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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 151817" data-attributes="member: 22">03 May 89: DYNASTY: Blast From the Past v. 04 May 89: KNOTS LANDING: Straight Down the Line v. 05 May 89: DALLAS: The Great Texas Waltz v. 05 May 89: FALCON CREST: Ties That Bind“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Monica, but Jason Colby isn’t your father,” declares Alexis. “It was me, It was me — I killed Roger Grimes!” cries Fallon. “Oh Vanessa, you were the love of my life,” JR informs a woman we’d never even heard of before last week. Each of these shocking statements would seem to overturn everything we’ve been told about a major character’s back story. Looked at a little closer, however, they actually enhance what we already know. If Monica and Miles were never legitimate members of the Colby dynasty, then Sable’s overprotectiveness towards them — or at least towards Miles — and her paranoia that he would lose his “rightful share” of Jason’s empire makes even more sense now than it did when THE COLBYS was on the air. It also finally answers the question as to why Sable is now as obsessed with destroying Alexis as she once was with keeping her family together: it’s thanks to Alexis spilling the beans to Jason about the twins’ paternity (in one of those off-screen events we were not privy to, much like Blake learning about Krystle’s illness or Abby discovering there was oil under Lotus Point) that she no longer has a family to protect, Jason having subsequently disowned both Sable and her children. (It’s interesting that the absent Jason is depicted in a somewhat harsher light on DYNASTY than he was on THE COLBYS, just as the Texas Ewings always have been on KNOTS.)Likewise, the discovery that Fallon shot Roger, a trauma she has suppressed since childhood, would surely help explain any number of her previously established neuroses — from the daddy fixation to the incest rape fantasies to possibly even her abduction by aliens.Meanwhile, the consequences of JR’s relationship with Vanessa Beaumont are spelt out for us. “You spoilt me for any woman that ever came after you,” he tells her, “and when we split up, I became cynical about love.” One might argue that we don’t require an explanation for JR’s womanising anymore than we needed the story of Charles Scott jilting Abby as a teenager to provide us with an origin story for her ruthless ambition, and that it’s been enough of a blast to watch JR and Abby behaving badly all these years simply for the hell of it. But whereas the casting of Charles Scott had a (temporarily) damaging effect on Abby’s character (why is she be so besotted with this wimp?), the gorgeousness of Gayle Hunnicut’s performance as Vanessa actually enhances JR’s. It’s not just that she's so radiantly romantic and (when JR gently declines her advances) elegantly lovelorn, but that she is so believably all those things. And because we believe in her, we can believe JR was once in love with her and so he becomes a more intriguing, multi-dimensional character in turn. Encountering Vanessa on his honeymoon is possibly the most interesting thing to have happened to JR all season — more than breaking rocks on a chain gang or spending a night in an elevator or even marrying Cally.The penultimate episode of DYNASTY contains two fantastic set pieces. As well as the ridiculously thrilling climax in the Carrington cottage, there’s the scene where all hell breaks loose in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel. After Sable informs Jeff that Adam is responsible for the tabloid headlines about him and Monica, he launches himself on Adam. Furniture is overturned, punches are thrown, names are called and accusations hurled (“You’ve been all over her!” “She’s my sister!” “That makes you a pervert!” “You’re slime!”). Then into the middle of the chaos strides Alexis, returning after an absence of three episodes, trailed by bellboys laden down with luggage. Swiftly apprised of the situation, she delivers the mother of all revelations: “It’s just not possible for there to have been incest between Monica and Jeff … Jeff and Monica are not brother and sister.” Cue more threats and insults (Sable: “You monster, I will tear your tongue out of your head!” Alexis: “Look at her, she’s like a rabid bitch!”) and pretty soon Alexis and Sable are scrapping alongside Adam and Jeff, with Monica and several extras running helplessly in-between them. There’s something oddly joyous about the whole thing. The shot where the camera takes a God’s eye view, surveying the mayhem from above, could have made an ideal end to the series: And there we leave them all, brawling and tearing each other’s hair out for the rest of eternity.There’s another God’s eye view shot on DALLAS. We’re shown JR’s bedroom from above as if the camera were on the ceiling looking down — except there is no ceiling. Instead, there's Don Lockwood and Sue Ellen perched in the rafters — because this isn’t JR’s actual bedroom, but the movie equivalent of it, which is indistinguishable from the real thing. So why would DALLAS go to the trouble of undermining one of its most iconic rooms (“one of the great battlegrounds of Texas,” as Sue Ellen referred to it a few months ago) by exposing it as a mere set? Maybe because the only way for Sue Ellen to truly break free of Southfork’s grasp is to fictionalise it, to reduce it to nothing more than a few plywood walls nailed together while a bunch of technicians mill around in-between takes. After all, if it’s not real, it won’t be so difficult for her to leave it behind. Sure enough, up in the rafters, she and Don are discussing his awkward relationship with John Ross — the next obstacle to be overcome before she can leave the show.Back on DYNASTY, the contretemps at the Carlton is followed by a pleasingly ironic scene where Sable is consoled by, of all people, Jeff. “You and I have been at each other’s throats ever since we first met, but I gotta tell you, I feel for you right now,” he says. That these two characters, who have been JR-versus-Pam-style enemies from the beginning of THE COLBYS, should achieve a level of understanding just one week before the DYNASTY-verse closes its doors for business is as satisfying as it is unexpected.Speaking of JR and Pam, Carter McKay delivers a great speech to April in Vienna which mirrors the ultimatum JR gave his sister-in-law at the start of DALLAS Season 6. “If you return to Bobby,” he told Pam then, “all hell is going to break loose. I’ll call off this truce that exists between him and me. We’ll be in a dogfight that will make what went on before look like a love match.” “If Bobby and JR steal this deal from me,” McKay tells April now, “they’re in for an all-out war … A war occupies all of a man’s life. Bobby’s not gonna have any time for you … He’s gonna have his back up against the wall and the only way he’s gonna win is by turning his heart to stone. If you have any hopes of becoming the next Mrs Bobby Ewing, pull him out of this deal.”The scene is further enhanced by the grandeur of its location — the State Hall of the Austrian National Library, no less. Sammy Jo finds herself in an equally evocative setting when she tracks Tanner McBride down to a church. FALCON CREST aside, the Catholic church is rarely seen in Soap Land and when it is, it’s invariably shown from the perspective of an outsider: Greg reluctantly attending his daughter’s baptism on KNOTS, Sue Ellen interrupting a grieving Kimberly Cryder on DALLAS and now Sammy Jo, who steals into the pew behind Tanner. “Don’t turn around,” she tells him. “I want to confess to you.” What follows is a her equivalent of Alexis’s recent review of past loves, only with the bitterness replaced by melancholy. “All my life I’ve fallen in love with the wrong people,” she begins sadly, before recounting her misadventures with Steven, Josh Harris, Jeff and now Tanner himself.Even rarer than the sight of a Soap Land character in church is to observe one actually praying. Ordinarily, a Soap Land character will offer up his innermost thoughts to a gravestone or a portrait or even an office chair rather than an actual deity. But after Sammy Jo leaves the church, we see an agonised Tanner praying at the altar: “Forgive me, dear God, I feel passion for this woman … Even though I know my thoughts are sinful, I can’t get her out of my heart … Please, dear God, help me.” At a time when every other plot strand on DYNASTY is interconnected, Sammy Jo and Tanner’s story feels weirdly extraneous, yet I find this scene very moving. (But then I’ve always been a sucker for crisis-of-faith stories).In Vienna, the Texas Ewings are set to make “one of the biggest deals in the history of the oil industry” as consortium head Rolf Brundin tells both them and McKay that “we will take all your crude for the next five years.” Back in California, the news is not so good for Abby. Rick Hawkins brings her advance word that Murakame’s drilling permits will be denied, which means she will be unable to access the oil under Lotus Point. At the same time, the Mackenzies are applying legal pressure for the real owners of Murakame to declare themselves. “You defrauded your partners out of their holdings,” Rick reminds Abby. “You could end up in jail, and it turns out it was all for nothing.”Blake Carrington might also end up behind bars — for the murder of Elsworth Chisolm. “We found your fingerprints in his apartment and a witness who heard you and him fighting just before he was killed,” Captain Handler informs him. “We’ve gotten convictions on a lot less.” By this point, we know that Handler and Roger Grimes’ son Dennis are the ones who bugged Zorelli’s apartment and that they are also after the Collection. (Unlikely alliances clearly run in Dennis’s blood — seven years ago, his grave-digging grandfather conspired with a psychiatrist to kidnap a Carrington baby.) We are also aware that Handler is taking his orders from higher up — but who? Could it be the same mysterious figures who are behind the European oil deal on DALLAS? “The consortium are not who they say they are,” Vanessa Beaumont informs the Ewing boys at the end of this week’s episode. “Before you sign any contracts, you must meet certain important friends of mine … This will all be made clear when you fly to Moscow tomorrow!”In a surprise move, Captain Handler blackmails Blake in broad daylight: “Mr Carrington, I’m representing some very important people, people who want to take an old art collection off your hands … Play ball with us and you may not have to go to jail for murder.” Back on KNOTS, it looks as if Rick Hawkins might also be about to blackmail Abby, but she heads him off at the pass. “I never intended to make you an accessory,” she coos apologetically, “[but] since you had prior knowledge of the oil at Lotus Point, you could be named as a co-conspirator with me.” She then comes up with a proposition that could save them both: “Could we predate … all the Murakame documentation … to reflect that someone else owned Murakame?” — that “someone else” being Ted Melcher.The brief window of time Abby has before the rest of the world, including Ted, learns that the oil under Lotus Point is worthless means she must move quickly. This puts her in a position similar to the one JR was in back in 1980 when he received advanced warning that his South East Asian oil wells were about to be nationalised. Just as JR managed to offload those leases onto unsuspecting members of the cartel, so Abby now attempts to pull a similar trick on Ted. In return for claiming that he has owned Murakame all along, she promises to split the (non-existent) oil profits with him fifty-fifty (“We can make millions!”). “You’re the only one I trust,” she assures him while whispering a similar tune in Rick’s ear: “You’re the one I depend on.”Meanwhile, Zorelli and Paige both return to their former place of employment — the police department and the Sumner Group respectively. “You bugged my apartment! … My ex-partner, my best friend!” Zorelli yells while attacking his erstwhile buddy Rudy. “You are a pathetic drone destined to die a junior vice president,” Paige snaps at Bob while clearing out her desk. In both cases, this behaviour is a smokescreen to mask their real agenda. Zorelli’s fight with Rudy is a stunt he hopes will lead to the genuinely corrupt cop showing his hand while Paige is trying to get to the bottom of Ted’s involvement with Murakame. “Whatever you’re doing, I am going to find out what is going on here,” she promises him.As the Murakame story grows increasingly dark, KNOTS starts making direct references to arguably the greatest film noir of them all, Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic Double Indemnity (starring THE COLBYS’ very own Barbara Stanwyck). It manages to do so in a more stylish way than the toe-curlingly contrived gags Bobby and April felt obliged to make about The Sound of Music on last week’s DALLAS just because they were in Austria. Double Indemnity first appears as one of a handful of black-and-white movies Mack and Paula are flicking between on late night TV. Every scene they happen upon shows a couple in a passionate embrace, which serves to exacerbate their own discomfort at being in close proximity to each other. Gary and Sally’s Friend are also watching the film while chatting on the phone. Inspired by the screen lovers’ secret assignation in Jerry’s Market, they arrange to finally meet in a similar location the following day. Abby and Ted, meanwhile, are too busy living their own version of Double Indemnity to watch it on TV. As if the parallels between their situation and Stanwyck and Fred McMurray’s in the movie weren’t clear enough already (a blonde femme fatale, a patsy she seduces into carrying out her dangerously illegal scheme, a crucial piece of legal documentation, murder), they are underlined by the shot of Abby and Ted in bed which turns slowly from black-and-white to colour, and a lush musical score that bears more than a passing resemblance to Miklós Rózsa’s for Double Indemnity. While KNOTS goes noir and DYNASTY is shot through with an end-of-season urgency (Blake: “We’re running out of time — we’ve got to find that collection!” Alexis: “They are ruining me — they’re stripping me of Colby Co and everything else I own!”), DALLAS proceeds at a more leisurely pace, with a grand ball and a prolonged making-love-for-the-first-time montage of Bobby and April in Austria. Meanwhile, an amnesiac Clayton goes walkabout in San Angelo. Fortunately, not all law enforcement officials in Soap Land are as rotten as Captain Handler, and a kindly sheriff helps Miss Ellie track her husband down to his first wife’s graveside (“I don’t remember her dying,” he tells her). But while a bewildered Clayton is free to wander the streets, a sane Angela Channing has been committed by her son to a mental hospital run by King Galen of Moldavia. She’s in a similar situation to Val Gibson at the beginning of this season’s KNOTS when no-one believed that Jill had tried to kill her and they all thought she was going crazy instead. Here, everyone thinks Angela’s losing it because of her claims of being imprisoned in Richard’s penthouse and Melissa coming back from the dead. Unlike Val, Angela has never seemed particularly frightened or even upset during her ordeal, just a bit cross. While she is clearly made of sterner stuff than Val and so less likely to show her emotions, her lack of reaction is one of the reasons the stakes on this week’s FALCON CREST don’t seem as high as on the other soaps. Only at the end of the ep, when she appears in court for her mental competency hearing and suddenly blurts out, “That’s the woman — the woman who pretended to be Melissa Agretti!”, only for a perfect stranger to turn around, does the gravity of Angela’s situation seem to impact her — and us.While Alexis flashes back twenty-something years to her breakup with Roger in the final scene of this week’s DYNASTY, JR and Vanessa also revisit the 1960s and the end of their own relationship. It turns out that Alexis and JR — Soap Land’s two biggest badasses — were each rejected by the love of their life. “Why weren’t you willing to run away with me? I would have married you,” JR asks Vanessa. “I wanted to go with him wherever he went, but he didn’t want me,” says Alexis of Roger. Whereas JR and Vanessa’s parting was at least bittersweet (“I loved my husband, but God, I loved you too, JR,” Vanessa replies), there was nothing sweet about Roger and Alexis’s final parting: “He was terrible to me — he was violent, he was threatening, he was horrible.”We watch in flashback as Roger strikes Alexis, knocking her unconscious, just four weeks after Roger’s other self, Tommy McKay, did the same thing to April on DALLAS. While in broadcast terms, only a month separates the two incidents, narratively, it is more than two decades. It’s as if Roger/Tommy were a Soap Land version of Eugene Tooms on THE X-FILES or Killer Bob from TWIN PEAKS — an evil entity who surfaces once every twenty-five years, unchanged by time, to beat the crap out of a female soap star.There’s more violent synchronicity in the Ewingverse as Terrence E. McNally becomes the first Soap Land actor to be murdered twice. As private detective Sam Barker, he was killed on DALLAS three years ago when Angelica Nero’s assistant Grace tampered with the brakes on his car. As Rick Hawkins, he is found electrocuted in his bathtub at the end of this week’s KNOTS. He’s the man who knew too much — about Marinos then, and Murakame now.If the Nazi treasure aspect of this season’s DYNASTY recalls a similar storyline on FALCON CREST, then the mystery of Roger Grimes’ death contains several echoes of the Hutch McKinney story on DALLAS: The remains of a long-dead shooting victim are found on the family property (Hutch on Southfork, Roger at the lake). The family patriarch becomes the prime suspect (Jock, then Blake). The campaign to convict him is led by a long-standing enemy (Cliff, Alexis). The truth finally surfaces via flashbacks to a violent argument about a wife’s infidelity (Digger goes nuts after realising Rebecca is about to leave him for Hutch, Roger cruelly rejects Alexis after Blake throws her out). There is a devastating discovery for a principal female character, too young to recall the events of the time (Pam discovers that she is Hutch’s daughter, Fallon realises that she shot Roger to save her mother). In each case, there’s also the added irony of Cliff and Alexis’s vengeance-fuelled schemes backfiring when the real killer turns out to be someone dear to them: Cliff’s father Digger, Alexis’s daughter Fallon.And this week’s Top 4 are … 1 (2) DYNASTY2 (1) KNOTS LANDING3 (3) DALLAS4 (-) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?