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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 6114" data-attributes="member: 22">07/Oct/82: KNOTS LANDING: Daniel v. 08/Oct/82: DALLAS: Where There's a Will v. 08/Oct/82: FALCON CREST: The ArrivalWith Soap Land suddenly more focused on big business than ever before, it’s ironic that almost all the businesses it depicts are in decline. Last week, as his adoptive son Richard Channing prepared to take his place as publisher of the San Francisco Globe, Henri Denault dismissed newspapers as "a dying business, economic anachronisms”. On this week’s KNOTS, where Val’s first novel is awaiting publication, JR describes the future of the book industry as "kind of dicey - everyone’s watching TV nowadays.” “There’s a world out there being taken over by a media explosion,” Richard echoes in this week's FALCON CREST as he frets about the Globe’s relevance. "This paper’s in the nineteenth century. It reads like the Farmer’s Almanac.” And it’s not just the publishing industries that are struggling: "Since I was last in charge, the world situation has changed somewhat,” reflects DALLAS’s Bobby during a meeting with Ewing Oil's department heads. "Oil doesn't seem to be the hot item it once was." Accordingly, he agrees to 25% cutbacks in the company's drilling and refinery operations. “This is wonderful,” he remarks. “I take over and we all start talking about cutbacks!” On his first morning in charge of the Globe, Richard Channing goes one better - he fires the editor-in-chief, rewarding his loyal service of thirty years with a week’s severance pay.It’s been over a year since JR appeared in KNOTS LANDING, but as always, Larry Hagman’s interactions with Joan van Ark are comic gold, with JR finding various ways to twist the knife into his sister-in-law, (such as feigning ignorance about her separation from Gary and deliberately mispronouncing "Capricorn Crude" as "Crude Porn" and "Corn Pone”) all under the veneer of Southern hospitality - “Valene, you still got a way with iced tea!” In fact, JR never seems more Southern than when he crosses over to KNOTS. Partly, it’s in the writing, but also in Hagman’s performance. For instance, I’m not sure he would ever pronounce “motorcycle” in DALLAS the way he does in KNOTS - as "motor-sickle”. This occurs during a really great speech he delivers to Abby about a motorbike Gary worked hard all summer long to afford when he was sixteen, winning Jock’s respect in the process: "Come September, my daddy took him down to the showroom, gave him a slap on the back and a blank cheque. And of course, Gary had read all the brochures and motor-sickle magazines. He knew exactly what he wanted. He signed the cheque, revved that old motor-sickle up - and drove straight through that pate glass window.” I love what Dallas Decoder had to say about this speech in his critique of the episode:Next to the parable about the blind horse that J.R. shares with John Ross during an early episode of TNT’s “Dallas,” this might be Hagman’s most memorable monologue. It makes me wish he had taken this act to the stage. Imagine: a one-man show where Larry Hagman tells stories, in character as J.R., about growing up on Southfork. It could’ve been this generation’s “Mark Twain Tonight.”<a href="http://dallasdecoder.com/2013/05/28/critique-knots-landing-episode-55-daniel/">http://dallasdecoder.com/2013/05/28/critique-knots-landing-episode-55-daniel/</a>Between this week’s KNOTS and DALLAS, we are offered an intriguing glimpse into the past lives of each of the Ewing brothers. Following the story of Gary’s motor-sickle, an affable pimp by the name of Carl Daggett drops by Ewing Oil with this nugget about Bobby: "You shoulda seen him in the old days. He was a real playboy - right, Bobby? Your style, my ladies. Good for Ewing Oil too!” Ray, meanwhile, receives a letter from "from my Aunt Lily" in Emporia, Kansas, which gives us just a hint of the economic circumstances he grew up in while his half-brothers were busy spreading the bees around and driving motorbikes through showroom windows. “Your daddy, Amos Krebbs, has been taken sick,” Lil writes. "He's been moved to the charity ward, but even that is costing more than we can afford.”Perhaps most tantalising of all, however, is the oh so brief encounter between JR and Lilimae when they pass each other in the doorway of Val’s house on KNOTS. Again, JR plays the smiling Southern gentleman to the hilt, helping Lilimae with the lamp she is carrying before continuing on his way - but the untold story that lies behind Lilimae's quaking delivery of the line: “What’s he doin' in this house??”, spoken only once JR is safely out of earshot, is one I dearly would have loved to hear Larry Hagman tell in his one-person stage show as JR (and/or Julie Harris’s in hers as Lilimae).If this week’s KNOTS brings out JR’s more comedic side, then Abby is noticeably harder and less playful in their scenes together than in previous encounters. In the old days, she was just flirting with power; now she clearly means business. She talks of marrying Gary (and therefore, of a divorce between him and Val) as if it were a foregone conclusion. With that in mind, she is as anxious to see Jock’s will as JR is in the following night’s episode of DALLAS. “Honey, you’re gonna have to wait until it’s read,” JR tells her, just as Harve Smithfield will later tell him: “No one will see that will until such time as it is read to the entire family.” However, JR already knows enough about the will (or at least claims to) to assure Abby that "Gary’s coming into money. Big money.” What JR's really interested in, it transpires, is the codicil Jock added to the will while he was in South America - and though JR pays lip service to Harve’s words, it is clear he isn’t prepared to wait to see it. “Where there’s a way, there’s a will,” he murmurs to himself. A similar line is delivered Angela in this week’s FALCON CREST. “Wills can be broken, and interlopers can be bought off,” she declares, referring to Richard’s inheritance of the Globe. Back on KNOTS LANDING, JR is canny enough to head a potential interloper off at the pass. “Keep [Gary] out of Dallas,” he tells Abby. "What makes you think that I want to be in Dallas?” she asks him. "You wanna be Queen of the Ewings,” he replies. "I’ll settle for Princess,” she counters wisely. “Fine, you got it,” he agrees. "You get the ermine and the jewels - but the crown stays in Dallas, ‘cos the crown is mine.”Towards the end of last season’s FALCON CREST, Lance purposefully arranged for Melissa to find him in bed with another woman the night before their wedding. Then in the season finale of KNOTS, Val accidentally found Gary in bed with Abby. In this week’s DALLAS, JR combines both scenarios when he accidentally on purpose walks in on Harve’s son-in-law and trusted employee, John Baxter, in a compromising position with Serena, his own loyal hooker-in-chief. JR then toys with John in much the same amusingly disingenuous way as he did Val on the previous night’s KNOTS (“I’m a firm believer in the sanctity of marriage and I’m damn disappointed in you, John”) before dropping the other shoe: “I wanna see my daddy’s will."A week after JR and Bobby move into new offices at Ewing Oil, Val redecorates her house and Richard Channing modernises the office he has inherited from his father at the Globe. Meeting him there for the first time, Angela registers her disapproval at the changes made in much the same way Katherine Wentworth did when Cliff refurbished her father’s office at Wentworth Tool & Die last season. Richard’s one concession to history is to keep his father’s leather desk chair - but even this he ends up slashing with a knife after an attempt to establish some sort of familial connection with Angela is coldly rebuffed. "Your birth was an unfortunate accident,” she informs him, "the result of Douglas Channing's weakness."Contrasting references to "the Mob" in KNOTS LANDING and FALCON CREST serve to reinforce the gulf between Soap Land’s “us” and “them”. Richard Avery tells Karen that Sid’s killers, Frank and Roy, (who resurface this week, having eluded prison on a technicality) "are working for the Mob.” On FALCON CREST, a curious Melissa wonders if Richard Channing belongs to that same organisation. “Organised criminals, the Mob, whatever you call them,” her father Carlo tells her, "they are just street punks compared to Channing. He is a true warmonger. Anyone else is just fighting for scraps.” Carlo also reveals that he left Italy as a young man to get away from the kind of murderous family feuds that Richard Avery parodies on this week's KNOTS. "Where do you think you are, Sicily?” he asks Karen in an attempt to dissuade her from pursuing a personal crusade against Frank and Roy. "You gonna talk to your Godfather? Poison their well? People like us, civilised people, we’re not equipped to deal with the Roys and Franks of this world. We need the law and people like [Mack] to enforce it.” Karen later concedes the point, telling Mack, “I'm a nice lady with three kids, a house and a business to run, not Michael Corleone.” Or Richard Channing, come to that. It’s interesting that Soap Land’s two major male newcomers - Mack Mackenzie and Richard Channing, one a federal prosecutor, the other an alleged warmonger - should come from such polar opposite worlds.The final third of this week’s KNOTS centres around the delivery of the Averys' baby. This is the fourth Soap Land birth thus far, and the third in which a car crash is central to the story. This time, however, the mother-to-be is not seven months pregnant and the crash is not caused by her being too drunk or hysterical to drive safely. Nor does it lead to a premature delivery, followed by much life-or-death operating table drama. In fact, Laura’s waters have already broken before she and Richard leave the cul-de-sac for the hospital. A diversion, a wet road and a minor accident that leaves both Averys uninjured but stranded mean that Richard is obliged to deliver the baby himself. The subsequent drama then stems not from the kind of emotional melodrama that surrounded the births of Baby John on DALLAS and Little Blake on DYNASTY, but from two people with a shared and difficult history trapped together in an extreme situation, his mounting panic and her morbid certainty that something is going to go horribly wrong (“Do you know how many women die in childbirth?”). As a result, there is a genuine feeling of danger and, ultimately, relief when the baby, Daniel, is born safely.And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are … it’s a close run thing as they’re all pretty great ...1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (2) DALLAS3 (3) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

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