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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 9834" data-attributes="member: 22">16/Feb/83: DYNASTY: The Mirror v 17/Feb/83: KNOTS LANDING: The Loss of Innocence v. 18/Feb/83 DALLAS: Legacy v. 18/Feb/83: FALCON CREST: The OdysseyDeclarations of war abound in this week’s Soap Land. On DYNASTY, Blake issues the following decree with regard to Alexis: “If she does anything to hurt Jeff, anything, there’s gonna be war between her and me, all-out-war, no holds barred." “Bobby wants all-out-war and believe me, he’s gonna get it,” JR tells his mama at the end of this week’s DALLAS. “Angela Channing declared war on me before I ever set foot in this town,” recalls Richard Channing on FALCON CREST. "I want her head - and Chase’s alongside it!"For the first time in Soap Land’s history, two “whodunnit?“ story-lines are running concurrently as the mystery surrounding Carlo Agretti’s death on FALCON CREST is joined by the question of “Who Killed Ciji?” on KNOTS LANDING. While the Carlo story has spanned almost an entire year, KNOTS introduces the Ciji plot just five weeks before the end of the season. As a result, it’s neither fish nor fowl: it lacks both the urgency of a season finale and the bombast of a season opener. Instead, there’s a strange stillness to this week's episode as we wait for the characters to discover what we at home already know, i.e. that Ciji is dead. The instalment weaves the same hypnotic spell as the two episodes of EASTENDERS that recently followed Lucy Beale’s murder, when you almost had to remind yourself to blink.Central to this feeling of stillness is an entire absence of a musical score. Watching this ep alongside the latest instalment of DYNASTY, with its majestically ridiculous background music continually driving the momentum forward, one becomes aware of what a pivotal role music plays in Soap Land, especially at the end of a scene where it often serves to absorb - or drown out - any ambiguity, lack of logic or absence in detail. As well as adding atmosphere, the music functions as a kind of shorthand, indicating how we and/or the characters are meant to be feeling before instantly transporting us from one scenario to another. In its absence, as in this week’s KNOTS, everything feels starker, more exposed. No music means there's one less layer of artifice between us and the characters on screen, giving the action an almost documentary feel. (I’m thinking particularly of the scene where a dishevelled, traumatised Gary staggers up the steps of the beach house after seeing Ciji’s body washed up on the shore.) This is as close to Soap Land vérité as the genre allows.In place of a melodramatic score sweeping us along, the kind of details that might ordinarily be forgotten instead rise to the surface: technicalities about police procedure, the perception of Ciji’s death as an accidental drowning gradually shifting to murder, the impact of autopsy results that reveal she was pregnant when she died. All these dramatic beats are acknowledged, unpacked and explored, rather than brushed over.In this regard, one of my favourite scenes in all of Soap Land (and beyond) is where Mack is called to the morgue to identify a body that fits Ciji’s description. There, he finds an attractive woman waiting, whom he recognises and addresses as Janet. He asks her what the body looks like. “Dead," she jokes. He laughs - at this point, it’s just another body, just another Jane Doe. Then the sheet obscuring the dead woman's face is removed and Mack receives the same jolt we did at the end of last week’s episode. Seeing his expression, Janet asks the dead woman's name. “Ciji,” he murmurs in reply, “Ciji Dunne. She sang." Janet makes a note of this. “I heard you got married,” she says. “What are you doing here?” Mack asks, staring at the body. Janet, still looking down at her notebook, assumes he’s talking to her. “I was in the neighbourhood,” she replies, a tad girlishly. “What?” he asks, suddenly looking at Janet as if registering her presence for the first time. She repeats her reply, but he turns to the coroner instead. “You said the girl drowned. She’s a homicide cop,” he says, indicating Janet. “What are you doing here?” he asks again, but this time he is talking to Janet. “I’m just taking a look,” she tells him coyly, but he sees past this. He asks the coroner to fast track the autopsy “for Janet - she thinks the girl was murdered."There are lots of small, subtle shifts in this scene, some or all of which might have been smothered or obscured by a musical score.The scene concludes with Mack asking the coroner to keep him informed of the autopsy results, not as a professional duty, but as a favour. “It’s personal,” he explains, and with those words, he relinquishes his self-appointed role as KNOTS LANDING's objective outsider. That title is immediately adopted by Janet, aka Detective, Baines. The final shot of the scene is of her watching Mack quizzically as he walks away, and it is through her eyes that we then view the regular characters' reactions to Ciji’s death as she goes from house to house questioning them.“People like us don’t get involved in murders,” Karen insists later in the episode. “People like us do and are,” counters Mack. This is KNOTS’ USP in a nutshell - ordinary (or at least identifiable) people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances. (It’s also a mite disingenuous - in its bid to depict Karen as “people like us”, the show conveniently overlooks the Jessica Fletcher style master plan she singlehandedly devised and executed to put the men responsible for her own husband’s murder behind bars earlier in the season.)Towards the end of the ep, KNOTS moves into more conventional territory as various characters are interrogated at the police station. It’s fun to see Kenny, Ginger, Richard and Gary put through their detective show paces by Baines and her enjoyably cynical partner, Lieutenant Morrison. An alcohol induced blackout means that Gary is unable to remember whether or not he killed Ciji, and he is subsequently arrested for the crime. This, of course, is exactly what happened to both Sue Ellen after the shooting of JR in DALLAS and (minus the alcohol) Lute Mae following the apparent killing of Michael Tyrone in FLAMINGO ROAD. More recently, the very same soap trope has recurred as part of the Lucy Beale murder storyline on EASTENDERS.The scene in the police station where Richard Avery complains about having to wait alongside “all this scum" (“They’re probably thinking the same thing about you,” suggests Laura) echoes both JR’s discomfort at sitting amongst the hoi polloi in the doctor’s waiting room in "Paternity Suit” (DALLAS Season 2) and Blake’s disdain for the people he was obliged to queue up alongside when visiting his parole officer in "Alexis’ Secret” (DYNASTY Season 2).There’s a lot of controversial suitcase packing in this week’s Soap Land. On KNOTS, Karen is alarmed to find Diana preparing to move to New York with her boyfriend, while on FALCON CREST, Chase is unhappy when Vicky moves out of the Gioberti house to shack up with her lover. Both daughters are calm but firm in the face of parental disapproval. “Chip and I are in love … and I wanna be with him,” Diana informs her mother. “I’m making a choice, a choice to be with Nick,” Vicky tells her father. “The way to make sure she goes is to forbid her to go,” Mack advises Karen. Maggie adopts a similarly pragmatic approach. “I’m not gonna try to stop you,” she tells Vicky. "Not that I could anyway … I think the time has come for you to make your own decisions.”This week’s DALLAS, meanwhile, opens with Pam loading her car full of luggage before driving away from Southfork. Reaction to her departure is mixed. “Bobby’s out there, moping in her dust,” reports JR with a smile on his face. “How can you be so happy at a time like this?” scolds Sue Ellen. Miss Ellie blames Pam’s departure on Bobby himself: “You just don’t understand what’s happening to you!”While Miss Ellie describes Bobby as "obsessed with beating JR”, Chase is, according to estranged wife Maggie, “possessed” by the Carlo Agretti murder investigation. Pam and Maggie both feel they have no choice but to stay away until their husbands come to their senses, and each has moved into a hotel. Pam's suite at the Fairview might be more spacious than Maggie’s modest room at the Tuscany Valley Inn, but has far less character. Both couples meet to discuss their problems this week - Pam and Bobby at a restaurant, Chase and Maggie in the latter’s hotel room. In each case, the discussion swiftly becomes an argument and the husband storms off in a huff before any differences can be resolved.Back on KNOTS, during an argument with Mack over Diana, Karen accidentally calls him Sid, thereby becoming the third Soap Land character of the season to commit the cardinal error of referring to a current (or prospective) love interest by a previous partner’s name. First Cliff Barnes mis-identified Afton as Sue Ellen when he emerged from his coma, and then Jeff Colby upset Kirby when he declared his love for her thinking she was Fallon. This led to Kirby accepting Adam’s dinner invitation and subsequently to her rape. The same pattern recurs this week when Kirby bares her soul to Jeff again, this time in hospital, only for him to fall asleep on her. Feeling rejected once more, she impulsively decides to quit her job as the Carrington nanny and accept Adam’s offer to work as a translator for Colby Co. Given the rarified world of Carringtons and Colbys she is caught up in, there’s something about Kirby’s self destructive behaviour that rings intriguingly and psychologically true.Most of the rest of this week’s DYNASTY is dumb, clunky fun - from Mark Jennings’ solemn speech about the hardships of looking good in tennis shorts to Dr Ling's mysterious patient seeing his new face for the first time. His verdict is grudgingly favourable: “Thank-you for giving me a face I can live with,” he says.In a season that has already seen major inheritances for the Ewing brothers, Holly Harwood, Melissa Cumson, Richard Channing and Jeff and Alexis Colby, it is now time for Cliff Barnes, Pam Ewing and Katherine Wentworth to each receive a share of their mother’s empire. While Cliff is bequeathed full ownership of Barnes Wentworth Oil, Pam and Katherine inherit their mother’s shares of Wentworth Industries (or what has since been renamed on New DALLAS as Ewing Global). However, no Soap Land will would be complete unless it spawned an uneasy business alliance between family members (such as those existing between JR and Bobby at Ewing Oil, Angela and Chase at Falcon Crest, and Alexis and Jeff at Colby Co). Rebecca’s decision to divvy up the voting shares in Wentworth Tool and Die between Cliff and his two half-sisters exactly parallels what Douglas Channing did with the New Globe on FALCON CREST, where Richard Channing and his half sisters, Julia and Emma, are the three major shareholders.The New Globe is where Soap Land’s first ever use of a computer as a plot point takes place this week when Emma cracks Richard’s access code and discovers several secret payments made to Carlo Agretti shortly before his death. Chase’s theory that Carlo was blackmailing Richard gains credibility when Angela learns that Richard’s adoptive father, Henri Denault, was a Nazi collaborator during World War II - and that Carlo knew about it!So it is that this week’s KNOTS LANDING ends with Gary Ewing being arrested as part of one "whodunnit?" story-line, and FALCON CREST with Richard Channing emerging as a primary suspect in the other.And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (2) FALCON CREST3 (3) DALLAS4 (-) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?