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

[James from London]

13/Feb/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: The Climax v. 16/Feb/84: KNOTS LANDING: High Ideals v. 17/Feb/84: DALLAS: When the Bough Breaks v. 17/Feb/84: FALCON CREST: The Aftermath v. 18/Feb/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Sport of Kings

There are two clear themes in this week’s Soap Land: miscarriages and missing daughters. On FALCON CREST, Melissa follows DYNASTY’s Kirby and DALLAS’s Sue Ellen to become the third character in as many weeks to lose a child while the families of Leslie Mallory on EMERALD POINT, Olivia Cunningham on KNOTS LANDING and LC Champion on THE YELLOW ROSE each do anxious waiting-by-the-telephone acting after all three girls mysteriously disappear.

“She doesn’t belong here, Bobby. She’s seeing a side of life that's gonna be very tough for her to have to give up.” That's Jenna Wade on DALLAS, worrying about the repercussions for her thirteen-year-old daughter Charlie should her relationship with Bobby break down. It's also the precise situation faced by Abby’s twelve-year-old daughter Olivia on this week’s KNOTS. “It’s her fault!” Olivia sobs, referring to her mother’s break up with Bobby’s brother Gary. "She ruined the best time of my life!"

Olivia is so unhappy that she runs away from home. This is prefaced by a prolonged sequence where we see her walking through the ranch one morning, greeting several of the hands by name, before apparently leaving for school. Instead of getting on the bus, however, she takes off on her own. It’s reminiscent of the early scenes in “Lessons” (DALLAS Season 1) that establish the regular charade Lucy would go through to make everyone believe that she too was on her way to school.

Over the course of the episode, we see Olivia walking across town before finally arriving at her destination, the cul-de-sac where she used to live. As she journeys back to the heart of the show, she encounters various scenarios that seem to represent aspects of KNOTS’ past. There’s a biker gang right out of "Land of the Free” who sound their horns as they drive past her and a homeless vagrant reminiscent of Lilimae during her shopping cart period. There’s also a car that pulls up to the sidewalk where she is walking. We’re too far away to hear any dialogue but the driver appears to beckon Olivia over. She complies but then hastily moves away, suggesting some kind of unsavoury proposition has taken place. While this echoes — albeit vaguely - Annie Fairgate’s false arrest for prostitution back in the KNOTS pilot, it chimes directly with the plot of this week’s YELLOW ROSE. After twelve year old LC Champion is abducted from a racetrack during a family visit to Los Angeles, her family fear that she has fallen prey to sex traffickers. While mother Colleen and brother Roy contact the police and then wait by the phone, her other brother Chance pounds LA’s mean streets looking for answers. These could easily be the same streets walked by Olivia in KNOTS. Chance too meets his share of down at heel characters along the way including a black hooker who calls him honky and a pimp trying to persuade a teenage boy to turn tricks for him.

Like “Dark Journey," the early episode of FALCON CREST where the teenage Vicky Gioberti runs into danger after leaving the confines of Tuscany Valley for the wilds of San Francisco, both THE YELLOW ROSE and KNOTS depict "the outside world" as a place fraught with sexual predators and victims. Like Chase Gioberti in that episode, Chance poses as an out-of-towner with a predilection for underage girls in his bid to locate the missing minor but makes a far less embarrassing job of it. However, by the time LC’s mama has gone undercover as a prostitute most of this ep’s credibility has gone out the window in favour of clunky, issue-based story of the week contrivances. Nevertheless, the regular characters remain three dimensional, their emotions raw and believable.

The Champions’ fears are realised when it is discovered that LC is indeed being held in some sort of sex palace specialising in underage girls. (Seems Olivia Cunningham had a narrow escape.) It's a far cry from the warm and welcoming brothels of DYNASTY and FLAMINGO ROAD’s first seasons. Heck, even Judith Ryland’s New DALLAS whorehouse wasn’t this sordid. The location turns out to be Michael Tyrone’s former house on FLAMINGO ROAD, aka the current exterior of the Carrington mansion on DYNASTY.

While its authentic action scenes have been one of THE YELLOW ROSE’s unique selling points when it comes to LC’s rescue we’re very much in generic TV territory. A locked door opens with one kick, a wooden chair shatters easily over a henchman’s head. (With only four regular characters and no ranch scenes this week, I think it’s safe to assume this episode was largely constructed as a budget-saving exercise.) During the ep’s climax, Roy Champion shoots one of LC’s captors on the very staircase where F’LINGO RD’s Michael Tyrone once memorably engineered his fiancee's discovery of his affair with her own daughter.

This is the second week in a row where Roy pulls a trigger in self-defence. Last week he shot and killed a gun-running border patrol cop. EMERALD POINT’s kidnapped daughter, Ensign Leslie Mallory, does the same thing this week to escape her Russian captor. Where a stoic Roy was quietly counseled by his brother Chance, a wailing Leslie seeks solace from her two equally distressed sisters, the three of them congregating for a loudly emotional group hug.

Back on KNOTS, it’s dark by the time Olivia arrives at Val’s house. The emotional pile up at the end of the episode, with Gary and Abby each arriving separately at Val’s (who herself has been confined to bed due to her pregnancy) is just great. If I remember correctly, this is the first time Abby has stepped foot in Seaview Circle since she and Gary left at the beginning of last season and the ep gives her a moment to look ruefully around the cul-de-sac as if to say, I never thought I’d be back here again.

Try as she might, Abby remains strictly on the back foot throughout this week’s KNOTS. As well as ordering her off his ranch, Gary also freezes his company's assets which puts her at a serious disadvantage with the Wolfbridge Group. Adding insult to injury, Greg has dumped her for Laura and her own children have elected to stay with Gary instead of her. This is by no means the first time Soap Land's villains have received their comeuppance — JR most memorably after his family learned that he had mortgaged Southfork, Alexis when her various schemes caught up with her towards the end of DYNASTY’s second season — but with Abby it feels somehow different, more complicated. Whereas JR’s and Alexis’s Achilles heels were signposted from the outset (his desperate need for Jock’s approval, her unrequited love for Blake) Abby’s is better hidden, even from herself.

When the possibility of Gary finding out about her deceptions has been discussed before, either with Jim Westmont or Laura, Abby has adopted a nonchalant attitude: so what if he divorces her, she'd shrug, there’s always community property. Now that he has found her out and shunned her, one gets a sense that Abby is as surprised as the audience by how much it hurts her: caring so much was never part of her business strategy. This leads to an unexpected outburst in the middle of Val's living room. "Cathy’s at the ranch. You forgave Laura. Did they treat you any better than I did? Why me? Why am I the only one you won’t forgive?" she shouts at Gary. Then in front of Val, Lilimae and Ben, Olivia matter-of-factly informs Abby that Gary plans to divorce her. Angry as she is with her mother, this humiliation isn’t intentional, which somehow makes it worse. However, the episode’s big twist is that its final shot doesn’t land on Abby, or even Gary or Olivia or Val, but on Ben. Throughout the scene, he has been a neutral, silent bystander — right up until the moment where he clocks the emotionally charged look between Val and her ex as Gary walks out the door. It’s a wonderfully surprising yet inevitable, knotty moment. (This week’s DALLAS also ends with an unusual choice for its freeze frame — a tearful Peter Richards.)

There is a feeling of randomness in Soap Land of late. From Kirby’s recent illness that caused her to lose her baby in DYNASTY to Sue Ellen’s car accident that resulted in her miscarriage on DALLAS to the mysterious headaches that send Maggie tumbling down a flight of stairs at the end of this week’s FALCON CREST - these are misfortunes that could befall anyone, not just the rich Colbys, Ewings and Giobertis. Is it not perhaps over-egging the dramatic pudding to inflict these characters with such arbitrary misfortunes in addition to the problems they already face as a result of the dysfunctional families they were born or married into? Given that some of these stories seem more laboured than others, the answer would be yes and no. That LC should be abducted on THE YELLOW ROSE not because her family is wealthy but merely because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time feels as wackily contrived as armed robbers gate-crashing Ginger’s baby shower on KNOTS or Lucy Ewing just happening to hitch a ride with a gun-toting nut-job on DALLAS. Conversely, the arbitrary nature of Sue Ellen’s accident — there was no Walt Driscoll-style avenger at the wheel of the other car this time — combined with the lack of hysteria that follows it gives the Ewings an unexpected credibility. They deal with this minor tragedy in much the same way as a real-life family might. Free of high drama and intrigue, the gap between “them” and “us” suddenly doesn’t seem as wide. In fact, estranged as they are, JR and Sue Ellen have never seemed so authentically married as they do this season.

FALCON CREST, meanwhile, deals with its equivalent car accident/miscarriage storyline in a far more conventionally soapy manner. This is in no way a criticism. In fact this week’s episode is utterly soap-tastic. It acknowledges all the conventions of the genre and then pushes them as far as they can go. Just as Linda and Melissa's car crash cliffhanger at the end of last week’s instalment paralleled Alexis and Fallon’s on DYNASTY two years ago so the similarities continue into this week's episode, only with a neat reversal. This time, it’s pregnant Melissa whom we see flagging down a car for help in the opening scene instead of Alexis while Linda lies unconscious behind the wheel in the same way Fallon did. On their way home from the party at Michael and Terry’s house, Chase, Maggie and Cole happen upon the accident. Cole’s distress at seeing his wife stretchered into an ambulance ensures that Linda remains the dramatic focus of the story. Thus when we later learn of Melissa’s miscarriage, it comes as a surprise in much the same way as the news of Sue Ellen’s did.

By this point, the Giobertis and Channings have gathered at Soap Land Memorial Hospital in their glitzy party clothes in the same way that the Carringtons did after Alexis and Fallon’s crash. In each case, the one person conspicuous by his absence is the father-to-be. On DYNASTY Jeff was in bed with Claudia while Fallon was giving birth to his son; on FALCON CREST Lance is in bed with Terry while Melissa is losing his. While no one on DYNASTY suspected Jeff of infidelity, almost everyone has an idea of what Lance has been up to and with whom. This leads to a terrifically dark scene where Lance returns to Falcon Crest in the early hours to find his grandmother waiting up for him. "The doctor said it would have been a boy” is how Angela breaks the news of the miscarriage to him. This echoes how Adam learned of Kirby’s miscarriage on DYNASTY two weeks ago. “It was a little girl,” the doctor told him. But whereas Blake proved a consoling presence for Adam in his time of need, Angela is icy cold towards Lance. "The only decent thing you have ever done is conceive a child and now it’s gone,” she snaps at him.

I’m not sure Sue Ellen has ever previously seemed more like a three dimensional, real world adult woman as she does in the final scene of this week’s DALLAS when she reduces Peter to tears with the brutal truth that “if the accident hadn’t have happened, I wouldn’t have had that child anyway. I would have aborted it. The pregnancy was a mistake, our relationship is a mistake.” The Sue Ellen we see here isn’t the dithering drama queen she was in Season 4 when she “didn’t have the strength to get dressed” simply because Cliff asked her for a loan. In other words, she isn’t using her miscarriage to play the victim. Her harsh words to Peter are echoed by Melissa on FALCON CREST when she says Lance regarding her miscarriage, “It was your baby. It was a part of you and that's why I'm glad it died.” Yet while FALCON CREST’s is the more melodramatic of the two story-lines, in some ways it’s also the rawest emotionally. And whereas Sue Ellen looks pretty much immaculate throughout her ordeal, even when she’s unconscious in a hospital bed, both Melissa and Linda look like they’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Other comparisons between the two stories: On DALLAS Jenna initially blames herself for Sue Ellen’s accident. “If I hadn’t have had her come to the shop to buy a dress none of this would have happened,” she frets. However, Bobby refuses to let her take responsibility. “There’s no way this is your fault,” he tells her firmly. On FALCON CREST, however, Melissa takes a somewhat different attitude towards Linda. "I lost my baby and I have you to thank for it,” she snarls at her. Meanwhile, Pam and Emma both recall their own miscarriages. “It was terrible, Bobby and I both wanted a baby so badly,” Pam tells Sue Ellen. “It leaves you feeling so empty, so helpless,” Emma tells Lance.

Another recent Soap Land trend: season-long associates finally becoming lovers. A few weeks ago it was JR and Katherine Wentworth on DALLAS. This week, it's Richard and Pamela Lynch on FALCON CREST and Gary and Cathy Geary on KNOTS. In a way, the JR/Katherine and Richard/Pamela relationships are opposites. JR and Katherine’s fling started out as consensual until JR threatened to play a tape of them together to Bobby unless Katherine continue to do his bidding. On FALCON CREST, in an unexpectedly rich and complicated scene, a drunken Richard first tries to force himself on Pamela before apologising, only for her to then tell him, “I want to be with you”. Greg and Laura’s affair on KNOTS LANDING doesn’t quite fit into this category — they haven’t known each other that long — but there's a slightly cynical, we’ve-both-been-around-the-block quality to their relationship that’s similar to Richard and Pamela’s. This week Laura listens non-judgmentally as Greg admits how he sacrificed his idealism in order to advance his political career. Meanwhile, it’s interesting, if unsurprising, that in spite of Cathy being only a couple of years older than Gary’s own daughter Lucy, nothing is made of the age difference between them. Lucy herself, meanwhile, continues to moon over Peter on DALLAS, while he in turn is preoccupied with his older lover Sue Ellen.

All this and Soap Land’s wackiest dream sequence to date, as Julia “wakes up” in the FALCON CREST asylum to find herself surrounded by multiple Angelas. “You’re never gonna escape me, Julia,” the Angelas tells her, “not in this life."

And this week’s Top 5 are …

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

 

[James from London]

22/Feb/84: DYNASTY: The Accident v. 23/Feb/84: KNOTS LANDING: No Trumpets, No Drums v. 24/Feb/84: DALLAS: True Confessions v. 24/Feb/84: FALCON CREST: Tests Of Faith v. 25/Feb/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Running Free

Each of Soap Land’s working girls - DYNASTY’s Tracy Kendall, FALCON CREST’s Terry Hartford, KNOTS LANDING’s Cathy Geary and DALLAS’s Jenna Wade - is visited by a figure from her past this week. First to arrive is “ageing but still attractive boy reporter” Jeremy Thatcher, an old flame of Tracy’s from New York, whom she persuades to write a magazine article discrediting Krystle as “the spoiled wife of a tycoon playing at being a career lady”.

Then the newfound happiness of both Cathy and Gary on KNOTS and Jenna and Bobby on DALLAS is cut short by the intrusion of an ex-husband. Whereas Naldo Marchetta introduces himself to Bobby in the elegant surroundings of the Oil Baron’s Club and apologises profusely for interrupting his and Jenna’s lunch, Gary’s first meeting with Ray Geary is less civilised — he walks in on him trying to rape Cathy. While Naldo remains charming and courteous throughout his ep ("You have always had such marvellous taste,” he tells Jenna on a visit to her apartment), Ray Geary refers to his former wife as “nothing but a two-bit whore trying to take some guy for all he's worth.”

Gary and Ray come to blows at the ranch, the fight ending with Gary holding Ray face down in the mud. It’s an exciting set piece but is eclipsed by a violent confrontation on this week’s FALCON CREST. Lance is lying in wait for Richard in an underground parking lot. "Everything up at Falcon Crest," he tells him, "my grandmother's loss of power, Melissa's loss of my baby, my mother's loss of her mind, it's all because of you. You have destroyed our entire way of life." Richard's chauffeur-cum-bodyguard comes to the rescue, but Lance overpowers him. Richard pulls out a gun. Lance kicks it away and they have a cool fight. Richard’s security team appear and slam Lance's fingers in a car door. Richard then punches him in the stomach. "You want revenge, do you?” he snarls. "You don't even know the meaning of the word. You, you disgust me, your whole family disgust me, and I won't rest until you and your family are through! Do you hear me, boy? Finished! Can that get through that vacant head of yours? ... Dump him on his grandmother's front porch." Again the viciousness of the scene feels specific to FALCON CREST - Richard and Lance are equally important characters who co-exist in the same opening title sequence yet it feels as if neither would hesitate to kill the other if necessary. That kind of cold-bloodedness doesn’t really exist on any of the other soaps.

Naldo Marchetta may be too suave to resort to violence but he does wield a weapon in this week’s DALLAS - Charlie’s birth certificate, which reveals that Jenna lied about Bobby being her father. Likewise on FALCON CREST, Terry’s former prostitute pal Kate Mars (recently seen making snarky comments about Peter and Sue Ellen’s relationship in that taco shop on DALLAS) also arrives from New York equipped with a smoking gun - Terry's little black book. "All the guys' specialities are listed after their phone numbers,” she explains as she hands the book over to Terry’s boyfriend Michael.

For Bobby and Michael, the truth about Charlie’s paternity and Terry’s former profession is less of an issue than the fact that they’ve been lied to. “What bothers me, Jenna, is that you just kept leading me on," says Bobby. “You’re either a pathological liar or I’m a pathological fool," Michael tells Terry. "Everything else is a lie ... All I ever wanted was a chance at the truth.” “I know how much the truth means to you, how important it’s been to you all your life,” Jenna tells Bobby - a line that, as Dallas Decoder points out in his recent critique of this DALLAS ep, takes on added significance following the cover-up of JR’s death on New DALLAS. http://dallasdecoder.com/2014/12/03/critique-dallas-episode-152-true-confessions/

When Cathy offers Ray $5,000 to leave town on KNOTS, he is unimpressed. When Angela Channing offers Kate Mars the same amount to wreck Michael and Terry’s romance she takes it. Naldo accepts an undisclosed amount from Katherine Wentworth for doing the same thing to Bobby and Jenna’s relationship, despite a brief crisis of conscience (“I didn’t say I was noble, I just know what I am.”) Over on DYNASTY, Peter de Vilbis absconds with $1,000,000 belonging to Blake Carrington. Will Sue Ellen’s Peter disappear just as easily? Not if Lucy’s got anything to do with it. This week, she offers him a modelling job (“I know you could use the money”). He isn’t interested — until Lucy mentions the shoot is going to be at Southfork.

As one piece of sleazy Eurotrash departs Soap Land (Peter de Vilbis) another arrives (Naldo Marchetta). The two men have a lot in common. Each comes from an aristocratic background (Naldo has been referred to as a count, Peter told Fallon his mother was a countess) yet both now travel the globe living off rich divorcees and heiresses. We learn this week that neither man is exactly the paternal type. Jenna explains to Bobby that even though Naldo is Charlie’s father, he "couldn’t care less about children” which is why she put Bobby’s name on the birth certificate in the first place. Meanwhile, Alexis tells Fallon that Peter ordered his former fiancee, Princess Marie Elena, to abort his child because “he didn’t want children … She refused so he dumped her.” Naldo and Peter even share the same fashion sense, both favouring the blazer-and-cravat-with-swept-back-hair look.

As Naldo’s revelation drives a wedge between Bobby and Jenna, Bobby’s brother Gary remains separated from his wife Abby. Both Ewing men, however, continue to make time for their respective partner’s daughter. Whereas Charlie Wade, a babyish thirteen year old, remains oblivious to the drama going on around her (“You’re everything I’d ever want in a daddy,” she tells Bobby dreamily, “all you have to do is marry Mommy”) a wise-beyond-her-twelve-years Olivia is all too aware of the estrangement between her mother and Gary. (“How many fathers am I going to have?” she asks Abby. “I hate you!” she yells at Gary after catching him with Cathy.) Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, little Joseph is too young to understand that he is caught in a power struggle between Melissa and Angela. “He’ll never come to you,” Melissa insists. “All little boys are drawn to power,” replies Angela chillingly. “Lance was and Joseph will be too.” This gets my vote for Line of the Week, ahead of JR’s well known “once you give up integrity, the rest is a piece of cake” quip, which is a little too knowing for my taste.

Melissa is the only recently bereaved mother-to-be to feature prominently in this week’s Soap Land. Kirby and Sue Ellen make brief appearances early on in their respective episodes before spending the rest of the hour recuperating off screen. Meanwhile, as if to compensate for all the recent baby loss, Val discovers she is expecting twins on KNOTS.

Given the extremely delicate — if not taboo — subject matter, it’s somewhat ironic that Edgar Randolph’s child molestation secret should come to light on DALLAS just one week after THE YELLOW ROSE’s episode about child prostitution. While the YELLOW ROSE story took place on LA’s mean streets, DALLAS’s unfolds amidst the dappled sunlight and pretty houses of small town Maryland. Whereas all the previous sexual predators we've seen targeting young girls in Soap Land (LC’s abductors and Olivia’s kerb crawler in last week’s YELLOW ROSE and KNOTS, Vicky’s would be pornographer in FALCON CREST Season 1) were situated “out there” on the big city streets, on DALLAS they’re living in fancy houses in respectable neighbourhoods. And in place of the tough-talking hookers and slimy pimps encountered by the Champions last week, the Krebbses meet an eccentric gardener and a cheerily domestic retiree, Sarah Mulgravy, who is transformed by rage at the mention of Edgar’s name: “Oh Lord! Why didn’t I have a gun in my hand when I went into that room?!” Sarah feels to me like a forerunner of Carmen Ramos on New DALLAS - both are housekeepers who come to bitterly regret their blind devotion to the rich families they served and the subsequent damage done to their children. Certainly, Sarah is Soap Land's most memorable one-scene character since Ciji’s mother on KNOTS.

Through their investigation, Ray and Donna come to learn that Edgar’s recent unstable behaviour (i.e., his suicide attempt) stems from his molestation of a little girl when he was a troubled teenager. Likewise on DYNASTY, Blake finally discovers that Adam’s recent unstable behaviour (i.e., his poisoning of Jeff) stems from the drugs he experimented with as a troubled teenager. "Edgar was a very confused adolescent. He had no real experience of anything,” explains victim-turned-psychologist Barbara Mulgravy. "He was a very lonely boy. He had no real family, no real friends,” explains Adam’s mother Alexis.

For both DYNASTY’s Dex and KNOTS LANDING’s Ben, the shadow of their respective lady love’s ex-husband looms large this week. On DYNASTY a new understanding is forged between Blake and Alexis following Adam’s confession, while the look he witnessed between Gary and Val at the end of last week’s KNOTS continues to weigh on Ben’s mind. At Mack’s urging, he tries to raise the subject with Val before leaving on his assignment to El Salvador, but cannot bring himself to say the words. In contrast, when Alexis turns down his marriage proposal, Dex has no hesitation in accusing her of being hung up on “your ex-husband whom you can't seem to get out of your head or your life or your heart!” Mark Graison might feel the same way about Pam and Bobby if he knew that they were having pre-dinner drinks together at Southfork. However, he has left the country in order to give Pam time to think about his marriage proposal. (In Mark's absence, it’s left to JR to voice his disapproval, somewhat amusingly, when he sees Pam at the ranch: "Say, weren't you here a couple of months ago? You're not gonna make a habit out of this, are you?”) Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, Phillip Erickson angrily resigns as Angela’s attorney when she does an Alexis and declines his offer of marriage.

While Ben bids a tender farewell to his fiancee Val before departing for Central America, Peter de Vilbis leaves for an unknown destination without a word to his. "Peter found you beautiful and amusing,” his lawyer informs Fallon, “and now he’s had to leave … He doesn't want to see you again.” “The minute [Ben] walked out the door, I started to crumble,” Val admits to Karen. The moment Fallon leaves the lawyer's hotel room, she starts hearing the voices of those Carringtons and Colbys who previously warned her against Peter. (However, disembodied voices are nothing to the trippy effect FALCON CREST uses to indicate Julia’s unhinged state of mind this week. Looking at herself in the mirror, she puts out her hand to touch her reflection and it bends.)

Following on from Sue Ellen and Melissa’s recent car accidents on DALLAS and FALCON CREST, this week’s DYNASTY and KNOTS also end with vehicular collisions, both of which technically take place off screen. Firstly, just after being jilted by Peter, Fallon gets into an argument with Jeff in the driveway of La Mirage. A drunk driver (I like to imagine it’s the same guy that knocked down Sue Ellen two weeks ago and that he's since hit all the bars in Soap Land to get over the shock) ploughs into one or both of them. (The camera is on Blake’s dismayed reaction during the moment of impact.) Meanwhile, KNOTS ends with Val taking a phone call about Ben, not dissimilar to those received by Miss Ellie and Claudia Blaisdel regarding their husbands two seasons earlier. “Their jeep was hit,” she tells Karen and Lilimae after hanging up. "The jeep’s been found but none of the men.” Have the jungles of Soap Land claimed yet another victim? Nor are Ben, Jeff and Fallon the only characters left in mortal jeopardy at the end of this week’s episodes - FALCON CREST concludes with Maggie learning that she has a brain tumour. “It’s inoperable,” Dr Michael tells her gravely.

Horses have been an element of several Soap Land story-lines this season. As well as the day to day ranch life which serves as a backdrop to much of the action on DALLAS, KNOTS and THE YELLOW ROSE, there’s the ongoing saga of Richard’s racetrack on FALCON CREST, the purchase and apparent kidnapping of racehorse Allegree on DYNASTY and a recent visit to the races on EMERALD POINT which seemed to trigger Casey Denault’s latent gambling addiction. However, the beautiful white stallion we see running across an oil drilling site in the opening scene of this week’s YELLOW ROSE and who then becomes the primary focus of the ep is the first Soap Land horse that’s an actual character. “It’s funny how everyone feels a little different when they see a horse running free,” observes Roy Champion and indeed the wild animal comes to represent different things for each of the show’s regular (human) characters. (And it’s not hard to draw a parallel between the stallion’s need for freedom and Julia’s implausible but exciting escape from a maximum security institution on this week’s FALCON CREST.) It’s a sweet and poetic ep that has very little do with conventional soap opera until the climax of the episode when several characters independently arrive at the same location, all with different intentions, resulting in a tragic shooting. In that respect, it strongly anticipates the KNOTS LANDING season finale in five weeks time.

THE YELLOW ROSE does contain one other classic soap moment this week: the Champions striking oil on their own ranch, thereby saving themselves from financial ruin at the eleventh hour. We’ve seen variations on this scenario before — Matthew and Walter’s well coming in towards the end of DYNASTY’s first season, the Ewings hitting it big in South East Asia during DALLAS’s second — while John Ross and Elena’s discovery of oil on Southfork will later be deemed significant enough to reignite the entire Ewing saga on New DALLAS. On this show, however, the iconic moment occurs when all but one member of the family are too preoccupied by the story of the week to even notice. Such absolute refusal to abide by Soap Land norms is quintessential YELLOW ROSE.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

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

 

[James from London]

05/Mar/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: Pandora’s Box v 07/Mar/84: DYNASTY: Steps v. 08/Mar/84: KNOTS LANDING: Finishing Touches v. 09/Mar/84: DALLAS: Fools Rush In v. 09/Mar/84: FALCON CREST: Little Boy Blue v. 10/Mar/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Sacred Ground

With characteristic perversity, this week’s YELLOW ROSE blows half a season’s worth of cliffhangers in its opening scene: Rose Hollister (Jane Russell) arrives unannounced at the house of her despised brother Jeb whom she hasn’t seen for forty years, informs him that she is Chance McKenzie’s real mother, that Chance is in line to inherit half the Hollister fortune and that she has incontrovertible proof that Jeb murdered their father. Jeb then spends the rest of the episode trying to kill her.

There’s another decades-old murder revelation on DYNASTY as Alexis informs Kirby that the mother she always believed died when she was two years old in fact ran off with her lover "and when he didn’t satisfy her anymore, she killed him.”

A third violent crime involving a long-dead parent is unearthed on EMERALD POINT where Celia, in Soap Land’s first hypnotherapy session since Dr Elby put Sue Ellen under the influence so that she could relive the events leading up to the shooting of JR, travels back to her tenth birthday and a mysteriously traumatic event involving her mother and a strange man in a gazebo. Her mother's screams and torn clothing are familiar Soap Land signifiers of rape but Celia comes out of her trance before the man’s identity can be revealed (though it isn’t hard to guess). Her wildly overwrought response to her childhood memories made me laugh out loud. In contrast, Val’s equally hysterical reaction to the news of Gary’s death in the opening scene of this week’s KNOTS LANDING never fails to chill me, in spite of several viewings and the advanced knowledge that things aren’t quite as terminal as they seem. This is in part due to Joan van Ark’s performance of course, but also how the scene is shot (we observe Val's break down from a distance) and the way her raw emotions are set against the strangely matter-of-fact behaviour of everyone else around her. (Mack even cracks a little joke to Karen when he speaks to her on the phone.) Directed by David Jacobs, this is one of those exceptional episodes of KNOTS where close attention has been paid to every detail.

As the body bag containing Gary’s corpse indicates, ranches can be dangerous places. Similarly, on EMERALD POINT, bad girl Hilary pulls an Alexis and arranges a horse-related miscarriage for good girl Kay in her father's stables. In both instances, there is a twist: the body in the bag is not Gary’s and Kay was never pregnant in the first place. However, there is nothing fake about the two dead bodies on THE YELLOW ROSE this week, casualties of yet another shoot out on that ranch.

Random trend of the week: Mothers trying to prevent their children from falling in water. A paralysed Fallon is convalescing poolside on the grounds of the DYNASTY mansion (last seen masquerading as a Paedophile paradise on THE YELLOW ROSE) when Little Blake wanders dangerously close to the water’s edge. Her mother’s instinct kicks in as she instinctively rushes to save him, regaining the use of her legs in the process. Meanwhile, on KNOTS LANDING, Abby finds Olivia in a rowboat on the lake of Gary’s ranch. Distraught over her stepfather’s death, Olivia stands up in the boat, loses her balance and falls into the water. Abby jumps in fully clothed to help her. There are echoes of Pam and Ray in the lake in the DALLAS pilot, only this time Olivia and Abby end up crying instead of laughing.

On this week's DALLAS, Charlie Wade follows the example set by Olivia after Gary and Abby’s split a few weeks ago. Where Olivia skipped school to walk from Gary’s ranch to the cul-de-sac, Charlie independently catches a bus from her school to the Ewing building to ask Bobby whether she is to blame for his break up with Jenna.

Who-should-attend-which-function is a topic discussed on four of this week’s soaps. On EMERALD POINT, Octopussy follows Soap Land convention by insisting that Admiral Mallory’s treasonous sister-in-law Tiffany Case be invited to their wedding for the sake of family unity. For the same reason, DYNASTY's Blake invites arch enemy Alexis to a formal dinner at the mansion to celebrate Fallon’s recovery. Surprisingly, Alexis declines the offer. ("The last time I saw Fallon at the hospital, she made it clear that she didn't want to see me.”) Greg Sumner also decides against attending Gary’s funeral on KNOTS. (“I’m not very good at funerals. I never know what to say.”) Equally conspicuous by their absence at the burial are any of the DALLAS Ewings. Mark St Clare, however, is an unexpected attendee, arriving at a crucial moment — just as Abby is about to spill all to Mack about her involvement with the Wolfbridge Group. The sight of St Clare is enough to intimidate her into remaining silent.

There are no such formal occasions on DALLAS this week (although Clayton twitches nervously when Miss Ellie cheerfully informs him that she’s invited his sister Jessica to stay at Southfork prior to their wedding: “What better way to find out all your deep dark secrets?") but Peter Richards does accept an offer from JR to work with John Ross at Southfork. “My my my, there goes the neighbourhood!” jokes Lucy in her only Soap Land appearance of the week in which her father is buried on KNOTS. JR does at least pay tribute to his “late” brother, albeit ironically when he refers him on DALLAS as “my brother Gary, who I’m particularly fond of”.

DYNASTY’s Alexis and KNOTS LANDING's Abby both display uncharacteristic vulnerability this week. While the rest of the Carringtons and Colbys gather for Fallon’s party, Dex finds Alexis alone in her apartment having had "a lot too much" to drink. He urges her to call Fallon and make amends. She picks up the phone but then cannot bring herself to go through with it. (“I can’t, I can’t!” she cries.) It’s a long time since Alexis has seemed so identifiably human. Indeed, when she talks about her relationship with Fallon ("We've never been really close. Maybe it's because we're alike in so many ways. We've tried. She's tried and so have I, but it's never lasted”) she sounds a lot like KNOTS LANDING Everywoman Karen Mackenzie describing her problems with Diana.

Abby, meanwhile, struggles to keep her emotions in check following the news of Gary’s murder. When Val pays her a visit and attempts to reach out to her, it looks as if a cessation of hostilities is about to take place, as occasionally happens in Soap Land between two female rivals (the brief moment of understanding between Pam and Sue Ellen after their husbands’ plane went down in DALLAS Season 1; Alexis’s fleeting gratitude towards Krystle when she brought her the news that Steven was still alive in DYNASTY Season 3). But Abby refuses to let Val in. "I won't let you share my pain,” she tells her coldly (echoing her niece Diana's equally defiant “I cherish the pain” line from earlier in the season). “I’m his widow, not you,” she adds. This is not mere Soap Land bitchery, it runs deeper than that somehow.

Ironically, when Abby does let her guard down to express her feelings about Gary, it is to Mark St Clare of all people — a man as far removed from Val on the emotional scale as it’s possible to get. "He counted in my life,” says Abby of Gary. "I don't care that he counted,” St Clare replies. "I don't care that he's dead. I have no sympathy for you.” At least when Alexis cries for her daughter on DYNASTY, she has Dex to comfort her. But while there’s no rapprochement between Abby and Val, there is one between Abby and Karen at Gary’s funeral, when Karen reminds Abby that “we’re family” and Abby tells her how helpful Diana has been with all the arrangements. “She loves her Aunt Abby,” Karen replies. “She loves her mother too,” adds Abby with surprising generosity.

In an effort to console Val at the funeral, Laura tells her the real reason Gary stood her up on their date at the beginning of the season was to spare her any more pain. “He married Abby not because he loved Abby, but because he loved you,” she explains. With equally good intentions, Sue Ellen informs Bobby on this week’s DALLAS that Pam “has decided not to marry Mark Graison … because of the way she still feels about you.” However, if Laura and Sue Ellen were in possession of the facts shown to us at the end of this week’s KNOTS and DALLAS — that Gary Ewing is alive and Mark Graison is dying — it is unlikely they would have shared these confidences with Val and Bobby.

The reveal of Gary alive and well in the final moments of this week’s ep echoes the reveal of Ciji drowned and dead thirteen months earlier. Instead of those quick, jarring cuts to Ciji’s washed up body on the shore during Ginger’s song, there are sudden, fleeting close-ups of Gary’s face during the funeral ceremony. Is this Abby flashing back to her dead husband? Or Val? It gradually becomes clear that no, this is happening now: As his funeral is taking place on the ranch, Gary is simultaneously alive somewhere else. Not only that but after spending the past hour focusing on the contrasting reactions of Abby and Val to his passing, the episode now ends with him happily kissing that other formerly dead character, Ciji/Cathy/Lisa Hartman!

Two enjoyably unsympathetic characters return to the Ewing-verse this week: grouchy cop Morrison is back on KNOTS after a few months while slimy banker Vaughn Leland returns to DALLAS after a few seasons. Each made a sufficient enough impact the first time around for Diana Fairgate and Afton Cooper to recoil at the mere sight of them. However, both comebacks contain a last minute twist. After playing the heavy towards Cathy Geary for the entire ep, Morrison and she turn out to be part of the same conspiracy and when he hauls her off for questioning at the funeral, he is in effect playing cupid for her and Gary. Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Vaughn Leland appears to be the answer to Cliff’s prayers, offering him the loan that he so desperately needs … but then we learn it’s all a part of JR's elaborate scheme to bring Cliff to his knees. “I always thought I’d be back on this ranch someday,” sighs Morrison, “Not in my wildest imagination did I ever dream you and I would be working together again,” Vaughn smirks to JR.

Like Gary on KNOTS, Kirby’s mother on DYNASTY turns out not to be as dead as was originally thought. According to Alexis, she’s in a similar sounding institution for the criminally insane to the one Julia Cumson recently escaped from on FALCON CREST. This week, a bewigged Julia navigates the same familiar cross-country landscape of gas stations, diners and roadblocks that Chip and Diana did when they were on the lam at the beginning of this season’s KNOTS. While on her travels, Julia manages to find a guy both trusting enough to swallow her down-on-her-luck sob story and kind enough to offer her refuge on his conveniently secluded ranch. However implausible this story-line may be, there’s something very satisfying about it. Julia might be an unhinged murderess but we’re definitely rooting for her to prevail.

Meanwhile, no one's quite sure how dead KNOTS LANDING’s Ben and DYNASTY’s Matthew Blaisdel are supposed to be. Both are lost in the jungles of Soap Land. "I'd go there myself if I thought it would help,” insists an unnamed government official on KNOTS to whom Karen has been unnecessarily harsh — and we believe him. (In this episode, even the bit players — like this guy and the never-before-seen cowboys who commiserate with Cathy at the funeral — are given a significant emotional beat.) At the end of this week’s DYNASTY, meanwhile, Claudia decides that she will go to Peru, after receiving yet another package from a beyond-the-grave Matthew.

Eventually, viewers at home are granted a glimpse of Ben in this week’s KNOTS, alive and delirious in some sort of makeshift hospital in Central America. Ben’s DALLAS equivalent Mark Graison also makes a brief overseas appearance, calling Cliff from the Middle East and complaining of a bug.

Where last week’s FALCON CREST ended with the news of Maggie Gioberti’s inoperable brain tumour so this week’s DALLAS finishes with the revelation of Mark’s irreversible blood disease, “a form of leukaemia”. In each case, there’s an only-in-Soap-Land breach of medical ethics. While Mark’s doctor (aka Abby Ewing’s first husband) breaks the bad news to Pam as gently as he can, (“Mark’s gonna need all the love you can give him in the next few months …”) FALCON CREST’s Dr Michael tells Terry about Maggie’s condition in the coldest way possible. "Your sister's dying,” he says without even looking at her. "She's got a tumour in her brain the size of a golf ball.” There’s also a terminally ill character in this week’s YELLOW ROSE. Shortly after introducing herself to Chase, the son she never knew, Rose Hollister also tells him she is dying of cancer. This plot point becomes somewhat moot when brother Jeb succeeds in having her shot dead before the end of the episode.

Following a fantastic, almost biblical showdown between Jeb and Chase, Jeb is arrested for murder by the very sheriff he has had in his pocket since the series began. This really feels like the end of THE YELLOW ROSE. God knows where it'll go from here.

Elsewhere, Angela Channing forces Melissa to trade her infant son to the Giobertis for half of Falcon Crest. I’m not sure how much logical sense this all makes, but it certainly feels like a momentous chapter in FALCON CREST history — more in keeping with "mythological” Soap Land baby losses like JR's snatching of Lucy away from Val or Jacqueline Perrault's sale of Richard to Henri Denault or Rose Hollister's loss of her son Chance than the comparatively lightweight occasions when Sammy Jo and Rita Briggs tried to sell their offspring on screen. That Angela can comprehend the awful price Melissa is paying yet does nothing to stop it simply because it is not in her own interest is what really sells the scene and gives it its power.

And this week’s Top 6 are …

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

 

[James from London]

12/Mar/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: The Wedding v 14/Mar/84: DYNASTY: The Voice (1) v. 16/Mar/84: DALLAS: The Unexpected v. 16/Mar/84: FALCON CREST: The Gathering Storm v. 17/Mar/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Debt of Honor

A wedding jeopardised by a violent maniac, a missing bride-to-be, an abandoned wedding dress - the final moments of EMERALD POINT anticipate plot elements still to come on this season’s DYNASTY, DALLAS and FALCON CREST. Certainly, EMERALD POINT rallies sufficiently at the end of its run for one to wonder what would have happened next. As classic last words of a season go, “You raped my sister!” is right up there with “My God, that’s my mother!” and “She’s dead, you bastard!"

A week after Gary was resurrected during his own funeral on KNOTS LANDING, the line between Soap Land life and death becomes increasingly blurred. At her father’s wedding on EMERALD POINT Celia sees her long dead mother being attacked by Harlan Adams, while on DYNASTY, Claudia hears her long dead husband’s voice over the phone. Both women then faint with shock. As Steven and Krystle rush to Claudia’s side in time for the freeze frame, Celia is attended to by a doctor who on closer inspection turns out to be … sinister cartel henchman Spheeris from FALCON CREST using a fake American accent! Before he can be exposed, he whips off his stethoscope and scuttles back to the Tuscany Valley in time for a James Bondian casino sequence where he violently threatens Pamela Lynch while her lover and boss Richard Channing is busy winning at the baccarat table.

There’s more gambling action in the opening scene of this week’s YELLOW ROSE which takes place in the kind of Vegas casino hotel where Bobby Ewing ran into brother Gary back in “Reunion” (DALLAS Season 1). In fact this week’s ROSE is a fascinating amalgamation of three stand alone episodes from early DALLAS, while also serving as a clear example of what sets THE YELLOW ROSE apart from its Soap Land contemporaries.

Like “Reunion”, the focus of the ep is the family black sheep, Trey Champion. However, Trey hasn’t managed to lick his gambling problem the way Gary did and he’s $35,000 in the red. This prompts his visit to the family ranch for the first time in several years (imagine if Gary had ever shown up at Southfork while in the throes of addiction). Acting like the successful rodeo star he once was, he tries to sucker big brother Roy into investing in a nonexistent shopping complex in order to clear his debts - it’s as if Bobby’s old college football hero Guzzler Bennett from “Fallen Idol” were masquerading as Dusty Farlow. However, Roy doesn’t have Trey on a pedestal the way Bobby did Guzzler. That role is taken by Roy’s son Whit instead.

Whit turns eighteen in this episode, just like Lucy Ewing did in “Runaway”, and is as frustrated by his father's reluctance to let him leave the Rose to join the rodeo circuit as Lucy was by her granddaddy's refusal to allow her to pursue her dreams of becoming a singer or invite Val to her birthday party. Adding to the sense of familiarity, Trey Champion is played by the same actor as Willie, the unhinged robber who picked up the hitchhiking Lucy in “Runaway”. A streak of Willie's manic self destruction runs through Trey’s character too (in his first scene, we see him put a gun to his head), but is mostly concealed behind a veneer of success. Where Willie gave Lucy a ride in his van, Trey lets Whit drive his Ferrari. Where Willie took Lucy hostage and held her at gunpoint, Trey inadvertently endangers Whit when two thugs from Vegas show up and threaten to hurt Whit unless Trey settle his gambling debts. (There’s an equivalent scene in EMERALD POINT this week where two mean guys rough up Casey Denault and make threats against his wife unless he pay off the losses he sustained at the race track.)

Just as Willie used Lucy singing in a bar as a distraction for an armed robbery, Trey contemplates a similar crime during a local rodeo in which Whit is competing. The main difference is that while Willie was jeopardising Lucy’s safety for his own ends, Trey is prepared to risk his own neck to save his nephew. For all his demons, Trey’s sense of decency ultimately prevails. And that kind of achingly heartfelt sincerity — always hard won and real, never maudlin or mawkish — is one of the qualities unique to THE YELLOW ROSE. While the other soaps more than deliver on cheap thrills (which aren't to be sniffed at) — characters are rarely depicted flippantly on THE ROSE. It may not always give you what you want, but it'll give you what you need.

There's also the richness of its dialogue to savour. Old time ranch hand Luther Dillard recalls Trey as “always lookin’ down the road farther than he could see”, while Trey himself explains his weakness for gambling thusly: “The turn of a card was as good to me as a good bucking horse or a pretty woman on a cold motel morning”.

Trey’s departing scene at the end of the episode has an open-ended poignancy similar to Guzzler’s on “Fallen Idol” and Gary’s on “Reunion”, but is ultimately more optimistic and even more touching than either. In fact I’d go so far as to say it’s a thing of beauty.

At the other end of the Soap Land scale, following Vaughn Leland’s comeback on last week's DALLAS, another amusing adversary returns to DYNASTY this week, heralded by a Middle Eastern flourish on the soundtrack. Yes, the outrageous Rashid Ahmed is back! Rashid’s dialogue is gloriously nonsensical: "It has been said that the greatest cuisines of the civilised world are Chinese and Italian," he informs a bemused Blake. "So it is appropriate that we two gourmets, gourmets in power that is, met first in Rome and now in Hong Kong!” Both Vaughn Leland and Rashid are the focus of somewhat improbable business story-lines this week. Should Cliff Barnes accept a too-good-to-be-true loan for his offshore drilling venture from Vaughn’s bank without insisting he first define the term "acceptable collateral"? Should Blake enter a top secret deal for the China Sea oil leases with someone as notoriously untrustworthy as Rashid? Probably not, but both story-lines are sufficiently entertaining for us to happily go along for the ride.

After a discussion with his financial adviser, Cliff meets with Vaughn at the Oil Baron’s Club to define the terms of the loan agreement. Just as they are reaching the crux of the matter, they are interrupted by JR, who has pre-arranged with Vaughn to stop by their table: "What a combination — the crook from Houston sitting down with the incompetent from Dallas," he observes before warning Vaughn against doing business with Cliff. Lest Vaughn be scared off, Cliff signs the loan agreement there and then, ambivalent wording and all. Back on DYNASTY, Adam takes a confidential business call from Blake while in Alexis's office and makes a note of his orders on her phone pad, conveniently writing the words "RASHID AHMED LEASES” so heavily that once he has gone, Alexis is able to decipher the indentation on the page underneath with ease. Both plots hinge on these absurd contrivances yet somehow succeed as much because as in spite of them. In each case, the implausibilities are part of the pleasure.

Of Soap Land’s four working girls, DYNASTY’s Tracy has seemingly played the smartest game thus far this season, keeping her cards close to her chest in terms what she’s really after, while the past secrets of FALCON CREST’s Terry, DALLAS’s Jenna and KNOTS LANDING’s Cathy have all caught up with them, jeopardising their relationships in the present. While deputising for Krystle on a business trip to Hong Kong this week, however, Tracy badly overplays her hand, making a pass at Blake so embarrassingly clumsy I can only watch it through my fingers. Meanwhile, Gary, Bobby and Dr Michael have each forgiven Cathy, Jenna and Terry their respective sins. Bobby even has a confession of his own for Jenna in this week’s DALLAS: “Pam’s still got a hold on me and I don’t know when or if I’m gonna feel any different about her than I do right now.” This echoes the admission Val made about her Ewing ex, Gary, on last week’s KNOTS: "This house has never been without him because I've never been without him and I know now I never will.”

Krystle learns she’s pregnant on this week’s DYNASTY, her previous inability to have a baby now modified to a “[the doctor] said that if I were careful and didn't do things to excess that I had a chance”, in the much same way that Maggie's brain tumour on FALCON CREST has been downgraded from "inoperable" to "surgery extremely dangerous”. Joining Maggie’s tumour and Mark Graison’s leukaemia on DALLAS are Fallon’s unexplained headaches on DYNASTY which she keeps secret from her family just like Pam Ewing conceals Mark’s illness from her loved ones — including Mark himself.

While Blake showers Krystle with gifts to celebrate her pregnancy (a sable coat, a Rolls Royce and chauffeur, a necklace) before setting off for Hong Kong, Mark returns from the Middle East also bearing gifts, pearls for Pam. The words he uses as he puts them round her neck — "I detoured five thousand miles and had six divers diving for these because I’m extraordinarily wealthy and very handsome” — sound very much like the boast made by Dex Dexter when he returned from Australia with a similarly impressive piece of jewellery for Alexis earlier in the season: "I spent most of my time searching for the one thing on this earth that comes closest to matching you - this.” But where Dex’s declaration was unequivocal in its macho confidence, Mark’s is laced with self-deprecating humour and anxiety as he awaits Pam’s response to his marriage proposal. “The answer’s yes, Mark,” she tells him. “Yes, I will marry you.”

Towards the end of this week’s DALLAS, Clayton’s sister Jessica arrives at Southfork for his wedding to Miss Ellie. Played by another statuesque Hollywood veteran with a salty no-nonsense demeanour ("Please, don't 'Lady Montford' me to death ... Folks used to say I rassled mountain lions down in San Angelo”), she makes a fitting replacement for Rose Hollister, killed off in last week’s YELLOW ROSE. It’s only when she’s alone at the end of the episode that we realise Jessica has a sinister secret agenda. “I wouldn’t count on your marrying brother Clayton, Miss Ellie,” she scowls into thin air. “I wouldn’t count on it at all.” Who knows? Maybe she’ll take a leaf out of psycho David’s book on EMERALD POINT and kidnap the bride just before the wedding. Nah, that’ll never happen.

FALCON CREST, meanwhile, concludes with a hospital scene. Two weeks after Fallon awoke from her coma on DYNASTY with an anguished cry of “Oh my God, I can’t move my legs!”, it’s now Maggie’s turn: “Oh God, I can’t see!”

And this week’s Top 5 are …

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

 

[James from London]

21/Mar/84: DYNASTY: The Voice (2) v. 22/Mar/84: KNOTS LANDING: Yesterday, It Rained v. 23/Mar/84: DALLAS: Strange Alliance v. 23/Mar/84: FALCON CREST: The Final Countdown v. 24/Mar/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Chains of Fear

There’s an awful lot of business talk in this week’s Soap Land, much of it hard to keep track of. From what I could glean, Blake Carrington is “half way to the hundred million he needs” to finance his deal with Rashid Ahmed on DYNASTY, Richard Channing requires another $30,000,000 to complete his race track on FALCON CREST, and after telling anyone on DALLAS who’ll listen how much operations in the Gulf are costing him, Cliff Barnes feels it’s time to ask friendly neighbourhood banker Vaughn Leland for some more money.

However, in each case, there is a saboteur working behind the scenes. Richard doesn’t realise his bank loan has been blocked by the cartel, Cliff has no idea his loan is in the hands of JR (“I’m gonna take over his precious Gold Canyon 340 and then it’ll all be over, it’ll all be mine”) and as Blake congratulates himself on pulling off “the deal of the century” in Denver, he is blissfully unaware that Alexis is meeting with Rashid in Hong Kong to talk about a scheme involving "you and me and Blake Carrington — and $5,000,000”.

Things are sort of reversed on KNOTS LANDING where the bad guys are only too keen for Abby to get back into business now that Gary’s dead. There again, as Mack points out to Abby, “They need you now. They need Lotus Point completed. What makes you think, sweetheart, that you’re going to be around to share in it?"

The dark secrets of three of Soap Land’s four working girls — Terry’s prostitute past on FALCON CREST, Jenna’s birth certificate lie on DALLAS and Cathy’s prison term for murder plus her private arrangement with Abby on KNOTS — have already been exposed this season. This week, it’s Tracy Kendall’s turn on DYNASTY. Her crime is comparatively minor — while still in Hong Kong, Blake catches her out in a lie regarding her past relationship with political fixer-upper Eric Grayson — but it’s enough to ensure her abrupt exile from Soap Land's inner sanctum. (In contrast, FALCON CREST's Terry has now been almost fully assimilated into respectability. "She’s come a long way in a few months,” says Michael proudly of her transformation from bad girl to devoted girlfriend and sister.) Watching Blake supply Tracy — Soap Land's smuggest, most obsequious gold digger to date — with enough rope to hang herself before briskly severing all ties with her is immensely satisfying. (It’s also reminiscent of the way he toyed with Krystle after learning of her emerald necklace deception in Season 1.) "I'm going back to Denver tomorrow morning alone," he tells her coldly. "I don't care what flight you're on, what plane or where you're going. I'm buying off your contract now, paid in full.”

Karen plays a similar game with Mack on this week’s KNOTS. Throughout the episode, she grows increasingly suspicious that he is lying about Gary’s death — and therefore about the promise he made her to drop his investigation into the Wolfbridge Group — but says nothing until the final scene where she confronts him and then ends their marriage as abruptly as Blake sacked Tracy. “It’s over,” she tells him, the finality of her words matching Michael Ranson's “It’s inoperable” about Maggie's brain tumour at the end of FALCON CREST two weeks ago.

This isn’t the first time the wife of a Soap Land super-couple has separated from her husband owing to his obsession. This time last season, Pam left Bobby over his desire to win Ewing Oil and Maggie walked out on Chase due to his fixation with Carlo Agretti’s murder. This time around, however, it’s Mack who has to move out.

Just like Pam in DALLAS Season 2, Kirby’s recent discovery on DYNASTY that her mother didn’t die when she was a small child has raised her hopes that she might still be alive. Kirby’s fiancé Adam, however, is no more interested in her quest to learn the truth than Bobby was in Pam's. Where Pam’s first port of call was the Hall of Records office in Corpus Christi, Kirby’s is the newspaper office in Bismarck, North Dakota (these being the respective small towns where Rebecca Barnes and Alicia Anders were last seen alive). It’s there that Pam’s and Kirby’s stories diverge. While Pam was delighted not to find Rebecca's death certificate, Kirby is dismayed to locate Alicia’s headstone in the local graveyard.

But who is the mysterious woman whom we see tending another grave when Kirby first enters the cemetery and who then approaches Kirby to explain to her Alicia’s innermost thoughts and feelings? ("She'd made a lovely rag doll. She called it Kirby. I remember she used to sit for hours with it cradled in her arms. Oh she loved you so much and she wanted to go back and find you …”) No clue to the woman's identity is forthcoming nor does Kirby ask for one. Instead, she accepts the woman’s story and her presence in the graveyard without question. Perhaps the most logical (or rather, the least illogical) explanation is that the woman is Alicia herself, for some reason denying her own identity in the same way Rebecca did when Pam initially approached her. Or maybe there is no explanation. Perhaps this strange apparition is simply the latest and most abstract of all the metaphysical leaps Soap Land has taken throughout this season: Celia time-travelling back to her tenth birthday on EMERALD POINT, FALCON CREST altering its own past to reinvent Julia as the mentally disturbed killer she never was, and the raising from the dead of two characters on KNOTS LANDING, one within the drama (Gary) and one without (Ciji/Cathy).

The scene ends on an ominous note when Kirby, after flashing back to Alexis telling her about her mother’s crime, decides to return to Denver. “I know what I have to do there,” she says darkly. There are similarly portentous moments elsewhere this week. “She’ll destroy all of us if we don’t stop her,” says Julia after learning that Angela sold Joseph to the Giobertis on FALCON CREST. “Wouldn’t it be awful if something happened and it didn't come off?” wonders JR to Jessica at the end of this week’s DALLAS, hinting that some unforeseen fate might yet befall Clayton and Miss Ellie's wedding.

There’s something unusually suave and debonair about JR of late. He has taken to sporting Peter De Vilbis’s old cravats and making knowingly grandiose statements like, “Southfork has just turned into a house of domestic bliss.” How much of this is for Lady Jessica’s benefit is hard to say, but it’s perhaps telling that in one of his few scenes away from Southfork this week we see him kicking back in his office with a takeaway pizza and boasting to Vaughn Leland about giving ulcers, not getting them.

Random trend of the week #1: English women failing to live up to their national stereotype. “I never did take to their tea drinking and little watercress sandwiches,” admits Jessica to Miss Ellie of her time as Lady Henry Montford in Blighty. “A good dignified British subject does not snuggle!” insists Pamela Lynch on FALCON CREST after lover Richard Channing accuses her of doing just that in her sleep.

Random trend of the week #2: Mothers-to-be returning to work with their doctors’ blessing. Krystle goes back to Denver Carrington while Val Ewing embarks on a short book tour. It’s all very “women of the '80s can have it all”, with Blake and Lilimae both depicted as endearingly old-fashioned for worrying about them.

It’s a toss-up which homecoming scene is the more touching: the one where Mark was reunited with Pam in last week’s DALLAS while unaware that he was dying, or the one in this week’s KNOTS LANDING in which Ben returns home and surprises Val who didn’t realise he was still alive.

With former Ewing wives Val and Pam now engaged to new beaus, there are commendably brave attempts by the men involved to deal with the situation maturely. “I had plenty of time to think about you and Gary and your life together, and to get good and mad with myself for thinking I ever had to compete with any of that,” Ben tells Val on KNOTS. "This isn't easy to say. I wish the best for you. I hope you'll be very happy together,” Bobby tells Pam and Mark on DALLAS.

This week’s YELLOW ROSE returns to the theme of the exploitation of illegal immigrants, this time focusing on families who are virtually kept prisoner and used as slave labour on a work farm. While undoubtedly well-intentioned, it doesn’t quite escape the white-characters-coming-to-the-aid-of-nameless-ethnic-day-players-we’ll-never-see-again pitfall we’ve seen on similar stand alone eps both of FALCON CREST and THE YELLOW ROSE itself. In addition, some of the plotting is seriously convoluted. With half the cast going undercover and then being held captive on the work farm, it sometimes feels like a deadly earnest version of the "JR in the Haleyville Penitentiary” story-line of DALLAS Season 11.

These shortcomings, however, are more than compensated for by an eye-wateringly passionate performance by Edward Albert as Quisto, the mixed-race half-brother of the Champion family. Quisto has been a really good, really warm supporting presence throughout the series so far and here he finally gets a chance to take centre stage. “I’m a racist,” he confesses, in an utterly riveting scene with brother Roy. "I’ve known about the way illegals are exploited all my life and I’ve never done a damn thing about it. I’ve given it a lot of lip service like a lot of other people but never put anything on the line. I never had to. I’ve been safe here where Papa brought me on the Yellow Rose. I’ve been a white Latino, a fully assimilated breed.” It goes without saying that no other character in Soap Land has ever come remotely close to delivering a speech like that.

Later on in the ep, Roy Champion takes a knife to Soap Land’s glamorous heart during a scene with an old flame turned fashion designer, the magnificently named Lila Devereaux. (Like Roy’s previous love interest, Mandy Winger, Lila will later show up on Cliff Barnes’s arm on DALLAS, this time as Liz Adams.) Roy attempts to open Lila’s eyes to the sweatshop conditions in which her soap-tastic outfits are being made: “Those dresses you’re wearing are very pretty but the place that’s turning them out is pretty damned ugly.” Suddenly all those designer gowns hanging in Jenna’s boutique and Krystle’s closet and on Abby’s and Terry’s backs don’t look quite as fabulous as they did.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

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

 

[James from London]

04/Apr/84: DYNASTY: Birthday v. 06/Apr/84: DALLAS: Blow Up v. 06/Apr/84: FALCON CREST: Love’s Triumph

To paraphrase Ray Krebbs in this week’s DALLAS, "Soap Land’s getting to be a regular emotional roller coaster. Can’t tell who's up or down anymore". The latest news is that a week after Val and Ben break off their engagement on KNOTS LANDING, Fallon accepts Jeff’s proposal on DYNASTY, joining Pam and Mark, Kirby and Adam, and Miss Ellie and Clayton as one of Soap Land's latest betrothed couples.

While Jeff presents Fallon with his grandmother’s engagement ring, Pam shows off the expensive ring Mark has just bought her. Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Pamela Lynch has to make do with a 60-carat necklace from boyfriend Richard Channing. However, all three women are keeping secrets from their men: Pamela L has been coerced into spying on Richard by the cartel, Pam E has persuaded Mark’s doctor to keep the news of his incurable illness from him until after their marriage, and Fallon secretly fears the headaches she’s been having might prove equally terminal for her.

After a scan, Fallon's doctor assures her she has "one of the healthiest, most normal looking brains in town”. Maggie Gioberti’s brain on FALCON CREST, however, contains "the most frustrating tumour I’ve ever seen in my life,” according to Michael Ranson as he strives heroically to remove it. The surgery spans the first half of this week's episode and leaves Maggie is in a coma for most of the remainder. She eventually wakes up in the penultimate scene.

While Maggie’s sister Terry tells Dr. Lillian Heller, Maggie’s anesthesiologist who just happens to also be an old flame of Michael’s, that “you’ve taught me a lot about being a woman”, DYNASTY’s Tracy Kendall acknowledges Krystle as a different kind of role model: “I'm just following in your footsteps ... the road you started on when you were just a secretary with an eye out for the boss and a better life. If that boss had been married, my guess is it wouldn't have stopped someone like you for a minute, maybe less.” Whereas Tracy’s tribute earns her a slap in the face, Terry’s leads to a sisterly embrace from Lillian that seems to set the seal on her official transformation into A Good Person.

It’s party time on both DYNASTY and DALLAS this week. In terms of spectacle, Little Blake’s birthday bash on the grounds of the Carrington mansion easily trounces the two gatherings on the cardboard Southfork patio — an informal family barbecue and a slightly grander evening affair to welcome Jessica back to Texas. A few Chinese lanterns from the Braddock party store cannot compete with the platoon of jugglers, balloon shapers, trapeze artists, real ponies, pretend ponies and miniature trains laid on for the young Master Colby. There’s even what Bobby Ewing once described when recalling one of his boyhood birthday surprises as “an honest God merry-go-round, with music and mirrors and hand carved horses”. For those of us watching at home, the highlight of the party is an amusingly barbed exchange between Krystle and Alexis, during which the latter lets slip about having given birth to a fourth child. She then hastily reclassifies it as “the miscarriage I had after Steven” but Krystle’s suspicions are aroused. In an equivalent scene at the Southfork party, Donna overhears Jessica questioning Ray about Clayton and Miss Ellie’s impending marriage and starts to suspect that she isn't quite what she appears to be.

The big bombshell on this week’s DYNASTY lands after the party guests have gone home and the family is toasting Jeff and Fallon’s engagement. Blake suddenly finds himself at the centre of a scandal right out of EMERALD POINT when Rashid Ahmed claims that Denver Carrington's $100,000,000 advance to secure the China Sea oil leases was really used "to buy arms to fight the other government claiming that area of the China Sea,” announces the TV news. "Naval forces have now moved into the China Sea and are patrolling the area. So there will be no oil exploration or drilling there in the foreseeable future. What does this mean for Blake Carrington who only a week ago was being touted as the American businessman who had just closed the deal of the century?”

That the news should break in the middle of Jeff and Fallon’s celebration at least allows the Carringtons to greet disaster in full evening dress, just as the Giobertis and Channings did Melissa’s car crash on the night of Terry’s party in FALCON CREST. In the same way that Angela and Maggie waited anxiously for news at Soap Land Memorial Hospital in sparkling dresses and fur stoles so Krystle mans the phones at Denver Carrington in a full-length Nolan Miller gown.

Where Mark St Claire and Mack Mackenzie were the puppeteers-in-chief in last week’s season finale of KNOTS, Alexis and JR are the ones pulling the strings week. While Alexis manipulates the Carringtons from afar ("It worked like a dream,” she purrs from her bubble bath as the family struggle to preserve their company) JR is more hands-on in his dealings — first insisting Peter attend Jessica’s party, then coaxing him to dance with Sue Ellen and all the while steadily dripping poison into Lucy’s ear until she gets drunk and explodes like a one-woman version of the Belmar Hotel sequence in last week's KNOTS.

“Don’t you know his motto? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” Sue Ellen warns Peter as JR observes them slow dance at the party. “I learned one thing in politics and it’s this: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” Greg Sumner advised Laura on KNOTS two weeks ago. Whereas Laura’s response was characteristically sceptical (“How am I being kept — close or closer?”), Peter is as naive as ever, dismissing Sue Ellen as paranoid and describing JR as "the warmest guy in the world ... I’m actually beginning to like him!"

In a genre and on a show where affairs are ten-a-penny, why do we find ourselves on tenterhooks waiting for Lucy to blurt out what everyone else in the room already knows — that Peter and Sue Ellen have slept together? Why is this infidelity (which doesn't even qualify as a one night stand) such a big deal? JR and Sue Ellen have each had “worse” affairs in the past (with her sister and his arch enemy respectively) and those took place in the days before they had an open marriage. Somehow DALLAS is able to tell a comparatively “small" JR/Sue Ellen story and make the stakes feel almost as high as they did when the plots involved Cliff Barnes and Kristin.

While it doesn’t take long for Blake to figure out the identity of “the woman behind the man, of the person behind this dirty business" at the end of this week's DYNASTY, the deliciousness of JR’s scheme is that no one involved in it — not Peter, Sue Ellen or Lucy — yet realises he has set them up. This enables him to ride gallantly to his wife’s defence after the penny finally drops for Lucy (“Just how long have you two been having this little affair, huh?”). Sue Ellen is left feeling both touched and guilty. It also leads to a really good JR/Sue Ellen scene in which — in spite of the season’s worth of absurdity leading up to it, beginning with Peter Richards in microscopic speedos and ending with Lucy Ewing’s heroic drunk scene (a sight as joyfully ridiculous as the Alexis/Dex fight in last week’s DYNASTY) — they seem for all the world like real people. “Good Lord, woman, don’t you want a man back in your life?” a near exasperated JR asks, sitting on the edge of Sue Ellen's bed in his pyjamas. “Of course I do, JR,” she mutters in reply, her hair tied up in an unglamorous (if still becoming) way. "Do you think I like living like this?” After she rejects him once again, he regretfully returns to his soap opera world, calling Harry McSween to continue his plot to bring down Peter.

Random trend of the week #1: At their respective get-togethers, Steven Carrington and Donna Krebbs each assumes the role of family photographer, capturing such classic moments as Alexis and Claudia with their arms round each other’s waists and Miss Ellie and Clayton’s first official pose as spouses-to-be. While Steven’s camera looks to be the fanciest that Carrington money can buy, Donna makes do with an ordinary Polaroid.

Random trend of the week #2: Female characters with murder on their minds. With no one on screen for them to confide their plans to, the shows each opt for a different approach to convey their intentions to the viewers at home. Where Kirby fires at a ghostly apparition of Alexis while taking shooting lessons on DYNASTY, Lady Jessica defaces a snapshot of Miss Ellie with a nail file at the end of this week’s DALLAS. (This gesture also confirms that what we saw in an earlier scene - Jessica hovering dangerously close to Miss Ellie, kitchen knife in hand, before being interrupted by Donna - really was what it looked like.) Over on FALCON CREST, Lucas catches Julia about to abscond with his gun. Later in the same scene, she refers to her mother as dead.

Random trend of the week #3: There’s a very charming scene during the DALLAS party where Punk and Mavis Anderson find Bobby and Jenna kissing in the Southfork living room. "These two were destined to be together ever since they was kids,” Punk remembers. “As soon as our backs was turned, they were always getting into some kind of devilment. Y'all weren't even up to our belt buckles,” There’s an equivalent anecdote on this week’s DYNASTY about the frog Steven dropped down Fallon’s back on Jeff’s sixth birthday. "She turned around to take a swipe at me, I ducked and she smacked you right in the face,” recalls Steven. "And established our relationship from that point on,” Jeff adds ruefully.

The Wolfbridge Group might be a thing of the past on KNOTS LANDING (at least for now), but their spirit of "widespread and vicious criminal activity” lives on in the FALCON CREST cartel. Where Wolfbridge claimed to have rigged a bomb in Mack’s jeep, the cartel this week implant one in the trophy due to be presented at the inaugural race at Richard’s track. Where St Claire’s thugs dragged Abby into their car and sped off at the end of last week’s KNOTS, cartel leader Norton Crane has Spheeris do the same to Pamela Lynch on this week’s FC. The end of the episode finds Richard Channing in a similar position to the one in which we last saw Gary Ewing - at the scene of the abduction, looking on helplessly.

And this week’s Top 3 are …

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

 

[James from London]

11/Apr/84: DYNASTY: The Check v. 13/Apr/84: DALLAS: Turning Point v. 13/Apr/84: FALCON CREST: Win, Place and Show

The race to the end of the season is on, with each of this week’s soaps just four episodes from the finishing line. While DYNASTY and DALLAS are still fun, there’s a slight sense of them slowing down in pace. Their respective eps end similarly to last week’s, with Blake still on the brink of financial ruin and Jessica still behaving sinisterly at Southfork for reasons yet unspecified. Nor are there many major plot advancements in-between. This leaves the field open for FALCON CREST to gallop into the lead with an action-packet instalment that includes a wedding, a murder attempt, a life-changing medical diagnosis and the return of a killer. One of the advantages of FC’s habit of juggling so many story-lines is that one can never be certain which are going to take precedence in any given episode. In this regard, it is arguably Soap Land’s least predictable show (the renegade YELLOW ROSE notwithstanding).

Probably the most significant development on this week's DYNASTY is Mark Jennings’ blackmail of Alexis. He is lurking on the terrace of her penthouse where he overhears Blake accuse her of colluding with Rashid Ahmed to destroy Denver Carrington. Alexis passionately denies any involvement with Ahmed and Blake appears to believe her. The scene ends with a rather nice profile shot of Mark smiling knowingly as he sips champagne on the balcony. (There’s an equivalent reveal on this week’s DALLAS after Clayton corners Jessica in the upstairs hallway at Southfork and warns her against JR: “He's had detectives looking into my past." "They won't find anything," she whispers. "You don't think I’d be fool enough to tell JR our little secret?" It’s only then that we discover JR listening from behind his bedroom door.)

Mark extracts $100,000 from Alexis in return for his silence about her meetings with Rashid in Hong Kong. “How far do you think a hundred thousand goes these days?” snaps Afton on DALLAS after Cliff accuses her of squandering the inheritance she received from his mother. Mark seems happy enough with his windfall, however. "I'm on top of the world, kid," he says to Krystle when he stops by her office to tell her he’s leaving town. "Where will you go?" she asks. "I've always liked New York," he replies. Laura Avery asked the same question of a departing Cathy in the KNOTS season finale two weeks ago. “Alaska," she replied. “They say it’s the land of opportunities."

Speaking of New York and opportunities, we catch a glimpse of Sammy Jo’s life in the Big Apple this week. When her chance of an exclusive modelling contract falls through, she tries to blackmail her overweight married lover over their affair just as FALCON CREST’s Terry did her elderly rich john back when she was living in New York at the beginning of the season. But where Terry’s boyfriend meekly complied, Sammy Jo’s sends her flying across the room with one punch. "You little whore, you're out of your league!” he snarls at her.

DYNASTY’s Blake and DALLAS’s Cliff Barnes are facing parallel business crises. Each has invested a fortune in an offshore oil deal with potentially huge dividends — Blake's is in the China Seas, Cliff's is off the Gulf of Mexico. Each is also the target of a scheme engineered by his worst enemy — Alexis and JR respectively — to deny him access to that oil and plunge his company into financial ruin. As has already been established, Alexis paid Rashid Ahmed to claim that Blake’s investment was a front for an arms deal, which means that Blake cannot commence his oil exploration until he clears his name, while JR secretly has control of Cliff’s bank loan and his site foreman. Both situations take a turn for the worse this week: On DYNASTY, the government with whom Blake is in partnership refuse to either refute the accusations against him or return his initial $100,000,000 investment, while on DALLAS, JR instructs Vaughn Leland not to loan Cliff any more of the money he desperately needs to continue drilling.

The pressures both men are under lead to key scenes with the women in their lives. In DYNASTY's closing scene, Blake tries to make light of his troubles for Krystle’s benefit but she won't stand for it. "Stop treating me like a toy wife," she tells him firmly. "I am big and strong enough to share the bad news as well as the good.” This situation is reversed on DALLAS. "I need all the money I can lay my hands on!” Cliff insists when Afton catches him rifling through her bank statements. She isn’t impressed. "I have enough money left ... to rent my own apartment and make my own way without you!” she tells him. Only at the end of the scene does her attitude soften. “You’re really in trouble, aren’t you?” she asks. But whereas the DYNASTY scene concludes with Blake opening up to Krystle ("Every dollar of that hundred million that I raised had a condition attached,” he explains, "a time limit on the exploration: if I can't start the search for that oil before the time limit, the creditors can call in for their money … and time is running out”), Cliff ends up turning away from Afton. “I’ll handle it,” he tells her coldly.

Two of Soap Land’s brides-to-be, DYNASTY’s Fallon and DALLAS’s Pam, suggest quickie weddings due to Denver Carrington’s financial crisis and Mark's illness respectively. "I just don't know if it would be right to go through with a big wedding with everything the way it is,” frets Fallon. “How about five minutes at City Hall this weekend?” proposes Pam. Their future grooms won’t hear of it, however. “The last time we ran off and got married with nothing but neon and plastic flowers,” remembers Fallon. “When Bobby and I got married, we got married in front of a justice of the peace in New Orleans - I think the whole ceremony just took about ten minutes tops,” recalls Pam. An equivalent scenario takes place when Terry and Michael elope during this week’s FALCON CREST. There is yet another addition to the Soap Land marry-go-round when FALCON CREST's Phillip, taking a leaf out of Peter De Vilbis’s book, announces his engagement to Angela before he’s even proposed to her.

Also on this week's FALCON CREST, Melissa endures stomach cramps as mysterious as Fallon’s headaches on DYNASTY. A trip to the doctor’s office reveals that her recent miscarriage has left her, like Pam and Krystle before her, unable to have any more children. Melissa uses this information creatively. Whereas Alexis, who had caused Krystle’s miscarriage in the first place, then used Krystle's status as “the empty-armed madonna” to taunt her for the next two seasons, Melissa turns her own barrenness into a weapon with which to torment the woman she blames for it, an already guilt-ridden Linda Gioberti.

This season's YELLOW ROSE, EMERALD POINT and DYNASTY have all included scenes of its prosperous characters enjoying a day at the races, while DALLAS has had Mark Graison introduce Pam, Cliff and Afton to the delights of the polo circuit. Now FALCON CREST has its very own racetrack as Tuscany Downs opens for business, beating KNOTS LANDING’s similar project, Lotus Point, to the punch and putting its nearest Soap Land equivalent, DYNASTY’s La Mirage Hotel, in the shade in terms of scale. Not only is this the pay off for Richard Channing’s season-long drive and determination but it also feels like a victory for his former self, Michael Tyrone, who was intent on bring a near identical gambling operation to Truro during his stay on FLAMINGO ROAD.

Richard inviting a reluctant Chase to the podium to make a speech during the opening ceremony feels like the reverse of Punk Anderson's unenthusiastic welcoming of Cliff Barnes to the stage at the Oil Baron’s Ball. During his speech, Chase manages to turn the tables on Richard by congratulating him for his generous donation of "15% of Tuscany Downs' gross profits to the people of the Tuscany Valley.” This comes as a surprise to Richard but he has no choice but to comply. Ambassador Lan Thon pulled a similar move on JR during the senate investigation into the counterrevolution at the end of DALLAS Season 3.

An aura of murderous intent permeates this week's Soap Land. “I’ll kill you, JR!” vows Katherine in DALLAS after he tells her he’s played a tape of them having sex to Bobby. “She did say she hated you and you deserved to die,” Julia’s psychiatrist tells Angela on FALCON CREST. “He’ll be dead within the week,” predicts cartel leader Norton Crane of Richard Channing, also on FALCON CREST. Meanwhile on DYNASTY, there’s a nicely moody shot of Kirby fondling her gun in preparation for her execution of Alexis. In the event, however, both Norton Crane and Kirby bungle their murder attempts badly. Kirby lures Alexis to her father’s house but fails to keep her there long enough to get her gun out her purse. Even more humiliatingly, Crane attempts to detonate Richard's explosive-rigged trophy on the opening day of Tuscany Downs, but in a last minute twist reminiscent of a Roadrunner cartoon, blows up his own car instead. The week’s most ominous death threat comes right at the end of FALCON CREST when a disguised Julia hitches a ride back to the Tuscany Valley. “I have to bury my mother,” she explains to the driver with a smile on her face. Yet another murder, this time in the past, is alluded to in the closing moments of DALLAS. “Amy died so we could keep the Southern Cross not sell it!” an angry Jessica blurts out to JR.

And this week’s Top 3 are …

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

 

[James from London]

02/May/84: DYNASTY: New Lady in Town v. 04/May/84: DALLAS: Love Stories v. 04/May/84: FALCON CREST: For Better, For Worse v. 05/May/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Villa's Gold

With Tracy Kendall making her final appearance on this week’s DYNASTY, it’s time to survey the progress (or lack thereof) made by each of Soap Land's four working girls — Cathy Geary, Jenna Wade, Terry Hartford and Tracy herself — over the course of the season. Cathy and Jenna both started off as waitresses before bagging themselves a better job and a Ewing brother. However, after realising that Gary was still hung up on both his ex-wives, Cathy threw in the towel during the KNOTS finale and decided to move to Alaska. Jenna, meanwhile, has weathered Bobby’s ongoing preoccupation with his ex-wife and this week her tenacity pays off when he asks her to marry him. As for our two gold-digging opportunists, FALCON CREST’s Terry was a trashy hooker who became a respectable doctor’s wife while DYNASTY’s Tracy has travelled in the opposite direction. Introduced as a perky, ambitious career woman, she’s since become a self-described "corporate whore”. This week she bitterly quits her job at Colby Co after refusing to let Alexis pimp her out to Blake’s banker. (The order to sleep with a middle aged banker also proved to be the line in the sand for Afton in DALLAS’s fourth season.) And so the 1983/4 season working girl winner is … Terry Hartford Ranson.

(Elsewhere, another blonde opportunist, DYNASTY's Sammy Jo, perhaps inspired by Terry’s success, abandons her sordid New York lifestyle to ingratiate herself with her rich relatives back in Denver. This week she moves into the Carrington mansion, makes nice to her Auntie Krystle, whips off her towel in front of ex-husband Steven, undermines his wife Claudia, and giggles flirtatiously with his brother Adam.)

Tracy is not the only character to have her butter-wouldn’t-melt persona exposed as a lie at the end of the season. “I don’t really know you at all, do I?” Bobby finally realises on DALLAS after Katherine Wentworth confesses that she has been scheming (and sleeping) with JR behind his back. His kiss-off line to her — “You and JR truly deserve one another!” — echoes Tracy’s to Alexis at the end of her last scene on DYNASTY. “Lex/Dex? You two deserve one another!” she snaps after admitting that she has been scheming (and sleeping) with Dex behind Alexis's back.

As one Soap Land door closes, another one opens. The introduction of a significant new character so near the end of a season isn’t standard Soap Land practice, but just four weeks after Lady Jessica Montford arrived at Southfork for Clayton and Miss Ellie’s wedding, the mysterious Dominique Devereaux books into La Mirage in time for the penultimate episode of this season's DYNASTY. There are some interesting parallels between the two women’s debut scenes. Both are given unusually prominent introductions, with the Ewings lining up to greet Jessica and Dominique making the grandest Soap Land entrance (flanked by five bellboys and two large trunks) since Alexis’s courtroom appearance at the end of DYNASTY’s first year.

Whereas Jessica was quick to dispel any notions of grandeur her title might have implied (“You forgot to untie the drapes — oh don’t worry, Miss Ellie, I’ve got it!”), Dominique is imperious from the get go. “Junior suite?” she snaps at the La Mirage desk clerk. "I specifically asked for a two bedroom suite. I don't sleep in my clothes nor do I sleep with them. I require one bedroom for my wardrobe and one for myself. If you don't have a two bedroom available, please call another hotel in the area that can accommodate me.”

That such an unapologetically regal character should be played by a black actress is significant — especially when one considers that the only other black person of note to have appeared in Soap Land this season was the nameless addict whom KNOTS LANDING’s Karen encountered in rehab. “I’m not like these people!” Karen protested back then, before her black roomie gently pointed out how similar their situations were. Similarly, Dominique, after showering Alexis with praise during their riveting face off at the end of this week’s ep, then dares to suggest that she is her equal — maybe even her superior: “I’m just as tough as you, maybe tougher."

Like Jessica, Dominique ends her introductory episode on an enigmatic note. “I wouldn’t count on your marrying brother Clayton, Miss Ellie — I wouldn’t count on it at all,” Jessica murmured once she was all alone, thereby setting up a mysterious story-line that has yet to be resolved. "Who the hell are you anyway?” Alexis asks Dominique this week. "Who am I?” she replies teasingly. "You'll find out very soon — very soon.” She then exits Alexis's penthouse with a slyly mischievous “Ciao — for now.”

Wedding fever is currently in full swing on Soap Land, with only a week to go before Pam and Mark’s big day on DALLAS and a fortnight before Miss Ellie and Clayton's and Jeff and Fallon's scheduled ceremonies on DALLAS and DYNASTY. This week, Clayton becomes the latest spouse-to-be (after Fallon and Pam) to suggest a last minute elopement to his intended (“We’re very big on tradition at Southfork,” Ellie informs him), while Fallon's dress fitting is interrupted by the noises in her head and Mark's stag party by Katherine Wentworth noisily drowning her sorrows at the Oil Baron’s Club. “Just promise me you’re not going to misbehave because I know what goes on at those things,” Pam tells Mark beforehand. Ironically, the only previous stag party we’ve seen in Soap Land was that of Mark’s former self, Sam Curtis, on FLAMINGO ROAD. If memory serves, what went on at that thing was mainly blue movies and cigars.

In spite of all these wedding preparations by various Carringtons, Colbys, Ewings and Farlows, FALCON CREST’s Philip and Angela leap frog over all of them, plighting their troth in a full blown Catholic church ceremony only one episode after becoming engaged.

This week’s instalment of FALCON CREST is more lightweight than I remembered. Partly this has to do with nearly all the major characters — regardless of their ongoing enmity towards the happy couple — being enlisted into the wedding party (Richard as best man, Maggie as matron of honour and Joseph, the very child Angela recently sold to the Giobertis, as her ring bearer). While assembling warring characters under the same roof whenever possible is an integral Soap Land convention (such as at the opening of Tuscany Downs in the last FC ep), the fact that in this instance the characters themselves seem to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation (as if they’re in on the joke) adds a different, more frivolous tone to the occasion.

This sense of levity is offset by the kind of brooding religious atmosphere that’s specific to FALCON CREST among the soaps. In fact this week, religion — specifically Catholicism — becomes a Soap Land story point for the very first time as Julia, back in the Tuscany Valley with a wig and a gun, takes confession with Father Bob. “I am overwhelmed with murder,” she says before admitting that she intends to kill her mother. The priest, bound by the sacrament of Confession which prohibits him from repeating what she has said, can only look anxiously around the church during Angela and Philip’s wedding ceremony. (Father Bob evidently takes his oath of confidentiality more seriously than Dr Kenderson does his on DALLAS. This week, in a scene that never fails to move me no matter how many times I’ve seen it, he finally talks to Mark about his terminal illness — but only after a drunken Katherine has already let the cat out of the bag.)

Tension-building as Father Bob’s silent dilemma is, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Julia's several thwarted attempts to shoot Angela, first during the ceremony itself and then later at the reception back at Falcon Crest, is Soap Land’s most blatant flirtation with self-parody since Alexis and Cecil’s deathbed wedding at the beginning of last season’s DYNASTY. (Did I mention that Julia spends much of this episode dressed as a nun?) The thrilling and comedic elements of this story-line coalesce in the closing minutes of the ep when Sister Julia makes her getaway with sweet little Joseph in tow: "You OK, sweetie? ... Then let's go get some ice cream!”

Business-wise, the outlook is grim for both Blake Carrington and Cliff Barnes this week. Cliff’s situation is marginally worse but it’s a close run thing. The banks are about to foreclose on Denver Carrington and Barnes Wentworth, but while Andrew Laird urges Blake to start selling off prime assets in order stay afloat, Cliff simply has no assets left. “I have sold everything I own,” he admits. As a last resort, each man reluctantly turn to the richest woman he knows for help: Blake’s ex-wife Alexis and Cliff’s half-sister Pam.

In the final scene of the last episode of DYNASTY (which originally aired two weeks earlier), Blake brusquely turned down a $100,000,000 loan from Alexis that came with the condition that if he failed to repay it within six months, she would automatically assume ownership of his company. "I'll see you in Hell before I let you get your hands on Denver Carrington!” he barked at her then. So it’s great fun to see him show up at her office this week and meekly offer to sell her his oil shale extraction process. Alexis delights in turning him down. "You're finally getting a taste of your own medicine,” she gloats, "and when it becomes too bitter for you, when you start to cough and choke on it, then you'll be back to accept the only offer that I'm ever going to make!” Meanwhile, an even more desperate Cliff bursts into his sister’s office in the final scene of this week’s DALLAS. "I'm in trouble,” he blurts out. "I need your help. The drilling is a disaster.” But before he can ask her for the money he needs, they are interrupted by a fateful phone call.

And here Soap Land synchronicity strikes once more. The previous episode of DYNASTY ended with the news that a moustachioed Mark had plummeted to his death. ("Your bodyguard Mark Jennings? He's dead ... He fell from the balcony of your penthouse, Mrs Colby. Too soon to tell if he jumped or if he was pushed.”) And now this week’s DALLAS ends the same way. ("Mark was flying his plane and it exploded over the Gulf. He's dead!”)

Lucas, the genuinely nice guy whom Julia left behind to face the cops in the previous episode of FALCON CREST, shows up on this week’s YELLOW ROSE as a not-so-nice guy out to steal some treasure that’s apparently buried on the ranch. The neat twist is that the criminal mastermind behind the operation is Juanita, the Rose’s new cook. Naturally no one suspects Juanita, she’s only the hired help. As a critique of the invisibility of Hispanic characters in Soap Land (e.g., the multiple servants answering to the names of Raoul and Teresa on DALLAS, or Gary and Abby’s housekeeper Maria, relegated to bit player status on KNOTS but who three decades later will appear on SOUTHLAND in the kind of multi-layered kick-ass cop role her white masters on KL could only dream of), it works. And in a week where Diahann Carroll's is the first black face to appear in a Soap Land title sequence since Melba Moore’s one-off appearance as a jailbird hooker in the FLAMINGO ROAD pilot, it also seems appropriate.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

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

 

[James from London]

09/May/84: DYNASTY: The Nightmare v. 11/May/84: DALLAS: Hush, Hush, Sweet Jessie v. 11/May/84: FALCON CREST: The Avenger v. 12/May/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: The Far Side of Fear

Phew, what a week: the season finale of DYNASTY, the series finale of THE YELLOW ROSE, the most powerful episode of FALCON CREST to date and an action-packed instalment of DALLAS that’s none too shabby either.

“Won’t it knock their socks off when they find out I’m a Carrington?” asks Dominique Devereaux of an empty room on this week’s DYNASTY. It certainly knocks the socks off DALLAS’s Donna and Ray when they find out, from Clayton, that Jessica isn’t Dusty’s aunt, but his mother. And those aren’t the only revelations of the week. We discover on DYNASTY that Sammy Jo was behind the violets sent to Claudia supposedly from her dead husband Matthew while Pam learns on DALLAS that Katherine was behind the letter read to Bobby, supposedly from Pam herself, that broke up their marriage. Another letter, this time sent to Pam, explains that Mark Graison’s plane crash wasn’t an accident — he knew he was dying and decided to end his own life rather than become a burden to those he loved. And in the same week that Mark G’s presumed accident becomes a suicide on DALLAS, Mark J’s presumed suicide is reclassified as a murder on DYNASTY.

Physical confrontations between women, ranging from the comedic to the tragic, recur throughout this week’s episodes. In ascending order of violence, there’s Alexis and Krystle’s beauty parlour run-in on DYNASTY where, in lieu of their annual catfight, Krystle throws a potful of mud in Alexis’s face after hearing her insinuate that Blake is not the father of her unborn child. Moving things up a notch, DALLAS’s Pam strikes Katherine across the face after learning that she has been scheming against her all along. Then things get seriously gun-crazy: Jessica makes off with Miss Ellie and a handgun at the end of DALLAS while DYNASTY’s Kirby and FALCON CREST’s Julia both realise their long-awaited revenge fantasies of holding Alexis and Angela respectively at gunpoint.

"Do it now, Kirby,” challenges Alexis. "Go ahead. Pull the trigger ... and watch me die. That’s what you want, isn't it?” “Are you just going to stand there?” Angela asks Julia. “I thought the idea was for you to shoot me.” Their bluffs called, neither Kirby nor Julia can go through with the deadly deed. It’s Lute Mae Sanders in FLAMINGO ROAD all over again. When faced with the reality of shooting Michael Tyrone in cold blood, she crumbled.

The climaxes of this week’s DYNASTY and DALLAS are dealt with in diametrically opposite ways. On DYNASTY, we are given no narrative explanation for Fallon’s headaches or what subsequently causes her to flee from her wedding at the Carrington mansion. Whatever she is feeling is conveyed to us through abstract imagery: nightmarish flashbacks, distorted point-of-view shots, off-kilter camera angles and a discordant musical score. The dark clouds and lashing rain also seem to reflect her emotional state (and unintentionally echo Miss Ellie’s lighthearted suggestion to Clayton in last week’s DALLAS, “You wanna get married in the rain?”).

After Fallon fails to appear for their wedding, her beloved Jeff finds her bridal dress discarded on her bedroom floor (in the same symbolic fashion that Admiral Mallory found his bride-to-be’s wedding gown abandoned in the final scene of EMERALD POINT). Jeff then spots her driving off into the night and sets off in pursuit. The episode’s — and indeed the season’s — final seconds show Fallon behind the wheel of her car, blinded by a sudden flash of headlights, followed by a scream that echoes over a black screen. This extra-diegetic ending is the equivalent of Sid Fairgate’s “Oh my God!” playing over his freeze frame at the end of KNOTS LANDING Season 2, but without the coherent narrative logic leading up to it.

“In everyone’s life there should be one perfect night,” Mark Graison told Pam on last week’s DALLAS. The morning after his perfect night, he died. Whenever I hear Pam’s description of his death — “Mark was flying his plane and it exploded over the Gulf” — it conjures up for me an image of Icarus flying too close to the sun. “I’m on top of the world, kid,” Mark Jennings told Krystle on DYNASTY a few weeks ago, “but I do know somebody who’d like to push me off.” And so it came to pass. Indeed, it’s an unwritten rule of Soap Land: no one can be too happy for too long. With Fallon’s abstract malady, DYNASTY has distilled that rule to its essence and dispensed with plot altogether: the pain and noises in her head, for which there are no medical explanation, began when she and Jeff first reconciled. As their wedding day has grown nearer, her torment has worsened, reaching crisis point just before the ceremony. Therefore, in the absence of a more conventional explanation, her suffering can be interpreted as the result of too much happiness. By daring to believe in an idyllic future with Jeff, Fallon was flying as dangerously close to the sun as Marks Graison and Jennings.

Whereas nothing about Fallon’s behaviour is explained on DYNASTY, everything about Jessica’s actions is spelled out on DALLAS this week, to an almost laughable extent, thanks to her diary which JR finds at the eleventh hour. The journal’s most recent entries reveal her twenty year old secrets in the way that is most convenient for the present day plot. For example, the first page JR reads seems to implicate Clayton in the fire that killed his wife, while the entry on the next page — which isn’t read until after JR has driven across town to accuse Clayton of mariticide — completely exonerates him. Hokey as such blatant exposition is, it’s highly enjoyable, as is Fallon’s logic-be-damned pre-wedding freak out.

While the DYNASTY wedding guests wonder what has become of the bride, a detective arrives at the Carrington mansion to speak to Alexis. Their subsequent exchange reminds me of the scene at the end of “Blackmail” (DALLAS Season 4) where the police show up at Ewing Oil to talk to Bobby. Alexis thinks the police are at the house due to Fallon’s disappearance while Bobby assumes their visit to his office is connected to Lucy’s. “We don’t know anything about your daughter/niece,” they reply. Instead, they explain, they want to talk to Alexis and Bobby about the suspicious deaths of the men who were blackmailing them — Mark Jennings and Jeff Farraday respectively. Adding to the sense of déjà vu, the sergeant who then arrests Alexis for Mark’s murder is played by the same actor who killed Jeff Farraday.

The DYNASTY/DALLAS parallels continue with Blake Carrington and Cliff Barnes. This week, both men are forced to sell off their assets to keep their companies afloat. Each encounters an old adversary happy to take advantage of the situation. Dex Dexter offers Blake $10,000,000 for his football team — a deal which Blake angrily rejects: "That team's worth $50,000,000 at least and you know it!” Katherine Wentworth, meanwhile, offers Cliff $18,000,000 for his third of Wentworth Tool & Die even though it’s worth $25,000,000 — a deal which Cliff reluctantly accepts. ("You really enjoy twisting the knife, don't you?” "I do get a certain satisfaction, seeing how it's going into you.”) While Cliff’s deal with Katherine buys Barnes Wentworth another week, Blake’s refusal to do business with Dex means it’s the end of the road of Denver Carrington.

Not for nothing is this episode of DYNASTY called ‘Nightmare’. What worse fate could a Soap Land alpha male imagine than the loss of his beloved company? It’s a demise that every businessman from Jock and JR on DALLAS to incompetent old Claude Weldon on FLAMINGO ROAD has come perilously close to, only to sidestep at the last moment. But in the DYNASTY season finale, the unthinkable actually happens to Blake Carrington. Likewise, what could be more devastating for a Soap Land diva than to find herself, in all her finery, behind bars with a bunch of cackling hookers laughing and jeering at her? Whereas last season's KNOTS ended with Gary enduring his jail time with silent stoicism, this season’s DYNASTY ends with Alexis grabbing her cell bars and screaming, “Get me out of here!” DALLAS’s Peter Richards, out on bail after being set up by JR on a drugs charge, can surely sympathise. "I keep having nightmares about that jail!” he exclaims this week.

Something I’d never previously noticed about this week’s episode of DALLAS — how the opening shot of Bobby and Jenna driving into Southfork while joking about how the family will react to their engagement mirrors the very beginning of the series which had Bobby and Pam driving into Dallas while joking about how the family would react to their elopement.

Something I'd never previously noticed about the entire Lady Jessica story-line — how many references there are to characters substituting for other characters. In the same episode that Sue Ellen describes Clayton to Jessica as the father she never had, Jessica explains to Ellie how Clayton was more of a parent to her when she growing up than their own father was. JR’s resentment at the prospect of Clayton replacing his father (“becoming the second man on a one man ranch”) mirrors Jessica’s resentment towards Amy for replacing her as Dusty’s mother — and it’s the idea of Ellie doing the same thing now — in effect becoming “the new Amy” — that pushes Jessica over the edge in this episode. A side note: Jessica telling Ray at her party that he reminds her of Clayton as a young man puts Donna in the de-facto role of a second substitute Amy, which makes it fitting that Jessica also assaults her (albeit off screen) before making off with Ellie.

“She’s got Mama!” JR shouts at the end of DALLAS. “She's taken my baby!” yells Melissa at the beginning of FALCON CREST. Indeed, FALCON CREST picks up where DALLAS leaves off this week, but ratchets up the pathos. There isn’t really time for DALLAS to explore the emotional consequences of Clayton learning that his sister is a psychopath who burned down his house, murdered his wife and now plans to do the same thing to his fiancee — the best he can muster is an “oh no, Jessie” — whereas this week’s FALCON CREST is all about emotional consequences, about how it feels to have a dangerously disturbed woman as a mother, a daughter and a sister.

If Fallon’s mystery meltdown at the end of DYNASTY feels like the latest development in Soap Land’s increasingly abstract form of story-telling which began with FALCON CREST retroactively turning Julia into a killer, then this episode of FC is the emotional pay off for that decision. The flippantly comedic tone of last week’s episode is entirely absent, replaced by a strong sense of gravitas, especially in the moving scene where Lance finds Angela in her study reading a letter written to her by Julia when she was in college: ‘Dear Mother, there are so many opportunities here … I can hardly wait for you to come down for parents’ weekend so I can show you around.' "Did you go?” Lance asks Angela. She shakes her head. "I was too busy,” she says. "Even for a weekend?” he persists. "I was a businesswoman before it became fashionable,” she replies,” and I didn’t have time to do the things I wanted to do … Julia understood. She had such promise, only …” "Everything went wrong,” concludes Lance. What’s so touching is that Lance doesn’t display any rancour towards Angela here, just a profound sadness for his mother.

”I was a businesswoman before it became fashionable.” That’s one in the eye not just for Abby and Alexis but for all the other Angela-come-latelys who have joined them in the executive suite this season: Krystle, Pam, Laura, Claudia, et al., none of whom will have to worry about missing parents’ weekend because this is the have-it-all Soap Land eighties where childcare simply isn’t an issue anymore. For the first time, one gets a real sense of the solitary road Angela must have walked in those less shoulder-pad-tastic days.

While her family worry and ruminate, Julia drives down the same dark Soap Land highway that Fallon did after fleeing her wedding. Where Fallon swerved to avoid the obligatory Soap Land roadworks, Julia deftly dodges the police roadblocks set up in her honour.

It all leads to a hostage situation at the springhouse with Julia (still in her nun’s habit) holding Joseph (never cuter) at gunpoint. She agrees to release him on the condition that her mother take his place. As the rest of the cast gradually congregate outside the springhouse, it feels like a slow-burn version of the Belmar Hotel climax on this season’s KNOTS. Every gesture, every close up carries an emotional weight. The exchange made, Lance watches as Melissa and Cole are reunited with their son and then take him away. I've always found it significant that Richard — of all people — should be the one to register Lance's pain and give him a consoling pat on the shoulder. Only a few weeks ago, these two men were trying to kill each other in an underground parking garage yet somehow Richard’s gesture here feels true, and dramatically earned, in a way that his being best man at Phillip and Angela’s wedding last week didn’t.

Whereas KNOTS LANDING’s Belmar Hotel climax was the result of a trap set by characters external to the show’s core, FALCON CREST’s equivalent comes from within the Gioberti family itself. In fact, it feels as if the entire Falcon Crest saga has been building up to the moment where Angela enters the springhouse and is forced by Julia to acknowledge her own failings for the first time. "I’ve always had a difficulty expressing my feelings ... I’ve never been a mother to you,” she admits. A truce of sorts is reached and Julia is persuaded to hand over the gun. The sheriff’s deputy positioned outside misreads the situation and, thinking that Julia is about to shoot her mother, fires his rifle. Both women fall to the floor, a kerosene lamp explodes and a fire breaks out, exactly a year and a week after the fire at Southfork. Just as Bobby and Ray rescued JR, Sue Ellen and John Ross, Lance and Chase manage to save Angela, but they can’t get to Julia in time. The episode ends with everyone watching the springhouse burn with Julia still trapped inside. And this isn’t even the season finale.

In place of a psychotic nun, the final episode of THE YELLOW ROSE brings us Soap Land’s first bisexual killer-rapist. After murdering Whit’s girlfriend (a pre-fame Robin Wright) in the first scene, he turns his attention to Colleen Champion. With not enough evidence for the police to hold him, the ep turns into a grim but gripping hybrid of “Winds of Vengeance” and “Land of the Free” from DALLAS and KNOTS’ respective first seasons. Like this week’s FALCON CREST, it builds to a fatal hostage situation before concluding with a touchingly humble prayer round the family dinner table. Lord love THE YELLOW ROSE — idiosyncratic to the end.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

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

 

[James from London]

18/May/84: DALLAS: End Game v. 18/May/84: FALCON CREST: Ashes to Ashes

Two contrasting episodes to end the season. While the DALLAS finale is giddy, giggly fun, much of FALCON CREST plays like a sombre epilogue to the tragic events of last week’s instalment.

This week’s DALLAS begins in the same way as that episode of FALCON CREST did, with the family on red alert following the abduction of one of their own. But whereas the consequences of Julia snatching Joseph formed the basis of the entire ep, Jessica’s kidnapping of Miss Ellie is dealt with and resolved in roughly twelve screen minutes. It's urgent and exciting, but unlike Julia’s story, not particularly moving. Ultimately Lady Jessica is a guest-starring villain whose story-line can be tidily concluded over an info-dumping lunch between Ellie and Clayton, while Julia has been an integral character from the outset whose loss cuts deep. “I failed her,” Lance admits tearfully this week. “We all failed her,” Angela replies.

Back in the eighties, BBC radio presenter Terry Wogan was given to affectionately mocking DALLAS’s more eccentric moments on his popular daily breakfast show. This episode will have provided him with rich pickings: the discovery of Miss Ellie trussed up in the trunk of Jessica’s car, her “beautiful” wedding dress which is essentially the same outfit she wears every week adorned with a string of pearls, the fact that the wedding itself (which the show has been building up to for five months) takes place off screen, Pam’s monologue about her sad life delivered to an uncomprehending but transfixed Christopher, the turban Sue Ellen slips into for an afternoon at the movies, and some deliciously ripe dialogue, particularly in the scene where Bobby tells Katherine of his plans to marry Jenna. “You can’t — not that slut with the child from that awful Italian!” she shouts. “I make my own decisions — especially regarding my love life!” he shouts back.

It’s all wonderfully silly but not in a self-parodic or smirky way. Absurd as it might be, this is still full-on, red-blooded soap opera played with the utmost conviction.

Dramatically, the strongest scenes are the ones involving Cliff Barnes (and even those are often laugh-out-loud funny, thanks to Ken Kercheval's remarkable ability to wring comedy from the unlikeliest of lines and situations). The best of these is the office confrontation where Vaughn Leland spells out to Cliff the bleakness of his circumstances: “If you don’t strike oil by midnight tomorrow night, the bank is foreclosing and all the assets of Barnes Wentworth will belong to the bank.” Cliff slumps in his chair, defeated. This is his equivalent of the moment in last week’s DYNASTY where Blake realises he’s lost Denver Carrington. Both men then receive a surprise visitor — but whereas Dominique Devereaux chose not to reveal her big secret to Blake, JR can’t wait to tell Cliff that he has been behind the offshore deal “from the very beginning ... The only way I could get through that thick skull of yours was to have you bankrupt your mother’s company while I just sat back and watched ... Tomorrow morning the janitor’s gonna come in here and sweep you out with the rest of the trash, unless of course you do the honourable thing — get in the elevator, go up to the roof and jump off, huh?”

As it turns out, of course, JR’s gloating is somewhat premature. Cliff will end up striking oil before both his deadline and the end of the season. “It’s the biggest tract in the Gulf!” hollers his foreman in the Gulf. It’s a great moment: a perpetual loser like Cliff striking it rich is as big a twist as the high and mighty Blake Carrington losing everything.

“I always thought you cared for the family, JR,” says Bobby after he learns that his big brother was working with Jessica to stop Miss Ellie’s wedding. “That’s what kept our relationship going despite everything else ... but if it’s true and you only care for yourself and the hell with the rest of us, then it's over and we’re through as brothers.” Bobby’s words seem to hit home — just before his mama’s wedding, JR raises a glass to Clayton, acknowledging him as "one of the few men I've never been able to beat. I truly admire that.”

Family reconciliation is a prevalent theme on FALCON CREST as well. "This isn't much of a family," declares Angela in the aftermath of Julia’s death. "The first thing I have to do is pull us all together again.” Like Mark Graison in DALLAS, Julia has left a letter to be opened after her death. If Mark’s last words to Pam (read aloud last week by Cliff) were moving, then Julia’s final message to Lance (read aloud this week by Angela) are downright heartrending. "If this day ends the way I think it will, I will never see you again. Please don't allow them to bury me anywhere near Falcon Crest. I want my ashes to be scattered across the hills of Tuscany in Italy ... Pray for me.” And so it is that Angela spends the remainder of the episode persuading the rest of the cast to travel with her to Italy for the funeral: Richard donates his plane, Chase offers to fly it, Maggie agrees to read the eulogy, etc. It’s all quite contrived, but enjoyably and touchingly so.

The dramatic device of first breaking a family apart and then having them movingly find their way back to each other feels very New DALLAS. On that show, the dramatic focus was often on the emotionally conflicted male heir, John Ross. Similarly in this episode of FALCON CREST, the character who goes through the biggest personal journey is Lance. First he turns away from his family, then ends up in jail after getting into a bar fight (“I own this valley!”), then breaks down over his mother’s letter. By the end of the episode he’s inherited her shares in the New Globe and started to regain his cock of the walk swagger. Lorenzo Lamas navigates all of Lance’s emotional twists and turns (which also includes a surprisingly tender break-up scene with wife Melissa) very well.

JR on DALLAS and Melissa on FALCON CREST go to extreme and devious lengths to get their exes back into bed this week. Having already framed Peter Richards on a drugs charge, JR agrees to keep him out of prison on the condition that Sue Ellen start sleeping with him again. “I want you where I want you, when I want you,” he tells her. Meanwhile, Melissa pays a Falcon Crest worker $5,000 to lure Cole off Richard’s plane before it takes flight. Having separated him from his wife, she takes him to dinner and then kisses him on the Falcon Crest porch. He responds, then pulls away. Melissa goes inside the house leaving the door ajar. Cole hesitates … Meanwhile at Southfork, Teresa the maid informs Lucy that Sue Ellen was moving her belongings back into JR’s bedroom when “suddenly she dropped everything that she was carrying, grabbed something from a drawer and left.” What will Cole and Sue Ellen do next? Tune in next season to find out.

Two years earlier, the FLAMINGO ROAD season finale blatantly referenced the “Who Shot JR?” mystery by having several of its characters line up to threaten Michael Tyrone’s life. It then cleverly subverted audience expectations of a whodunnit by having Tyrone fake his own death. The final third of this week’s DALLAS pulls a similar trick. First it establishes a handful of characters as having a motive to kill JR. Then in the final scene, an unknown assailant enters the Ewing offices just as they did once before, only this time they shoot ... Bobby. Given that he is hit from behind while sitting at JR’s desk, it would seem that he is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time — like Karen Mackenzie was when she took the bullet intended for Gary on the KNOTS season finale seven weeks ago.

Just as the events of the KNOTS cliffhanger were orchestrated by a shadowy criminal organisation (the Wolfbridge Group) so a similarly sinister conglomerate (the cartel) is responsible for the plummeting plane at the end of this season’s FALCON CREST. "We've been sabotaged," realises Chase at the controls. "Aw hell, Denver, we're going down!” (With Denver as their destination, it’s tempting to imagine the FALCON CREST cast crashing through the roof of the Carrington mansion halfway through Jeff and Fallon’s aborted wedding celebrations.)

No doubt the FALCON CREST plane crash would be filmed on a much grander scale today, but with little more than a few shaky camera moves and some stock footage of a plane engine, a sense of impending doom is nonetheless palpably evoked.

And this week’s Top 2 are …

1 (1) FALCON CREST
2 (2) DALLAS

 

[James from London]

25/Sep/84: PAPER DOLLS: Episode 1 v. 26/Sep/84: DYNASTY: Disappearance v. 28/Sep/84: DALLAS: Killer at Large v. 28/Sep/84: FALCON CREST: Requiem

Shortly after FLAMINGO ROAD ended two years ago, two of its central players returned to Soap Land in different guises. Sam Curtis became Mark Graison on DALLAS and Michael Tyrone morphed into Richard Channing on FALCON CREST. Towards the end of last season’s DALLAS, Mark was killed in a plane explosion and the FALCON CREST finale cliffhanger suggested Richard was headed for a similar fate. In their place, the Soap Land gods have seen fit to reincarnate a third FLAMINGO ROAD character, Constance Weldon Carlyle, as Racine on PAPER DOLLS. While Mark and Richard were pretty much identical to their previous selves on FLAM RD, Racine is less similar to hers. Constance was a pampered and petulant princess whereas Racine presides over her own modelling agency with a cool head and a shrewd business sense. Still, as Angela Channing remarked towards the end of last season’s FALCON CREST, businesswomen are now in vogue in Soap Land and had FLAMINGO ROAD continued, it’s not inconceivable that Constance would have ended up behind a desk herself — especially if the knowledge that she was the illegitimate daughter of the town tramp had spurred her to build a new life for herself.

As it is, Racine and Constance do have a couple of things in common: neither is averse to a bitchy wisecrack, and where Constance frolicked naked in a swimming pool with the future Richard Channing, Racine does the same thing in a jacuzzi with the future Jack Ewing.

By chance, Michael Tyrone’s same swimming pool, and the grounds surrounding it, show up in this week’s FALCON CREST. After recently playing host to Little Blake’s birthday party on DYNASTY and a soiree for rich paedophiles on THE YELLOW ROSE, they now provides the setting for cartel leader Norton Crane’s assassination. The interior of the house appears later in the same episode, but this time doubling as the Buenos Aires residence of Crane’s successor, Johann Reibmann. In the same room where Michael Tyrone once fed his sinister-looking fish, Reibmann now pets his exotically-coloured birds.

The season premiere of each of the week's returning soaps finds its characters in varying states of helplessness. On DYNASTY, Jeff finds Fallon’s abandoned car at the scene of an accident but no amount of quizzing of police or paramedics yields any clue to her whereabouts. Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, Cole and Melissa can only stand and wait for a similar combination of professionals to bring news of their loved ones from the site of the plane crash. Over on DALLAS, JR, Sue Ellen and Lucy wait anxiously at Soap Land Memorial Hospital as Bobby undergoes emergency surgery following his shooting by a mystery assailant. Later, it’s Pam and Jenna’s turn to nod politely as yet more medical experts point at x-rays and talk about Bobby’s blindness.

Yes, three years after Blake Carrington and FLAMINGO ROAD’s Skipper both raged against the dying of the light, Bobby becomes the third Soap Land character to lose his sight. In spite of the dismayed reactions of those around him, it doesn’t feel like such a big deal for him. Certainly, he doesn’t seem to be experiencing the same kind of post-cliffhanger trauma this week as his alpha male contemporaries, DYNASTY's Blake and FALCON CREST's Chase.

While Chase is plagued by nightmares of the plane crash he feels at least partly responsible for, Blake’s situation — and that of the rest of the Carringtons — is even graver, what with the loss of Denver Carrington, Alexis’s arrest for murder and Fallon’s disappearance occurring almost simultaneously. “What’s happening to us?” asks Alexis, as well she might. However mysterious and abstract Fallon’s final scenes were at the end of last season, her family’s reactions to her vanishing feel emotionally real. When Jeff returns to the Carrington mansion without her, Blake’s bewildered disappointment resembles Miss Ellie’s when the Ewing boys came back from South America without Jock.

As Blake Carrington falls on DYNASTY, Cliff Barnes rises on DALLAS. “For the first time in my life, I don’t know what to do,” Blake admits to Krystle. "You mean, after all these years I finally won?!” asks an incredulous Cliff after learning of his eleventh hour oil strike. "I've never seen you so defeated,” Alexis tells Blake — and for once she isn’t gloating. “Cliff Barnes has become a mighty big man in this town … You’re yesterday’s news!” Marilee Stone informs JR — and she is gloating.

Following Bobby's shooting on DALLAS, which JR assumes was intended as an attempt on his own life, and the plane crash on FALCON CREST, which Richard Channing assumes was an act of sabotage by the cartel, both men beef up their personal security. For some reason, when JR employs bodyguards, it feels like an act of weakness — an example of physical cowardice that Jock would surely have disapproved of. Yet when Richard hires a Head of Security, it only adds to his mystique, to his Howard Hughes-like aura of untouchability. Either way, both security teams are soon put to the test, JR’s when Edgar Randolph takes a shot at him outside the Ewing building and Richard’s when someone — who turns out to be his girlfriend Pamela on the run from the cartel — breaks into his house and takes refuge in his closet.

While Edgar’s attempt on JR’s life is unsuccessful, he at least gets to pull the trigger, which makes a refreshing change after all the fumbling with firearms we’ve seen recently from Kirby on DYNASTY, Julia on FALCON CREST and Sue Ellen early on in this week’s DALLAS when she attempts to retrieve the gun stashed under her pillow to fend off JR’s advances, only to be interrupted by a call from Soap Land Memorial with the news of Bobby’s shooting.

While no one on DALLAS acknowledges that this is the second time a Ewing brother has been shot by an unknown intruder in the Ewing offices — the whole scenario is played completely straight — FALCON CREST comes dangerously close to suggesting its characters know they are living inside a soap opera. Before moving out of the Channing house, Melissa bids farewell to her soon-to-be-ex-grandmother-in-law with the line, "I'll always be available for the family gatherings, Angela — funerals, shootings, divorces and, of course, reading of wills.”

As in any new Soap Land season, there are losses. Gone from the opening credits of DYNASTY and DALLAS are Pamela Sue Martin and Barbara Bel Geddes. Lost in the between-seasons-shuffle are DYNASTY’s Kirby and DALLAS’s Peter Richards, both of whom started out as sweet-natured young idealists who subsequently had their hearts broken and spirits crushed before being blackmailed off their respective shows (she by Alexis, he by JR) without so much as a good-bye scene between them. Killed off screen as a result of the FALCON CREST plane crash are new grooms Phillip Erickson and Michael Ranson, while returning for the new season only to bid farewell in its first week are FALCON CREST’s Linda Gioberti (another fatality of the crash) and DALLAS's Afton Cooper. Discounting the various minor players who bit the dust during THE YELLOW ROSE’s frequent shoot outs, Linda is the first character to die on screen since Chip Roberts on KNOTS LANDING. (That said, we have yet to learn if Karen Mackenzie was alive or dead at the end of last season's KNOTS.) Afton, meanwhile, is rewarded for four years’ loyal service to Soap Land with arguably the best farewell scene since the original Steven Carrington’s on DYNASTY. (Richard Avery’s and Mark Graison’s exits were very poignant, but neither actually got to say good-bye to anyone.) Like Steven, Afton tells it like it is. “Our relationship is ridiculous,” she informs Cliff, “and it’s over. I just wish I could say it’s been terrific."

Of course, Afton’s departure becomes even more interesting when viewed in hindsight, when one realises that the character, like Sammy Jo when she first departed DYNASTY in Season 2, must be pregnant at this point. Her line to Cliff, “I’m not drinking with you,” leapt out at me this time around. For the first time, it occurred to me that Afton might already know she’s pregnant here. Perhaps it’s even the reason — combined with the fact that “Cliff Barnes has just become a mighty big man in this town” — that she decides to leave. Nothing if not intuitive, could it be that Afton senses what a dangerous combination power and a child could be for Cliff? Given how things will pan out in New DALLAS, one of her final lines to him — “You are the coldest man I have ever met; you make JR Ewing look like a saint” — now sounds oddly prophetic.

There are also some new additions to Soap Land this week. DYNASTY and FALCON CREST each feature a suavely handsome newcomer in their opening credit sequence — Brady Lloyd and Greg Reardon respectively. On DYNASTY, Brady pays a surprise visit to his wife, Dominique Devereaux, at La Mirage. Given that this is Brady’s introductory scene and some character background must necessarily be shoehorned into their marital conversation, they make for an impressive — and convincing — couple. Also, a scene between two black people, much less a black couple, is very unusual at this point in Soap Land’s history. In fact, if one were to recall the last conversation between two people of colour one would have to reach all the way back to the DALLAS mini-series when “Barbecue” caterers Tilly and Sam speculated about which of the Ewings would be the first to get drunk. In contrast, all Dominique and Brady are interested in is each other. (With that in mind, it's hard not to notice that the only other black faces in this week’s Soap Land belong to Lloyd Bridges’ efficient secretary on PAPER DOLLS and Bobby’s skilled surgeon on DALLAS — both highly competent professionals who are entirely ancillary as characters.)

Where Brady is black, FALCON CREST’s Greg is English — or at least half English. "My father was American … I moved over to California to go to Stanford,” he informs an unimpressed Angela during their first meeting. Likewise, Brady must remind his wife (in order to inform us) of his credentials: "Remember me, baby? I'm the guy that took a few talented unknown kids and parlayed them into a billion dollar recording business." "Oh Brady,” chides Dominique affectionately, "you're beginning to sound like your own press release. You do have that habit, you know.” To show a more personal side, Greg and Brady each manage to squeeze in an endearingly irrelevant anecdote about their mothers. "My English mother ... taught me not to ask sarcastic questions,” Greg tells Angela. "My mother used to say I had a way with words when I was a little boy and her dream was for me to grow up and write poems for a greeting card company,” Brady informs a completely charmed Claudia Carrington.

Amidst all the upheaval in this week’s Soap Land, some past sins are unearthed. “You set Peter up, didn’t you?” realises DALLAS’s Lucy during a conversation with a prevaricating JR. "Peter was playing around with Sue Ellen and you found out about it!” Meanwhile on DYNASTY, Steven is going through Colby Co’s books when he finds out about the pay off Alexis made to Rashid Ahmed that led to Blake’s downfall. While Lucy’s realisation yields no immediate consequences beyond a desultory cry of, “Nobody around here cares about anybody or anything!”, the impact of Steven’s discovery is far-reaching, leading first to a major fall-out between mother and son ("There is nothing about you that I can believe in anymore, nothing!”) and then to Blake swearing revenge against Alexis in a way that feels like a turning point for his character: “I’ll bury her just the way she's tried to bury me!” Towards the end of this week's DALLAS, Bobby informs Pam and Jenna that just prior to being shot, he'd found a bug in his office phone — and he suspects JR of being responsible for it. Later, JR assures Bobby that he will take care of Ewing Oil in his absence. “That’s a little like having the fox watch the henhouse,” Bobby replies drily. JR will use the same metaphor himself a few decades later. “You’re not the first Pam to fox her way into the henhouse,” he tells Cliff and Afton’s offspring at the beginning of New DALLAS’s second season.

With so many repercussions from last season, this week’s episodes could be forgiven for not ending with a fresh twist, yet that’s precisely what each of them do. On DYNASTY, just when it seems as if life cannot get any worse for the Carringtons, Sammy Jo snatches Danny at the airport, giving Adam the slip and making a quick getaway with the kid when she’s supposed to be boarding a plane to New York. Like the last Soap Land character to abduct a child, she leavens the sour taste of her crime with an irresistible quip. "You OK, sweetie?” Julia asked Joseph when she drove off with him in FALCON CREST. "Then let's go get some ice cream!” "My two best dresses were in that suitcase, honey lamb,” Sammy Jo tells Danny as she bundles him into the back of a cab, "but if everything goes the way I plan, your mom's gonna have more, lots more!” DALLAS ends with a slightly more predictable, but still fun, twist as it emerges that Edgar Randolph didn’t shoot Bobby as everyone has assumed. “Whoever tried to kill you is still at large!” Captain Fogarty tells JR. FALCON CREST, meanwhile, ends with the most unexpected, gloriously bonkers surprise of all — the revelation that there’s Nazi treasure buried under Falcon Crest and nobody knows about it apart from three sinister Europeans in Buenos Aires. "Falcon Crest will surrender its treasure!” shouts Gustav Reibmann, the most sinister European of them all.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

1 (-) DYNASTY
2 (1) FALCON CREST
3 (2) DALLAS
4 (-) PAPER DOLLS

 

[James from London]

04/Oct/84: KNOTS LANDING: Buying Time v. 05/Oct/84: DALLAS: Battle Lines v. 05/Oct/84: FALCON CREST: Father's Day

KNOTS LANDING is back, its characters in a similar state of emergency to those in last week’s returning soaps. Where DYNASTY kicked off with a frantic Jeff Colby shouting helplessly at the police about his missing (ex-)wife Fallon, KNOTS finds Gary Ewing doing the same thing regarding his missing (estranged) wife Abby, abducted in front of his eyes at the tail end of last season. And where the DALLAS Ewings gathered anxiously at Soap Land Memorial Hospital where Bobby was undergoing emergency surgery to remove the bullets sustained in his season finale shooting, Karen Mackenzie’s family now do the same following hers.

KNOTS being KNOTS, there are differences in approach. The cop Gary deals with isn’t an anonymous bit player but a firmly established recurring character, the perennially grouchy Detective Morrison. And where Bobby’s "five-hour" surgery on DALLAS was skimmed over in a matter of screen minutes, Karen’s “very long" operation spans most of the episode. Like Bobby’s doctor, her surgeon is played by a supporting black actor, but here some attempt has been to flesh out his character — we’re shown that Dr. Garner grows irritable under pressure, has an awkward bedside manner and a penchant for Charlie Parker. Also unlike DALLAS, we follow the medical action into the operating theatre, and when she regains consciousness after her surgery there is more time spent establishing Karen’s disorientation and discomfort than there was Bobby's.

While all of this is a laudable attempt by KNOTS to make a generic soap situation feel more specific and “real”, it's also a way of padding the episode out, to compensate for the comparative lack of action happening elsewhere.

There is tension in the hallways of Soap Land Memorial Hospital this week, on both KNOTS and DALLAS. Diana makes it clear to Mack that she resents his presence ("My mom asked you to leave and now I’m telling you ... We don’t need you, Mack”) while Jenna points out to Pam that as Bobby’s ex-wife, she has no place at his bedside either (“You gave up all rights to him when you walked out on him”).

“I know you think you still love, Bobby,” Jenna tells Pam, who doesn’t deny it. “Everything you said about Gary and me is true,” Val admits to Ben in yet another Ewing-verse hospital scene. "All my protests and all the denying — and then some stranger just mentions his name and I go running after him all over again.” In both cases, the cat is out of the bag: in spite of the full seasons' efforts they put into building new lives, Pam and Val are clearly still in love with their Ewing exes.

Karen makes it through surgery, but as with Bobby, there is a caveat. For Bobby, it’s his blindness. For Karen, it’s her paralysis. Not for her a sudden “Oh my God, I can’t move my legs!” moment equivalent to Fallon’s on DYNASTY or Chase’s on FALCON CREST. Instead, Dr. Garner explains during a long and faltering speech, her paralysis will manifest itself gradually. For both she and Bobby, the long-term prognosis is grim. “The longer [his recovery] takes, the less likely he is to regain his sight,” Bobby’s doctor warns Jenna this week. “Shortly after the paralysis becomes permanent, you are going to die,” Dr Garner tells Karen. Whereas FALCON CREST's Maggie and DALLAS’s Mark Graison each learned of their terminal condition from someone with whom they already shared a strong connection — a cousin-in-law and a lifelong friend — Karen and Dr Garner have no pre-existing relationship. It’s here that KNOTS' decision to develop the doctor’s personality pays off — we get the sense of Karen talking to another human being rather than just a sympathetic talking head.

In the past, I've always had a problem with the scene in this week’s DALLAS where JR explains to John Ross that it wouldn’t be fair of him to wrest control of Ewing Oil away from Bobby while he’s in the hospital: “You've got to remember, with family you play fair because there are rules to follow and if you do, you’ll be able to live with yourself.” JR’s words here felt to me like a cop-out on the part of the writers, a way of reigning in the character’s ambition, not out of a preexisting sense of family loyalty, but simply in order to preserve the show’s status quo, whereby the two brothers continue running the company together, however uneasily.

However, New DALLAS has given me a different outlook. When Bobby is stricken with cancer towards the end of New DALLAS’s first season, an equally frail JR reluctantly abandons his plans to drill for oil on Southfork and instead signs ownership of the ranch back to his brother. That situation is depicted so meaningfully and poignantly that its power sort of reverberates back through the years to imbue the JR/John Ross scene with a credibility I never felt it had before. Similarly, the way Sue Ellen seems to drift back to JR’s side in this episode, after keeping him at arm’s length for so long, was something I always found frustrating and disappointing, as if the writers didn’t know what else to do with her character. Viewed from this distance, however, it seems inevitable. Regardless of the rights and wrongs (or even the dramatic highs and lows) of the matter, this is simply how their relationship functioned: Sue Ellen could only ever keep JR at bay for so long.

Last week’s DYNASTY saw Blake Carrington in something of a decline, leaving other people to make important decisions about his family and business while he sat brooding in his bedroom in his pyjamas and silk dressing gown. “Stop shutting out the world!” Krystle pleaded with him. There’s an equivalent scene on this week’s DALLAS where Sue Ellen comes down to breakfast to finds JR sporting a similar pyjamas/silk dressing gown ensemble after spending a sleepless night brooding on the Southfork patio. Like Krystle, Sue Ellen tries to get her husband to open up — not to the whole world this time, just to her. Like Blake, JR is reluctant. “JR, you worked very hard to get me back in your bed again,” she snaps. "I thought that meant I’d be back in your life again too. Well apparently I was wrong!” She gets up to leave, but he stops her: “Wait a minute, Sue Ellen, can’t you see how hard it is for me to talk about this?” He then goes on to regale her with a list of his current problems — Cliff’s oil strike, Bobby appointing Donna as his deputy at Ewing Oil, a would-be assassin still on the loose — while she listens sympathetically. Again, viewed from a post-New DALLAS perspective, such a scene — JR and Sue Ellen bickering and talking almost like a conventional long-married couple — takes on a poignancy it never had before, and that it probably wasn’t even intended to have.

There are yet more sleepless, pyjama-clad nights in this week’s FALCON CREST. This time, Maggie is the supportive wife attempting to comfort husband Chase who is still haunted by the plane crash. Eventually, he conquers his demons by climbing into the pilot seat of a small crop duster and flying it over the vineyards.

While this week’s KNOTS ends on a downbeat note with Karen’s prognosis, DALLAS concludes with a delicious twist as Cliff, who has spent much of the preceding hour savouring his recent victory over JR in the Gulf, is abruptly arrested outside his office for Bobby’s shooting. Pam can only stand and watch as he is led away. “You can’t do this!” she protests helplessly. She then turns to see a smiling JR watching from his car across the street. As he drives off, her eyes narrow in anger.

For the second week in a row, however, the prize for the most outrageous episode ending is taken by FALCON CREST. Remember the bomb that turned out not to be in Mack’s jeep at the end of last season’s KNOTS? Well it’s found its way into Johann Reibmann’s limousine instead. As Reibmann climbs into the car, which is parked in front of his Buenos Aires home, his son Gustav watches discreetly from inside the house. The bomb goes off and there is an almighty explosion. We then see the flames reflected in the window in front of Gustav’s face. He wears a grave expression but does not seem surprised. It would appear that we’ve just witnessed Soap Land’s first case of patricide.

And this week’s Top 3 are …

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

 

[James from London]

09/Oct/84: PAPER DOLLS: Episode 2 v. 10/Oct/84: DYNASTY: The Mortgage v. 12/Oct/84: DALLAS: If at First You Don't Succeed v. 12/Oct/84: FALCON CREST: Strangers

There is some interesting cross-referencing between the soaps this week. "She’s sixteen years old, she looks like Joan Collins up there!” complains the protective mother of a young model on PAPER DOLLS, while on DALLAS, Lucy pays a nostalgic to visit to the Hot Biscuit, the diner where her mama waited tables way back in Season 1. "She's living out in California now,” Lucy tells Al, the proprietor. He asks her to say howdy to Val the next time she talks to her. "Yeah, I will — if I talk to her,” Lucy replies glumly. This is the DALLAS equivalent of Val’s admission on last year’s KNOTS that it had been “seven or eight months” since she and Lucy last spoke. Those are the only references on either show to an estrangement between mother and daughter.

Speaking of silent estrangements, this week’s DALLAS also brings news of the death of Jason Ewing, Jock’s never-previously-mentioned brother. "I don’t remember Jock ever talking about him,” remarks Sue Ellen. JR explains that the brothers had a falling out back when he himself was just a little boy and never spoke again. (Jason’s death also lays the foundation for the eventual arrival into DALLAS of his son Jack, who is currently locked in a combative relationship with his present father on PAPER DOLLS.)

Another Soap Land relative we’ve heard of but never seen before is Paul Hartford, Maggie and Terry’s father on FALCON CREST. Despite the enticement of great-grandchildren, brain tumours and plane crashes, he has never visited his daughters in the Tuscany Valley before this week’s episode. There’s no familial estrangement in this case, just the full itinerary of an archaeology lecturer.

To varying degrees, the Carringtons, Ewings, Channings and Giobertis are all still suffering the consequences of last season’s cliffhangers. On each of the shows this week, an attempt is made to unite the respective families. On DYNASTY, Blake gathers his brood together and delivers a rallying speech: "We are all of us Carringtons,” he reminds them. "We are all of us facing desperate problems at this moment of our lives. It's when things are bad, when we have to struggle, that's when we Carringtons are tested. We have to pull ourselves together. We have to be strong. We have to be what we always are — an example to others.” Over on DALLAS, Sue Ellen does her bit by hosting the first family dinner at Southfork since Jessica’s visit. Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Maggie throws yet another party, this time, a picnic, in order to "mend a few fences” between the Giobertis and the Channings.

In each case, the sense of family harmony is short-lived. Soon after his “Carringtons Unite!” speech, Blake turns on Krystle for selling her jewellery and furs in order to help him start over. "Dammit Krystle, I told you they were not for sale!” he shouts. Meanwhile, Jeff comes close to cracking up after identifying a body in the morgue which turns out not to be Fallon’s. (Like Chase Gioberti last week’s FALCON CREST, Jeff is tormented by nightmares of last season’s cliffhanger. Where Chase dreamt of plane crashes, Jeff dreams of disappearing brides.) Back at Southfork, Sue Ellen’s family dinner soon descends into bickering. "Family? That's a joke," grumbles JR as he surveys the jumbled assortment of Ewings, Krebbses and Farlows seated at the dining table. "The only one who qualifies is Ray and he misses by a half.” On FALCON CREST, Angela puts a pall on the party mood when she accidentally-on-purpose reveals that Maggie is adopted. Maggie’s father is dismayed ("Oh Mrs Channing, you're out of line!”) while Maggie herself is astonished.

Surprisingly, Soap Land's most united clan are currently the Barneses of DALLAS. During a run-in with Pam, JR accuses her of sounding increasingly like her brother. The remark is intended as an insult but she embraces it: “That's fine with me,” she tells him, "because that means I'm beginning to sound more and more like a Barnes.” The point is reiterated during a later argument between Pam and Sue Ellen. “You are clearly a Barnes,” Sue Ellen tells her disparagingly. Finally, Pam delivers to Cliff her own pocket-sized version of Blake’s “We are all of us Carringtons” speech: "I had my doubts at first, but I'm convinced now that you didn't shoot Bobby. We’re finally gonna be a family — and we're gonna be as strong a family as the Ewings ever were.”

Indeed, the Soap Land worms appear to be turning. "I've never believed in the Barnes-Ewing feud,” Pam informs JR, "but now I'm going to join it. I'm going to do everything I can to help Cliff and I'm not going to rest until all our family scores are settled!” This chimes with the vow Blake made against Alexis in the DYNASTY season opener: "I'm going to teach her a lesson that she's never going to forget. I’ll pay her back. I'll bury her just the way she's tried to bury me!” It’s exciting to hear such virtuous characters as Pam Ewing and Blake Carrington lowering themselves to the vengeful levels of their long-term foes. It opens up a whole fresh can of soapy possibilities.

As the first step in rebuilding his empire, Blake has taken out a loan on the Carrington mansion. Towards the end of this week's DYNASTY, he discovers that the mortgage is held by Alexis. "I'm getting even, Blake," she gloats. "In three months' time when that note becomes due and you can't pay it, that house belongs to me.” In other words, it’s Cliff, JR and Gold Canyon 340 all over again. But where Cliff was stunned into silence when he learnt of JR’s plan at the end of last season, Blake lets Alexis have it with both barrels: “There have been times when I’ve wanted to kill you, but not now. You’ve got a murder trial coming up. When they find you guilty, I want to be there and take a look at your face … That’s the day that I can’t wait for!”

While Alexis’s bail was set at $2,000,000 in the DYNASTY season opener, it costs half that to get Cliff out of jail following his arrest for Bobby’s shooting at the end of last week’s DALLAS. Both Cliff and Alexis continue to protest their innocence this week, but it is pointed out by their legal representatives, Messrs Duncan (“one of the best lawyers in town,” according to Cliff) and Ballard ("the best criminal attorney in the country,” according to Alexis) that there is compelling evidence against them. Not only is Cliff unable to provide an alibi for the shooting because he was so drunk, but the gun that shot Bobby was found in his apartment. Meanwhile, there’s the small matter of the $100,000 cheque Alexis made out to Mark Jennings and the fact that she was in the penthouse when he was killed. Whereas Alexis’s trial date is set for November ("That doesn't give us much time,” she frets), the charges are dropped against Cliff when a mysterious brunette steps forward to say they were together at the time of the shooting — and who should it be but Mandy Winger from THE YELLOW ROSE! So who planted the gun in Cliff’s condo? The answer to that lies in the closing shot of this week’s DALLAS which reveals a villainous looking Katherine poised over Bobby’s hospital bed with a syringe.

Cliff and Alexis aren’t the only characters to be falsely accused of cliffhanger-related crimes this week (assuming, of course, that Alexis is as innocent as she claims to be). On FALCON CREST, Richard and Angela are each trying to pin the blame for the plane crash on Chase, but for different reasons. Richard knows that the plane was really sabotaged by the cartel, but cannot expose them without implicating himself. Angela, on the other hand, neither knows nor seems to care who was really behind the crash; she simply views it as an opportunity to get Chase out of her hair once and for all. To that end, she and Lance start a rumour that the crash was caused by Chase's alcohol-induced negligence.

Whereas JR made his contempt for Pam clear at the very beginning of DALLAS (“Did your brother put you up to this, Miss Barnes?”), a veneer of civility has always existed between Angela and Chase on FALCON CREST regardless of what they’ve said or thought about each other in private. Sure, they’ve often clashed over their opposing business ethics and Angela has occasionally lashed out at Chase in extremis, but they have always then reverted to their default roles of an interfering aunt and headstrong nephew who regard each other with a grudging respect. Since the plane crash, however, there has been a shift. This week’s episode finds them freely trading insults as Angela calls Chase’s champagne dreary and accuses him of buying his way into the good graces of Wine Growers Magazine. “Bribery’s your style, Angela, not mine,” he retorts. Strangely, such undisguised animosity serves to lighten the show’s atmosphere rather than darken it: with Chase and Angela both now free to say what’s on their minds, it means there's one less secret lurking in the shadows. The arrival in the Tuscany Valley of Gustav Reibmann also contributes to the change in tone. The casting of Paul Freeman, who played a similarly artefact-obsessed villain with Nazi connections in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, is surely no coincidence. RAIDERS was itself influenced by the children’s adventure serials, full of action and gleefully daft cliffhangers, that cinemas used to show each week during the 1930s and ‘40s. The FALCON CREST Nazi treasure plot shares some of that same irresistible Saturday Morning Picture Show comic-strip-come-to-life quality.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

1 (1) DALLAS
2 (2) FALCON CREST
3 (-) DYNASTY
4 (-) PAPER DOLLS

 

[James from London]

16/Oct/84: PAPER DOLLS: Episode 3 v. 17/Oct/84: DYNASTY: Fallon v. 18/Oct/84: KNOTS LANDING: Calculated Risks v. 19/Oct/84: DALLAS: Jamie v. 19/Oct/84: FALCON CREST: The Outcasts

This week’s KNOTS LANDING and DALLAS both open with a recent gunshot victim, Karen Mackenzie and Bobby Ewing respectively, lying in their hospital bed trying to make sense of what is happening to them. Karen is full of questions about the terminal prognosis she received at end of the previous episode while Bobby, even more pressingly, wants to know why Katherine Wentworth is looming over him with a syringe.

Death — or at least the threat of it — looms large in all of this week’s soaps. As well as Katherine’s attempt to murder Bobby at the beginning of DALLAS, KNOTS and FALCON CREST both end with an apparently fatal shooting, PAPER DOLLS with two hit men lurking outside a married couple’s apartment and DYNASTY with the shock news of a major character's death.

The searches for Soap Land’s missing wives, DYNASTY’s Fallon and KNOTS LANDING’s Abby, both reach a conclusion this week. "She's dead, Blake,” weeps Jeff upon his return from Portland, Oregon in DYNASTY’s poignant final scene. Over on KNOTS, Mark St Claire summons Greg to the marina where he is holding Abby hostage. During their tense showdown, Greg shoots St Claire at point-blank range. Crucially, he pulls the trigger after he and Abby are out of danger. A central KNOTS character committing cold-blooded murder is at least as rule-breakingly thrilling as Johann Reibmann blowing up his own father on FALCON CREST two weeks ago. While not quite in the same league, the twist at the end of this week’s FC — Richard Channing’s trusted Head of Security turning out to be his assassin — is also pretty neat. The freeze frame of Pamela Lynch watching from the shadows as Padgett pumps bullets into Richard’s sleeping form adds an extra spooky frisson.

In the midst of all this death, Dr. Garner backtracks a little in this week’s KNOTS, telling Karen that her condition isn’t quite as untreatable as he previously claimed: there is an extremely high-risk operation that might save her life. There was a similar revision made on last season’s FALCON CREST following the episode where Maggie was told her brain tumour was inoperable. Like Maggie, Karen decides against surgery. “Mrs. Mackenzie, you’ve just chosen to die,” Dr. Garner tells her. When it comes to such decisions, there seems to be clear a gender divide in Soap Land. “If an operation is the only way I’m going to get my eyesight back, then I’m gonna have the operation no matter what the risks!” Bobby Ewing insisted on last week’s DALLAS. Similarly, FALCON CREST’s Chase and KNOTS LANDING's Sid have both previously gambled on life-or-death surgery to restore the use of their limbs. For Chase the risk paid off, for Sid it didn’t. More recently, DALLAS’s Mark Graison chose to go out in a blaze of glory rather than endure a slow terminal decline. On last week’s DALLAS, Sue Ellen referred to such behaviour as “that whole stupid macho thing — the image that men have of themselves.” What would be the female equivalent of such behaviour, I wonder? “That whole passive-aggressive maternal martyrdom thing” perhaps.

Almost exactly a year to the day after FALCON CREST’s Vicky bade farewell to her father Chase (still in hospital after being shot) before leaving California for an exciting future in New York, KNOTS LANDING’s Diana bids farewell to her mother Karen (still in hospital after being shot) before leaving California for an exciting future in New York. Like Vicky, who was set to resume her plans of becoming a dancer, Diana’s inclinations lean towards the creative. Given her flair for fashion design, she’ll probably hook up with Victoria Hill from KNOTS Season 3, who can then introduce her to Racine and the rest of the PAPER DOLLS crowd. “You'll have all of Manhattan,” Karen assures her, "the beginnings of a wonderful career.”

As Diana heads off for pastures new, it’s kind of poignant to see her DALLAS equivalent, Lucy Ewing, embark on her own new career path — as a waitress at the Hot Biscuit. A rich heiress choosing to sling hash at a diner might seem like one of Soap Land’s zanier storyline decisions, but then Lucy explains her reasons to Ray: "I've got status, money and that wonderful Ewing name. None of it's ever meant happiness for me ... I wanna feel like I'm part of this world, not just some aging rich kid.” Her reasoning is reminiscent of Fallon’s in DYNASTY two years ago: "I should have gotten out a long time ago, to prove myself, to prove that I’m a worthwhile human being.” Whereas Fallon’s idea of independence was to run one of her father’s businesses, thereby still trading on her family name, Lucy sheds her Ewing identity altogether, reverting to her married name of Cooper. “The people here … they just know me as Lucy,” she explains. "They either like me or they don’t, but either one's OK because they’re judging me, not my money or my name, just me. And that’s the first time in my life that’s ever happened.” Granted, it’s still an unlikely scenario, but there’s something very endearing about it. And let’s not feel too sorry for Lucy; she's already sampled the PAPER DOLLS world and found it wanting. “Modelling was a joke,” she tells Ray flatly — a viewpoint with which PAPER DOLLS itself seems to partially concur, judging by a scene in this week’s ep where the future Paige Matheson poses happily in some deliberately tasteless teenage fashions as her mother, who aspires to see her on the cover of British Vogue dressed like Princess Di, looks on in exasperation.

There’s some unexpected self-analysis from two of Soap Land’s least introspective characters this week. DALLAS's Cliff and DYNASTY’s Alexis each explains what motivates their quest for power and, even more interestingly, acknowledges some of their own shortcomings. "All my life, I have had one drive and that’s to be the winner that Digger wanted me to be,” Cliff tells Pam while discussing what led to his break-up with Afton. "That has been the most important thing in my life. I’m not saying that that’s right, but that’s me." "Steven, there is nothing in my life more important than my children,” insists Alexis during an argument with her youngest son, "but I do value money because money can help protect people that I love. I value it as much as I resent this trial that's coming up, this nightmare!” During a subsequent strategy meeting with her lawyer, she admits that “ever since Blake Carrington banished me from Denver, from my children, my main charity, unfortunately, has been Alexis Carrington Colby."

Meanwhile, to capitalise on her upcoming murder trial, Alexis's unauthorised life story is being serialised in the Denver Chronicle. It's full of scandalous tidbits about her past (“an incident in Portofino with a film star ... a party that made headlines”) but she doesn’t seem to mind. Amusingly, her only concern is about the photograph chosen to accompany the feature. "I don't particularly like this picture,” she frets. "I look a bit pale.”

In contrast, two of Soap Land’s more mysterious women, DYNASTY’s Dominique Devereaux and PAPER DOLLS’ Racine (so mysterious she has no surname — “like Cher,” as someone helpfully explains), are less willing to have their histories documented. "I don't share my private life with anyone,” declares Dominique. This makes things a little tricky both for Claudia Carrington, who is trying to assemble a biography of Dominique to promote her singing engagement at La Mirage, and the reporter who has been charged with writing Racine’s life story for Newsbeat Magazine. (In pleasingly soapy fashion, the reporter is also the lover of the best friend of Racine’s oldest client.) Hoping to prise Racine out of her glamorous comfort zone, the reporter takes her on a mystery date — to a rib shack on the wrong side of town populated entirely with black extras. Racine acquits herself surprisingly well, even managing to nibble on a chicken wing without smearing her lipgloss — an indication, perhaps, of humbler beginnings.

Back on DYNASTY, Racine’s former FLAMINGO ROAD father, Claude Weldon, resurfaces in Caracas as Billy Waite, “a killer shark” in business according to Blake. While Claude was as unscrupulous as they come, he was more a stooge than a shark. It’s during Billy's unsuccessful attempts to charm Krystle, and later seduce Alexis after she flies to Venezuela to dissuade him from doing business with Blake, that Claude’s sleazy, and ineffably amusing, personality reemerges. He suggests "a siesta in one of the cool recesses of my hot hacienda” to Alexis. "Oh Billy, we tried that once and it wasn't such a good idea,” she reminds him.

Trend of the week: Soap Land divas violating the terms of their parole. Arrested for shooting Bobby and then freed on bail, DALLAS’s Katherine skips the country, getting as far as London before disappearing altogether. As she is leaving Billy Waite’s villa in Caracas, Alexis is apprehended by police officials on suspicion of trying to do something similar. The scene is reminiscent of JR's surprise arrest in Cuba a couple of seasons ago ("Silencio, Signora!”), only funnier and more glamorous. "I will escort you to your plane and on to your flight," she is informed by one Lieutenant Lopez. "Upon your arrival in Miami, you will be met by federal officers and taken to the county jail, then you will be served with extradition papers from the state of Colorado and taken to Denver in custody." "This is outrageous!" Alexis protests. She then looks to Billy for help, only to find that he has vanished at the first sign of trouble — a quintessentially Claude Weldon move.

Soap Land sometimes makes strange bedfellows and this week finds innocent Michael Fairgate on KNOTS and battle weary JR on DALLAS singing from similar hymn sheets. “It's all over, everything,” laments Michael to his mom. "Diana, she’s going to New York, Eric’s always working, Mack’s moved out, and you’re in the hospital — I don’t even have a family anymore!” “Everything’s gone so damn wrong,” sighs JR during another heart to heart with Sue Ellen, “the family and the business … No matter what I do, I can't seem to win anymore.”

Two uninvited guests appear on Soap Land doorsteps this week. Both young and plainly dressed, they each announce themselves as a long-lost relative. “I’m your nephew,” Joshua Rush informs Lilimae Clements when he shows up in Seaview Circle. "Your sister was my mother, married to Jonathan J. Rush.” The stranger at Southfork, meanwhile, introduces herself to JR as “Jamie Ewing, Jason’s daughter. My daddy and your daddy were brothers.” A third unfamiliar face appears without warning by Terry's pool on FALCON CREST but he needs no introduction. Terry identifies him as Joel — "a lousy coke head with a stinking habit you can't afford and you’re not going to get any money from me to pay for it!" “Terry sweetheart,” Joel replies, "that’s no way to welcome back your long-lost husband.” Whereas Joel is enjoyably scuzzy, Joshua is almost dazzlingly pure on KNOTS. Jamie, meanwhile, only appears in the closing moments of this week’s DALLAS and is so shabbily dressed it takes the Ewings a moment to even determine her gender.

Speaking of FALCON CREST newcomers, Jean-Louis de Bercy, the latest arrival in the Tuscany Valley, pays a visit to Angela this week to present her with a sculpture of a falcon he has carved for her. Angela is characteristically suspicious of new neighbours bearing gifts but accepts it, unaware of the state of the art listening device planted inside. (Ironically, this is the same week that Bobby finally gets the Ewing Oil phone system debugged in DALLAS.) Nor does Angela realise that Jean-Louis is really the father-killing, Nazi-treasure-hunting Gustav Reibmann. There have been Soap Land imposters before — Michael Tyrone alias Michael Edwards on FLAMINGO ROAD, Chip Roberts aka Tony Fenice on KNOTS LANDING — but this is the first time the audience has been in on the deception from the start.

And this week’s Top 5 … it’s a close run thing but ...

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

 

[James from London]

23/Oct/84: PAPER DOLLS: Episode 4 v. 24/Oct/84: DYNASTY: The Rescue v. 25/Oct/84: KNOTS LANDING: Hanging Fire v. 26/Oct/84: DALLAS: Family v. 26/Oct/84: FALCON CREST: Shadows

This week’s episodes of DYNASTY and KNOTS LANDING both begin where the previous week's ended, on the subject of death. Blake desperately hopes that the burnt body in the Portland morgue isn't Fallon's. Meanwhile, Gary arrives at the marina in time to see a corpse being loaded into a coroner’s wagon and for a moment thinks it might be Abby's. While Gary’s fears prove unfounded, Blake’s hopes are dashed when Fallon’s scorched engagement ring is produced. In lieu of an identifiable body, it assumes the same significance that Jock Ewing’s medallion did in South America — it symbolises death.

While Abby is happily reunited with her kids at Gary’s ranch, Fallon’s son sits on the Carrington staircase and wonders forlornly if Mommy’s now in Heaven with his puppy. In this scene, Little Blake follows DALLAS’s John Ross and FALCON CREST’s Joseph to become the third Soap Land son born into his respective show to then graduate to a proper speaking role.

Give or take a summer hiatus, Fallon’s death comes close on the heels of Julia’s on FALCON CREST. Where Julia’s tragedy — both her demise and the events leading up to it — felt somehow inevitable, a symptom of the corruption at the heart of Falcon Crest, Fallon’s remains a mystery. We don’t how or why she ended up in a plane crash with her former fiancee. Nonetheless, following her death Fallon's father is gripped by the same instinct as Julia’s mother was after her’s. "Julia's death would mean something if we could just pull this family together again,” said Angela then. “This terrible loss, maybe it'll help bring the rest of the family together,” says Blake now. Interestingly, where Angela was able to corral the disparate Channings, Cumsons and Giobertis relatively easily, the ostensibly closer knit Carringtons are harder to convince. "I don't consider him family,” says Steven firmly of his brother Adam. Meanwhile, Jeff is angry at Fallon for running off with Peter De Vilbis. "I'll deal with my grief, my feelings, in my own way,” he tells Blake.

More complicated yet is the relationship between the grieving parents. Alexis is back in jail — a consequence of violating her parole in order to sabotage Blake’s deal in Caracas — when Blake visits her with the news of their daughter’s death. First, she lashes out at him (“You killed her, you killed my baby!”) before collapsing in his arms. Later, during Fallon’s wake, Blake learns that she nixed his deal with Billy Waite. “If I could just forget she’s the mother of my children,” he tells Krystle angrily, “but I can’t, I can’t forget.” Over on KNOTS LANDING, the relationship between Gary and Abby, reunited following her kidnapping, is even more conflicted. “I love you … but as a businesswoman, you represent everything I loathe,” Gary tells Abby. “I can’t stay in this marriage without your trust,” she insists. “Trust?” he laughs. "What are you, nuts?! After all that’s happened, if I trusted you … wouldn’t I deserve your contempt?” “What a love affair,” Abby sighs.

More screen time is devoted to Fallon’s burial on DYNASTY than any other of Soap Land’s recent plane crash fatalities. The victims of the FALCON CREST crash were swiftly dispatched in a three-way funeral in the season premiere while no such arrangements regarding Mark Graison were even mentioned on DALLAS. Fallon is laid to rest in what appears to be the same Soap Land cemetery as KNOTS LANDING’s Chip a year earlier. Back then, Chip’s sister Angie undercut the solemnity of the occasion by calling him a cheat and a thief at his graveside. Similarly, as Fallon’s coffin is lowered into the ground, Jeff calls her a bitch. Blake may not strike him across the face the way Diana did Angie but he comes pretty close. “You drunken fool! I will not let you desecrate my daughter's funeral!” he snarls at him.

While the Carringtons and Colbys are still struggling to deal with the consequences of last season’s finale (“What are we going to do?” sobs Alexis; “I don’t know what to do,” admits Blake), the rest of Soap Land is moving forward. A week after being deposed by Lance as the head of the New Globe, FALCON CREST's Richard buys a radio station and invites Maggie to be its star reporter. Likewise, on KNOTS, Gary acquires a cable TV station and invites Abby to run it.

In order to prove himself worthy of his new position at the Globe, Lance feels the need to get his hands dirty working incognito in the print room. This puts him in a similar position to Lucy Ewing at the Hot Biscuit — where Lucy calls herself Cooper, Lance answers to the name of Harold. Slumming it has a contrasting effect on these two privileged twenty-something heirs. By deliberately flirting with a fellow waitress’s beau in front of her, Lucy behaves more mischievously than we’ve seen her in years, while Lance taking a stand on behalf of a bullied co-worker is the noblest thing we’ve seen him do, well, ever. His transformation from pampered playboy to workers’ champion is as cheesy as it gets, but — hey — I like it.

Joining Lance on the road to redemption are fellow bad boys Adam Carrington and Greg Sumner, each branded a hero following his rescue of baby Danny and Abby Ewing respectively. (Adam doesn’t go to the same murderous lengths to secure Danny’s release as Greg does Abby's, but he does bind and gag a semi-naked Sammy Jo to a motel bed before making off with her son. The DYNASTY cameras are so impressed by his efforts that they linger on them for almost a full minute.) "I guess I really didn't know you,” a grateful Steven tells his brother after being reunited with his son. “How do you thank a man for saving his wife’s life? … I’ll always be grateful,” Gary tells Greg.

Random trend of the week: Controversial decisions made by a husband or wife without consulting their partner. On DYNASTY, Blake is angry when he learns that Krystle has fired the majority of their household staff as an economic measure. On KNOTS, Abby is dismayed to discover Gary has sold off almost all the acquisitions she made for Gary Ewing Enterprises for ethical reasons — not only that, but he’s invited Karen to become a fully participating partner in Lotus Point. Over on DALLAS, JR stands by unhappily as Sue Ellen invites Jamie to stay at Southfork. “You’re a Ewing and this is where you belong,” she insists. When challenged by their formidable spouses, Krystle and Gary assert themselves admirably. "Blake, one night some time ago,” Krystle recalls, "you told those people that it was Mrs. Carrington who ran this house and no one else. Well, I did what I had to do.” “I’m going to do business my way,” Gary informs Abby, "fairly, honestly." The fact that JR does not challenge Sue Ellen — his ire is saved for Jamie herself — is interesting: an unspoken acknowledgment that she is mistress of Southfork in Miss Ellie’s absence.

We learn this week that JR’s cousin Jamie and Val’s cousin Joshua have a lot in common. Each lost their mother at a young age ("Mama died just after I was born,” Joshua tells Val over coffee in her kitchen; "She died when I was five,” Jamie tells Sue Ellen and Donna over lunch at Southfork), each then subsequently developed a close relationship with their father (“It’s been just Papa and me,” says Joshua; "I could never leave my daddy alone,” says Jamie) and each have had an itinerant upbringing because of their father's occupation ("We travelled around a lot ... Papa’s a preacher and I help him,” Joshua explains; “We just kept travelling … Wherever there was oil, that’s where we were,” Jamie recalls).

A week after Joshua and Jamie, long lost relatives from humble beginnings, turned up unannounced on Ewing doorsteps, Dominique Devereaux inverts the same scenario on DYNASTY. Where Jamie hitchhiked her way from Alaska to Southfork, a chauffeured limousine ferries Dominique to a modest house in a poor neighbourhood. Where the Ewings regarded Jamie’s arrival on the ranch with bemusement, the little kids playing in the street react to Dominique’s appearance with something approaching awe. "Look at the big fancy car! Hey, pretty lady!" one of them calls out excitedly. Where JR momentarily mistook Jamie for a boy, the woman who comes out of the house to see what all the fuss is about exclaims, "For a minute, I thought the President of the United States had decided to visit Northern Colorado!” The woman is Dominique’s Aunt Bessie who hasn’t seen her niece since she was a skinny young girl called Millie Cox. (This means that Dominique, like Lucy on DALLAS, Lance and Gustav Reibmann on FALCON CREST, and possibly Racine on PAPER DOLLS, is hiding behind an alias of sorts.)

There have been equivalent going-back-to-my-roots scenes before in DALLAS (Pam looking around the house where she was raised by her Aunt Maggie, Ray’s Aunt Lil welcoming him back to his old homestead). However, the reunion between Dominique and Aunt Bessie, with its extravagant dialogue ("What is the single most beautiful word in the English language?” “… Lullaby”), more strongly resembles one of those old Hollywood women’s pictures: one can easily imagine a fur-trimmed Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck revisiting her poverty-stricken past, only this time the scenario is replayed with an entirely black cast.

This sudden influx of long-lost relatives is interesting enough, but things aren’t necessarily as they appear to be. “I don’t believe for one second that you’re Jason’s daughter,” JR tells Jamie on DALLAS. Val goes one better on KNOTS when she realises Joshua isn’t Lilimae’s nephew after all — but her son. However, it’s Dominique’s revelation that provides Soap Land with its most delicious moment of the week. In the final scene of this episode of DYNASTY she drops by the Carrington mansion, ostensibly to offer her condolences about Fallon, but really to deliver this zinger to Blake: “We have so much in common, our blood, our genes, our daddy.”

FALCON CREST has a little long-lost relative action of its own, as Chase and Cole hire Joel McCarthy as Falcon Crest’s new transportation manager, unaware that not only is he Terry’s secret husband, but also the man who mugged Maggie in the parking lot of Tuscany Downs earlier in the same episode.

There’s more parking lot drama at the end of this week’s DALLAS: Pam is startled to see a familiar-looking car parked in front of the Barnes Wentworth building. ”Mark??” she murmurs as the driver pulls away. Only one hour later, FALCON CREST ends with a remarkably similar cliffhanger when an even more familiar-looking face steps out of the vineyard shadows. “”Julia!!” gasps Emma. First Mark, then Julia ... maybe there’s hope for Fallon after all.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

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

 

[James from London]

30/Oct/84: PAPER DOLLS: Episode 5 v. 31/Oct/84: DYNASTY: The Trial v. 01/Nov/84: KNOTS LANDING: A Little Help v. 02/Nov/84: DALLAS: Shadow of a Doubt v. 02/Nov/84: FALCON CREST: Lord of the Valley

On this week’s DYNASTY, we hear the name of Blake’s father, Tom Carrington, for the very first time. Like Jock Ewing’s brother Jason, first referenced on DALLAS three weeks ago, he is an integral-but-never-previously-mentioned part of his respective show’s mythology. Tom and Jason both have vaguely disreputable reputations — Jason’s (alleged) daughter Jamie describes him as “a pretty hard drinker” while "Tom Carrington philandered with women all over Colorado,” according to his (alleged) daughter Dominique.

Over on KNOTS LANDING, Lilimae Clements paints a contrasting picture of her son’s father, Jonathan J. Rush, as harsh, pious and exacting ("I could never live up to his expectations, he always wanted more of me than I could give, more than anyone could give”) while on FALCON CREST we learn that Richard Channing was once married. ("What happened between you and Stephanie?” Pamela Lynch asks him. "The cartel happened,” Richard replies darkly.)

This week, Richard’s former step-daughter Lorraine becomes the latest Soap Land long lost relative to show up unannounced. He might be surprised to see her and she may have a somewhat idealised view of him, but at least there’s no ambiguity about their family connection, which makes Lorraine something of a novelty amongst this season’s new faces.

In the same way that Jamie’s keepsake photo of Jason and Jock failed to convince JR of her identity in last week’s DALLAS, Blake is equally unimpressed by Dominique's collection of love notes that were sent from his father to her mother. While Jamie's Alaskan driving licence at least indicates that she is legally a Ewing, Dominique’s birth certificate does nothing to support her claim that she is a Carrington. "That piece of paper simply lists the father as unknown,” she admits, "and it screams to the world that I was born illegitimate.” Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Joel McCarthy comes up with a piece of documentation that Terry would dearly love to discount but can’t: proof that they are still married. "Your attorney never bothered to file the final papers,” Joel tells her. "You put your trust in the wrong guy.” Yep, it’s Krystle and Mark Jennings’ non-divorce all over again, only with a better twist: if the truth is revealed, Terry stands to lose the vast fortune she inherited from Michael Ranson, the man she thought she was married to. “You’ve sure taken a big enough bite out of the Ewing apple,” JR tells Jamie after Sue Ellen treats her to some new clothes and a makeover, but that’s nothing compared to how much of Terry’s inheritance Joel plans to devour.

While Jamie feels rejected by the Ewings (“a family that doesn’t want me”) on DALLAS, KNOTS LANDING’s Joshua is devastated to learn that his mother didn’t die as he had always believed, but instead abandoned him as an infant. Two weeks after arriving in Soap Land, Jamie and Joshua both decide to move on. Sue Ellen persuades Jamie to stay and Val makes a similar appeal to Joshua. “It is beautiful here,” Jamie admits, looking out of her bedroom window at a Southfork-by-night view we aren’t privy to. “Beautiful” is the kind of generic description characters on DALLAS are always giving about Southfork. However, until New DALLAS, it rarely looks especially beautiful on screen. Conversely, the ocean backdrop in the KNOTS scene where Val finds Joshua after he has been out all night really is beautiful. There’s something primal about it too — she finds him on the beach by instinct (“This is where I would have come”), the same way Gary found her after she learned of his affair with Judy Trent in Season 2.

Of all of Soap Land’s current long lost relative story-lines, Jamie’s feels the most laboured and uninteresting, Dominique’s the most melodramatic and fun ("I am a bastard who started with nothing and I made a fortune, and dammit — I am going to be accepted as a Carrington too!”) and Joshua’s by far the most moving. The scene where Lilimae races to the bus station to stop him leaving town, only see his bus driving away, then realising he has had a last minute change of heart and decided not to leave after all, which leads to a tearful reunion between mother and son, is a variation on the kind of scenario we’ve seen a hundred times in movies and on TV. DYNASTY did their own version on Season 2 when Krystle changed her mind about boarding a plane to Dayton in favour of reconciling with Blake. However, the intensity and sheer presence of Alec Baldwin in the role of sorrowful man-child Joshua elevates this entire storyline to a higher emotional level. He makes Joshua's innocence completely mesmerising, almost otherworldly.

The main focus of this week’s DYNASTY is Alexis’s murder trial. A year ago, FALCON CREST's Julia and KNOTS LANDING’s Gary were both behind bars on equivalent charges. Where Gary did nothing to defend himself and Julia went so far as to request the death penalty purely to spite her mother, Alexis is also proving to be her own worst enemy — bribing a warder to keep her in creature comforts, arguing with reporters outside the courtroom, shouting at witnesses while they’re on the stand and attempting to manipulate the jury’s sentiments by appointing her firstborn son Adam as her defence counsel.

There’s an enjoyably twisty courtroom scene where Blake, having been subpoenaed by the prosecution, testifies to his ex-wife's violent nature. When pressed, he says that he believes her to be capable of murder. Cue gasps from the courtroom. However, under cross-examination by Adam, he is forced to concede that "she had no motive” for killing Mark. Having come so close to hammering the final nail into Alexis’s coffin, it looks as if he may yet prove her saviour. The bitter irony is not lost on Krystle. "You're passing judgement on another human being. That's not like you,” Blake gently chides her. “But it is like her, never to be punished for what she does!” insists Krystle.

Even more twisty is the situation between Greg and Abby on this week’s KNOTS. Where Alexis battled through a crowd of reporters on her way into court, Abby struggles through a crowd of reporters on her way to deliver a statement declaring that Greg’s shooting of Mark St Claire was strictly in self-defence. This is not a charitable act on Abby’s part. Having exonerated Greg — and therefore saved his political career — she intends to continue their quid pro quo relationship. Greg sees the situation differently: now that she has publicly spoken out on his behalf, he has no further use for her and so abruptly severs their association. Abby is as taken aback as Alexis was when Blake wound up testifying in her favour. She then spends the rest of the ep busting some classic soap moves in order to turn the tables on Greg once more.

This week’s KNOTS also sees the unveiling of the very impressive new Lotus Point office set. (Not only is it everything a Soap Land executive suite should be, but there’s an honest-to-God natural stream running through the reception area!) Just like JR and Bobby at Ewing Oil, bitter adversaries Abby and Karen have been given offices right next door to each other — all the better for barging angrily in and out of. “Abby will not be a problem,” Gary assures Karen with the kind of insane optimism that fuels at least 75% of all Soap Land conflicts. Interestingly enough, DALLAS questions its own unlikely office arrangement this week (“Are you sure it’s worth it, butting heads with JR every day?” Ray asks Bobby) and manages to come up with an impressively plausible justification for it ("I don’t have a choice,” Bobby replies. “I can’t leave Ewing Oil ... It's a trust that Daddy left me, I can't walk away from that").

Now that Abby and Karen are officially the KNOTS equivalent of the DALLAS Ewing brothers, it’s appropriate that Abby should embark on her most JR-like scheme to date. In the process, she assumes control of TV news station, Pacific World Cable, in the very same week that Richard Channing takes charge of radio news station, KRDC, on FALCON CREST. Abby and Richard each find their existing staff wary of the change in management. While Abby’s new employees are nervous that she’s going to fire them, Richard blithely gives the entire workforce their marching orders.

For the time being, Abby is less concerned with making her mark on PWC than regaining her leverage with Greg. To that end, she despatches an investigative reporter to dig into the medical history of one Bob Caulfield, Greg’s rival for the state senate. This parallels JR’s targeting of government official Edgar Randolph in last season’s DALLAS. Where JR learned of Edgar’s teenage history of child molestation, Abby discovers that Caulfield underwent electro-shock treatment as a much younger man. While JR blackmailed Edgar directly, threatening to expose his secret unless he did his bidding, Abby’s route is more circuitous. First, she arranges for Caulfield's secret to be “leaked" to the press (overriding her own station manager, Ben Gibson, in the process). Then, having discredited Caulfield in the most ignominious way possible, she then threatens to pin the blame for the leak on Greg unless he falls back into line. In other words, she out-JRs JR.

This week’s episodes of DALLAS and FALCON CREST start up immediately where last week’s left off, with Pam Ewing and Emma Channing each in a state of high excitement after seeing what appeared to be someone returning from the dead. Both are met with scepticism. “There must be some explanation — why would somebody be driving Mark's car?” asks Pam’s secretary Jackie, while Angela banishes Emma to her room until further notice. Pam spends the rest of this week’s DALLAS trying to get to the bottom of this latest mystery. The further she digs, the stranger things appear. At the end of the episode, during a confrontation with Mark’s lawyer, she reaches a conclusion of sorts: "You're making it sound as though Mark weren't dead, as though he were planning to come back!” Over on FALCON CREST, there’s no doubt that Julia really has come back — she’s even in the opening credits. But where Pam and Emma both struggle to convince people of what they have seen, it emerges on this week’s DYNASTY that Steven Carrington has witnessed something that he can tell no one about. But if Steven can’t speak his secret, how are we the audience to learn of it?

It’s interesting how often dreams have cropped up in this still new Soap Land season. FALCON CREST's Chase and DYNASTY's Jeff have both been tormented by visions of the previous season's cliffhangers while on last week’s KNOTS, Abby awoke from a dream of her ordeal at the hands of Mark St Claire to be comforted by Gary. In this week’s DYNASTY, for the first time in Soap Land’s history, a nightmare contains crucial plot information as Steven dreams what he cannot say: the sight of Mark Jennings plummeting to his death as Alexis stands on her balcony watching.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

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

 

[James from London]

07/Nov/84: DYNASTY: The Verdict v. 08/Nov/84: KNOTS LANDING: Ipso Facto v. 09/Nov/84: DALLAS: Homecoming v. 09/Nov/84: FALCON CREST: The Intruder

In this week’s DYNASTY, Steven Carrington testifies in court that he witnessed Mark Jennings' death at the end of last season. This claim doesn’t quite match up with what we saw on screen at the time, but Alexis’s incredulity at being betrayed by her favourite child (“It's a lie! I didn't do it! Steven, how could you do this to me? I'm your mother!”) is sufficiently entertaining to compensate for any lapse in continuity. Meanwhile, on KNOTS LANDING, Lilimae tells Joshua about a letter she wrote to his father after moving in with Val and Gary. We subsequently learn it was his discovery of this letter that prompted Joshua to track her down. We never saw Lilimae write such a letter of course, but that doesn’t seem too important now — Lilimae isn’t as prominent a KNOTS character as Val or Karen and as such there’s no reason we should be privy to her every move. Over on FALCON CREST, Julia seeks out former lover Lucas and explains how she cheated death during the springhouse fire. (She escaped through a hole in the plot.) However, no mention is made of the human remains found in the ashes that were believed to be hers. Again, we’re happy not to dwell on this omission because the prospect of having Julia back on the show is just such an intriguing one — not only has she returned from the dead but she's still on the run: where on FALCON CREST can she go from here?

While none of this narrative revisionism is especially troubling for the audience — I doubt I’d have noticed any of these discrepancies as a once-only viewer — Soap Land's characters are less willing to take each other at face value. On DYNASTY, Blake still refuses to acknowledge Dominique as his sister, even as he allows her to bail him out of trouble with a $70,000,000 cheque. On DALLAS, JR remains similarly unwilling to believe that Jamie is Jason’s daughter despite her insider knowledge that Jock’s nickname for his brother was Tumbleweed. Meanwhile, FALCON CREST's Angela Channing becomes the latest Soap Land character to look bemused when a perfect stranger shows up at the door claiming to be a member of the family. “I am Francesca, Francesca Gioberti!” cries an excitable Italian woman, flinging her arms around her. Back on DALLAS, a suspicious Eddie follows Lucy after she leaves her waitressing job at the Hot Biscuit and rumbles her true identity as a Ewing.

In the midst of all this distrust and talk of impostors, it’s ironic that Miss Ellie should return to DALLAS after what feels like a lengthy absence (in actual fact, her honeymoon lasted the same amount of time as Julia remained dead on FALCON CREST) looking and sounding like an entirely different, much more glamorous person. Ellie Ewing — a character whose appearance was so unchanging it resulted in an unintentional gag in her final episode when her “beautiful” wedding dress proved indistinguishable from almost every outfit she’d worn previously — is completely unrecognisable as Ellie Farlow. This is far by Soap Land’s most conspicuous recast to date. The nearest equivalent is Steven Carrington's on DYNASTY and that transformation was an incorporated into the narrative. When the Carringtons lined up to welcome Steven home, viewers and characters were on the same page. When the Ewings do the same for Mama, we’re not.

Miss Ellie’s new look aside, this is a strangely minor key installment of DALLAS. The fireworks and dramatic confrontations that led up to Miss Ellie and Clayton's wedding have been replaced by a melancholic resignation at the prospect of their homecoming. “I can’t believe a Farlow’s going to be living here at Southfork,” sighs JR more in sadness than in anger. It’s an intriguing, even brave, tone to adopt for an ep that supposedly heralds the start of a new era for the show — the one where Mr. and Mrs. Clayton Farlow take their places as the new heads of Southfork. Instead of looking forward, the episode winds up looking back to Jock’s glory days as a wildcatter, and by the end of the hour, it’s turned into a roundabout tribute to his enduring strength as a character. “You still live here, Jock. It’s still your house,” Clayton quietly acknowledges. Even the ever gracious, all-new Miss Ellie is not immune to the pervasive sense of anti-climax. Tear your eyes away from that eye-catching bouffant in her final scene and there’s a sad looking woman underneath it, silently disappointed that the big homecoming hasn’t worked out as she’d hoped.

"My children were born and raised in this house. One of them was buried from this house. Can't you understand what this place means to me?” Blake asked Krystle in a recent episode of DYNASTY. I was reminded of that dialogue during JR and Bobby’s argument over whether Jock’s portrait should be taken down from the wall at Southfork prior to Clayton and Ellie’s return. "I'm not ready to pretend Daddy never existed,” states JR. "Hell, he built this house, he built Ewing Oil, he's the reason the two of us are here ... I'm not going to bury his memory."

I was always a little resistant to this scene before. To see the Ewing boys arguing over a painting — even one as significant as Jock's — felt somehow un-DALLAS to me. Viewed from post-New DALLAS perspective, however, it’s another scene that has grown in significance. When one thinks of JR's own posthumous portrait hanging at Ewing Global, to see him back when he was fighting to keep his father’s memory alive becomes very poignant. After all these years, I feel as if I've finally grasped what this scene is really about.

Elsewhere this week, Soap Land stokes the flames of a few long-standing feuds. Steven’s testimony against her on DYNASTY has the effect of making Alexis more vengeful than ever. "I don't forgive my enemies," she informs Blake. "It's not over yet, and it won't be until I've repaid everyone for their treachery ten times over!” Meanwhile, Cliff’s new found success on DALLAS means that he is now in a position to poach key personnel from Ewing Oil. “He’s becoming a monster,” JR warns Bobby. "We’re in a war, buddy, and we’re losing one battle after another." Over on FALCON CREST, in the same week that Angela sues Chase over the wrongful death of her husband, she delivers a great speech to Greg Reardon reiterating her deep-seated resentment at her nephew’s presence in the Tuscany Valley: "Where was he when I was trying to rebuild the vineyards after Prohibition? And where was he when I was trying to pull all of this land together? He didn’t give a damn about Falcon Crest until he learned it was an empire!”

KNOTS LANDING is seemingly the odd soap out here. It’s the grand opening of Lotus Point this week, which means that, for the first time in ages (Season 4, perhaps?), all of the principle characters are in the same place at the same time. The rarity of such an occasion and the fact that everyone seems to be dreading it (Cathy to Laura: “Who do you least want to run into at this party?” Gary to Abby: “Half our guests are going to be avoiding the other half”) shows how much things have changed since KNOTS' community-spirited days when its characters actively chose to spend time in each other’s company. The gathering gives long-standing adversaries Val and Abby an opportunity to come face to face for the first time since Gary’s funeral but they don’t interact at all, KNOTS having little interest in rehashing old conflicts for the sake of it.

Except … the long dormant Val/Abby story takes an exciting and unexpected twist at the very end of the episode. By this point, we’ve already been introduced to Pacific World Cable employee PK Kelly. A tomboyish girl reporter nursing a barely concealed crush on Ben Gibson, she wouldn’t be out of place in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, while her vocal delivery — all breathy vowels and precise consonants — has always reminded me of Marilyn Monroe’s. I guess Kelly's closest Soap Land contemporary would be Betty, Lucy’s fellow waitress at the Hot Biscuit on DALLAS. As well as being tough-talking but vulnerable working girls, both are tertiary characters on the very outskirts of the drama who nonetheless add a pleasing sense of texture to their respective show. Kelly admits to Ben that she observed him drafting love letters to Val on his word processor. Charmingly antiquated as it now seems, Ben’s rueful observation — “That’s the trouble with these damn computers: everything you type goes on the television” — sounds more pertinent in 2015 than it did in 1984.

Kelly’s confession is a set up for the scene at the end of the episode when Abby inadvertently happens upon a draft of one of Ben's letters to Val and can’t resist taking a closer look. So it is she discovers that Gary is the father of Val's unborn babies. The resulting freeze frame — Abby’s stunned reaction reflected in Ben's computer screen — is a Soap Land classic. Unsurprisingly, it comes courtesy of my favourite Soap Land director, Larry Elikann.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

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

 

[James from London]

13/Nov/84: PAPER DOLLS: Episode 6 v. 14/Nov/84: DYNASTY: Amanda v. 15/Nov/84: KNOTS LANDING: Truth and Consequences v. 16/Nov/84: DALLAS: Oil Baron's Ball III v. 16/Nov/84: FALCON CREST: Pain and Pleasure

Striding into La Mirage with five luggage-laden bellboys trailing behind her, Dominique Devereaux made an impressively grand entrance at the end of last season's DYNASTY. There's a similar scene at the start of this week’s FALCON CREST when Francesca Gioberti (like Dominique, the illegitimate half-sister of her show’s leading character) sweeps into Angela’s house, but this time it’s staged more as slapstick comedy. Francesca and Chao Li address each other in their own native tongues with neither understanding the other (“Mr Chow Chow Chow!”), while Greg Reardon trips over Francesca's vast array of suitcases and hatboxes when he enters the scene.

In fact, DYNASTY aside, there is an unusually lightweight feel to much of this week’s Soap Land. While not exactly played for laughs, there’s something of the sitcom about Gary and Val’s continually backfiring attempts to reunite Karen and Mack on KNOTS LANDING, while on DALLAS (where Mandy Winger plays a similarly unsuccessful cupid for Pam and Bobby), Miss Ellie tries to resolve her and Clayton’s marriage problems via the not-terribly-dramatic method of purchasing of new bedroom furniture.

Meanwhile, the procession of long lost relatives continues. Hot on the heels of Angela Channing's half-sister comes Alexis Colby's secret daughter, Amanda. Like Francesca and the rest of Soap Land’s recent family additions — Joshua Rush, Jamie Ewing, Lorraine Prescott — Amanda’s arrival is unannounced. However, unlike those characters, she doesn’t simply turn up on the doorstep. Instead, she makes a succession of unexplained appearances — one at the prison where Alexis is being held for murder and two inside her penthouse — before her identity is revealed.

There is an abstract quality to these introductory glimpses of Amanda: we are given no logical explanation as to how she gains entrance to Alexis’s apartment, while the long silent gaze she shares with Dex when they first see each other could be something from a pop video — precisely the kind of pop video we see being filmed during an extended montage sequence in this week’s PAPER DOLLS. The video showcases the future Paige Matheson who, like Amanda, smirks and pouts throughout. Both girls are blonde and youthful (Future Paige’s age is been established as seventeen while Dex describes Amanda as “maybe nineteen, twenty years old”), both are coquettish and haughty by turn.

Soap Land’s recently departed teenage girls, Diana Fairgate and Vicky Gioberti, were accessible, relatable redheads. Amanda and Future Paige seem to herald a new era of Soap Land princess: blonde, remote, even a little aristocratic (Amanda has a cut glass English accent, Future Paige a glamorous modelling career). Perhaps sensing her time has passed, Soap Land's original spoilt princess, Lucy Ewing, formally abdicates her position on this week’s DALLAS. "I'm not part of that kind of life anymore,” she declares when six-year-old John Ross asks why she isn’t at the Oil Baron’s Ball with the rest of the Ewings. "Things that are important to your mommy and daddy aren't really important to me.” This short scene, distinctively filmed from overhead as the Ewing cousins walk up the Southfork staircase, is Lucy and John Ross's only significant conversation of the original DALLAS series, and it makes a nice companion piece to their fascinating restaurant scene in New DALLAS. Meanwhile, Ray and Donna’s roles as wry observers at the Oil Baron’s Ball ("Just liable to have a big brawl like last year,” says Ray of the Barnes and the Ewings; “Bite your tongue, Ray Krebbs,” mock-chides Donna) anticipates Ray and Lucy’s similar function at New DALLAS’s family gatherings.

What with the Oil Baron’s Ball in this week’s DALLAS and the grand opening of Lotus Point in last week’s KNOTS, it seems to be party season in Soap Land once again. FALCON CREST joins in the celebrations with Jean-Louis De Bercy’s housewarming soiree to mark his arrival in the Tuscany Valley. In the same way that the Lotus Point gathering was regarded as an obligatory function no one really wanted to go to, there is a fair amount of scepticism about the De Bercy bash. "That man has no business living in this valley,” sniffs Angela. "I think I’m going to be busy that day." There is no such negativity about the Oil Baron’s Ball, with all the DALLAS characters save Lucy happy to attend. The closest the episode gets to displaying any cynicism about the party is Cliff Barnes accepting an invitation to sit at Jeremy Wendell’s table in order to make the rest of the oil community envious.

One of the few FALCON CREST characters excited about Jean-Louis’s gathering is newcomer Lorraine Prescott. (“It’s the biggest party of the year!” she exclaims.) However, step-father Richard is determined to keep her away from his enemies at Falcon Crest and refuses to let her attend. Lorraine is so upset that she decides to leave the Tuscany Valley altogether. This leads to an emotional airport confrontation between her and Richard, and at the last minute Lorraine has a change of heart about leaving. The scene is reminiscent of the bus station reconciliation between Joshua and Lilimae on KNOTS a few weeks ago. In both cases, it becomes apparent that the older character (Lilimae, Richard) regards this second chance at parenthood as a way of redeeming themselves for past mistakes. “You could help make me a better person … I need you,” Richard tells his step-daughter.

Both of this week’s Soap Land parties contains an instance of “attraction at first sight” — but whereas JR Ewing’s fascination with Mandy Winger is dealt with discreetly (he does not approach her, but merely admires her across a crowded ballroom and then eavesdrops on her conversation with Pam), Richard Channing’s interest in Francesca Gioberti, aka the new one-third owner of Falcon Crest, could not be more blatant, and the episode concludes with the rest of the characters watching as he takes her in his arms and waltzes her around the dance floor.

KNOTS LANDING’s Joshua and DALLAS's Jamie each receives a job offer this week from an unexpected source - Abby and JR respectively. The position JR suggests to Jamie, as an assistant with an oil company in East Texas, would necessitate her leaving Southfork and possibly Dallas itself. Conversely, Abby’s offer to Joshua, that of a runner at her cable news station, places him right at the heart of the KNOTS action. While Sue Ellen nixes JR’s attempt to ship Jamie off the show, Val frets over Abby’s motives for wanting to move Joshua centre stage. Lilimae, on the other hand, is so impressed by Abby’s apparent magnanimity that she decides to forgive her and Gary their past indiscretions, thereby bringing two seasons’ worth of hostility to an end.

Over on DYNASTY, there’s a striking resemblance between Hal Lombard, the sleazy Southern businessman presently being courted by both Blake and Steven (on behalf of Denver Carrington and Colby Co respectively), and Gil Thurman, the sleazy Southern businessman courted by both JR and Cliff on DALLAS two years earlier. In the same way that Thurman’s Texas refinery was so important to JR and Cliff for a combination of personal and business reasons, so Lombard’s Texas oilfield represents more than just another deal for the two Carrington men. To Blake, it is his first step in rebuilding his empire while for Steven, it’s an attempt to make amends to his mother, currently languishing in prison following his testimony against her in court.

Whereas JR and Cliff behaved with characteristic animosity towards each other (“Nothing would give me more pleasure than to kick JR's butt”), Blake and Steven each take the high road. "There is nothing personal, nothing hostile in my trying to get that field,” Steven assures his father. "I accept that,” replies Blake. "That shouldn't stop us from loving each other."

As for Hal Lombard, he is less interested in the deal itself with than in any fringe benefits that go along with it — just as Gil Thurman was. Whereas JR tried to charm Thurman by inviting him to dinner at Sue Ellen’s townhouse, Blake goes one better and invites Lombard to stay at his mansion. And in the same way that Sue Ellen reacted angrily when Thurman made a pass at her, a heavily pregnant Krystle is equally outraged when Lombard propositions her. However, it’s interesting to note that while JR immediately set about soothing Sue Ellen’s hurt feelings even as his deal went up in smoke, Blake is less sensitive towards Krystle, who is shocked when he continues to deal with Lombard. When he offers Lombard a share of the China Sea leases to sweeten the deal, it looks as if Blake has gained the edge over Colby Co's bid — but when Krystle snubs Lombard again, he storms off in a huff after telling Blake to forget the deal. Blake blames his wife. "I'm afraid we're in for a very stormy time ahead," he tells her ominously.

In the best scene of this week’s KNOTS LANDING, Greg Sumner and wife Jane return to his hotel suite after his senatorial victory. All is calm until his security team leave and then Greg erupts with triumph: “Washington DC! The senate! The United States senate! I am in the club!" But then he is completely wrong-footed when Jane asks for a divorce. The scene is strongly reminiscent of the one at the beginning of this season's DALLAS in which Cliff Barnes returned to his apartment with a bottle of champagne after striking it rich to find Afton with her bags packed. Jane Sumner and Afton Cooper — two long-suffering, supportive women who decide to leave their man just as he reaches the pinnacle of his career. “Who needs her?” muttered Cliff to an empty apartment as a way of masking his pain after Afton had gone. Once he has recovered from the initial shock, Greg reacts similarly. “I’ll be leaving in the morning,” Jane tells him. “Why wait?” he replies before calling the front desk to say that she’ll be checking out immediately.

This week’s KNOTS and DALLAS end similarly — each with a freeze frame of a central female character in the midst of a celebration fretting about an ongoing love triangle. Abby broods about Gary and Val’s unborn child during Greg’s victory party in the closing moments of KNOTS, while DALLAS ends with Pam looking crestfallen after JR announces Bobby and Jenna’s engagement at the Oil Baron’s Ball.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

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

 

[James from London]

20/Nov/84: PAPER DOLLS: Episode 7 v. 21/Nov/84: DYNASTY: The Secret v. 22/Nov/84: KNOTS LANDING: Love to Take You Home v. 23/Nov/84: DALLAS: Shadows v. 23/Nov/84: FALCON CREST: The Trump Card

"I've called the wrong woman mother for my entire life! You’re my mother! Don't you have anything to say to me?” That's the rather wonderful opening line, delivered by Amanda Bedford, née Carrington, to Alexis on this week’s DYNASTY. Over on KNOTS LANDING, Joshua Rush is just as angry at his father Jonathan J. Rush (aka Special Guest Star Gil Thurman) for deceiving him about his mother’s identity for his entire life. "You kept the truth from me!” he shouts. "I was protecting you,” Jonathan insists. Alexis defends herself similarly. "I know what scandal can do,” she tells Amanda. "I wanted to prevent that from happening to you.”

"I was so sure of who I was and what I wanted,” Amanda continues, "and then in just one moment, I became someone else. Amanda Bedford ceased to exist.” "It was a shock to me to find out that I was … not who I thought I was,” echoes Francesca Gioberti on this week’s FALCON CREST. "I can’t help feeling that Jasper Gioberti cheated me out of a part of my life.” Meanwhile back on KNOTS, in a profoundly moving sequence, Joshua undergoes an identity crisis right in front of our eyes. “It’s all a lie,” he weeps, “my whole life. I don’t know what I’ve done that was good or that was bad. I don’t know if I’ve ever been right. I don’t know what is right.”

A common theme in Soap Land’s current spate of "long lost relative” storylines, of which there are several, is a fear that the new character will fall prey to undesirable influences. “She’ll corrupt you,” predicts Joshua’s father on KNOTS, referring to Lilimae. Meanwhile, FALCON CREST's Richard Channing is uneasy about the developing relationship between step-daughter Lorraine and Lance Cumson. “I want you to watch her night and day,” he instructs his assistant Pamela. There again, Lance’s grandmother doesn’t approve of her new half-sister Francesca getting involved with Richard either. “Angela warned me about you,” purrs Francesca. Back on DYNASTY, Alexis is eager to keep Amanda away from Blake. "I'm not going to let you take her away from me,” she vows to him at the end of this week's episode, "not this child!”

The exceptions to this rule are DYNASTY’s Dominique and DALLAS’s Jamie. Far from feeling protective of his apparent half-sister, Blake goes so far as to actively encourages Dominique to renew her acquaintance with the nefarious Rashid Ahmed in order secure a public apology from him. "Then will you finally trust me, Blake?” she asks. "Will you admit that I am your sister?” Over on DALLAS, Jamie is less in danger of being corrupted by the Texas Ewings than of being bored to death by them. “I'm getting kind of tired of wandering about through shops and malls and hair salons every day,” she complains to Sue Ellen. "I want more in my life than that!” This is the most insistent Jamie has been since showing up at the beginning of the season. Soap Land’s other recent twenty-something arrivals - KNOTS' Joshua and FALCON CREST’s Lorraine - have been similarly undemanding, humbly asking for little more than to be accepted by their new families. DYNASTY’s Amanda proves far more rebellious in her second ep, earning herself a slap in the face and a "You little bitch!” from Alexis when she leaks the truth of their relationship to the press.

Even as Amanda’s identity as "ALEXIS COLBY'S SECRET REVELATION” becomes front page news, the name of her father remains a mystery. Blake's surprise when he first meets her that she is older than he was expecting parallels Miss Ellie’s in DALLAS a few weeks ago that Jamie should be so young. Whereas Jamie’s youth served to cast further doubt (if only momentarily) that she was really Jason’s daughter, Amanda’s age leads Blake to suspect she might be his own. After so much such suspicion exhibited towards Soap Land’s other recent family additions — JR’s hostility towards Jamie, Lilimae’s initial coldness towards Joshua, etc., — there’s something touching about Blake’s eagerness to claim Amanda as his child. His scepticism over Alexis’s claim that Amanda was the result of a brief fling with a ski instructor in Gstaad leads to a classic DYNASTY exchange. Blake: "There was no ski instructor." Alexis: "There were many ski instructors." Blake: "I'll bet there were!”

The weighty significance of fathers is a recurring Soap Land theme, particularly in this week’s episodes. As well as Blake and Amanda getting to know each other on DYNASTY, there’s Jonathan and Joshua working out their issues on KNOTS. Meanwhile FALCON CREST's Maggie is moved to learn that the biological father she never knew was a World War II soldier killed in action and on DALLAS, Miss Ellie makes the controversial decision to remove Jock’s portrait from Southfork living room at the same time as assuring her boys that, “Your daddy is in every shadow of this house.”

Ordinarily the epitome of effortless leadership, Miss Ellie has been undergoing a period of transition of late as she adjusts to her life as a newlywed while still living with her previous husband’s children at Southfork. This has resulted in her being wrong-footed in almost every scene. Confusingly, it’s also coincided with Donna Reed taking over the role as Ellie. I’ve always been very critical about Reed’s acting but now I can see that she conveys her character’s indecision and insecurity very well. So why does her presence still seem so odd? I think it’s to do with scale. What Reed is delivering, if one can get past the distractingly glamorous hairdo and designer dresses, is quite a subtle, nuanced performance — one that DALLAS itself, now that Bradford May’s triumphant stint as Director of Photography is over and the show has reverted to a more generic look and feel, isn’t fully equipped to capture. It’s as if the rhythms of the programme and actress are slightly out of sync.

By contrast, on this week’s KNOTS, the acting, writing, camera work and music are all working in perfect unison. In one scene, Karen finds Mack, from whom she is still estranged, sitting on the rocks by the sea. For some reason, she brings a coffee pot along with her and tries to refill his cup but he won’t let her. It’s a small, seemingly incidental detail that somehow says so much. On DALLAS, such lower key moments — such as the subtleties of Donna Reed’s acting — tend to get lost in the shuffle. DYNASTY may not be quite so artful as KNOTS but the pull of the action, the swell of music, the boldness of the acting and camera work all feel like they're driving in the same direction.

While Ellie's removal of Jock’s portrait becomes a major plot point on this week’s DALLAS, a framed photograph of another dead husband, Peter De Vilbis, conveniently displayed on a hotel room dresser, enables us to learn the secret identity of Jeff Colby’s latest squeeze, Nicole Simpson, on this week’s DYNASTY. Peter’s Euro-trash contemporary from last season, DALLAS’s Naldo Marchetta, also resurfaces this week. He claims that he wants to become part of his daughter Charlie’s life — but what’s he really after? Similarly, Nicole’s true motivations for insinuating herself with Jeff have yet to be revealed.

This DYNASTY episode also introduces us to Soap Land’s latest PR guy, Luke Fuller. Whether he’ll turn out to be as duplicitous as his publicist predecessors — Leslie Stewart, Chip Roberts, Tracy Kendall — remains to be seen. He seems to possess the same unnerving eager-to-please preppy quality as Chip, and Claudia, who walks into her bisexual husband's office to find Luke straightening his tie, is already a little wary of him.

In the same week that Mimi Rodgers suffers an abduction-induced miscarriage on PAPER DOLLS, radiant mothers-to-be Krystle Carrington and Val Ewing are each shown undergoing what appears to be a routine medical check up. Both about seven months pregnant, both are assured by their doctors that they and their babies are perfectly healthy. Nevertheless, each scene results in a sense of impending doom. In spite of her doctor’s blessing, Blake will not contemplate the idea of Krystle returning to work for the remainder of her pregnancy. "Krystle, darling,” he reasons, "in two months we'll be holding the most precious gift that could be given to us — a new life. Now is it too much to ask that you wait those two months?" "Two months - I wonder what could happen to us in two months?” broods Krystle portentously. The way the background music swells around her and the screen then fades to black suggests that whatever is going to happen, it won’t be good. Meanwhile, it’s only after Val has left her doctor’s office with some new medication that we glimpse his face and realise we’ve seen him before — lunching with Abby’s sinister associate Scott Easton earlier in the same episode. (We’ve also seen him several times on DALLAS as JR’s banker, but that’s another story.) We then see hear him on the phone to Easton. “It’s taken care of,” he tells him enigmatically. "I’d say two to three days at the most.” Again, we don’t know exactly what’s going on, but with the creepy doctor landing the final shot of the episode, there’s clearly something looming menacingly on the horizon.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

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

 

[James from London]

27/Nov/84: PAPER DOLLS: Episode 8 v. 28/Nov/84: DYNASTY: Domestic Intrigue v. 29/Nov/84: KNOTS LANDING: Tomorrow Never Knows v. 30/Nov/84: DALLAS: Charlie v. 30/Nov/84: FALCON CREST: Tarantella

After a slowish start, PAPER DOLLS gets spicier this week, shedding some of its more vanilla characters in the process. There are some wonderfully overripe one-liners, all of them delivered with relish by Morgan Fairchild’s Racine: “Darling, a little piece of advice for the future — when a lady has a hot tub in her bedroom, it is not Mother Teresa’s apartment,” she purrs at a lover who has mistaken their fling for something more serious. “The only time I’ve ever seen you well-dressed is when you’re naked,” she coos at a neophyte male model before giving him a Jamie Ewing-style makeover. “In this town, the only way you get fed is if you look like you’re not hungry,” she continues — her appearances-are-everything lecture resembling the one Fallon gave to Krystle back in DYNASTY Season 1 (“The poor cut back in hard times, that’s why they’re poor. The rich know that’s the time to spend.”).

PAPER DOLLS is at its best when it portrays the fashion world as a cut-throat one in which only the tough and the beautiful survive. The closer it gets to depicting what models actually do, however, the duller it becomes. Each episode contains a sub-MTV montage or two where pretty young people pose for the cameras while poor imitations of contemporary pop hits play in the background. During these interludes, the show's dramatic momentum invariably grinds to a halt.

Whereas the real life US Navy proved too lumbering and monolithic for EMERALD POINT NAS to squeeze much excitement out of, PAPER DOLLS suffers the same problem in reverse: the world of modelling and fashion is too ephemeral and transitory to be pinned down dramatically (as everyone from Aaron Spelling to Robert Altman also discovered). Popular music might be similarly intangible and fast-moving, but one of the many impressive things about twenty-first-century super-soap EMPIRE is how fearlessly it has folded the mythologies and cliches of the record industry — hip-hop especially — into its narrative.

Other highlights from this week’s PAPER DOLLS: We learn that the most wholesome and innocent young model on the show has, somewhat inevitably, acquired an obsessed fan — one who has the most impressive photo-based shrine to his beloved since Roger Larsen’s to Lucy on DALLAS. And this ep of PD ends with the grandest Soap Land entrance since Dominique Devereaux's on DYNASTY. Lauren Hutton’s similarly French-sounding Colette Ferrier emerges from the shadows of Lloyd Bridges’ office in an Alexis Carrington-style veiled hat. It’s a quintessential soap moment and, as was the case with Dominique, the fact that we know neither who this woman is nor what she wants doesn’t detract from it at all.

At first glance, DYNASTY's Dex and DALLAS’s Clayton don’t have much in common as characters, but they find themselves in similar situations this season. Each is an alpha male whose attempts to assert himself in his romantic relationship are continually thwarted. On DYNASTY, Alexis is too preoccupied with errant daughter Amanda to respond to Dex's amorous advances. On DALLAS, in spite of Miss Ellie's best efforts, Clayton still feels like an outsider at Southfork. This week, their frustrations result in both men making similarly inappropriate threats to a much younger woman. "You should have your bottom smacked,” Dex tells a smirky Amanda after an argument with her mother. “If you don’t think I won’t turn you over my knee and paddle you, you’re very wrong,” Clayton informs a truculent Lucy in an attempt to establish some authority over his wife’s family.

The drastic measures taken by Blake Carrington towards Rashid Ahmed in this week’s DYNASTY strongly echo those of Bobby Ewing towards commissioner George Hicks in DALLAS Season 5. Whereas Bobby paid a hooker to plant cocaine in Hicks’s apartment so that he could then blackmail him into voting against JR’s oil variance, Blake has Dominique secrete heroin in Rashid’s villa in Istanbul in order to force a signature out of him that will clear Blake’s name. Pam and Krystle’s reactions are word-for-word identical when they find out what their men have been up to. “You’re not the man I married,” they tell their husbands. "How much money do we all need?" Pam asked Bobby back then; "How many millions do you need?" Krystle asks Blake now. Both men insist that they’re fighting not for money but something nobler (“There were reasons,” Bobby insists. "I never meant for it happen that way," Blake protests), but their wives aren't buying these moral rationalisations. "You would do anything to beat JR and get the company — anything!” Pam told Bobby. "All I know is that a man is dead ... because of you!” Krystle tells Blake.

Just as Pam barely had time to absorb the discovery of Bobby’s blackmail before being hit by the news of her mother’s fatal plane crash so Krystle’s distress at Blake’s blackmail is followed immediately by her fall down the stairs of the Carrington mansion while heavily pregnant.

Storylines colliding (Rashid dying in Istanbul, Krystle falling down the stairs in Denver), events spiralling out of control (Rashid’s unnecessary death in a police shoot-out echoing the circumstances leading to the supposed death of his FALCON CREST wife Julia last season) — this is the stuff that thrilling soap climaxes are made of. On this occasion, however, the execution lacks a little something. I’d have liked bigger close-ups and crazier camera angles. Had my favourite Soap Land director Larry Elikann been in charge, in other words, this week’s DYNASTY could have been an off-kilter classic.

As it is, Krystle's tumble downstairs is shown in all its stuntwoman glory but lacks the shock and immediacy of Maggie Gioberti's comparatively modest fall down her sister Terry’s flight of stairs in last season's FALCON CREST. One of the best scenes of this week’s FC takes place on the same staircase where a frightened Terry pulls a gun on what she believes to be her unstable ex-husband Joel — but instead, she comes dangerously close to shooting Richard Channing. It’s a tense and atmospheric scene which also marks an unexpected shift in Terry and Richard’s relationship from adversarial towards something more intimate.

Ironically, in the same week that Krystle’s disapproval of Blake’s dubious business methods leads to a crisis in their marriage on DYNASTY, Karen is reconciled with Mack on KNOTS LANDING, having finally come to terms with his dubious business methods. “I know how important your work is to you,” she tells him. "I know that if you’re going be true to yourself and true to that work then sometimes there’s going to be some danger and you’re not going to run from it. That’s what makes you so good at what you do. I don’t want to take that away from you." Not that everything in the Mackenzie garden is rosy, however. Karen neglects to mention that she is dying. As a result, the post-coital bed scene following their reunion takes on an aura of wistful romantic sadness similar to the one between Pam and a terminally ill Mark Graison at the end of last season’s DALLAS. "Let's make this a perfect night. In everyone's life, there should be one perfect night,” whispered Mark to Pam. “I just wish this moment could last forever,” whispers a weepy Karen to Mack.

Like DYNASTY, this week’s KNOTS also features a heavily pregnant blonde woman in physical danger, but again the atmosphere is very different. With Val following her creepy doctor’s instructions to eat to the point of discomfort, unaware that she is thereby inducing a premature labour, it feels like we’re entering body-horror territory. By the time she gives birth on the operating table under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs and surrounded by sinister medical staff and wonky camera effects, we could be watching a TV remake of ROSEMARY’S BABY. At the end of the episode, when Abby receives an anonymous middle-of-the-night phone call implicating her in the unknown fate of Val’s babies, the tone has shifted again, this time to that of a conspiracy thriller.

In an episode full of eerie moments, one of the oddest occurs when Val, upon the start of her contractions, tries to reach Lilimae and Joshua by calling the club where they are watching Cathy perform. However, the sound of her voice is drowned out by Cathy singing, of all things, “Hole in My Heart” — almost as if Ciji were reaching out from beyond the grave to take one last act of revenge against Val in her hour of need. With Dominique busy doing Blake’s bidding in Istanbul, Cathy has no competition in the Soap Land chanteuse stakes this week. Instead, FALCON CREST gives us a tarantella — a gloriously mad dance performed by Francesca Gioberti, as the rest of the show's characters look on in slack-jawed amazement. This isn’t Soap Land's first show-stopping dance routine — DYNASTY’s Sammy Jo, FLAMINGO ROAD’s Christie and EMERALD POINT's Hilary have all gyrated provocatively in the past — but Francesca’s tarantella ("an old festive dance, originally said to be the cure for the sting of a tarantula") is something else altogether. Instead of sexy mischievousness, Francesca’s performance is fuelled by righteous anger. "You are the tarantulas who made me sick and sad with your poison and your plots! I am ashamed!” she explains to her audience at the end of the dance. “I have now danced away the poison!"

As longstanding Soap Land viewers, we now expect the inhabitants of FALCON CREST (as well as the other soaps) to backstab and scheme against each other, but Francesca - an unsuspecting newcomer - does not. As such, she provides an outsider's perspective that reminds us how outrageous we once found these characters. Interestingly, there’s an equivalent scene in this week’s KNOTS LANDING. Instead of the naive Francesca, however, it falls to streetwise Mack Mackenzie to offer the outsider’s viewpoint (even though he's now been a regular character for over two seasons) and in place of a publicly performed tarantella, his outburst takes the form of an exasperated rant in the privacy of his station wagon: “I should have taken French in school: cul-de-sac — dead end. I should have known. Everyone in there’s a basket case … I’ve had it! To hell with them! I’m getting the hell out of all their lives!"

The depiction of Francesca as a literal "innocent abroad” is in contrast to Soap Land’s customary portrayal of characters with foreign accents as untrustworthy and opportunistic. For example, on this week’s DALLAS, Bobby refuses to believe that Naldo Marchetta’s newfound interest in his daughter Charlie could possibly be genuine. "He’s supported himself his entire life convincing people that he’s sincere,” he reminds Jenna. “You are a disgrace to your sex and your countrymen,” Alexis informs Rashid Ahmed, another dodgy foreigner, in this week’s DYNASTY shortly he double-crosses the Carringtons one last time — after signing the confession exonerating Blake, he pulls a gun on Adam and makes a dash for freedom. "Don't be a fool! You'll never get away, Ahmed!" Adam shouts, and so it proves when Rashid is shot and killed before he can reach his helicopter. And on the subject of racial stereotyping, it’s notable that the last thing KNOTS LANDING’s Val sees on the operating table before she succumbs to the anaesthetic and her nightmare begins is a pair of Asian eyes looking down at her from behind a surgical mask — silent, inscrutable, sinister, other.

After learning that Naldo is her real father, DALLAS’s Charlie runs away from home. "I didn’t know what to think except that somebody I’d never heard of before was really my daddy,” she later explains. "It’s funny to have a father and not even know who he is.” Her experience echoes that of Amanda Carrington on DYNASTY. "I never really had a father,” she tells Blake this week. "It’s such a terrible feeling to think you know who you are and then to find out you’re not that person at all. It’s like looking in a mirror and all at once not seeing your face but somebody else’s."

A missing child is every parent’s nightmare and so the distress of Jenna — a single parent with a full-time job — over Charlie's disappearance should feel very relatable. However, DALLAS’s shiny glamour — more extreme this season than ever before — works against the drama in this case. Jenna’s expertly coiffed hair, immaculate makeup and designer outfit all serve to distance us from whatever she is feeling.

KNOTS has upped its glamour quotient this season too (as tacitly acknowledged by Mack when he told Karen a couple of weeks ago: “You look good in a hat”) yet somehow it manages to retain its believability during its own child-related drama this week. Val, alone in the house, goes into premature labour unexpectedly. Her hair and makeup are no less perfect than Jenna’s, but her pain and fear feel much more real. The way she braces herself against the pain of her contractions by putting her legs up on a table, knees apart, gives the scenario an earthiness you’d be hard-pressed to find in any of the other soaps. In fairness to DALLAS, other scenes in this week’s ep strike a more successful balance between the everyday and the outlandish (Donna complaining about Ray’s outdated views on the man/woman relationship while standing in front of her ten million dollar oil well; Lucy fighting with Eddie when she realises he knew that she was a Ewing before he took her to bed).

While Bobby and Jenna’s fears that Charlie has been abducted ultimately prove unfounded on DALLAS and a huge question mark now looms over the whereabouts of Val’s babies on KNOTS, by far the most wonderfully bonkers kidnapping of the week takes place on FALCON CREST when Julia — an escaped killer whom everyone believes is dead — is snatched by Johann Reibman — the murderous son of a Nazi war criminal whom everyone believes is an antiques dealer.

And this week’s Top 5 are …

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