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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 149061" data-attributes="member: 22">29 Mar 89: DYNASTY: Sins of the Father v. 30 Mar 89: KNOTS LANDING: Giganticus II: The Revenge v. 31 Mar 89: DALLAS: April Showers v. 31 Mar 89: FALCON CREST: Resurrection   One way or another, Roger Grimes aka Tommy McKay causes an awful lot of trouble this week. On DYNASTY, Fallon wakes up screaming from a dream about him. “Looked like you were going ten rounds with Sugar Ray,” observes her bedmate Zorelli. “It’s like he’s inside my head. I can’t get him out!” she replies. On DALLAS, April can’t get him out of her apartment and later wakes up in the hospital looking like she’s gone ten rounds with Sugar Ray too.Zorelli suggests Fallon is suppressing some childhood trauma: “Some things are so painful, the mind just blocks things out.” We’ve been here before, of course — Miss Ellie’s denial after Jock’s death, Val becoming Verna after the loss of her twins, Emma flipping out after killing Jason, Fallon’s own incest fantasy-induced amnesia — but when Fallon turns to her mother for answers about Roger (“He did something that really terrified me,” she insists), Alexis is offended: “I hope you’re not suggesting that he molested you … Your father murdered him and now you’re trying to vilify him! He’s dead. For god sake, let him rest in peace!” Similarly, when April turns to Tommy’s sister for help early on in this week’s DALLAS (“He kicked down my front door and threatened me”),  Tracey, like Alexis, refuses to take her seriously: “I just don’t believe that … Tommy’s been working very hard to turn things around. I’m not about to let someone like you spoil it all.”The seeds of Abby’s and Sue Ellen’s Soap Land departures are sewn this week, with Ted Melcher introducing the idea of Greg becoming the US Trade Representative for Japan (a post Abby will end up taking) and Don Lockwood asking Sue Ellen if she’s ever considered leaving Texas for good. (She claims never to have considered the notion.) More pressingly, it’s only six weeks until the entire Carrington/Colby clan will disappear from our screens without warning and so we must take our sense of closure where we can find it. Handily, there are a couple of scenes in this week’s DYNASTY where characters reflect upon their pasts. Alexis, in an interlude of alcohol-fuelled nostalgia, reviews her four husbands (“What a bunch!”). First, Blake (“He didn’t love me but he’d kill anyone who was going to make me happy”), then Cecil (“He died on the wedding night — and I got the blame!”), followed by “dear, dumb Sean” (“He died and tried to take me with him!”) and finally Dex (“The only feelings he’s got are between his waist and his knees”). She concludes while gazing longingly at a snapshot of Tommy McKay, that Roger Grimes was “the only man who ever loved me.”Then it’s Dex’s turn. During a heated exchange with Alexis, he insists that he has “put the last eight years on hold just so I could be there for you!” To be pedantic, Dex has only known Alexis for the past five years, but maybe time moves differently in Soap Land — which could also account for a passing remark of Karen Mackenzie over on KNOTS. After Paula Vertosick complements her on her house, she casually remarks that “we’ve been here about, oh, ten years.” Ten years is how long KNOTS has been running, which suggests that the Fairgates arrived in the cul-de-sac only a short time before Gary and Val moved in. There’s no specific reason why that shouldn’t be the case, but it’s never been mentioned before and with Sid and Karen being the mom and dad of Seaview Circle from the very beginning, it’s just always felt like they’d been there a longer amount of time.Back on DYNASTY, Sable finds Alexis, still brooding about the past, looking through some old mementoes, including a painting once gifted to her by Roger Grimes. Sable recognises it as the work of Frederich Stahl, Adolf Hitler’s favourite painter: “Hitler admired Stahl’s work so he stole everything the man ever painted … and none of his paintings were ever seen again.” It then emerges the Collection buried at the bottom of the Carrington consists of precious artworks procured by the Nazis during World War II, and that this is the terrible secret Blake’s been hiding all season (indeed, the past thirty-something years). He explains to Sable to his father came by the treasure innocently, without realising what it was. Years later, with the aid of Dex’s father and Jason Colby, Blake hid the loot with a view to one day returning it to its rightful owners. The realisation that no-one we know was guilty of any wrongdoing is just the tiniest bit anti-climactic. It means that there is no cold-hearted, evil counterpart to FALCON CREST’s Nazi gold-diggers (Jacqueline Perrault, Henri Denault, Johann Reibman) for us to be shocked (and secretly thrilled) by. Apparently, the only person who sought to profit from Nazis’ crimes was this week’s resident troublemaker, Roger Grimes/Tommy McKay.Speaking of whom, in a brief scene on DALLAS (that I’m pretty sure was cut from the original BBC broadcast), Tommy/Roger becomes the first Soap Land character to snarf cocaine onscreen. Previously, whenever the likes of Olivia Cunningham or Peter De Vilbis were about to indulge, the camera would abruptly cut away. Following on directly from this scene, we see Tommy burst into April’s apartment, trash the place and then beat her unconscious. As far as depictions of male-on-female violence go, this is more brutal than anything Soap Land has previously served up. The only incident that comes close is the beating Sean Rowan gave Leslie Carrington at the end of last season’s DYNASTY.Tommy v April is an unfair fight in more ways than one. When April first arrived in Dallas, she was a sexy, witty gold-digger. During the past year or so, she has become an increasingly diluted character. A few weeks ago, she threw herself a one-person birthday party. The moment where she giggled delightedly at the pair of oversized fluffy duck slippers she’d gifted herself ranks as Soap Land’s most toe-curling moment since Melissa Agretti’s final meltdown. Tommy, on the other hand, is currently the most fascinating person on DALLAS. A long-haired, volatile young man, he’s trapped on a show where everyone else is either middle-aged and square or just acts like they’re middle-aged and square. He’s the first Soap Land character who seems to actively hate the programme he’s on and so spends his time frantically pounding on the self-destruct button, trying to find a way out.While one could legitimately argue that the scene between Tommy and April is gratuitous, that we don’t need to see every blow (although it’s the dubbed-on sound effects rather than the clearly pulled punches that give the scene its impact), the incident certainly isn’t treated lightly. Unlike the Sean/Leslie assault, after which Leslie was never mentioned again, it proves to be a major turning point for all the characters involved. It reignites both the feud between the Ewings and the McKays, and Bobby and April’s romance. Also, unlike those blurred lines that occur whenever JR coerces a woman into having sex with him, the show makes it clear that April is no way complicit in her ordeal. “I’m gonna press charges against him. I did everything I could to avoid it so I’m not gonna blame myself,” she tells Bobby afterwards. The assault also leads to further violence when Bobby goes after Tommy to give a taste of his own medicine. As the younger and bigger of the two, Tommy manages to get a few decent licks in, but ultimately it’s not his face in the opening credits and so he ends up taking a beating. (One way or another, it’s a week of violent retribution for Roger Grimes/Tommy McKay. As well as Bobby Ewing knocking him out for battering a defenceless woman, Blake Carrington concludes that “it was my father who killed Roger Grimes” after he caught Roger helping himself to the Nazi loot back in ’64.) Tommy’s attack on April aside, there is some blatant objectification of women on this week’s DALLAS, even by the series’ own standards. For the second time this season, JR meets Detective Rattigan in a PG-13 titty bar chockfull of women in skimpy bikinis and high heels either dancing in front of men or serving them drinks. Later in the ep, JR meets with Tommy, whom he finds at a newsstand ogling the centrefold of Boudoir Magazine. Each of these scenes begins with JR making a quip about the other man’s lowbrow tastes and ends with him engrossed in what he has just supposedly disapproved of. In the bar scene, he becomes so distracted by the floor show he doesn’t even notice when Rattigan departs. After Tommy leaves the newsstand, JR picks up his discarded magazine to see what he was looking at. “Well, he doesn’t have such bad taste after all,” he murmurs, chuckling appreciatively.The Boudoir fantasy comes to life on FALCON CREST when Richard Channing encounters Samantha Ross, an enigmatic prostitute who just happens to be a dead ringer for the late Melissa Agretti. “Do all hookers hate men?” he asks her. “Yes,” she replies matter-of-factly. Richard, however, turns out to be the exception to the rule. “I am attracted to you,” she admits. “With you, it’s strictly pleasure, no business.” A hooker who doesn’t even charge — who could ask for more? However, the gender stereotype is intriguingly inverted at the end of the episode. “You’re a bigger whore than I am, Richard,” she tells him. “I am indeed,” he concurs, snogging her face off.Sexism rears its head on KNOTS LANDING too, this time in the workplace, as Paige finds herself playing gopher for Abby and fixing coffee for minions (“Could you make us a fresh pot, hon?” smarms Mort). Unlike DALLAS’s centrefolds and FALCON CREST’s fantasy prostitutes, she at least gets to voice her frustrations — which sets off a brilliantly (and wittily) plotted chain of events. “I have worked for you for over a year now,” she reminds Greg. “I know I can contribute substantially more to Sumner Group* than I do working as a glorified note-taker and errand-runner.” She then impresses the boss by suggesting he lobby for the Japanese trade representative post by ingratiating himself with Murakame, the corporation that recently bought out Lotus Point. There’s only one problem, of course — Murakame is a fictitious company invented by Abby. To keep the charade going, she is forced to hire an actor to assume the role of Mr Nagata, a Murakame representative. (There’s more secret casting on DALLAS where Sue Ellen and Don Lockwood fly to Malibu to audition “a dozen JRs” for their movie.) Abby plans for Nagata to meet with Greg, “pronounce himself insulted at Greg’s offensive western ways” and refuse to have anything more to do with him. Paige unwittingly scuppers this scheme by enlisting a Mr Toyo to instruct Greg in how best “to do business without offending Japanese sensibilities.” While KNOTS is clearly having fun with Asian stereotypes here, the joke is ultimately at the expense of Americans’ ignorance of a culture other than their own. (This ignorance reaches its apotheosis on DALLAS when Gustav Hellstrom introduces himself to Cally as a Scandinavian. She looks at him blankly. “What’s a Scandinavian?” she asks.) At one point during his lesson with Mr Toyo, Greg holds his hands up in confusion: “Lemme get this straight — if Mr Nagata is smiling, it could be because he got the joke, because he didn’t get the joke or because I ticked him off?” “Yes,” replies Mr Toyo, a broad grin on his face. “How come you’re smiling?” Greg asks. “Because you pay me so much to explain these things to you!” he replies. This remark reminds me of an exchange between Bobby Ewing and Tilly, the black caterer at Ewings’ first barbecue back in the DALLAS mini-series. Bobby asks her to please stop addressing family members as “Mr Bobby” and “Mr Jock”. “Time I drop the mister, I have to charge 10% less,” she replies. Eleven years later, Mr Toyo (as well as Mr Nagata) is simply doing what Tilly did back then — making a profit by exploiting rich white people’s cultural preconceptions.The whole idea being her brainwave, Paige fully expects to attend the meeting with Greg and Mr Nagata, but is blocked by Abby: “I’ve only made a reservation at the restaurant for four people,” she smiles icily. “We can’t very well spring a fifth person on Mr Nagata. After all, he might think you’re a geisha girl!”The shift that's occurred in Paige’s character by this point is fascinating. Somewhere during this storyline and without the viewer even noticing, she has been transformed from snooty heiress to plucky underdog. Now she is essentially playing Melanie Griffiths’ titular character in Working Girl while Abby mirrors Griffiths’ nemesis boss played by Sigourney Weaver. Who knows if this was mere coincidence, but the movie had been nominated for five Oscars just six weeks before this episode aired so it was certainly in the zeitgeist. Also, the characters’ wardrobe choices for this sequence — Paige circumspect in black, Abby bold in red — match Griffiths’ and Weaver’s in the film’s promotional poster.Two weeks ago, DALLAS celebrated its 300th episode by trapping JR and Bobby in an elevator. During this episode of KNOTS, Paige does the same thing to Abby so she can take her place at the meeting with Mr Nagata. Abby gets off easier than the Ewing boys, however. “Bobby and I have been stuck in an elevator for thirteen hours,” JR informs Cally at the start of this week’s DALLAS. “I’ve been stuck in there for over two hours!” complains Abby. Meanwhile, Angela Channing spends the entirety of this week’s FALCON CREST, its 200th episode no less, also trapped, albeit in the rather more spacious surroundings of the New Globe hospitality suite, courtesy of son Richard. She complains to Garth that she’s “a prisoner in a penthouse” after he catches her trying to pick the lock of the private elevator.The buried Nazi treasure isn’t the only twist on this week’s DYNASTY to echo an old storyline on FALCON CREST. Turns out Tanner McBride, the sweet guy from the hospital Sammy Jo has the hots for, is a priest. It’s Melissa and Father Christopher all over again, only then we knew from the start that Padre C was a man of the cloth. Frederich Stahl’s painting, a landscape of what looks like a country town, looks nice, but I’m not as excited by it as Hitler apparently was. Cally’s latest artwork on DALLAS is also a landscape, more Grandma Moses in style, and gets the thumbs up from Miss Ellie and Clayton. (“This one’s better than the last one!” declares Ellie.) All things considered, I think I’d prefer to have the Farlows than the Führer as my champion.In spite of Blake’s and Abby’s best efforts, this week’s DYNASTY and KNOTS each end with someone stumbling upon the respective secret they’ve worked so hard to keep. On DYNASTY, Blake, Jeff and Dex are at the Carrington Lake checking on the site where the Collection is buried, unaware that Zorelli is observing them through a pair of binoculars. On KNOTS, Paige is watching cable TV in her recently acquired apartment when she spots the Executive Vice President of Murakame being terrorised by Giganticus, the hundred-foot star of his own badly dubbed black-and-white monster movie. Quicker than you or I could whip out a camera phone in 2019, Paige slams a tape into her VCR and and hits the record button. I really love how this majestically crappy movie bookends this episode of KNOTS. In the first scene, we hear Pat Williams ordering her daughter Julie to turn it off, while the last shot of the ep has Paige looking intently at a close-up of Nagata.Trend of the week: Coincidences — or are they? “I thought that everything that happened was just a bizarre coincidence,” Blake tells Sable, “Grimes’s body preserved for all those years so close to where the Collection was buried [but] it all must be connected!” Sure, Roger’s body and the Collection might be connected, but Sable’s diver and Krystle being at the lake at the exact same time remains a coincidence — a pure, undiluted soapy coincidence.Likewise, Michael Fairgate just happens to meet Paula Vertosick, the very forest ranger who made a pass at his stepfather earlier in this season's KNOTS. “Isn’t that wild that we both heard her lecture?” he says to Mack. “It’s such a coincidence!” That’s not the half of it: Mack and Michael each meeting Paula separately at White Horse Mountain is one thing, Paula then coming to Knots Landing to teach a class at the same college Michael attends and being an expert in the exact field Karen needs someone to be an expert in so she can oppose the oil drilling at Lotus Point is quite another. But it all slots together so beautifully, so knottily, it’s not that one merely forgives or overlooks the contrivance, the contrivance becomes an actively pleasurable part of the viewing experience.Other characters, meanwhile, use coincidence as a smokescreen for their own premeditated actions — such as when Cally and JR “accidentally” bump into Gustav Hellstrom. “Hopefully, there’s still some money to be made in oil — that’s why I’ve come to Dallas,” Gustav explains.  “Well, that’s a coincidence,” exclaims JR. “Ewing’s my name and oil’s my game!”However, the biggest, soapiest, nuttiest coincidence of the week occurs on FALCON CREST when Richard Channing looks across a crowded restaurant and happens to see a woman who happens to be played by  the same actress who used to play Melissa. It’s his “Holy shit, it’s Ciji!” moment. But while she may look just like the screechily hysterical Melissa who went up in flames, Samantha’s personality is more like Melissa’s when she first arrived in FC — controlled, measured, mysterious. It’s like welcoming back an old friend.This week’s Top 4 is … close! DALLAS’s violence and FC’s doppelgänger made their respective episodes memorable, while DYNASTY is a 5-star episode all the way. But KNOTS is even better than that. I’d forgotten how much I love this first era of the Sumner Group with Greg and Abby in adjacent offices and all that scheming in the shadows. It’s as good as soap gets.(*This week’s KNOTS is the first time the Sumner Group has been referred to by name — only minus its definite article.)1. (1) KNOTS LANDING2. (2) DYNASTY3. (-) DALLAS4. (-) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?