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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 164832" data-attributes="member: 22">01 Feb 90: KNOTS LANDING: My Bullet v. 02 Feb 90: DALLAS: I Dream of Jeannie v. 02 Feb 90: FALCON CREST: Brotherly LoveThe centrepiece of both KNOTS and FALCON CREST this week is a compellingly awkward gathering at the home of each show’s richest and least predictable character — respectively Greg Sumner, aka “a major imperialist exploitative capitalist pig,” according to his dead daughter’s boyfriend, and Michael Sharpe, aka “one of the most influential financial barons of our century,” according to his son.Greg’s gathering is a mini-“Noises Everywhere” with added ghosts. It’s a more impromptu affair than Laura’s wake, but again features a disparate group of characters brought together by a death. Greg’s behaviour as a bereaved father has been no more conventional than it was as a bereaved husband so a concerned Carlos calls Paige and asks her to come over. She’s with Tom, who has only just learnt of her past relationship with Greg and thinks she’s still hung up on him, so she pretends she has a work emergency. (Call this karma for Tom telling her the same lie the night he went to Canada with Mack.) While she is on en route to the ranch, Paula arrives to check in on Greg. Carlos tries to reach Paige to dissuade her from coming but gets her answering machine instead. He leaves a message which Tom hears and realises Paige has lied to him.So it is that Greg finds himself surrounded by Paula, with whom he doesn’t really have anything in common, but who by virtue of their affair has become his de-facto next-of-kin; Paige, whose feelings for him run deep but who cannot, for all sorts of reasons, fully express them; and Tom, who ostensibly shows up in his capacity as one of the cops assigned to Mary Frances’s murder, but is really there to catch Paige out in a lie. As if this were not sufficiently uncomfortable, the ghosts of Greg’s father Paul Galveston (fresh from haunting that Scottish castle he blackmailed Bobby Ewing into buying for him a couple of years ago) and Mary Frances herself also put in an appearance.But are they ghosts or merely figments of Greg’s imagination — a means of articulating the thoughts he is unwilling or unable to acknowledge by himself? Either way, he’s the only one who can see or hear them. It would be cool to think of Jean O’Brien, the Pam look-slightly-alike on DALLAS, existing in the same way, i.e., only in Bobby’s mind, but as if to dispel this notion, he quickly introduces her to Cliff who sees what he can see. “So it’s not my imagination,” Bobby concludes. “Well, if it is, we’re both hallucinating — she is the spitting image of Pam,” Cliff replies. Intriguingly, he later modifies this assessment to, “She looks just like Pam would have after her surgery” — apparently forgetting that she looks exactly how Pam did after surgery when he met her last season. Adding to the mystery, Bobby later shows Jean a picture of Pam, presumably taken prior to her accident. Her immediate response? “It’s me!”The Jean O’Brien story is far more interesting than I remembered. The fact that she clearly isn’t Pam immediately throws the focus back on Bobby. He’s pretty much the last DALLAS character one would expect to fall prey to such an irrational, dreamy fixation. If anything, he’s the anti-dream man, the one who informed Pam (and millions of viewers) that “none of that happened.”Then there’s Jean herself. Whereas previous Soap Land doppelgängers Cathy Geary and Samantha Ross had an air of mystery about them, at least initially (DYNASTY’s Rita not so much), Jean is depicted as one of the ordinary “us”, as opposed to the rich and powerful “them”. Whilst talking to a girlfriend, she describes herself as “a middle-class Dallas girl who’s been driving used cars all of her life, not exactly what you’d call a prime catch — especially for somebody like Bobby Ewing.” When Bobby enquires about her background, she tells him she “grew up on the wrong side of the tracks” — a phrase Pam used about herself on at least one occasion. She also has a Texas accent similar to the one Pam had in the series’ early days before years of soapiness washed it away. So while Jean may not be Pam’s identical twin, she is perhaps what Pam would have become had she and Bobby never met.According to New DALLAS, Cliff is the only person at this point who knows that Real Pam is dead. For reasons that will become apparent in about twenty-four years time, he has chosen to keep this information to himself. His decision is paralleled in two contrasting storylines in this week’s Ewing-verse. On KNOTS, Meg is thrilled to have won a goldfish at the fair. She and Mack bring it home and put it in a tank, but then the fish stops moving. It’s dead — as dead as Mary Frances and Real Pam — but like Cliff, Mack and Karen elect to keep this news to themselves. Instead, they replace the fish with a doppelgänger and Meg is none the wiser.What the Mackenzies do for a three-year-old girl with a goldfish, JR attempts to do for an elderly man with a prostitute. Blackie Callahan is a wildcatting contemporary of Jock and Digger whose expertise JR requires in order to locate oil in the town of Pride. Blackie agrees to come out of retirement on one condition: he wants a night with Beth Anne Templeton, aka “the prettiest thing in Tulsa.” The only snag is, as Blackie’s daughter explains to JR, he hasn’t seen Beth Anne for over fifty years. So, in order to indulge the fantasies of “a crazy old man who wants to spend one night of love with his eighty-year-old ex-girlfriend”, JR enlists the aid of a look-not-very-much-alike hooker who greets her trick with the pre-arranged opening line: “Blackie, at last, we meet again!” Blackie is as satisfied with Fake Beth Anne as Meg is with her fake fish, even though he is not as easily fooled. “Beth Anne? You think I’m crazy? That old broad must be ninety if she’s a day!” he cackles.When the Ghost of Mary Frances recounts a childhood memory of a toy bird she cherished then lost, only for Greg to replace it while she was asleep (a story which directly echoes Meg’s goldfish saga), is she describing something that really happened or is Greg, as the Ghost of Paul Galveston insists, “making this up — you don’t know what you remember. You wish this had happened”? Over on DALLAS, Mr None of This Happened is having his balloon similarly popped by Cliff who accuses Bobby of “chasing some fantasy.” “Every time I look at her,” Bobby replies, referring to Jean, “I flash back to the times Pam and I had together.” If Bobby is chasing memories, then Greg is inventing them. “If you haven’t got any authentic Norman Rockwell memories, you can always paint a few of your own,” his father’s ghost tells him.There’s one more doppelgänger this week: when Bobby follows Not Pam out of the Oil Baron’s Club at the start of this week’s DALLAS, the restaurant’s never-before-seen lobby turns out to be identical to that of the Sumner Group. One almost expects Mort and Bob to emerge from the elevator.Over on FALCON CREST, Michael throws a small dinner party to commemorate Lauren splitting up with Richard and moving in with him. This new living arrangement allows the somewhat intense nature of Michael’s feelings for his sister, which have only been previously hinted at, to come to the fore in a storyline falconcrest.org describes as “crazy and disgusting.” It starts off like a slightly darker version of Monica and Jeff’s relationship during last year’s DYNASTY, with some titillating taboo-prodding: Michael telling Lauren that, as a teenager, “I used to wish that we weren’t brother and sister, that we were both adopted from different families and thrown into the same house, that it was God’s way of putting us together.” Later in the ep, he calls her from his office to tell say, “I’m just sitting here with about $32,000,000 worth of business to take care of and all I can think about is you.” But as the episode unfolds and we start to realise how suffocatingly possessive he is, whether or not he’s physically attracted to his sister becomes almost beside the point; this isn’t a juicily sensational storyline about incest, but a grimly fascinating portrait of a man with an obsessive need to control. At one point during his dinner party, he casually informs Lauren that he has made arrangements to have “your name changed back to Lauren Sharpe … That’s who you are now. You’re Lauren Sharpe. Lauren Daniels doesn’t exist anymore.” “I don’t exist anymore?” she asks, recoiling. “Michael, you live in a tunnel and it is a dark narrow tunnel that goes round in circles … You don’t wanna be a dictator, you wanna be a god, a master of the universe.”There are two declarations of love this week. On KNOTS, Tom surprises Paige mid-argument with the admission that “I’ve never felt like this before … I’ve never been in love before.” On FC, Genele does the same thing to Richard over breakfast. “I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you in the courtroom,” she admits. While Paige is pleased, Richard is circumspect. Nonetheless, Genele seems to regard this as an opportunity to turn her life around. She even goes to confession to redeem herself. (Father Bob and Genele in the same scene? It’s like two worlds colliding.) “I wanna start over,” she weeps. “I believe I have the chance to be happy, but I need first to be absolved of my many sins.” And so she joins the list of Soap Land characters trying in some way to escape their present reality — either by reinventing the past (“If you haven’t got any authentic Norman Rockwell memories, you can always paint a few of your own”) or by retreating into it (“Every time I look at her, Cliff, I flash back to the times Pam and I had together”) or by eradicating it (“Lauren Daniels doesn’t exist anymore”) or, in Genele’s case, by being absolved of it.Back at the FC dinner party, Michael’s son Danny brings new girlfriend Sydney over for coffee. He is anxious that she and his dad hit it off, but the encounter goes about as well as Greg’s with his daughter’s boyfriend Robert. “You didn’t deserve Mary Frances,” Robert declares. “She caught your bullet. You should have been sitting in that chair.” “You should be put in jail for what you did to Emma,” Sydney snaps at Michael. Greg and Michael react to these displays of youthful self-righteousness sardonically. “I’m not real happy having met you either, Robert,” replies Greg drily. “I’ll have to be content with the notion that you were simply a lapse in my daughter’s good judgement.” “Uh oh, she’s getting angry — get rid of the knives and forks!” wisecracks Michael, referring to Sydney’s recent bout of husband-stabbing. After Sydney storms out, Michael gets serious, ordering Danny to fire his girlfriend from her job at Falcon Crest: “Drop her from the payroll and if I find out you’re still seeing this ungrateful little twist, then you’re off the payroll too.”Mary Frances was sitting in Greg’s office chair when she was shot, just as Bobby Ewing was in JR’s when he took a bullet at the end of DALLAS Season 6. Back then, JR was presumed to be the intended target and so he quickly surrounded himself with bodyguards. The same thing happens with Greg now. (The withering contempt with which he regards his security staff is really fun to watch.) But in each case, this proves to be a red herring. Just as the DALLAS shooter turned out to be after Bobby all along, so Mary Frances's, it transpires, was after her. But why?Mary Frances’s death, rather like the discovery of Roger Grimes’ body on DYNASTY, is the beginning of a storyline rather than the climax of one. Greg finds a fake passport and a notebook full of indecipherable data amongst her belongings. In an enigmatic yet touching end to the ep, Mary Frances (or the spectre thereof) appears to her father one last time and listens patiently as he lays out the questions her death has left him with: “What were you doing that got you killed? What was in that notebook? What were you doing in my computer …? What were you researching? I run one of the largest privately held corporations in the world, I can’t even begin to estimate my net worth, and I can walk the streets at night. You? You run around the globe with a dirty duffel bag to your name and somebody wants you dead — you, not me. What were you doing?” Without replying, Mary Frances slowly fades away.Guest of honour at Michael’s dinner is an old high school buddy, Joey Walts. Like Guzzler Bennett, Bobby’s pal in “Fallen Idol” (DALLAS Season 1), Joey was a sporting hero in his youth who has never recaptured his former glory (“We all just stood there staring at you, wishing we were you — it was biblical,” Michael recalls). Again like Guzzler, he has since fallen on hard times and is now reaching out for financial backing for a new business venture. So too is James Beaumont on DALLAS. Whereas James is pitching “an upscale, extremely trendy New York-style bistro”, we’re never told directly what Joey’s project is. While James promises a couple of good old boy Texas bankers that “this is the best investment you’ll ever make”, Joey assures Michael that his is “an idea whose time has come … The franchise possibilities are international.” It’s clear that Michael derives some satisfaction from seeing his former hero coming to him hat in hand, while the DALLAS bankers quickly lose interest in James’s proposition once they realise the rest of the Ewings aren’t involved (“The only reason we even agreed to this meeting is we thought we were doing business with JR”). Michael, however, agrees to help Joey out — on his terms. “This deal will work if I make it work … Companies don’t make me, I make companies,” he crows.But then Michael slowly becomes fixated on the idea that Joey is sleeping with his sister behind his back. (“Thinking you’d slip her one while you were in town, is that it?”) When he finds they’ve had lunch together without telling him, he loses it completely and tells Joey at the last minute that the deal is off. When Joey tries to salvage their twenty-five year friendship, he yells at him to get out. By the end of the episode, Michael has lost Lauren too. “I have just got to get away from you,” she tells him. “You are a deeply disturbed person and you need help … I am not a thing you can own, I am just a person who happens to be your sister … YOU CANNOT OWN ME!”There is further financial disappointment on KNOTS when Harold, who’s gotten himself into hot water over some gambling debts, asks Mack for a $13,000 loan. Not realising how serious the situation is, Mack turns him down.“No wonder this city’s falling apart,” huffs James, after the bank declines his proposition. His pessimism is shared throughout Soap Land. “These are sad days for Dallas,” Jean O’Brien’s realtor boss tells Bobby. “We’re putting up more houses than we can sell. It’s like living in a ghost town.” “Wineries are going under all the time these days,” echoes Joey on FALCON CREST.When a disillusioned Cally complains to James about JR (“I don’t have to worry about him and other women, I have to worry about him and Ewing Oil!”), she joins a long line of Soap Land wives who have found themselves playing second fiddle to their husbands’ work. “Your damn all-consuming business was your mistress,” Alexis once told Blake. “I was closer to you, closer to the core of your life, when I was your secretary,” Krystle once told Blake. And although Pam once conceded that “Bobby’s never been unfaithful to me”, Sue Ellen was quick to point out it was “because he has a new mistress, Pam — Ewing Oil. It’s the same mistress that JR has.”Minor trend of the week: Random presidential references. On FALCON CREST, Lauren jokingly accuses Michael of being “knee-deep in some of the most amoral, shameless business deals since the Teapot Dome scandal.” Having no idea what a teapot dome scandal could be, I googled it. According to Wikipedia, it was “a bribery scandal involving the administration of United States President Warren G. Harding from 1921 to 1923.” Over on DALLAS, Blackie Callahan refers to the incumbent President, George Bush Sr (like Blackie, a former Texas wildcatter) as an old friend: “To quote an old oilfield buddy of mine, ‘Read my lips’ — there is oil under Buck Flat.” Granted, it’s not quite Alexis Colby reminiscing about Portofino with Henry Kissinger, but still.And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (2) FALCON CREST3 (3) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?