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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 11316" data-attributes="member: 22">13/Oct/83: KNOTS LANDING: Nowhere to Run v. 14/Oct/83: DALLAS: The Letter v. 14/Oct/83 FALCON CREST: Conspiracy v. 15/Oct/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Divided We Fall“Seems like two lifetimes ago,” says Pam Ewing as she and Bobby recall the early days of their marriage in this week’s DALLAS. While the soaps have always drawn upon their own back stories, embellishing them as they’ve gone along to give their sagas a sense of dramatic weight, this line of Pam’s is the first time that events shown on screen - and that are part of the viewers’ memories as well as the characters' - have been enshrined in the same way. It serves to remind us of how long these shows have been on the air, how much history they now have to draw on."There's a calm in the air,” Pam notes in another scene. “It's the first calm I've known since I married into that family.” In other words, it’s the first calm since DALLAS - and by extension, Soap Land itself - began. Indeed, following the sense of tragic inevitability leading up to the Southfork fire, and to a lesser extent Ciji’s murder, at the end of the 82/3 season, there’s now a sense of DALLAS and KNOTS reawakening, emerging blinking into the sunlight, growing in confidence and opening up to new horizons, both narratively and visually.“A calm in the air" isn’t the only thing we’re experiencing for the first time. At the end of this week’s DALLAS, when Pam and Bobby have failed to see through Katherine’s latest scheme to keep them apart, it dawns on us for the first time that, wow, maybe they're really not going to reconcile at the eleventh hour the way they, Blake and Krystle, and Chase and Maggie, always have in the past. When the frame freezes on Pam walking tearfully away from Bobby, she is heading towards the unknown - the same unknown this week’s Soap Land is full of.Somehow this sense of newness is embodied by Peter Richards, John Ross’s new camp counsellor, making his DALLAS debut this week. Golden-haired, open-faced, maybe a little dorky, he radiates health, youth and hope in a way no DALLAS character has before. Even JR refers to him, without a trace of cynicism, as "a fine young man”. If one were watching this episode for the first time without any prior knowledge of the character it would be hard to predict how he will fit into the Ewings’ story.There’s always been something cinematic about Gary’s ranch on KNOTS LANDING. I guess it’s the way it’s photographed, but one really gets a sense of its beauty and vastness the way one rarely did with Southfork - for all the talk of what a special place it is - before New DALLAS. (There’s also a vicarious pleasure to be had from seeing the former residents of Seaview Circle adjusting to their beautiful new surroundings.) In its own modest way, DALLAS also expands visually this week ... by showing us the Ewings’ upstairs hallway and John Ross's bedroom for the first time (those brief glimpses before the fire notwithstanding). While THE YELLOW ROSE is now the most authentic looking of all the soaps - both eps thus far appear to have been shot entirely on location - FALCON CREST remains the most visually sumptuous. In one striking shot, we see Julia standing in the prison yard gazing through a wire fence at the lush vineyards beyond.This week’s KNOTS and DALLAS include equivalent scenes of “new” affluence. In her capacity as realtor, Laura drops by Gary’s new ranch in the middle of a work day to find he and Abby basking by the pool. Similarly, Mark Graison treats Pam, Cliff and Afton to an afternoon by his pool. Sure, Abby had a backyard pool in the cul-de-sac, but this is on a whole different level. “I must say, this is the most fantastic place I’ve ever sold,” says Laura taking in her surroundings. And while Pam may already be accustomed to being a rich man’s wife, Mark’s way of life is far grander than anything Cliff and Afton are used to. ("Mark, this is wonderful!" Afton gushes.) Besides, the Ewings never laid on clowns, balloons and a lawn full toys for Christopher’s amusement the way Mark does here - even if Christopher remains steadfastly unimpressed by the gesture. (Christopher aside, there is strong competition for the happiest Soap Land kid of the week. On KNOTS, Olivia and Brian embrace ranch life and horse riding as eagerly as John Ross takes to Peter Richards and trampolining on DALLAS, while not even a pumped stomach or a spell at Soap Land Memorial can wipe the smile off Joseph's chubby little chops on FALCON CREST.)In spite of their surroundings, Cliff and Gary both keep on eye on business in these scenes. While Cliff badgers Pam to form a consortium with he and Mark, Gary offers Laura a job working alongside Abby at Gary Ewing Enterprises. Given Laura’s personal history with Abby and Cliff’s unending obsession with the Ewings, Pam and Laura are understandably dubious about forming these alliances, but in each case, the dramatic potential is clearly too juicy for the writers to allow considerations of mere logic to stand in their way.This is also the week that Abby finally joins the rest of Soap Land's movers and shakers by getting her own office - and it’s a sexy one. With an en-suite conference room and upstairs apartment thrown in, it combines the coolest aspects of both Alexis’s office at Colby Co and her penthouse in the sky. And again, there’s the secondary thrill of seeing Abby, after all her years of cul-de-sac scheming, finally getting what she wants. Well, almost. “Gary has taken a sudden interest in the business,” she complains to her confidante James Westmont. "I believe he’s bent on wasting his fortune. I want to prevent him doing that - for his own good.” Once more, there is a parallel here between Gary and Sue Ellen’s respective new starts. Neither is willing to go back to the way things were before they started drinking. As Sue Ellen puts it this week, "There are a lot of things that are gonna on that you're not gonna like, JR, but guess what? I'm gonna be doing them anyway.”Both Gary and Sue Ellen’s sober-eyed perspectives include a pragmatic view of their relationships. “On my own, I don’t amount to much," Sue Ellen told Pam last week, “so I guess I’ll just have to lead a married life without a husband.” This week, Gary admits to Laura that although he loves Abby, he doesn't trust her. While Sue Ellen plays it safe, ploughing all her energies into helping her son, Gary is still attracted to danger. “Being with Abby is like high-speed auto racing,” he laughs. "It’s risky, but man - what a kick!"FALCON CREST may not have the same “fresh start” feeling as KNOTS and DALLAS - if anything, the show is getting darker - but there is still a sense of moving into uncharted waters. A leading character who is also a self-confessed murderer behind bars? There is no Soap Land precedent, no generic narrative blueprint for how Julia’s story will resolve itself. Just as we don’t quite understand how the story got here, we have no idea what will come next.The scenes where Richard and Melissa visit Julia in jail are the most compelling of the Soap Land week. Her reasons for killing Carlo seem to change from scene to scene. Her motives, whom she was trying to protect then and whom she is trying to destroy now, are almost impossible to keep track of. Further layers of confusion are added by Richard and Melissa, each of whom has had a parent murdered by Julia, feigning forgiveness for her crimes as part of some as yet unspecified revenge. Lies, fantasy, insanity, writers’ revisionism … add to this the lurid yet abstract nature of the dialogue (“I’ve always felt you would be the key to the destruction of Angela Channing!”) and it’s as if the scenes themselves are unhinged.During Melissa's visit, Julia has a flashback montage, which seems to echo moments, not just from her own life, but all of Soap Land’s history. First, we see her watching Carlo in bed with another woman - he doesn't realise she’s there but the woman does (just as JR failed to notice Sue Ellen’s presence when he was in bed with Holly Harwood). Then we see her lurking behind a tree with a gun which she intends to use on Carlo (the same way Alexis did with the rifle she then fired to startle Krystle’s horse). This is followed by previously-seen footage of Carlo’s death scene, with inserted shots of Julia wielding the murder weapon, just as the reveal of JR’s would-be assassin combined the shooting we had already seen with a fresh close-up of Kristin pulling the trigger.Julia’s fellow killer on KNOTS LANDING, Chip Roberts, is no longer in a position to make a fresh start either. As the police search closes in on him and Diana, the dynamic between them shifts. While Chip grows increasingly despondent - at one point sitting in the middle of the road in tears - Diana emerges as the dominant partner in their relationship, essentially becoming the brains of the outfit. When the shack they have taken refuge in is surrounded by police, it is her idea to make it look as if Chip is holding her hostage with a gun.This week's DALLAS and KNOTS both save their best moments for last. While the settings of their final scenes are very different - Bobby and Pam meet for a heart-to-heart in a busy square in downtown Dallas whereas Chip and Diana are at the centre of a quasi-siege situation in an Oklahoman field - each of the women involved approaches her predicament with a similar “love conquers all” mentality. "If Bobby and I have a love that's strong enough, we can fight JR and anybody else who thinks that my marriage is over,” declares Pam. “We were meant to be, Chip ...We love each other and that’s all that matters,” Diana insists. Both, however, are in for a rude awakening. On DALLAS, Pam has the emotional rug pulled from under her when Bobby tells her that their love is “just yesterday’s memories” and that “I'm letting you go”. Meanwhile on KNOTS, Mack's well-intentioned - not to mention heroic - rescue attempt completely screws up Diana’s plan for her and Chip's quick getaway. However, even as Chip is arrested and taken away by the police, it is Diana who has the last word. When an intrusive TV news crew approach and ask “Miss Fairgate” for a comment, Diana looks down their camera lens and announces: "It's not Miss Fairgate, it's Mrs Tony Fenice!” Thus the circumstances of the first Soap Land wedding of this season - murderer marries his hostage-cum-accomplice whilst on the lam - turn out to be as unconventional as the first such ceremony of last season - ailing billionaire marries ex-wife of his nemesis from his hospital bed then immediately dies.This week’s YELLOW ROSE takes over when KNOTS LANDING left off, with a suspect in a killing being led away by police amidst a flurry of pushy reporters. Where KNOTS’ TV newsman demonstrates his insensitivity by loudly hoping for a shootout in time for the evening news, the YELLOW ROSE press gang do their bit by repeatedly referring to the accused man as “the Indian” instead of his name, John Stronghart. (Stronghart is the ranch hand who last week took money to let some bad people onto the Yellow Rose Ranch, not realising they were drug runners. In a subsequent shoot out with the police, an officer was killed. The cops are now keen to pin the shooting on Stronghart.)The theme of casual racism continues throughout in the episode. “I don’t like my client being harassed because his ancestors didn’t land at Plymouth Rock,” Quisto Champion complains to the local sheriff. (As on EMERALD POINT NAS, the show’s central family includes a lawyer among its number - all the more convenient for participating in murder-related story lines.) “You gonna carry that cross your whole life, boy?” asks the sheriff mockingly, referring to Quisto’s own half-Mexican origins. "I run a clean department,” he adds. “You never gave a Mexican a problem he wouldn’t have had if he was white?” Quisto persists. "Or an Indian?” (This is the first time the issue of race has been raised in Soap Land since Gus Nunuoz left the Tuscany Valley “to help my people” at the beginning of last season’s FALCON CREST.)THE YELLOW ROSE also offers the most enjoyably ornate dialogue of the week. “Doggone, woman,” exclaims Quisto to Colleen, "here it is, a day hotter than high school love, and you look like fresh-cut flowers. How do you do it?” “Just hard work and horse manure,” comes the reply.It’s pretty much a four-way tie, but this week's Soap Land Top 4 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (3) FALCON CREST3 (2) DALLAS4 (4) THE YELLOW ROSE</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?