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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 16313" data-attributes="member: 22">30 Jan 85: DYNASTY: Triangles v. 30 Jan 85: KNOTS LANDING: Lead Me to the Altar v. 01 Feb 85: DALLAS: Legacy of Hate v. 01 Feb 85: FALCON CREST: The ShowdownIt’s a tough week for relationships in Soap Land. "We're through!” Brady Lloyd shouts at wife Dominique on DYNASTY. "It's over, isn't it?” guesses Luke Fuller correctly during a scene with Steven Carrington in the same episode. “This is over,” echoes Joshua Rush on KNOTS LANDING, walking out on girlfriend Cathy. “Now I'm going to do exactly what I want, and that's to have nothing to do with either of you,” declares Mandy Winger to JR on DALLAS.In each case — and as the title of this week’s DYNASTY suggests — a third party is involved. Brady believes that Dominique has chosen her newfound brother over him ("My wife doesn't need me anymore! She's got Blake Carrington!”), while Joshua’s boss is having a similarly destructive impact on his relationship (“Don’t let Abby do this to us!” Cathy pleads). Meanwhile, Steven is torn between his feelings for Luke and his marriage to Claudia in much the same way that Mandy is caught between arch enemies JR and Cliff. "I'm afraid of losing any sense of who I am or what I want,” explains Steven to Luke. "You don't understand what's happening to me!" Mandy tells Cliff.An interesting parallel emerges this week between Steven and Luke on DYNASTY and Joshua and Cathy on KNOTS. Although Joshua started off the season as shy and innocent, and was near-traumatised following his first sexual experience with Cathy, he has since grown in confidence, and that has been reflected in the evolving physicality between he and Cathy on screen. A recent play-fight between them in Laura’s house inevitably ended up the bedroom, and during an argument a couple of weeks ago, Joshua impulsively picked Cathy up and threw her over his shoulder before laying her down on a couch and straddling her. As a result, we’re left in no doubt as to the passionate nature of their relationship. By contrast, due to the constraints of the era, Steven and Luke have done little more than pat one another on the arm. Prior to this week’s episode, Luke straightening Steven’s tie was as intimate as it got between them. In this ep, in lieu of an actual love scene, they share a sweaty game of racquetball, and even then, when Steven puts out a hand to help Luke to his feet at the end of the match, there is a shared awkwardness, even a guilt, in response to this chaste contact. This partly reflects Steven’s conflict within himself. Indeed, the restrictions of the period and Steven’s own inhibitions inform one another till it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins. Strangely, this seems much clearer to me now than it did when these episodes first aired: not only is this Soap Land’s first depiction of two men falling in love (Steven’s previous male relationship having commenced before the series even began), but one of the men is married with a child and the other is his workplace subordinate. As such, the show and its characters find themselves navigating both a narrative and emotional minefield simultaneously."I'm starting to care for you a great deal,” Steven admits to Luke before ending their relationship. “Joshua, I love you and you love me,” insists Cathy on KNOTS — only Joshua isn’t listening. While Steven is willing to suppress his own feelings in order to conform to the expectations of those around him, Joshua chooses to deny his feelings in order to transcend those around him. “I don’t think it would be fitting for my viewers to see me in a saloon … I’m sure that’s hard to understand for someone like yourself,” he murmurs, barely looking at Cathy, intoxicated instead by his own power and success. Such arrogance should render Joshua laughably absurd but it doesn’t — because there is something genuinely mesmeric about him.So where do Steven's and Joshua’s self-absorbed self-denial leave Luke and Cathy? As if confused and heartbroken weren’t enough, both are cast in the default role of sexual predator. After all, it can’t be Steven's and Joshua’s faults that they each succumbed to their basest desires, can it? As Luke delivers his “Normal is loving someone” speech, we can sense both the actor and character pushing against the restraints that the show and the relationship with Steven have placed upon him. Meanwhile, Joshua pretty much slut-shames Cathy when he refuses to believe her claim that Abby paid her to make Gary fall in love with her. “Maybe it’s what you wanted to have happen — did you try to seduce him too?” he asks. And just as we don’t laugh at Joshua’s egotism, neither do we sneer at Luke's and Cathy’s tearful helplessness. Both characters have a truthful dignity about them.While DYNASTY treats Steven and Luke’s relationship with the utmost solemnity, KNOTS finds room for a more flippant gay reference: “What the hell are you doing with Mackenzie?” demands Paul Galveston. "We’re having an affair,” quips Greg Sumner.Just as Joshua breaks up with Cathy in the dressing room of the club where she sings, so DALLAS’s Mandy Winger attempts to sever ties with JR in the dressing room of the restaurant where she models. “We can just say goodbye and forget we ever met,” she coolly suggests. Interestingly, JR’s response is similar to Cathy's. “You can't say you don't feel somethin' for me,” he insists. But whereas Joshua manages to completely disregard Cathy’s words, Mandy’s resolve begins to crumble as soon as JR starts nuzzling her neck.Poor Mandy Winger! As well as being caught between JR and Cliff, she also finds herself a reluctant part of another triangle, in which her already shaky relationship with Cliff is being encroached upon by the constant presence of Jamie, alongside whom Cliff is fighting for control of Ewing Oil. Mandy does a better job of extricating herself from this situation than from her involvement with JR. “I'm getting out - because three’s a crowd,” she informs Jamie and Cliff before walking out the door. Amanda Carrington does something similar on DYNASTY. Finally tiring of flashing back to her night of passion with step-father Dex while he and Mummy get it on upstairs, she turns up at the Carrington mansion in the early hours of the morning with a suitcase.Over on FALCON CREST, Greg Reardon offers some contrary advice to an even more antagonistic trio — Chase, Angela and Richard. “Perhaps it’s time for the three of you to work together for once,” he suggests. Such counsel proves sound, for no sooner do the threesome pool their knowledge than they fathom that cartel honcho Gustav Reibmann and Tuscany Valley newcomer Jean Louis de Bercy are one and the same. This seems to be the week for aliases to unravel — just as Reibmann’s true identity is about to exposed on FC so Val Ewing finds it increasingly difficult to cling to the delusion that she is really Verna Ellers on KL.… which leads us to yet another triangle, between Val/Verna, fiancee Parker Winslow and outsider Gary Ewing — whom this week materialises out of nowhere in the reflection of Val’s bedroom mirror as she is trying on her wedding dress. Then he appears in the room itself, clad in full morning dress, and he and Val dance lovingly together like two figures atop a wedding cake. This is Val’s more extreme version of what Pam described to Bobby in last week’s DALLAS as her fantasy taking over — “you know, the dream — that you and I would get back together.” It's also an inversion of the nightmare sequence experienced by Fallon when she looked at her wedding-dress reflection at the end of last season’s DYNASTY. So many conflicting perceptions rub up against each other in this Val/Verna story-line — fantasy and reality, past and present, dreams and nightmares, even fact and fiction: for as Gary points out this week when he shows her a copy of Nashville Junction, Val has now become a character in her own novel.Elsewhere on this week’s KNOTS, Mack’s Tidal Basin murder investigation closes in on Galveston Industries. Meanwhile, in the cracking opening scene of this week’s DALLAS, Pam blames JR for sending her to the Caribbean on a wild goose chase looking for Mark. Paul Galveston and JR both then deftly shift the blame away from themselves: Galveston has two of his employees confess to the murders while JR plays a tape of a phone conversation that makes it appear as if Cliff were the guilty party. No one is entirely convinced by either manoeuvre, but there’s nothing they can do to prove it. Little wonder that both men are referred to as snakes — Galveston by Karen during a conversation with Mack, JR by Pam during their aforementioned confrontation, in which she also vows to get revenge by joining Cliff and Jamie in their fight to take Ewing Oil away from him. Adam calling Luke a little troll prompted a punch up between he and brother Steven in the Carrington gym on last week’s DYNASTY. Pam telling Bobby about the wild goose chase JR sent her on leads to a fight between the Ewing brothers in the Southfork pool on this week’s DALLAS. And there’s further sibling violence on FALCON CREST when Richard takes a swing at half-brother Chase. Whereas the Carrington brawl was witnessed by Claudia, who pleaded ineffectually with Steven and Adam to come to their senses, the Krebbses and Farlows prove more proactive on this week’s DALLAS. Clayton and Ray jump fully-clothed into the pool to pull Bobby off JR while Miss Ellie and Donna shout disapprovingly from the sidelines. Over on FALCON CREST, Angela is the bystander — at least until Chase ducks and Richard’s fist inadvertently connects with her jaw. Each of these altercations is very enjoyable in its own way (and let us not forget poor old Gary Ewing, who has taken a pasting from Parker Winslow’s good ole boys two KNOTS eps in a row), but for sheer entertainment value, absolutely nothing beats a duel in the Southfork pool. Unusually, this week’s Ewingverse episodes each makes reference to its sister show. On KNOTS, Gary tries to jog Val’s memory (before literally jogging with her) by talking about his family in Texas (“My mother’s still living there — so are my brothers, JR and Bobby”), while DALLAS ends with those very same mother and brothers being served with a subpoena (courtesy of Cliff and Jamie, suing them for their shares of Ewing Oil) over breakfast. “Gary Ewing is being served in California,” the process server confidently informs them. As a matter of fact, Gary Ewing is currently in Tennessee, trying to stop a wedding. In so doing, he goes where no previous Soap Land wedding guest (or wedding-crasher in this case) has gone before. It has long been a soap trope on such occasions for the words, “If any man can show just cause why these two may not lawfully be joined together ...” to be accompanied by a close-up of a spurned love interest (Matthew Blaisdel during Krystle’s first wedding to Blake, Cole Gioberti during Melissa’s to Lance, Amanda at Alexis and Dex's, Cliff at JR and Sue Ellen’s), who ultimately decides to hold their peace rather than stop the ceremony altogether. Gary, however, speaks out, interrupting the wedding in a final bid to remind Val who she really is. The episode ends with Val at the altar looking back and forth between Gary and Parker — that triangle shape again.While Parker Winslow is happy to wed Val by pretending not to know she isn’t really Verna Ellers, FALCON CREST’s Gustav Reibmann is happy to date Emma Channing while pretending that he really is Jean-Louis de Bercy. This week Emma tells him about the secret tunnels built underneath the Tuscany Valley: "In the old days, all wineries had storage rooms dug deep into the hills. They hired Chinese labour gangs to do the digging ... During the Prohibition, they used them to run illegal wine and brandy. Falcon Crest is honeycombed with all these tunnels.” I really like the way the tunnels, with their strong historical context (the themes of Chinese immigrants and Prohibition having already been established in the show’s early days), recur at pivotal moments in the FALCON CREST saga — enabling Carlo Agretti’s murderer to access his house and Julia to escape the spring house fire. Now Gustav hopes they will lead him to his unholy grail — the Nazi treasure hidden under Falcon Crest. In this regard, FALCON CREST's secret tunnels serve a similar purpose to DYNASTY’s China Sea oil leases, which have proved a useful thread upon which to hang several disparate story-lines during the past two years. This very week, Blake prompts the interest of Alexis and Dex, and the dismay of Krystle, by announcing an auction in Acapulco where he aims to sell off some of his China Sea leases. That’s the same Acapulco that FC’s Gustav describes as one of "the most romantic ports in the world,” promising to sail Emma there on his yacht.Emma’s tunnel revelation also inspires Soap Land’s wackiest therapy session to date when Gustav subjects Julia, who is still labouring under the illusion that he is her psychiatrist rather than her jailer, to a most unusual line of questioning: “Tell me about the tunnels, Julia - the tunnels!”Speaking of Julia, Pam’s shock at the end of last week’s DALLAS upon hearing that Mark Graison hadn’t come back from the dead after all is matched by Angela’s astonishment at the end of this week’s FALCON CREST when she hears (at gunpoint, no less) that Julia has! And this week’s Top 4 are … 1 (1) DALLAS 2 (2) KNOTS LANDING 3 (3) FALCON CREST4 (4) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =