Festive Names

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 5957" data-attributes="member: 22">30/Mar/82: FLAMINGO ROAD: The High and the Mighty v. 01/Apr/82: KNOTS LANDING: Letting Go v. 02/Apr/82: DALLAS: Acceptance v. 02/Apr/82: FALCON CREST: The Good, The Bad and the ProfaneIt’s been a hectic week in Soap Land. While FLAMINGO ROAD’s Field and Sam fly to Nassau to investigate Michael Tyrone’s past, Gary and Abby, chaperoned by Val, travel to Sacramento to beg a busy senator to help repeal an outdated bill that prevents them importing methanol from Mexico. Last week, Michael Tyrone went to extraordinary lengths to get his gambling bill passed by the legislature - including staging his sister’s overdose and arranging her kidnapping. The question on this week’s KNOTS is: how far will Abby go to persuade the senator to see things her way?Field and Sam putting their differences aside to oppose a common enemy feels very New DALLAS. When they reach the Caribbean and encounter several spooked and spooky black people who speak of voodoo and spirits and hexes, the vibe becomes distinctly LIVE AND LET DIE. This supernatural atmosphere is fresh territory for Soap Land (KNOTS’ “Three Sisters” episode notwithstanding) and is as exciting as it is completely deranged.While being held prisoner in Nassau, Sandie Swanson somehow manages to get word to Field that he is in danger if he remains on the island. Another reformed “Spy Who Loved Me” also comes up trumps this week: Afton offers Cliff her support on DALLAS after everyone else has turned their backs on him. (The sight of Cliff alone in his apartment with a gun, only to be interrupted by a blonde visitor, also calls to mind Claudia Blaisdel at the end of last week’s DYNASTY.)In spite of Sandie’s warning, Sam and Field’s plane is sabotaged. After it crashes somewhere in the jungles of South America - sorry, I mean the Everglades - the episode turns into a cross between DALLAS instalments “Survival” (Bobby and JR’s plane crash) and “The Search” (the Ewing boys look for Jock), only with added snake bites and voodoo dolls. “If I were you, I’d get out my widow’s weeds,” Sheriff Titus advises Constance with his customary tact. "Where they went down, they find one in a hundred,” he adds, making it sound as though Sam and Field have as much chance of being rescued as Jock Ewing or Matthew and Lindsay Blaisdel (or even Sam’s future self, Mark Graison, after his DALLAS plane crash).This week’s Soap Land includes no less than three proposals of marriage. Michael Tyrone asks Lute-Mae to marry him on FLAMINGO ROAD, while Mario and Lance pop the question to Vicky and Melissa respectively on FALCON CREST. Mario and Vicky - following the example set by Soap Land's other young, interracial couple, Skipper and Alicia, in last week’s FLAMINGO ROAD - decide to elope, only to get cold feet at the last second. Lance, meanwhile, proposes to Melissa solely to appease his grandmother. As Melissa has shown not the slightest interest in him, he is confident of a rejection. He is somewhat dismayed, therefore, when she accepts his hand in marriage.It’s interesting that a character as recently introduced as Melissa should have become so prominent on FALCON CREST so quickly. Not only is she given a large amount of screen time, but we also see much of the action from her point of view. The fact that no one, save her doctor, knows she is pregnant (or by whom) creates a complicity between the character and the viewer. It is this that sets Melissa apart from her Soap Land contemporaries, Fallon Colby and Constance Carlyle.All season long, we have been privy to information about Fallon and Constance that they themselves have been unaware of (the possibly that Blake might not be Fallon’s father, the fact that Lute-Mae is Constance’s mother, plus the knowledge that each of the men they are involved with - Nick Toscanni and Michael Tyrone - has been secretly plotting vendettas against their families). Melissa, on the other hand, is a keeper of secrets, not a victim of them. Unlike Fallon, who was pressured into eloping with Jeff by Cecil Colby, Melissa has made her decision to marry a man she doesn’t love independently. Like Abby in this week's KNOTS LANDING, she is the one in control.Speaking of Abby, Val is anxious to know exactly how she managed to persuade the handsome senator to repeal the outdated bill. Abby’s explanation is both circuitous and revealing: “There are people who have a lot of money and they use that money to get what they want. There are people who have power and they use that. You use whatever you have. Whatever tools you can find, whatever resources are available, you use them to get what you want.” For Melissa on FALCON CREST, that means the Agretti vineyards: “Power is land.” “We don’t always do what our emotions tell us,” she says to boyfriend Cole by way of explaining her decision to marry Lance. "Sometimes we have to use our heads instead of our hearts.”Cole and Val are equally appalled by such cold-blooded pragmatism. “I thought we loved each other!” Cole protests. “What about what’s right and wrong?” Val asks Abby. “Morality is something you dwell on after you know where your next meal’s coming from,” Abby replies. “I think that I better keep my eye on you all the time,” Val tells her. “Val, do,” Abby smiles sweetly. "How else are you gonna learn?” Melissa ends her conversation with Cole on a similarly "generous" note: "Too bad you’re not the heir to Falcon Crest. Maybe someday I can share the spoils with you.”The night before their wedding, Lance arranges for Melissa to find him in bed with another woman - a taster, he explains, of what to expect if she goes ahead with their marriage. Watching in hindsight, this scene feels like a subversion of the honey trap Holly Harwood set for JR and Sue Ellen in DALLAS - but that won’t happen for another year. What fascinates most is Melissa’s reaction, or lack thereof, to what she sees. Her face, shrouded in darkness, does not flicker. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t laugh, she doesn’t deliver a bitchy one-liner or make a vow of vengeance. She just stares silently back at Lance. It’s hard to think of another Soap Land female at this point who would react the same way. Where Fallon might be more cultured and witty, closer to the archetypal madcap heiress of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, Melissa is the Soap Land equivalent of the film noir femme fatale - inscrutable, maybe even deadly.Lance and Melissa are the fourth Soap Land couple to make it up the aisle this season, and theirs is easily the darkest, juiciest and most beautifully filmed Soap Land wedding to date. The juxtaposition between the overt religiosity of the ceremony, performed by a real Catholic priest, (Father Bob, who also wed Skipper and Alicia in last week’s FLAMINGO ROAD) and the utter amorality of the characters involved, for whom this is but a cynical business transaction, (“I marry Melissa, you get the power,” says Lance to his grandmother) is deliciously perverse. As with Blake and Krystle’s wedding on DYNASTY, the action cuts between the happy couple and the bride’s other love interest - but instead of brooding on a hilltop like Matthew Blaisdel, Cole is inside the church, lurking behind a pillar near the altar - and while Melissa is saying her vows to Lance, her eyes are trained on Cole's. Have I mentioned how perverse this wedding is?As their titles - “Letting Go” and “Acceptance” - suggest, this week’s episodes of KNOTS LANDING and DALLAS cover similar ground. Each deals with a widow coming to terms with the death of her husband. For Karen Fairgate on KNOTS, this means letting go of the past (her marriage to Sid) and facing the future as a single woman. For Miss Ellie on DALLAS, it’s about accepting the fact that the past (Jock’s death) even happened at all. On KNOTS, Karen’s new friend Larry asks her away for the weekend. On DALLAS, Punk Anderson invites an already fragile Ellie to join him and his wife at the Oil Barons' Ball where the Jock Ewing Memorial Scholarship is to be presented. Both invitations catch the women off guard, leading to a period of introspection. While Karen seeks counsel from her wise, kind brother Joe (a less insane version of Nick Toscanni), Ellie reluctantly listens to her equally kind stepson Ray.Both women reach a kind of emotional catharsis whilst surrounded by their family. The Fairgates are watching home movies, the Ewings are sitting down to dinner. For Karen, it's the images of Sid alive and well, and for Ellie, it’s the sight of Jock’s empty chair at an otherwise full table, that makes each of them suddenly feel their loss so keenly. Ellie’s crockery-smashing breakdown in the Southfork kitchen is very touching, but the home movie scene in KNOTS - which shows Karen and the kids first laughing at the footage of Sid clowning around, then crying as the reality of his absence catches up with each of them - is in a league of its own. It’s a simple, truthful and profoundly moving sequence, and has the same transcendent quality as some of the scenes in New DALLAS following JR’s death.In the final scenes of their respective episodes, Karen visits Sid’s grave and Miss Ellie stops by the Krebbs’ house. Karen talks to Sid about letting go of “my fantasy, the one that hovers around telling me this didn’t really happen, you’re not really gone, it’s all been a terrible nightmare. You are gone and it’s real.” This acknowledgement is echoed by Ellie: “I know that Jock is not coming back.” When Ellie, seated at the Krebbs’ table, finally admits that “Jock is dead”, Donna is moved to kneel in front of her and take her hand. This action is mirrored by Joe Cooper in an earlier scene of KNOTS where he crouches in front of Karen before gently reminding her that she is "not Sid Fairgate's wife anymore.” While Karen speaks to Sid of “our beautiful, sacred memories”, Ellie closes this episode of DALLAS by declaring, “I have my memories of him, and my memories are forever.” It’s a lovely conclusion, but there’s also a kind of TV neatness about it - the freeze frame of BBG smiling fondly into the middle distance suggests that normal serenity has now been resumed - whereas Karen’s speech at the graveside has a wonderfully messy quality - the emotion of the scene is repeatedly undercut by her self-consciousness about talking to a headstone - which again lifts it out of the ordinary.At the opposite end of the emotional scale to DALLAS and KNOTS LANDING, this week’s FLAMINGO ROAD ends on a deliciously ominous note and FALCON CREST on a delectably wicked one. Both are quintessential Soap Land moments. In FL’INGO RD, Michael is sitting in front of a chess board. “Soon I shall destroy each and every one of them,” he murmurs, "Titus, Claude, Field, Constance … ” As he mentions each name, he knocks over a different chess piece. Then he picks up the Queen and holds in front of his face. “... But the very first move in the game is Lute-Mae Sanders,” he adds, before tossing it onto the fireplace where it begins to burn. It’s a brilliant scene. Utterly bonkers, but brilliant.Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, new bride Melissa waits until the very end of the episode, and the cutting of the cake, to inform her groom that she’s pregnant. “It’s not mine,” Lance replies. “It is now,” she tells him, popping a piece of cake into his mouth. Just then, someone snaps a picture of the happy couple. Freeze frame on Lance, looking stunned with a gobful of Victoria Sponge. Exquisitely funny.And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …1 (4) KNOTS LANDING2 (-) FALCON CREST3 (2) FLAMINGO ROAD4 (3) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?