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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 6970" data-attributes="member: 22">10/Nov/82: DYNASTY: The Wedding v. 12/Nov/82: DALLAS: Hit and Run v. 12/Nov/82: FALCON CREST: Home Away From HomeDYNASTY solves the “Who Kidnapped Little Blake?” mystery in the first two minutes of this week’s episode, when Jeff finally thinks to mention the weirdo in the cemetery who has the same surname as one of Blake’s enemies - in much the same way that Pam suddenly remembered the photographer she had warned off Lucy a full two days after Lucy mysteriously disappeared in last season’s DALLAS.No sooner is the baby recovered safe and sound than we bid farewell to Claudia, who takes her leave of the Carrington mansion (“Goodbye, sweet house”) before being led away to the Soap Land Sanatarium in a scene that is ridiculous and endearing at the same time. The long walk down the staircase, the fur stole, the weeping servants we’ve never seen before - the allusion to SUNSET BOULEVARD is blatant, but what’s less clear is whether the show is cruelly having fun at the expense of its most fragile character or somehow elevating her by giving her such a grand exit.The one moment in this week’s Soap Land that feels genuinely cinematic - or at least “Old Hollywood” - is on FALCON CREST. We see stock footage of a plane landing on a runway at night, then a chauffeured limousine pulling away from the airport, and finally Jacqueline Perrault’s partially revealed face as she checks her makeup in a compact mirror and orders her driver to take her to the Tuscany Valley.Both Cole in FALCON CREST and Fallon in DYNASTY announce their decisions to fly the nest this week. "I wanna move out and take the baby,” Fallon informs Blake. "I should have gotten out a long time ago, to prove myself, to prove that I’m a worthwhile human being.” “I’m moving to the Demery place,” Cole tells Maggie. "I feel like I’m living in a fishbowl here.” (Abby likewise compared Seaview Circle to a goldfish bowl in the first KNOTS episode of the season.) Given that keeping their family under one roof for the rest of their lives is an imperative for any self-respecting parent in Soap Land, Blake and Maggie each reacts with predictable dismay. “You don’t have to move out,” Blake insists. “This is crazy, Cole, this is just crazy,” protests Maggie. "What do you think this is going to do to your father, to the whole family?” Maggie’s plea might be more impassioned, but Blake ultimately proves the more persuasive parent as Fallon relents when he offers to set her up in a business of her choosing. Cole, meanwhile, moves in with DALLAS’s Sally Bullock, aka Katherine Demery, his older woman. His parents are far from pleased when they find out the nature of the relationship - the first time age difference has been presented as an issue in a Soap Land affair.I didn’t derive the same vicarious pleasure from watching Fallon looking around the La Mirada hotel as I did from seeing Richard Avery scope out the venue that subsequently became his restaurant on KNOTS LANDING a few weeks ago. However, watching her inadvertently flirt with her own brother Adam is fun. This is Soap Land’s first intentionally unintentional incest storyline (as opposed to Lucy and Ray's romp in the hay, which was unintentionally unintentional).Fallon isn’t the only spoilt princess in Soap Land to locate her work ethic this week. Over on DALLAS, Lucy resumes her modelling career following her kidnap/rape/abortion/daytime TV sabbatical. Meanwhile, on FALCON CREST, Melissa finds herself in an almost identical position to that of Soap Land’s quintessential spoilt princess, FLAMINGO ROAD's Constance, when she discovers her husband of convenience in the arms of a woman he genuinely loves. Even though Lori Stevens is nowhere near as established a character as Lane Ballou was in F’LINGO RD, Lance is depicted as being as serious about her as Field was about Lane. Also like Lane, Lori is a chick from the wrong side of the tracks (albeit with an incredible apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay) who cares little for the trappings of money and power. While Melissa may not be in love with Lance the way Constance was with Field, she has her own complication - her pregnancy. By the end of this week’s episode, she has been confined to bed for the remainder of it.DYNASTY’s Alexis Carrington and DALLAS’s Rebecca Wentworth both move out of their somewhat modest homes this week (Alexis’s wonderfully atmospheric studio, Rebecca’s nondescript condominium) in favour of somewhere grander. “I’m going to be living in his palazzo,” boasts Alexis to Krystle before setting off from the Carrington kitchen to marry Cecil. Meanwhile, Rebecca shows Pam round the grounds of her impressive new mansion in Dallas. Both women seem to want recapture times gone by. “I wanted something like what I had in Houston,” Rebecca explains while Alexis brags of how brilliant Denver’s social scene will be once she and Cecil start entertaining, "as it used to be when I entertained in this very house [in] the good old days.” Rebecca also talks about playing hostess, but rather more wistfully: “Cliff might wanna entertain. Who knows? He might even wanna live here.”A change of address isn’t the only thing Alexis and Rebecca have in common (although only one of them jarringly refers to a bit player as “an obese nurse” and "a fat phantom in white”). Both still carry scars from the unhappy marriages that led to them being separated from their children while they were growing up. "Fallon is his darling daughter and Steven is his embarrassment. Everyone is his, his, his!” rants Alexis of Blake. "Pam, I was seventeen," Rebecca pleads. "I could barely read or write. I wasn’t ready to be a wife or a mother. And Digger, Digger was destroying me. I didn’t want to leave you, but I had to save myself and somehow I found the strength to do it.” Alexis was also seventeen when she married Blake. Both women now see revenge against a powerful family as a way of assuaging their wounds."The past is over and nothing can change it,” Alexis continues, "but let me tell you something, Krystle, the future is going to be very different because in a very short time, this faultless family is going to be hearing from me - including you, and you especially are going to cringe at what you hear, Krystle Jennings Carrington, the oh, so sterling, once and maybe future secretary!” There’s nothing much Krystle can do but roll her eyes at this bewildering verbal onslaught.The discussion between Rebecca and Pam is more balanced. "I know how angry you are at JR, and God knows you have every reason to be,” Pam tells her mother, "but I'm asking you now, please stop this vendetta before it gets out of control ... Buying Cliff an oil company is one thing, but buying Wade Luce's company and getting him into the cartel, that could hurt all of Ewing Oil. It'll turn the cartel against the whole family. That affects Bobby, Christopher and me!” “… You have the Ewings' strength behind you,” argues Rebecca. "Whose strength does Cliff have?" "He should have his own,” Pam replies. "Yes he should," Rebecca agrees, "but he doesn't, not yet, and maybe that's because when he was growing up, when I should have been there to give it to him, I was off trying to develop some of my own.” There follows one of Pam’s all time greatest lines: "Mother, you've always had strength. You proved that when you left your children to go out and start a new life. It's a cold, calculating kind of strength. Is that what you want for Cliff?"Adam Carrington gains access to Blake’s office under false pretences this week in order to meet his father for the first time. However, their meeting is about as successful as Richard Channing’s was with Angela in FALCON CREST a few weeks ago. Both end the same way - in total rejection. “I know right now I’m your son,” Adam tells Blake, "but now that I’ve met you, I’m happy to remain just the guy I was before I ever heard your name - Carrington. What a rotten family it must be!” “Get the hell out of here!” shouts Blake. This week, Richard also meets Cole Gioberti for the first time. This also goes badly, with Cole bursting into his office and accusing him of press harassment before threatening him with violence. Elsewhere, Chase’s mother Jacqueline takes one look at Richard and high tails it back to Zurich. By comparison, Mickey Trotter’s introduction to the Ewings goes pretty smoothly, with only a dismissive put-down from JR to contend with.The final scene of this week’s DYNASTY - Alexis and Cecil’s bedside wedding - poses the same conundrum as Claudia’s departure earlier in the ep. Are the programme makers joking or are they deadly serious? Is this scene a pastiche of melodrama, or melodrama taken to the next level? As it is, the scene - with Cecil in pyjamas and Alexis decked out in a girlish white wedding dress - feels like an episode of SOAP scored by Max Steiner.Following the end of “Silver Shadows”, the KNOTS instalment in which ageing movie director Andrew Douglas becomes besotted by Abby, this is the second Soap Land scenario where a wealthy man on his deathbed spends his final moments with a woman he knows is after his money. Andrew Douglas might have been confused enough to bequeath his fortune to a woman who was already dead, but such behaviour is almost rational next to Cecil’s gloriously bonkers wedding speech to his bride: “My wedding gift, a gift without peer, is such that, when I do go, I can leap into my grave laughing, knowing that I’ve left you with power and money, and with you and Blake at each other’s throats. What’s the matter, sweetheart? Is this honeymoon talk upsetting you?” He then goes on to feverishly quiz Alexis about the night of her wedding to Blake. Bizarrely, his final line of dialogue echoes Miss Ellie’s back in the DALLAS mini-series when she spoke about how lucky she was to have married a man with dirty fingernails: "Tell me, were his nails clean that night, Alexis, or were they stained with the oil of his Carrington Rig Number One?"We’re only seven weeks into the season and the Soap Land death count is already unusually high when Cecil clutches his heart and then joins Gus Nunuoz, Carlo Agretti, Amos Krebbs and Kate Torrance in the great eternal cliff-hanger in the sky.Next to this week’s DYNASTY - all verbose cod-Shakespearean dialogue and bright daytime soap lighting - DALLAS feels comparatively earthy. Even JR’s most recent schemes - setting Harve’s son-in-law up with a hooker and now framing Walt Driscoll’s wife in a hit and run car accident - seem less outlandish than those of the past few years. There’s a pleasingly back-to-basics feel about his machinations, much like those perpetrated by him and John Ross in New DALLAS’s first season.As a freshly bereaved Alexis bows her bridal-veiled head in sorrow in time for the DYNASTY freeze frame, her predecessor in widowhood, Miss Ellie, reaches the stage Karen Fairgate was at nine months ago when she felt able to accept a lunch invitation from another man. In Ellie's case, it's twinkly old Walter Lankershim from DYNASTY.Minor parallel of the week: Krystle and Pam both playfully refer to their husbands as “cute". (In each case, this is the calm before the marital storm.)And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are …1 (1) FALCON CREST2 (4) DALLAS3 (2) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?