravely. It’s only after the call that he starts to break down. The way Mack struggles in vain to contain his emotions — at one point biting on his bathrobe to stop himself from crying — is compellingly authentic.

This is also the episode that establishes Mack and Ben as close friends. First, they team up to clear Mack’s good name (which was besmirched in last week’s ep by his former best bud Greg Sumner) by investigating the Wolfbridge Group, then gradually begin to confide in each other about their emotional lives — the way ordinary men rarely do but Soap Land characters are compelled to. KNOTS navigates this transition via three separate scenes between the two men. In the first, Mack asks Ben how he is feeling with regard to his break up with Val. In the second, Ben does the same to Mack apropos of his problems with Karen. Each man avoids answering the other’s question, which kind of tells us what we need to know. Then in the third scene, having broken the macho ice, they are free to openly discuss their relationships and feelings. “Maybe men and women don’t belong together,” Mack concludes. "They sure as hell don’t seem to understand a damn thing about each other." (Friendships between men aren’t really a factor on the other soaps where nearly all male relationships are drawn along familial lines. The exception would be Blake Carrington’s friendships with Andrew Laird and Joseph Anders, but it’s notable that both of those men are/were in his employ.)

Broadly speaking, masculine emotions — deeply felt but rarely articulated — are what drives THE YELLOW ROSE and gives it its unique flavour. The most powerful scene in this week’s episode is between Roy Champion and his son Whit. When Whit calls his mother — who is suing Roy on Whit’s behalf — a pregnant slut, Roy’s intuitive response is to punch him. Whit retaliates in kind. Seconds later they’re hugging each other fiercely and exchanging “I love you”s. On any other soap, this would be as icky as it sounds but here it feels primal and real.

And this week’s Top 6 are …

1 (3) DALLAS
2 (4) KNOTS LANDING
3 (1) THE YELLOW ROSE
4 (2) FALCON CREST
5 (5) DYNASTY
6 (-) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.

 

[James from London]

16/Jan/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: Secrets v. 18/Jan/84: DYNASTY: Seizure v. 19/Jan/84: KNOTS LANDING: Second Chances v. 20/Jan/84: DALLAS: Some Do...Some Don't v. 20/Jan/84: FALCON CREST: Bitter Harvest v. 21/Jan/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Deadline

Currently, the most interesting part of EMERALD POINT is the corruption of Casey Denault, who began the series as a heroic navy pilot and this week blackmails Harlan Adams into making him a vice president of his company. Meanwhile DYNASTY’s principle bad boy Adam has turned over a new leaf in the opposite direction, apologising to Jeff for past behaviour and vowing to do right by Kirby. However, his fresh start appears to be predicated on his future with Kirby and their baby, both of whose lives are hanging in the balance by the end of this week's episode. Over on KNOTS, Ben Gibson’s disappointment at not being the father of Val’s child has caused him to rethink his plans to settle down and he decides to accept an assignment in Central America instead. Adam and Ben’s male broodiness is echoed by, of all people, JR Ewing. “I just ache for more children,” he admits to Sue Ellen in this week’s DALLAS. “That’s never gonna happen,” she assures him curtly. JR, Ben, Adam … it’s an interesting shift, given that it’s usually the feelings of its baby-deprived female characters that Soap Land chooses to focus on.

Terry Hartford’s declaration in last week’s FALCON CREST that she is to be “the next Mrs Michael Ranson” is matched by similarly bold claims from Tiffany Case and Peter de Vilbis in this week’s EMERALD POINT and DYNASTY. “Why don’t you just accept the fact that I’m going to be Mrs Harlan Adams and get on with it?” suggests Tiffany to Harlan’s daughter Hilary, even though she and Harlan are no more engaged than Terry and Michael. Meanwhile DYNASTY’s Peter takes Fallon by surprise by announcing at a press conference that she “will soon be Mrs Peter de Vilbis”. Blake is no happier to learn of his daughter’s engagement via the medium of television than Karen MacKenzie was when she found out about her daughter’s marriage in similar circumstances earlier in the season ("It's not Miss Fairgate, it's Mrs Tony Fenice!” yelled Diana at a TV camera after Chip’s arrest). While Blake calls Fallon “a very impulsive young lady”, Karen admits that she and Diana are equally headstrong during a believably tentative mother/daughter reconciliation scene in this week’s KNOTS.

Both Bobby Ewing and Alexis Colby find themselves all dressed up with nowhere to go this week. A tuxedo-clad Bobby arrives at Jenna’s place to take her to hear the Dallas Symphony (“tonight was gonna be culture night”) only to find her knee deep in preparations for her imminent boutique opening. Meanwhile Alexis waits in a pink ballgown for Dex to escort her to an opening night at the ballet. When he eventually shows up, he’s wearing a soiled leather jacket and jeans, having come directly from an oil field. Both couples compromise - Bobby by taking Charlie out for hamburgers while still in his tux, Dex by sliding out of his dirty clothes in the middle of Alexis’s living room and encouraging her to do likewise. Dex’s lack of inhibition contrasts with fellow toy boy Peter Richards' meek assurance to Sue Ellen in this week’s DALLAS that “making love with you isn’t half as important as just being with you”.

Alexis, Sue Ellen and FALCON CREST’s Michael Ranson are all enticed out of their comfort zones by their much younger lovers this week. Dex takes Alexis to Powder Valley in order to meet hayseed land owner Oscar Stone, portrayed by the same actor who played hayseed land owner Wally Kessell in the DALLAS Season 1 episode “Sue Ellen’s Sister”. Back then Jock Ewing referred to Wally as "an old buzzard"; now Dex calls Oscar "an old coot". Just as the Ewings were trying to persuade Wally to part with his oil rich land, so Dex and Alexis are trying to get Oscar to do the same. To keep him sweet, Alexis takes to the dance floor of Oscar’s local saloon for a heel-clicking hoedown. Over on DALLAS, Peter Richards takes Sue Ellen ice skating in an attempt to prove that they can pass for a normal couple. Alexis and Sue Ellen fare surprisingly well on dance floor and ice respectively. (Refreshments prove more of a challenge, however. Alexis’s saloon bar martini is served on the rocks with an onion while Sue Ellen looks decidedly queasy after eating what Peter describes as "the best taco you ever tasted”). Whereas Alexis and Dex’s evening is deemed a success when Oscar agrees to their deal, Sue Ellen and Peter’s takes a turn for the embarrassing when they run into some of Peter’s friends who mistake Sue Ellen for his mother. A similar faux pas is made when Terry drags an ill-at-ease Michael to a cowboy bar on FALCON CREST. “You mean this guy isn’t your father?” sneers a young guy, hitting on Terry. Terry does nothing to discourage him. “I wanted to see how you’d handle him,” she purrs to Michael later. Peter, on the other hand, is at pains to prove to Sue Ellen that his friends’ comments don’t matter. “They’re stupid, they just don’t understand how we feel!” he protests. “Our relationship is wrong,” Sue Ellen insists, her eyes misting over. While Dex and Alexis’s relationship feels smug and self-congratulatory, there’s something sweetly fragile about Peter and Sue Ellen’s. (Much like Kenny and Ginger’s arc on KNOTS and Mark's and Kirby's in DYNASTY, Peter’s story on DALLAS is working for me this watch-around in a way it never has before.)

Of course, the centrepiece of Alexis’s trip to the Powder Valley saloon isn't her country hoedown but a surprise rendition of “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have”. This is the third example of a Soap Land character breaking unexpectedly into song this season. The first, and most impressive, was KNOTS LANDING’s Gary serenading Cathy with a spirited version of "Cigarettes, Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women”. He even accompanied himself on guitar. (Interesting that Gary’s song choice, like Alexis’s, should be a cowboy-tinged number written roughly forty years earlier.) This was followed by Blake Carrington’s somewhat awkward half-spoken attempt at Cole Porter’s “Embraceable You” delivered to the brim of Krystle’s hat during their wedding reception.

Alexis’s isn’t the only song in this week’s soaps either. In the long-awaited return of Soap Land Song Wars, her Marlene Dietrich homage is pitted against Cathy Geary’s version of Bonnie Raitt’s “Love Has No Pride”. Whereas Alexis’s performance is so carefully choreographed as to be a bit tame, the brief snatch we get of Cathy’s country ballad (it’s interesting that KNOTS seems to be moving her away from Ciji’s soft rock numbers) is quite lovely. Ergo, Cathy’s the winner.

However, while fellow working girl Jenna Wade seems to be consolidating her position within the Ewing-verse - this week’s DALLAS sees both the opening of her boutique and the (re)consummation of her relationship with Bobby - Cathy’s is looking somewhat shaky. During the same ep that Gary finds out she has served time for murder, Abby coolly informs her that her services as an extra-marital “distraction” are no longer required. (Somewhat perversely, Cathy ditches her wholesome denim cowgirl look for her clandestine meeting with Abby in favour of dressing like a gangster’s moll from the fifties.)

Elsewhere on this week's KNOTS, Abby further embroils herself with the Wolfbridge Group in order to move up the completion date on the Lotus Point construction. It’s an excitingly reckless move that results in Mack being badly beaten in a parking lot. Conversely, Richard Channing’s continued refusal to involve FALCON CREST’s Wolfbridge equivalent, the cartel, in his race track project leads to him being chased by a car and nearly killed in an underground parking garage. While both scenes are effective — Mack’s pummelling is cross cut with Karen waiting for him to show up for their counselling session — FALCON CREST’s has the edge in terms of thrills. This kind of sinister action scene, especially when directed by good old Larry Elikann, is what FALCON CREST does particularly well.

There’s an strong ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN-style feeling of satisfaction in watching KNOTS LANDING’s Ben and Mack knocking on doors and staking out offices as they gradually piece together what the audience already knows. “Laura!” gasps Mack at the end of the ep as another piece of the Wolfbridge/Apolune jigsaw falls thrillingly into place.

Meanwhile THE YELLOW ROSE continues to confound expectations, wilfully refusing to defer to any recognisable Soap Land norms. This week’s episode picks up where the last one left off, following the story of a dying prisoner on the lam, and the vibe is very much early stand alone DALLAS (specifically the gentler aspects of episodes like “Fallen Idol” and “Home Again”) combined with KNOTS LANDING Season 3 at its most touchingly eccentric (i.e., “The Rose and the Briar”). For much of the ep it feels as if we aren’t even in soap opera territory anymore — but then a subplot kicks in halfway through that couldn’t be soapier if it tried: an interfamily court fight combined with a Julie Grey-style document leak. This culminates in the most viscerally dramatic scene of any of this week’s shows where a pregnant woman (DALLAS’s Mrs Scotfield) contemplates suicide in the ladies room. As if that weren’t unexpected enough, the Champions then amicably agree, almost as an afterthought, to do the Soap Land unthinkable — drill for oil on their own land.

And this week’s Top 6 are …

1 (2) KNOTS LANDING
2 (1) DALLAS
3 (4) FALCON CREST
4 (3) THE YELLOW ROSE
5 (5) DYNASTY
6 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.

 

[James from London]

30/Jan/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: Disguises v. 01/Feb/84: DYNASTY: A Little Girl v. 02/Feb/84: KNOTS LANDING: Lest the Truth be Known v. 03/Feb/84: DALLAS: Twelve Mile Limit v. 03/Feb/84: FALCON CREST: Power Play

There’s a strong sense of urgency in this week’s Soap Land as several characters try to extricate themselves from situations that are spiraling dangerously out of control. “I don’t even care about the money anymore, I just want out!” pleads Laura Avery on KNOTS LANDING. “It’s too late for that, Laura. You’re in this as deep as anyone is,” snaps Abby. “I can’t do this anymore. Let me out, please!” begs another cornered redhead, Tiffany Case on EMERALD POINT. “It is too late,” replies the Russian Rashid Ahmed sternly. While Tiffany attempts to flee the country, KNOTS' Cathy Geary — another character whose past sins are catching up with her — tries to leave Gary's ranch, but both are driven back from whence they came by ruthless men who insist they finish the jobs they started. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Edgar Randolph tries to leave the planet via a combination of pills and booze but is discovered by Ray and Donna Krebbs before it’s too late.

Even death holds no escape. "At least if I had died, they wouldn't know about my past,” says Edgar, referring to his family in the final scene of this week’s DALLAS. "Sure they would,” JR replies. "I'd break your story to the newspapers before you were even cold in the ground.” JR ends the episode with a threat: “Don’t you ever mention my name to Donna Krebbs again or you’ll really regret that you didn’t die today.” On KNOTS, Laura makes the mistake of mentioning Mark St Clare’s name to Mack Mackenzie. St Clare then applies the same polite not-in-so-many-words method of intimidation to Laura that the sinister Mr. Spheeris did to Pamela Lynch on last week’s FALCON CREST. "You have such a lovely face, delicate somehow,” Spheeris told Pamela, his threat unspoken but obvious. “How old are your sons now?” St Clare asks Laura. "They depend on you, don’t they? … I’m sure you’ll find a way to sever all connections with Mack Mackenzie.”

Both Laura and FALCON CREST’s Maggie are plagued by anonymous calls throughout this week's episodes. “He made threats against my children!” panics Laura. “He said something terrible would happen if I didn’t let Jacqueline Perrault rest in peace!” frets Maggie. Things are looking equally bleak for Richard Channing by the end of this week’s FALCON CREST: “This isn’t just a newspaper article — it’s my death warrant,” he murmurs after discovering Emma has published Maggie’s exposé of Jacqueline on the front page of the New Globe without his, or Maggie’s, knowledge.

Back on DALLAS, Ray and Donna barge into JR’s office to accuse him of driving Edgar Randolph to attempt suicide, having correctly surmised that JR was blackmailing him. JR, however, manages to talk his way out of trouble and Donna ends up grudgingly apologising to him. Meanwhile on KNOTS, Mack bursts into Greg’s hotel suite, interrupting his smooch with Laura, and accuses him of being in cahoots with Apolune. Technically, he isn’t, but Mack refuses to believe his protestations of innocence. “I AM NOT, I REPEAT NOT INVOLVED IN THIS!” Greg screams, blowing the cool he has sustained since arriving in KNOTS all those weeks ago. The three-way showdown between JR, Donna and Ray is a blast but the one between Mack, Greg and Laura is electric. Soap Land’s been tense before but never quite as much as it is here. Larry Elikann is the perfect director for this kind of paranoid, explosive scene: all looming angles, tight close ups and shouting faces.

At the end of this week’s KNOTS, a desperate Laura throws herself on Mack’s mercy: "I wanna tell you everything I know." There’s a confession at the end of this week’s DYNASTY too, as Adam finally admits to Blake that it was he, not Alexis, who poisoned Jeff. Whereas Alexis is exonerated by Adam, Abby is implicated by Laura (“Apolune is Abby’s company”). Just as Laura is looking for protection for her children so Adam is seeking absolution in the hopes of somehow saving his prematurely born baby. However, his efforts are in vain. “It was a little girl,” the doctor tells him sombrely.

As if all this danger and darkness weren’t enough, another slightly loopier streak of paranoia also runs through this week's Soap Land. On EMERALD POINT, it’s slowly become apparent that newcomer David, the sleepy-eyed writer who lives by the beach like a slightly artsier Ben Gibson, is not the laid-back guy he first appeared to be. Having persuaded the widow Octopussy to let him use her life story as the basis for his new novel, he appears to be developing an obsession with her. Like previous Soap Land psychos, DALLAS’s Roger Larsen and Peter Horton in FLAMINGO ROAD, he has numerous photos of the object of his fascination pinned to his wall — but he also seems to have a past connection with her. Could he possibly be her missing-presumed-dead husband come back to life with a new face and a screw loose? A similar question hovers over the anonymous gifts Claudia keeps receiving on DYNASTY — has Matthew Blaisdel returned from the dead to torment his wife with violets and cryptic messages? Another long lost husband also shows up in KNOTS LANDING, Cathy Geary’s ex, Ray.

Ray may not have returned from the dead, but one could argue that his appearance is still a resurrection of sorts. For if one buys into the theory that Cathy is a karmic reincarnation of Ciji, then who is Ray — a dangerously possessive and manipulative Svengali ("Skin and bones, but I saw what you could be,” he tells Cathy, recalling their first meeting) — but the spirit of Chip Roberts transposed to another body? For her part, Cathy regards Ray with the same doe-eyed passivity that Ciji did Chip. Her newly extended back story reveals that she too has been a singer since childhood — but while the young Ciji attended Carolyn Dewbarry’s Tap & Ballet School, Ray had thirteen-year-old Cathy playing clubs in Charlottesville whilst lying about her age and sleeping with him in the backseat of his car.

In the same week that the neurotically needy Celia begs Navy boyfriend Simon not to embark on a reconnaissance mission in EMERALD POINT, KNOTS LANDING’s Val and Lilimae try to dissuade Ben from his reporting assignment in Central America. “There are wars going on!” reasons Lilimae. Unusually in Soap Land, where faraway trouble spots are customarily referred to no more specifically than "South East Asia" or "the Middle East", KNOTS dares to be a little more precise about Ben’s destination — El Salvador. Even more surprisingly, he invites Val to come along. This leads to a speech one would unlikely to hear anywhere else in Soap Land’s hermetically sealed world. “There is something about going to an undeveloped country, coping without all the gadgets that you think you need, there’s something about seeing the way people live in other parts of the world that helps you to look at your own world differently,” he tells Val. His persuasive pitch is countered by a touching monologue of Lilimae’s. “After all the adventures, strangers met and experiences had are over, there’s nothing really to hold on to,” she says to Ben. "At some point you have to be able to look someone in the eye and know that they know you … This is the best part of my life.” After listening to free spirit Lilimae extol the virtues of stability on KNOTS, it’s a little ironic to hear quintessential homebody Ellie Ewing embrace the inevitably of change during a cosy late night chat with Bobby on DALLAS. “Isn’t it odd how things work out? People change, partners come and go,” she muses philosophically.

Also undermining Ben’s inclusive world view is Soap Land’s depiction of foreigners as uniformly sinister and untrustworthy, DYNASTY's Alexis and FALCON CREST’s Pamela notwithstanding. (While neither woman is exactly saintly — Alexis is on particularly bitchy form this week — Soap Land appears to regards Brits as honorary Americans at this point.) The remainder are portrayed as either cold-blooded killers (Russian Rashid Ahmed on EMERALD POINT, the Germanic-sounding Spheeris on FALCON CREST) or Eurotrash gigolos — while we have yet to meet Jenna’s ex-husband Naldo Marchetta, the description Katherine Wentworth’s PI gives in this week’s DALLAS of his escapades with an Italian countess in Argentina mirrors the tawdry tale Alexis tells of Peter de Vilbis and the Moroccan princess he drove to a suicide attempt when he jilted her "and flew off to Monte Carlo with some obscure little French actress with no talent — at least not for acting” in this week’s DYNASTY.

Peter also finds time this week to goad Jeff into striking him in public. He does this by making a sexually crude comment about the woman Jeff loves. “I'm her instructor,” he boasts with reference to Fallon, "a very good instructor, in the air and in bed … She never told you about that?” Over on FALCON CREST, Lance does much the same thing to Cole. "If you ever wanna know what it's like to be with a real man, Linda,” he says to Cole’s wife, "you've got my number.” Just as Jeff knocks Peter off his La Mirage barstool so Cole pushes Lance into a clothing rack in the store they’re in. While Peter taunts Jeff merely for his own amusement, Lance has another motive for provoking Cole — to discredit him at little Joseph’s custody trial.

This is the third custody hearing in Soap Land’s history. Earlier this season Blake fought Steven for custody of Danny in DYNASTY while two years ago JR and Sue Ellen battled over John Ross on DALLAS. (Incidentally, the same actor who played the judge at John Ross’s preliminary custody hearing is now Cole’s lawyer at Joseph’s. He was also the minister who married Alexis and Cecil on DYNASTY.) Both of those storylines took centre stage in their respective episodes; each was deemed more significant than any other concurrent plot. This, however, is not the FALCON CREST way. The story of Cole suing Melissa and Lance for custody of his son, which has been building for almost two years and which strikes at the heart of the show’s central conflict between the Giobertis and the Channings, is given no more weight or prominence than anything else in this week's episode. And while it’s still dramatic and juicy, it does not feel anywhere as momentous as it might have. Perhaps the trade-off is that we get remarkable scenes like the one in which Lance, in order to embellish the blow he received from Cole, orders Chao Li to give him (Lance) a proper beating. “Lance, tradition forbids this,” protests the mild-mannered Chao Li, but he is insistent: “My grandmother wants results, I’ll give her results.” Melissa looks on in horror as Chao Li reluctantly follows orders and beats Lance up. It's the kind of deliciously dark and twisted moment one would only get in FALCON CREST.

After Chao Li gets through with him, it’s a toss up who makes the bigger dramatic impact: Lance when he limps into court with a bruised and puffed up face, or Mack Mackenzie in the opening scene of this week’s KNOTS when he whips off his dark glasses to reveal the gruesomely swollen eyelid that causes Laura to flinch and turn away in shock.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (3) FALCON CREST
3 (2) DALLAS
4 (5) DYNASTY
5 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.

 

[James from London]

06/Feb/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: Lost and Found v. 09/Feb/84: KNOTS LANDING: So Shall You Reap v. 10/Feb/84: DALLAS: Where is Poppa? v. 10/Feb/84: FALCON CREST: Changing Times v. 11/Feb/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Land of the Free

Two weeks after Peter de Vilbis’s engagement to Fallon on DYNASTY, Ben Gibson proposes to Val on KNOTS LANDING but does so over a bacon and avocado sandwich in Val’s kitchen rather than as part of a televised press conference at La Mirage. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Mark Graison is still waiting for another former Mrs. Ewing to reply to his recent marriage proposal.

When confronted by Tom Mallory over her involvement with the KGB on EMERALD POINT, Tiffany Case crumbles and insists she was forced into cooperating with them. When confronted by Mack MacKenzie over her involvement with the Wolfbridge Group on KNOTS LANDING, Abby remains defiant and admits nothing. When confronted by Bobby over his alleged blackmail on DALLAS, JR makes light of the whole idea.

While JR wriggles off the hook with little effort, Tiffany and Abby fare less well. Tiffany is informed that the only way she can escape prosecution is to work as a double agent to bring down the Russians, and this week’s EP ep ends with her life in jeopardy. Meanwhile Gary hits the roof when he learns that Abby’s been secretly diverting funds from his company, and this week’s KNOTS ends with her driving away from his ranch having been given her marching orders. To make matters worse, her children have elected to stay behind with Gary.

Another mother faces a similar loss on this week’s FALCON CREST when Angela makes her daughter-in-law an offer: if Melissa will sign over custody of Joseph so that Angela can trade him with the Giobertis for half of Falcon Crest, Angela will make Melissa her sole heir. It’s a shocking proposal that comes without warning yet we scarcely see Melissa deliberate at all before agreeing to it. (In contrast, Val mulls over Ben’s marriage proposal at length during a sequence that establishes the KNOTS’ convention of cross-cutting between two parallel conversations — on this occasion between Val confiding in Karen and Ben talking to Mack.) In its own way Melissa and Angela’s Faustian pact still feels momentous, especially in the way it references Julia, still languishing in the State Institute for the Criminally Insane. "Would you have sacrificed one of your children for Falcon Crest?” Melissa asks Angela. “I'm afraid I already have,” she replies. Fleetingly, it feels as if Melissa has no moral choice but to surrender her son.

There’s a FALCON CREST party this week. Unlike the recent big balls on DALLAS and DYNASTY, it’s a somewhat impromptu affair - Terry persuades Michael to let her throw a small dinner party which soon escalates into a full-scale bash. The event itself, however, turns out to be an 80s soap classic. Specifically, it’s an early 80s Lorimar soap classic. It’s lean and it’s mean with nary a shoulder pad in sight. Everywhere you look secrets are being revealed, lies being told and illicit kisses stolen. When Richard turns on Melissa and brutally informs her he cannot possibly be the father of her unborn baby because he’s had a vasectomy, it evokes the crackle and hiss of JR and Sue Ellen snapping at each other in the darkness of Baby John's nursery or Constance glowering vengefully at Field and Lane after discovering them together in the shadows of early FLAMINGO ROAD.

As one long-term friendship is mended on this week’s KNOTS - Karen and Laura’s - another falls into disrepair at the FALCON CREST party. Michael and Chase argue bitterly following Terry’s (false) allegation that Chase made a pass at her when they were living under the same roof. Michael then goes on to fulfill the same "inappropriately drunk" role at this party as Cliff Barnes did at JR and Sue Ellen’s wedding and Sammy Jo did at the big Carrington do in DYNASTY Season 2.

That very DYNASTY episode ended the same way as this week’s FALCON CREST does — with two glamorously dressed women, one heavily pregnant, driving away from a party whilst fighting angrily about a man. (Then it was Fallon and Alexis rowing about Cecil Colby, here it’s Melissa and Linda fighting over Cole.) The force of the argument causes the driver to lose control of the car and swerve into some dramatically positioned road works. Screams. Freeze frame. End of episode.

There's also a parallel between this scene in FALCON CREST and what happens to Sue Ellen on DALLAS. Just as Melissa is involved in a car accident after leaving a party so Sue Ellen is hit by a car while shopping for a dress for one (Punk and Mavis’s anniversary celebration). Also like Melissa, Sue Ellen is pregnant — although we don't find that out that until the doctor at Soap Land Memorial announces that she’s miscarried. Cut to JR and Peter both looking stunned. Freeze frame. End of episode.

There’s really only one scene in this week’s YELLOW ROSE that resembles anything we see on the other soaps. On DALLAS, Bobby surprises Jenna's thirteen year old daughter Charlie by buying her a horse while his half-brother Ray looks on benignly. On THE YELLOW ROSE, Roy Champion surprises his twelve year old half-sister LC with an elementary school graduation gift of a locket while their half brother Chance looks on benignly. But whereas Charlie’s outing merely serves as an opportunity for Ray to tell Bobby of his suspicions regarding JR and Edgar Randolph, the theft of LC’s locket by a young Hispanic boy sparks off an entire story-line about child poverty, abuse and exploitation. Running alongside this story is an equally dramatic subplot which culminates in an illegal immigrant giving birth during a deadly shoot out with some crooked cops. All is well by the end of the hour, however, for this is an entirely stand alone episode. From a Soap Land perspective, where we’re used to seeing shows develop away from self-contained instalments towards more episodic storytelling instead of the other way around, it’s tempting to view this as a retrograde step (where the hell is Jane Russell anyhow?) but viewed on its own terms, this is still an absorbing, dramatic and touching ep with some lovely acting. In contrast to the other soaps, its lead characters espouse a belief in the American Dream that is neither cynical nor jingoistic. I guess the difference is that it sides unequivocally with the underdog — immigrants, underprivileged kids — against their exploiters.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

1 (2) FALCON CREST
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) DALLAS
4 (-) THE YELLOW ROSE
5 (5) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.