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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 8550" data-attributes="member: 22">19/Jan/83: DYNASTY: Danny v. 21/Jan/83: KNOTS LANDING: To Have and To Hold v. 21/Jan/83: FALCON CREST: Broken PromisesThere's a great scene in this week’s KNOTS LANDING where Gary pays a visit to Kenny Ward in an attempt to patch up their friendship. Kenny and wife Ginger are among Soap Land's least explored characters. We’ve been given more psychological insight into Kirby Anders in half a dozen episodes of DYNASTY than we have the Wards in over three and a half years of KNOTS. Kenny and Gary's relationship itself has only been introduced to the story as a way of keeping Gary connected to the cul-de-sac after his break up with Val. As a result, Kenny’s primary function in the scene is to act as Gary’s conscience, recounting his past sins. “You got Sid Fairgate involved in selling stolen auto parts and now he’s dead,” he reminds him. "Val stands by you, you run out on her. Now you’re just doing the same thing to me … It’s time somebody told you the truth about yourself … Congratulations, Gary. You’ve finally learned to be a true Ewing.”Looked at another way, as a result of being left alone by the writers, the Wards are now the most stable couple in the cul-de-sac. Kenny is the only character in the same profession as he was at the beginning of the series (even he is somewhat unemployed at this point) and of the original couples, theirs is the one marriage that has both survived and is blossoming. Quite a turnaround, given that Kenny was the least sympathetically depicted cul-de-sac resident when KNOTS began.There’s an equally good scene over on FALCON CREST between Richard Channing and his adoptive father Henri Denault. The actors portraying these two cold and ruthless businessmen play against the aggression of their dialogue, which is full of ultimatums and accusations, imbuing it instead with emotion and vulnerability, even affection. The results are fascinating - it feels like the characters are trying to reach out to each other, but the words they’ve been scripted to say won’t allow them to.Denault wants Richard to return to the company fold in New York. “This isn’t a request,” he clarifies. "It comes from someone above me.” “Suppose I refuse?” asks Richard. “You’d simply become another competitor,” Denault tells him, "an adversary to be vanquished … Come home with me now before you do something foolish.” “My dear father,” replies Richard, "I work for myself and neither you nor your mysterious superior will tell me when to turn tail and run from the enemy.”Richard might be determined to stay in his soap opera, but DYNASTY's Sammy Jo can’t wait to leave hers. “I really hoped I’d never see this place again or anybody in it,” she tells Krystle. Sure, she wants the Carrington money, but not the lifestyle that accompanies it. Instead, she wants to become a model in New York - the same city Richard is refusing to return to. Unlike Sammy Jo, fellow DYNASTY character Kirby’s ambition is to be accepted by the Carringtons as an equal, “not to be the downstairs girl that you try and take to bed, but the upstairs girl you marry.” This desire for social acceptance echoes Lane Ballou’s vow that she would eventually "make it" onto Flamingo Road.Kirby’s line, "The upstairs world, I tasted it in Paris,” is echoed by Kenny on KNOTS LANDING: “I wanted it so bad I could taste it. Gary, you dangled a dream in front of my face and then you snatched it away.” Whereas Kenny craves success but only on his own terms, Kirby is prepared to prostitute herself to get what she wants: "I have something some men want,” she says, referring in part to her rape by Adam, "and next time, I’m going to make sure that I get what I want in return - respectability."Kirby speaks about her body as if it were a bargaining tool, and Sammy Jo and FALCON CREST’s Melissa view their newborn children in the same way. Sammy Jo even offers to sell her son, Danny, to Blake to finance her independence in New York. “What’s important is me,” she tells the Carringtons. "I have one life and one body and I wanna use it for me.” Melissa, conversely, uses her son, Joseph, to further entrench herself at Falcon Crest. “That baby guarantees me a place here,” she tells Lance. "It’s all gonna be mine one day.”Baby buying is not a new concept in Soap Land. Only two weeks ago on FALCON CREST, Angela discovered that Jacqueline Perrault had sold Richard to Henri Denault when he was a baby. Over on DALLAS, Jeff Faraday sold his child to Bobby and Sue Ellen tried to buy Rita Briggs’. However, when Sammy Jo makes her proposition, Blake draws a line in the sand, decrying the selling of a child as "morally repulsive”. He instead offers her $100,000 to keep the baby. When she declines, Blake and Krystle agree to look after the child until such time as she is ready to assume responsibility for him. The fact that they will be sending her monthly cheques in the interim means, in effect, that they will be renting Danny instead - a slightly less morally repulsive arrangement, it would seem.That pages from Val’s manuscript should end up on the front page of Global Gossip under the headline "BOOZE AND WOMEN MADE MY LIFE HELL — EWING EX TELLS ALL” makes Brooks Oliver’s line to Miss Ellie in DALLAS two weeks ago - "Ewing is a name that sells newspapers” - seem somewhat prophetic. In contrast to this gross violation of Val’s privacy, Richard Channing assures brother Chase he will keep Cole's apparent suicide note/murder confession out of the New Globe in this week’s FALCON CREST - quite a concession, given the aggressive smear campaign he launched against Cole earlier in the season.Elsewhere on this week’s KNOTS, Laura and Ginger argue over their differing perceptions of Ciji. To Laura, Ciji is "a nice girl ... a good friend”, while Ginger describes her as "the most conniving woman I've ever met.” Here again, Ciji is a blank canvas, becoming whatever these characters require of her: Laura needs a best friend, someone who will side with her unquestioningly against Richard (in a way Karen never would), whereas Ginger wants someone to blame for all her dissatisfactions. In each case, that’s who Ciji becomes.Karen and Mack elope to Vegas for the third Soap Land wedding of the season - but this time the groom neither dies immediately after the ceremony nor gets pushed into a swimming pool. Instead, the nuptials are played for laughs as the happy couple are married by an eccentric old couple in a ticky-tacky, rinky-dink ceremony. The “any objections to this wedding?” section - which led to a dramatic freeze frame at JR and Sue Ellen’s wedding in DALLAS - provides the funniest moment, with the spaced out officiator waiting so long for someone to object (in spite of there being only two witnesses in attendance) that Mack has to prompt him to continue with the service. The comedy is possibly a little overdone, but it’s charming enough and contrasts effectively with the scenes of a despondent Gary teetering on the verge of an alcoholic relapse. Like Sue Ellen’s drunken moments in New DALLAS, there's a deep sadness, a profound loneliness, about these scenes. We don’t see Gary actually take that first drink. Standing on the terrace of his beach house, glass in hand, gazing out to sea, (I’m reminded of Val looking at the view from Jeff Munson’s New York balcony two weeks ago) he turns his back to the camera before lifting the glass to his mouth. We then cut to a long shot of the beach house in which he becomes just a tiny figure in the distance. The camera then pans discreetly away from the house towards the ocean, which in KNOTS always seems to somehow evoke a sense of inevitability: it was always going to turn out this way.The week after embarking on their clandestine affairs, DYNASTY’s Alexis and FALCON CREST's Vicky both surprise their respective lovers with an afternoon visit. Alexis and Mark narrowly avoid discovery when Fallon comes calling while they are between the sheets. Vicky and Nick aren’t so lucky. When Nick’s wife Sheila walks in them, they are merely planning a picnic, but that’s enough for her to realise what’s been going on between them.“Broken Promises” is FALCON CREST at its dark, mysterious best. This is a bit of a ridiculous comparison, but I'm kind of reminded of the 1946 movie THE BIG SLEEP. It’s nowhere near as smart or witty as that, but it has a similarly pulpy appeal, with its multiple mysteries, double and triple crosses, hardboiled characters and a labyrinth of supporting players that are hard to keep track of but all of whom have a part to play in the plot. There are no less than three as-yet-unseen figures lurking in the shadows at this point - Henri Denault’s anonymous all-powerful boss who has ordered Richard back to New York, Cole’s unknown attacker who is presumably also Carlo Agretti’s killer, and the elusive Mr Fong, an apparent witness to Carlo’s murder. And if Melissa Cumson is FALCON CREST's film noir femme fatale, then Diana Hunter is its ice cool Hitchcock blonde. This week, she proves to be more than Richard Channing’s enigmatic assistant when she offers to spy on him for his father. (Denault makes a point of letting her how dispensable she is: “If you lose Richard’s trust, you’ll be absolutely of no value … Things of no value are usually discarded, Miss Hunter.”) Chase even hires a private eye, disgraced DALLAS senator "Wild Bill” Orloff, last seen running a diner on FLAMINGO ROAD, to help navigate a way through the murkiness of the story-line. And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are …1 (4) FALCON CREST2 (2) KNOTS LANDING3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?