KNOTS LANDING versus DALLAS versus the rest of them week by week

[Mel O'Drama]

I recall watching it when it was released on VHS and thinking, "Once is enough." I mentally filed it away it in the same category as "Conundrum". So the last thing I expected this time around was to totally enjoy it.

It's great when that happens.

how incredibly naff the naff bits are,

Not naff, per se, but I've always found the vision of 'Allo 'Allo's Gruber being on Knots a little surreal. I think he even trips over the furniture at one point, but carries on like a trouper.

the good bits - like the ending - hold up pretty well.

Yes. You'd have to go a long way to top the ending of the series, but fortunately the ending to BTTCDS is satisfying enough.

I think there's something about the feel of early 80s soap -- DALLAS and DYNASTY'S second seasons, maybe KNOTS's fourth -- that almost crosses over into '60s pop art kitschiness: the lurid closeups, the giddy pace, the frenetic score. It's all teetering on the edge of ... of ... something.

Now you mention it... yes. I hadn't really thought of it until you said.

Oh, now that's interesting -- especially that it was Val who said it first. Back then, she was the stable one.

Yes - it's quite the role reversal.

I kinda love that Gary and Val have traded the stability hat back and forth over the past nearly 60 years.

It's mindblowing to think of their relationship spanning six decades. That takes us back to before Victoria Principal was born(!)

it became one of those Val/Gary callbacks, right alongside Gary's frequent use of "give-us-a-kiss".

It's odd that I never really noticed the callbacks.

The Loudest Word was the first Knots episode I watched and, as a seven year old, I wasn't familiar with the expression "piece of cake" and had to ask my Mum what it meant. So it's stuck in my mind as one of the more memorable pieces of dialogue.

Incidentally, I've always thought of the expression as an Americanism (perhaps because of the Knots connection) but turns out it could well be a terribly British RAF thing.

 

[Seaviewer]

I know I'm in the minority here but I liked the Henery the Eighth scene. Like the two characters I remember when the song was a bonafide hit and I thought it was a nice way for two old friends to blow off some steam.

 

[James from London]

This week’s DYNASTY, KNOTS and FALCON CREST all boast juicy scenes of confrontation between two women, each following in a different Soap Land tradition. On DYNASTY, Alexis strides into Blake’s office and immediately starts talking to him, even though his chair is turned away from her. In due course, the chair spins round to reveal … Dominique sitting in his place! A crisp exchange of insults, threats and vague ultimatums follows. (“If you persist in pursuing this rather reckless course of action, you better be looking behind you because I’m going to be watching you every step of the way!”). The equivalent scene on KNOTS is the only one of the week to pass the Bedchel test (i.e., it features a conversation between two women which isn’t about a man). This time, it’s Karen barging into Abby’s office (“Don’t bother knocking, Karen, just come right in”), armed with accusations, to deliver what Abby describes as “this morning’s tirade.” (“You couldn’t resist, could you? … You knew I was gonna get that appointment so you went after it yourself … I’m gonna fight for it, with every bone in my body!”)

One KNOTS instalment that would score extremely highly on the Bedchel test is "The Three Sisters", the haunted house ep from Season Three that I re-re-watched yesterday. Its only male character is a Scooby Doo-ish creepy caretaker who appears in one scene and is soon forgotten about. Apart from brief mentions of Laura’s boss Scooter and the unhinged father of the titular sisters, no other men are even referred to. Everyone else who appears or is spoken about for the entire episode is female, corporeal or otherwise.

 

[Stillwitty]

29/Dec/82: DYNASTY: The Locket v. 30/Dec/82: KNOTS LANDING: The Block Party v. 31/Dec/82: DALLAS: Mama Dearest v. 31/Dec/82: FALCON CREST: ...Divided We Fall

1982 ends as it began in Soap Land. At the start of the year, the Ewing brothers flew to South America to look for their daddy Jock, missing presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Fifty-one weeks later, Blake and Alexis fly to Bali to look for their son Steven, missing presumed dead following an oil rig explosion in the Java Sea.

Back then, Miss Ellie decreed that “the family should pull together when there’s trouble.” Krystle has the same wish now but lacks the matriarchal authority to enforce it. “I guess I’ll just never understand this family,” she tells Fallon sadly. "At a time when most people need to pull together, you go off by yourselves like wounded bears.”

“Don’t shut me out, you need me now,” she pleads as Blake leaves for Bali without her. "I don’t need anybody to help me fight my battles, Krystle,” he replies coldly. This exchange is echoed by other couples in this week’s Soap Land. “Mack, don’t shut me out,” says Karen in KNOTS LANDING as Mack wrestles with parental problems. “I’ll work this out myself - alone!” he shouts back. In this week’s DALLAS, in the wake of a family row following Miss Ellie’s shock decision to break Jock’s will, Bobby elects to take a drive. “I’ll go with you,” offers Pam. "I'd just as soon be by myself,” he replies, more gently than either Blake or Mack, but just as firmly, before driving off into the night. Sue Ellen observes this exchange from the shadows and when she later finds JR deep in thought, is mindful not to impose herself upon him the way Pam did Bobby, Karen did Mack or Krystle did Blake. "Would you rather be alone?" she asks him carefully.

It’s interesting how much angrier and more dysfunctional the Carringtons seem in their time of crisis than the Ewings did a year ago. On their way to South America, the Ewing boys huddled together on a crowded plane, fondly sharing childhood reminiscences and refills of bourbon. Travelling separately on the same flight to Bali, Alexis locates Blake in the first class lounge and first berates then physically attacks him. The contrast continues when both parties reach their destination. While the Ewings, even JR, accepted without question Punk’s assurances that everything was being done to find their precious daddy, Blake immediately pulls rank with Cassidy, Punk’s equivalent: “What are you doing? That’s what I wanna know! It’s been forty-eight hours since the explosion and you don’t have one scrap of information about the survivors?”

And while the Ewing family as a whole (apart from Sue Ellen) remained optimistic about Jock’s chances of survival, the Carringtons (except Blake) all seem resigned to Steven’s death. Ironically, Fallon’s description of Steven as "probably dead somewhere at the bottom of the ocean where nobody will ever find him” will ultimately prove more applicable to Jock.

Things are far less harmonious in DALLAS these days, however. In this week’s instalment, “Mama Dearest", everyone’s turning on everyone. As well as the Ewings fighting amongst themselves, Punk nearly comes to blows with Cliff - and the sight of Ellie turning to ice when Harve Smithfield reluctantly tells her he will be unable to represent her in court is one of the most effective moments in an episode full of effective moments. Meanwhile, Rebecca’s chastisement of her son (“I won’t be a party to any violence!”) takes on fresh resonance in light of Cliff’s actions in New DALLAS. Add to this Miss Ellie’s scolding of her eldest son (“I don’t think you give a damn about your daddy’s wishes - all you care about is yourself!”) and this episode could be renamed, in the parlance of modern day DALLAS, “Mama No Like".

After initially shutting her out, Bobby later unburdens himself to Pam. Over on KNOTS, Mack does the same with Karen. Both men admit that they are the way they are because of how their fathers raised them - the primary difference being that while Bobby always tried to emulate and please Jock - "I wasn't just a road man for Ewing Oil, I was the best road man for any oil company because that's what Daddy expected, and that's what I expect from myself” - Mack’s life has been determined by a doomed attempt not to turn out like his father. “I’m like him, you see?” he explains to Karen. "And that’s the worst part. I hate his lousy guts and yet I’m like him and I know it. That’s probably why I never got married - because I knew I’d be just as crappy a father and husband as he was.” “That's why Daddy turned away from Gary,” Bobby continues. "'The Ewings must succeed' and Gary didn't care about that, but Pam, JR and I do."

On DYNASTY, Blake repeatedly insists that his search for his son is "just between Steven and me.” On KNOTS, the scenes between Mack and his father, Pete, who is terminally ill, also have a life and death intensity to them. Jeff Corey’s performance as Pete brings a fresh layer of authenticity to the show. There aren’t many Soap Land characters whom I genuinely feel I could have met in the real world, but Pete is one of them. (Granted, this might have something to do with Pete’s Scottish brogue, which the character is meant to be faking, but which the actor pretty much nails.)

While the significance of the father/son relationship cannot be underestimated, what of those Soap Land sons who grew up without either a father or a mother - what of Adam Carrington and Richard Channing? This week, Richard confronts Jacqueline Perrault, the mother who abandoned him as a baby. It’s interesting to compare this scene with the equivalent one between Cliff and Rebecca in DALLAS Season 3. Where Cliff invited his mother to his apartment for coffee and cake (not to mention liquorice), this is a much more businesslike arrangement: Richard receives Jacqueline in his office where he makes a point of placing a clock timer on his desk in order to limit their conversation to half an hour.

Both Cliff and Richard are looking for straight answers. "I was barely five years old and you pretended to be dead … why?” asks Cliff. "Why did you put me in an orphanage?” demands Richard. So confronted, both women prevaricate, adopting a similarly martyred tone, as if to suggest that they themselves are the real victims. "It’s so hard to explain,” sighs Rebecca. "Oh Richard,” pleads Jacqueline, "I never wanted to choose between my sons.” Both men then let their mothers have it. While Cliff becomes emotional, ("Do you have any idea what it’s like to be five years old and be told that your mother’s dead only to find out the truth is that she didn’t want you, that she was only thinking about herself?!”) Richard keeps his feelings under control. "I’ve spent my life searching for my mother,” he tells Jacqueline calmly. "As a kid, I always dreamed of greeting her with open arms, but as I got older, my resentment grew to the point where the only excuse I’d accept was death. I wanted my search to lead to my mother’s grave.” Jacqueline gasps in shock, then begs Richard to keep her identity as his mother a secret (much as Rebecca did when she first met Pam).

Meanwhile, on DYNASTY, Adam is put in the strange position of mourning a brother he has never met. "Growing up alone the way I did, I’d have given a lot for a kid brother,” he tells Fallon with apparent sincerity. Then while flirting with Kirby a few minutes later, he blithely dismisses Steven as “just a name to me”. This duality is mirrored by Richard in FALCON CREST. ”I sort of like the idea of having a brother,” he bashfully admits to his newly acquired sibling Chase. "Even more, I like the idea of having you as a brother.” Later in the episode, Miss Hunter asks him if he honestly has any feelings for Chase. “Yes,” he replies coldly. "Hatred.”

Jacqueline Perrault is central to another FALCON CREST scenario that hearkens back to early DALLAS this week. Her consequences-be-damned insistence on visiting her great-grandson Joseph at Falcon Crest echoes Digger Barnes’ determination to peak a sneak at his supposed grandson Baby John in “Rodeo”. In order to see the child, Jacqueline, like Digger, must keep her blood tie to him a secret and instead suffer the humiliation of kowtowing to her nemesis, who smugly believes that she is the child’s direct ascendant. Just as Jock did when Digger cradled John Ross, Angela keeps a beady eye on Jacqueline during her visit with Joseph.

Compared to Jacqueline, Chase and Maggie don’t appear overly concerned about their new grandson - or perhaps it’s just that they are occupied with other story-lines. A possible downside of FALCON CREST's focus being split between multiple plots, each of equal importance, is that it’s hard to keep track of where the characters’ emotional priorities lie. Whereas Digger's pilgrimage to the Southfork nursery was a significant and poignant part of that particular DALLAS episode and had a lasting impact on him, Jacqueline’s equivalent visit is dealt with in a couple of minutes, after which the characters swiftly move on to other stories. This isn’t to say the plot won’t yet resurface and bite us on the ass when we're least expecting it - which is a possible upside of FALCON CREST being such a busy show.

The week before Christmas, there was the La Mirage opening in DYNASTY and the Southfork barbecue in DALLAS. Now it’s party time in FALCON CREST and KNOTS. Like DALLAS, KNOTS’ celebrations are of the daytime, al fresco variety, with a bit of local fundraising thrown in - a “block party”, or what we English might call a fete - with the added bonus of rising rock star Ciji Dunne belting out power pop cover versions on a makeshift stage.

FALCON CREST plays host to no less than two gatherings this week. First, there’s the Founder’s Day Parade which, like the block party and the barbecue, is a wholesome community event (“This whole thing smacks of an office picnic,” observes Miss Hunter drily) and also has a period dress theme. (The exact period I’m a little vague on - somewhere between THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE GREAT GATSBY it appears - with Nick Hogan and Lance both sporting the same style of white Gatsby-esque hat that Mark Jennings wore at La Mirage two weeks ago). This is followed by a more glamorous party at Angela’s house. For a change, there’s no dress code here - but while there are plenty of low cut gowns with spangly sequins, there are, strangely, no shoulder pads.

Soap Land parties are almost always an excuse to bring estranged or feuding characters together in the same environment - see Blake, Alexis and Neil McVane at La Mirage, Cliff, the cartel and the Ewings at Southfork, Angela, Richard and Jacqueline at this week’s party at Falcon Crest - and then watch the sparks fly. Not so at the KNOTS LANDING block party, where Abby and Gary drop Olivia off at the entrance to the cul-de-sac and then disappear off-screen for the rest of the episode. (As a result, Gary is referenced more in DALLAS this week than KNOTS, thanks to Miss Ellie’s controversial decision to sell Ewing Oil “and give half the money to a drunk and a cowboy.”) Consequently, the block party is a somewhat tame affair, the highlight of which is Ciji and Lilimae duetting on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

There’s something dreamlike about the scene at the end of this week’s KNOTS, where Pete Mackenzie comes to Seaview Circle looking to make up with Mack, with whom he has argued. It is dark and the party guests have all left. He finds Lilimae amongst the streamers and other party debris blowing gently around in the cul-de-sac, searching for a random piece of paper. As she roots about, she distractedly imparts unhelpful advice to Pete about how she and Val came to terms with their differences: “We don’t talk about them. All we do is not do them anymore.”

Pete carries with him his own father’s kilt, which he plans to present to Mack as a symbol of reconciliation. This is mirrored by Mark Jennings' gesture towards Krystle on DYNASTY when he returns her grandmother's locket which he stole from her and pawned during their marriage years before. After thirty years, I’ve finally forgiven Mark for not being Matthew Blaisdel and the gradual reconciliation between he and Krystle has actually been quite sweet to watch.

KNOTS closes on an emotional embrace between Pete and Mack, their differences nonetheless unresolved. Angela’s party on FALCON CREST concludes more dramatically. Just like the La Mirage opening and the Southfork barbecue, the celebrations are disrupted, this time by an impromptu toast from Richard “to my mother, Jacqueline Perrault.” Cue a “You bitch!” from Angela, and an if-looks-could-kill freeze frame of Lana Turner. Very funny.

And this week’s Soap Land Top 4 are … wow, this one was close ...

1 (1) DALLAS
2 (4) DYNASTY
3 (3) FALCON CREST
4 (2) KNOTS LANDING

Knots should have scored higher based alone on Mack crying his eyes out - tough guys crying is never easy to witness and even harder to perform...

 

[James from London]

Knots should have scored higher based alone on Mack crying his eyes out - tough guys crying is never easy to witness and even harder to perform...

Had I been ranking individual performances rather than episodes as a whole, Mack's might have well have been at the top of the tree (although I don't think I'd have taken how "hard it is to perform" into account; as a viewer, that's not really any of my business), but as it is, context is everything. That said. it's a while since I watched all these eps back to back, so I may well feel differently about them now. In fact, I kind of hope I would.

 

[Stillwitty]

30/Nov/83: DYNASTY: Peter De Vilbis v. 01/Dec/83 KNOTS LANDING: Homecoming v. 02/Dec/83: DALLAS: The Buck Stops Here v. 02/Dec/83: FALCON CREST: The Double Dealing

While Soap Land’s quartet of female newcomers can be loosely grouped together as everyday "working girls" (in fact, Angela uses that precise term to describe Terry’s chequered past in this week’s FALCON CREST) this season's male arrivals are a more disparate bunch. Dr Michael Ranson has been established as a morally upstanding authority figure on FALCON CREST, but is possibly too avuncular (i.e., old) to fit the mould of dashing romantic hero. That is a role more suited to Ben Gibson on KNOTS or Dex Dexter on DYNASTY, who are as different from each other as they are from the women they have fallen for, Val and Alexis respectively. Where Ben is solemn and thoughtful, Dex is quick tempered and cocksure. If Ben had invited himself into Val’s home after their first meeting and then kissed her without warning before complimenting her on her fantastic mouth — as Dex does Alexis in this week’s DYNASTY - she would mostly likely have run a mile (barefoot along a beach, obviously).

Dex is closer in personality type to KNOTS’ other newcomer, Greg Sumner, but Greg is really in a category of his own. Striding through every scene with a phalanx of advisers and minders, he regards the KNOTS regulars with amused irreverence. “What’s with this Ewing character?!” he asks of Gary. “You’re nuts!” he says to Abby. What makes him so much fun, and such a different sort of character, is that he gives no indication of being in somebody else’s soap opera. As far as he’s concerned, this is THE GREG SUMNER SHOW and all the Mackenzies and Ewings merely supporting players.

This leaves the two Peters - Peter Richards on DALLAS and Peter de Vilbis, the latest addition to DYNASTY’s opening titles. At first glance, the two could not be more different. DALLAS's Peter is the embodiment of the All American Boy: young, wholesome, athletic. DYNASTY’s Peter is archetypal Eurotrash: dead-eyed, decadent and drug-taking. In their opposing ways, each feels like a Soap Land anomaly. Neither is rugged or manly in the traditional sense. Peter Richards’ boyish innocence, the contrast between his lack of sexual awareness and his eagerness to display as much of his hairless young body as he can get away with, renders him, by DALLAS standards, somewhat effete. Peter de Vilbis’s exotic (i.e., unAmerican) dissoluteness, thick foreign accent and silken smoking jacket create a similar effect. Two sides of the same coin, it’s not hard to imagine Helmut Berger raping and murdering Christopher Atkins (not necessarily in that order) in one of those disturbing Nazi-themed flicks he used to make with Luciano Visconti. As it is, both Peters make unlikely love interests for the women they have been cast opposite, Sue Ellen and Fallon respectively. On DALLAS, this incompatibility is addressed and explored; on DYNASTY, it remains unacknowledged. Admittedly, Fallon has yet to be exposed to the seamier side of de Vilbis's character.

That is revealed to the audience in a scene between Peter and his lawyer (Jeff Munson from KNOTS, who presumably crossed over to the dark side after being dumped by Val). We see De Vilbis racking up lines of coke and learn that he is in debt for six million dollars. His solution to the latter, it transpires, is Fallon herself, aka "a fascinating girl whose father has millions”. In an equivalent scene in this week’s KNOTS, between Greg Sumner and an as yet unnamed associate, we discover that Greg is not who he appears to be either. He is involved with mysterious off screen figures referred to only as “they".

“They know about Mackenzie - we talked it out on the phone,” he assures his unknown acquaintance enigmatically. “They didn’t know he’d get this close this fast,” the acquaintance replies. “They’re overreacting … What do they want me to do?” Greg asks. “Get rid of him … The feeling is very strong about this, Greg,” the associate instructs him. Greg promises to resolve the “situation”.

Greg’s circumstances are paralleled on FALCON CREST where Richard Channing has his own share of mysterious off screen figures to contend with. “Your debt to the company did not die with Henri Denault,” his attorney/emissary John Osborne informs him this week. “You’re not free until they say you’re free ... They want absolute control of the race track … These people are ruthless. They’re accustomed to getting what they want.” Richard is less acquiescent than Greg, however. “Nobody pulls my strings,” he snarls. “Power belongs to those who take it!” he adds for good measure, sounding just like Jock Ewing.

Another connection between Soap Land’s new men: the oldest and youngest of the bunch, Michael Ranson and Peter Richards, are each at the centre of a hopeless crush. Michael finds himself the object of Emma’s wide-eyed adoration in FALCON CREST and when Terry flirts outrageously with him in front of her, Emma is as crushed as Peter is by Sue Ellen’s rejection of him on this week’s DALLAS. (“The way you feel about me is a complication I don’t need in my life,” she tells him sternly.) When confronted by Maggie, Terry denies any interest in Michael (“He’s old enough to be my father,” she protests - providing a gender variation on Sue Ellen and Peter's May/December story-line). However, later Terry seduces Michael in a beautifully shot vineyard scene where Michael's self doubt and vulnerability — could this gorgeous young thing really desire him? — are touchingly conveyed.

While Sue Ellen has already likened Peter (Richards) to a young Bobby Ewing, Fallon tells Peter (de Vilbis) that he reminds her of her father in this week’s DYNASTY. Over on KNOTS LANDING, there is no doubt as to who Cathy Geary reminds Gary of. This results in one of two attempted make-overs in this week’s Soap Land. The first comes in DYNASTY where Claudia takes offence at Alexis going through her wardrobe “like a tornado” and offering to buy her "a few new chic things” — in other words, to make Claudia over in her own image. "You have to accept that the world and society judges us by the way we act and dress,” Alexis lectures her new daughter-in-law. An unsuspecting Cathy, meanwhile, is more than happy for Gary to treat her to a new dress and hairstyle. (Gary’s half-brother Ray also delves into the world of women’s clothing this week when as he surprises Donna with a fur coat he purchased from “a cute little sales girl” in New York. The snooty saleswoman Gary and Cathy encounter, meanwhile, is cut from the same designer cloth as the one Sue Ellen and Pam dealt with in the first episode of this season’s DALLAS.)

Pretty soon, Cathy is looking more like Ciji than Ciji did. As Gary encourages her to mime along to one of Ciji’s old songs, he simultaneously flashes back to Ciji singing the same song — and KNOTS reaches a whole new level of strangeness. Factor in the replica of Ciji’s space vixen dress that Cathy is now wearing and it almost feels like we’re in science fiction territory — albeit intriguing, emotionally-fuelled science fiction. What’s most interesting is the tension between the characters and the plot — especially when Laura walks in on Gary and Cathy/Ciji and we see the weirdness of the situation through her eyes (“What a scene, huh? … Like something out of wax museum!”) Clearly the writers came up with the idea of a Ciji lookalike first and then worked backwards to explain it. In the same way, the characters on screen are struggling to make sense of the situation they’re in (“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Gary admits). As a result, the story feels somehow contrived and organic at the same time. It’s a heady mix.

As KNOTS takes a turn for the fantastic, this week’s DALLAS feels almost … well, one hesitates to use the word “realistic” in relation to DALLAS, but this ep, which focuses almost exclusively on the Ewings in their leisure time (the scenes of JR trying to root out the company mole being the exception), might just be the closest the series has come to depicting the characters as real people. (Miss Ellie’s continued absence, which frees the rest of the Ewings to behave more like adults, helps in this regard, as does the source lighting, which adds a subtle sense of — OK, I’ll say it — realism to the interior scenes.)

The motivations and ambitions of Soap Land’s new girls come under scrutiny this week, as well how far they are willing to go to achieve their goals. On KNOTS, Laura questions Cathy’s reasons for hanging around Gary. “Nobody’s ever taken care of me before,” she replies simply. "It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me and he hasn’t even asked for anything in return, but if he did I’d probably go along with it.” Jenna Wade isn't so easily bought, however. “I’ve had offers to marry rich, but I’d never trade my self respect for that,” she tells Bobby on DALLAS. Nor is she impressed by Katherine Wentworth’s attempt to pay her to dump Bobby and move to Houston. Over on FALCON CREST, Richard playfully offers to turn the New Globe over to his assistant Pamela "in return for the intimate favours you guard so closely.” “Is that an offer?” she asks gamely. “So you can be bought! Well, now we’ve established our marketplace, why can’t we haggle the price?” he replies, this time channeling Donna Krebbs. Meanwhile Angela summons Terry to tea and threatens to expose her sordid past: “You’ll do as I say or you’ll find yourself back in the Park Avenue hotel lobby you came from”. When Terry agrees to do her bidding, Angela laughs and calls her an opportunist.

From an ex-Park Avenue girl to a former Madison Avenue one: “Ambition is not a dirty word in my dictionary,” says Tracy Kendall on DYNASTY before kissing the boss’s son. It doesn’t seem to be for Laura Avery either, who justifies her betrayal of Karen and Gary to Abby on KNOTS thusly: “Gary’s got his millions. You’ll get yours if you haven’t already. Karen’s husband died and she’s happily remarried. Val’s husband left her — she’s got a bestseller, new boyfriend, more money than she’s ever had before. Well, my husband left me too and the little I’ve got is five percent of Lotus Point. I think I’m entitled to that small piece of the pie, don’t you?" (It’s kind of cool to know that said husband was on set during this infamous speech, Richard Avery having directed this week's KNOTS.)

Two bizarre job appointments in Soap Land this week: On DYNASTY, Alexis hires Mark Jennings, the man who was arrested for her attempted murder only two months ago, as her personal bodyguard. On KNOTS LANDING, Gary hires Cathy, a lookalike of the woman he was in jail for murdering only two months ago, as a ranch hand. As part of their respective new working arrangements, Mark moves into Alexis’s penthouse and Cathy onto Gary’s ranch. At this, Alexis’s suitor Dex raises an eyebrow while Gary’s wife Abby looks stunned. (Even knowing what we do in hindsight, I'd like to think Abby is genuinely taken aback when she sees Cathy and Gary together for the first time — it’s more interesting that way.)

“Lucky horses,” murmurs Abby upon hearing that that the Ciji lookalike is going to be working the ranch. Horses and/or gambling provide a loose theme that runs through the week’s soaps. Fallon, Blake and Krystle have a day at the races during a visit to Los Angeles, it’s the annual Good Ole Boys Charity Rodeo at Billy Bob’s on DALLAS and on FALCON CREST, Richard reveals his plans to build a racetrack: “An endeavour that will soon tear the Tuscany Valley apart like carrion being savaged by packs of hyaenas.” This scheme sounds remarkably similar to the plan his previous self, Michael Tyrone, had to build a casino on FLAMINGO ROAD, even down to the shadowy gangster types lurking in the background. Then it was a sinister syndicate of investors, now it’s the cartel wanting in on the action.

Peter de Vilbis’s horse Allegree wins the DYNASTY race while the Krebbses are the victors at the DALLAS rodeo. Pam puts on an impressive show as Donna’s runner up in the ladies’ mechanical bull competition — especially when one remembers that the last time there was a rodeo on DALLAS, she was too timid even to watch Bobby compete. Jenna #3 fares less well, but her performance brings back memories of the last woman to ride a mechanical bull in Soap Land - Jenna #1, aka Constance Carlyle, on FLAMINGO ROAD. Back then, her display won her some unwanted attention from some cowboys which led to Mark Graison’s former self, Sam Curtis, coming to her rescue. Subsequently, Jenna #1 and Mark - I mean, Sam - adjourned to a nearby motel room for the rest of the afternoon. This time around, Jenna #3 and Bobby put on a public display of affection which prompts Pam to take Sam - I mean, Mark - back to her place for the night. (This makes Pam also the runner-up in the Former Ewing Wives Getting On With Their Lives Competition, Val having embarked upon her first post-divorce sexual relationship - with Ben - on last week’s KNOTS.)

Another Soap Land trend: drugs. Peter de Vilbis is on cocaine, Karen Mackenzie and Julia Cumson are spaced out on pills and the FALCON CREST sheriff is snacking on some unspecified medication which leads to him collapsing on a tennis court, Jeff Colby-style.

While Mark carries Pam upstairs at the end of this week’s DALLAS and we learn that Diana hiding is Chip on Gary’s ranch at the end of KNOTS, DYNASTY and FALCON CREST both close with a discovery of “Oh my God!” proportions. “Oh my God, you’re carrying Adam’s baby!” realises Jeff on DYNASTY. “My God, why would anyone want to do this?” exclaims Richard on FALCON CREST, kneeling over the slain body of John Osborne.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

1 (3) DALLAS
2 (2) KNOTS LANDING
3 (4) FALCON CREST
4 (5) DYNASTY

Always loved the character of Dex on Dynasty, but he has a lot in common with Mack - maybe more so than Greg. The over-the-top Machismo for one thing. He was also faithful to Alexis while married although frequently tempted. And let's not forget the hairy chest....

09/Jan/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: The Assignment v. 11/Jan/84: DYNASTY: Lancelot v. 12/Jan/84: KNOTS LANDING: Reconcilable Differences v. 13/Jan/84: DALLAS: Offshore Crude v. 13/Jan/84: FALCON CREST: Queen’s Gambit v. 14/Jan/84: THE YELLOW ROSE: Hell Hath No Fury

On this week’s DYNASTY and KNOTS LANDING, Blake Carrington and Lilimae Clements are equally bemused by the respective break-ups of Kirby & Jeff and Val & Ben. "There is a child involved,” Blake reminds Jeff, "an unborn child to whom you and Kirby have a tremendous responsibility.” "It’s not just you and Valene now,” Lilimae chides Ben. "You have your child to think about.”

Much to Ben’s frustration, Val continues to keep the reason for their break-up, the fact that she is really pregnant by Gary, a secret from both Lilimae and Gary himself. “You have a separate set of lies for each of us,” he tells her angrily. Conversely, on DYNASTY, Adam finally admits to Blake that he raped and impregnated Kirby. "In another time, they'd have dragged you out to the centre of the square and horse-whipped you, branded you an animal!” Blake shouts, appalled. There is a juicy paradox at work here. Earlier in the same episode, Jeanette the maid happens upon Adam looking at Little Blake and Danny. "The Carrington heirs,” she sighs. "How your father loves them. He'd give their parents the world for what they've given him." "Yes, the world,” he murmurs in agreement. So by incurring his father’s wrath, even offering to move back to Montana with Kirby and the baby, Adam is actually securing his place in the Carrington dynasty. "You're my son and dammit, you're gonna stay right here in this house and you're gonna learn what it is to behave like a man, like a Carrington!” bellows Blake.

Blake’s disgust is notable for another reason. His description of what Adam did to Kirby — “it's an act of violence, it's an act of abuse and violence” — is the first time a Soap Land character has defined and condemned rape so unequivocally. (I may be overlooking the FLAMINGO ROAD episode “Victim”, which I disliked so much I’ve erased most of it from my memory.) It’s ironic that it should fall to Blake to take such a stand. Like JR on DALLAS, he is a former rapist himself but has never been characterised as such. The “r” word crops up on this week’s FALCON CREST too, when Maggie brands Richard’s racetrack development as "the rape of the Tuscany Valley”. There’s also "an act of abuse and violence” between a male and female in this week's EMERALD POINT where the Russian Rashid Ahmed abruptly punches Tiffany Case in the face sending her sprawling onto some handily situated trash cans. This, however, was a moment so unexpected and absurd it made me laugh out loud.

As part of her complicated espionage plan, Tiffany does a Claudia Blaisdel and seduces the guy with access to the information she needs, then rummages through his pockets while he’s otherwise occupied. Her Jeff Colby equivalent is Lucy Ewing’s former English professor/lover, Greg Forrester, who is still the same good looking bespectacled nerd with a wife and kids that he was in DALLAS Seasons 2 and 3. Tiffany isn’t the only Soap Land redhead mixing business and pleasure this week as Laura Avery winds up in bed with Greg Sumner in KNOTS. Their getting together is depicted with such tantalising economy one can only speculate at what has motivated such a union: an attempt by Greg to keep Laura on side, an opportunity for Laura to exact some long-awaited revenge on Abby, or just good old fashioned physical desire. Most likely it's a combination of all three.

Random Soap Land trend of the week: minor characters in mortal jeopardy. FALCON CREST's recurring law enforcer Sheriff Robbins collapses with an aneurysm and refuses to let anyone but Michael Ranson operate on him. Michael, however, hasn’t performed surgery since losing a patient on the operating table years earlier. So far so Nick Toscanni, but whereas Nick rose to the challenge when faced with a similar crisis on DYNASTY, Michael freezes in the operating theatre and has to be replaced by another surgeon. Meanwhile, almost exactly two years after Jock Ewing’s fatal helicopter crash in DALLAS, a plane malfunctions on EMERALD POINT and a character we’ve never seen or heard of before, but whom we learn was a surrogate son to Harlan Adams, is killed. We learn of a similar bond on this week's YELLOW ROSE between Chance and the elderly Toat Gilmore who looked out for each other when they shared a prison cell for five years. Toat is still behind bars but now dying of a heart condition so Chance devises a convoluted scheme to get him out of jail and reunite him with his long-lost grandson.

Having introduced Jane Russell as the controversial Rose Hollister in last week’s YELLOW ROSE, this week’s ep doesn’t even refer to her. Instead, we have a wacky prison break plot involving rodeo clowns and identity-swaps. Soap Land hasn’t been this schizo since the story of Gary and Abby’s affair kept getting interrupted by tales of haunted houses, silent movie stars and Lilimae’s cross country trek with Jackson Mobeley in KNOTS Season 3. (Speaking of Jackson Mobeley, he makes his second Soap Land appearance of the season in the guise of a horse trainer on this week's DYNASTY.) But however implausible the YELLOW ROSE story, we buy into it because we believe in the characters.

Just as KNOTS LANDING’s Abby began this season by describing herself to Jim Westmont as “the next Mrs. Gary Ewing” before she had even been proposed to so Terry confidently informs Angela she is to be “the next Mrs. Michael Ranson” on this week's FALCON CREST. Like Westmont, Angela is skeptical, but blonde ambition will out. By the end of this week’s ep, Michael has confided to Terry that the patient he lost on the operating table ten years earlier was his own wife.

Other characters have their secrets too. Gary learns in this week's KNOTS that Cathy spent four years in prison. On THE YELLOW ROSE, Caryn Careiba, Jeb Hollister’s tightly wound personal assistant, lets her hair and her guard down to reveal to Roy Champion that she is the girl whose virginity he took when they were teenagers and she’s been obsessed with him ever since (it’s Jenna Wade's back story mixed with Katherine Wentworth's psychological profile). Even Michael Ranson’s DALLAS counterpart, the incorruptible Edgar Randolph, turns out to be susceptible to blackmail when JR unearths something unimaginably heinous from his past.

This week's DYNASTY and KNOTS each ends with a married couple in an emotional embrace, one partner supporting the other who has collapsed in tears. In both cases, there's a bit of a role reversal going on. Claudia Carrington and Mack Mackenzie may each have been the stronger, more dependable spouse in their relationship so far this season — Claudia helping Steven retain custody of his son and then reconcile with his father, Mack supporting Karen through her estrangement from Diana and problem with pills — but now they are the ones in need. While Claudia is in shock after receiving a bouquet of violets apparently from her dead husband Matthew, Karen eavesdrops on a phone conversation between Mack and his father. “I’m OK, I’m gonna get through this … Karen’s like the rock of Gibraltar … She’s the one that’s getting me through this,” Mack is saying bravely. It’s only after the call that he starts to break down. The way Mack struggles in vain to contain his emotions — at one point biting on his bathrobe to stop himself from crying — is compellingly authentic.

This is also the episode that establishes Mack and Ben as close friends. First, they team up to clear Mack’s good name (which was besmirched in last week’s ep by his former best bud Greg Sumner) by investigating the Wolfbridge Group, then gradually begin to confide in each other about their emotional lives — the way ordinary men rarely do but Soap Land characters are compelled to. KNOTS navigates this transition via three separate scenes between the two men. In the first, Mack asks Ben how he is feeling with regard to his break up with Val. In the second, Ben does the same to Mack apropos of his problems with Karen. Each man avoids answering the other’s question, which kind of tells us what we need to know. Then in the third scene, having broken the macho ice, they are free to openly discuss their relationships and feelings. “Maybe men and women don’t belong together,” Mack concludes. "They sure as hell don’t seem to understand a damn thing about each other." (Friendships between men aren’t really a factor on the other soaps where nearly all male relationships are drawn along familial lines. The exception would be Blake Carrington’s friendships with Andrew Laird and Joseph Anders, but it’s notable that both of those men are/were in his employ.)

Broadly speaking, masculine emotions — deeply felt but rarely articulated — are what drives THE YELLOW ROSE and gives it its unique flavour. The most powerful scene in this week’s episode is between Roy Champion and his son Whit. When Whit calls his mother — who is suing Roy on Whit’s behalf — a pregnant slut, Roy’s intuitive response is to punch him. Whit retaliates in kind. Seconds later they’re hugging each other fiercely and exchanging “I love you”s. On any other soap, this would be as icky as it sounds but here it feels primal and real.

And this week’s Top 6 are …

1 (3) DALLAS
2 (4) KNOTS LANDING
3 (1) THE YELLOW ROSE
4 (2) FALCON CREST
5 (5) DYNASTY
6 (-) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.

Very few people have ever mentioned the biting the bathrobe which I also thought was pretty brilliant. Nonverbal communication is often far more powerful than words.

9 Jan 85: DYNASTY: The Will v. 10 Jan 85: KNOTS LANDING: #14 with a Bullet v. 11 Jan 85: DALLAS: Winds of War v. 11 Jan 85: FALCON CREST: Insult and Injury

There are plenty of visiting-the-sick scenes in DYNASTY and KNOTS this week — Tom Carrington is dying at his home in Sumatra, Indonesia, while Karen Mackenzie is about to undergo life or death surgery in Soap Land Memorial Hospital.

In order to convey the gravity of Karen’s situation, KNOTS once again employs the kind of storytelling devices one is unlikely to find in any of the other soaps — the ep is bookended by scenes of Mack visiting a Catholic church to pray for his wife, voices from one scene play over the visuals of another, there’s a prolonged close-up of Karen’s eyes after her operation as her reflexes are tested to see whether the surgery has been a success, and to offset the pathos, there’s even a spot of physical comedy where Karen’s clumsy attempts to manoeuvre a wheelchair are accompanied by appropriately jaunty music. For once, however, KNOTS’ inventiveness works against it. It’s not that any of these touches are bad per se, but collectively they give an impression of an episode striving to be more meaningful and significant than it is. This story-line wants to evoke the same sense of realism and gnawing anxiety that Sid’s operation did at the beginning of Season 3, but actually Karen’s plight is no more “real" or less escapist that Maggie Gioberti's one-chance-in-a-million-that was-never-going-to-fail brain-tumour surgery from last season’s FALCON CREST. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a melodramatic medical storyline with a predictably happy outcome -- it's just that KNOTS won’t admit that that’s what this is, and the whole thing feels somewhat heavy-handed as a result.

Tom Carrington’s story on DYNASTY, meanwhile, functions within conventional soap parameters (it colours inside the lines if you will) and feels the more honest for it. It is also surprisingly touching. It's a variation on a scenario we’ve seen in Soap Land before: an estranged (i.e., never previously mentioned) relative shows up (e.g., Miss Ellie’s brother or the fathers of Mack Mackenzie or Lane Ballou), old wounds are reopened, a terminal condition is revealed and an eleventh-hour reconciliation takes place just in time for the closing credits.

While DYNASTY sticks by and large to this narrative blueprint, there are some nuanced differences. Usually, it’s a case of the dying man returning to his family in search of forgiveness. Here it’s Blake, closely followed by Dominique and Alexis, who visits Tom on his deathbed in Sumatra. Moreover, Tom himself is far from repentant, at least initially. "You want to make amends, tie everything nice and pretty, getting everything off your chest you've been pushing down all these years, like telling me what a nasty wretched old man I am?” he asks Blake mockingly. He’s even meaner to Dominique when she asks him to acknowledge her as his daughter. "My mother loved you,” she insists. "She never would have given herself to you if she didn't love you." "I hardly knew the woman," he blithely replies. "You are a LIAR! You are a LIAR!" she spits. It’s a great scene, as electric as it is long-awaited. We also get to see Blake and Alexis swap roles — for once, he is the cold resentful figure unable to forget or forgive Tom his past transgressions while she is warm and humorously affectionate towards her former father-in-law.

Alexis and Tom's bedside exchange reminded me of the final scene between Abby and the dying movie director Andrew Douglas in the stand alone KNOTS episode “Silver Shadows”. Douglas was fixated on Abby’s resemblance to the silent film actress Teri Clarington, while Tom tells Alexis she is "prettier than any moving-picture star”. Where Douglas promised to leave Abby his fortune, Tom makes a similar assurance to Alexis. In each instance, there is a twist: in his confused state, Andrew bequeaths his wealth to the long dead Teri herself rather than Abby, and although Alexis does indeed receive a slice of Tom’s estate, she is dismayed to learn she must share it not only with Blake but also “that cabaret singer” Dominique — Tom having had the requisite last-minute reconciliation with both his children.

As poignant as Tom’s farewell is (and it’s possibly Soap Land's most moving deathbed scene since Digger’s in DALLAS Season 2), the strongest emotional moment of the Soap Land week belongs to Charlotte Pershing on FALCON CREST. Desperate to raise the cash to get her daughter’s stolen pearls out of hock, she approaches Richard at Tuscany Downs and timidly begs him for a small loan in order to place a bet on a rank outsider in an upcoming race. He gently but firmly refuses. Charlotte can’t help but watch the race anyway and her silent scream as her chosen horse romps to victory is as vivid a depiction of the agony of addiction as any of Gary Ewing’s drunk tank freak-outs.

While Ray and Donna come up with corroborative proof that Jock, Jason and Digger really were equal partners in Ewing Oil on this week’s DALLAS, we’re also granted some intriguing glimpses into the DYNASTY and KNOTS backstories. We learn that Blake has yet another estranged relative — a brother, Ben — and that Greg's ties to Mack are much stronger than has previously been supposed. "His family practically raised you,” Paul Galveston reminds Greg. "Someone had to,” he replies.

There’s also a small, but revealing, insight into Abby’s past this week, during a short scene which finds her working late at the TV station, editing Joshua's sermon to make it more effective. She is clearly enjoying herself and Joshua is impressed and surprised at her skill. “I was an English major,” she tells him by way of explanation. That Abby should be both sensitively creative enough to make a positive contribution to Joshua’s work and ruthless enough to exploit him for it is part of what makes her character so beguiling. It’s a duality that most of Soap Land’s other antagonists do not possess — certainly not Angela Channing or JR, nor even the painterly Alexis. Richard Channing might be an exception, however.

Even though he has found Val in Shula, Abby has instructed her detective, Peter Freilich, to file a report for Gary’s benefit claiming that his search has reached a dead end. This week, Freilich decides to blackmail Abby in return for his silence. She reluctantly agrees to pay up until he explains that it’s not money he’s after, but sex. This potentially places Abby in the same situation that Afton Cooper, Laura Avery and Holly Harwood have each previously found themselves — as a woman coerced (but not necessarily physically) into having sex with a man against her will. It’s very strange to see Abby in this position — not only does she make an unlikely sexual victim, but the men who forced themselves on Afton, Laura and Holly (Gil Thurman, Chip Todson and JR respectively) were each in a position of power; Freilich is Abby's financial and social inferior. Whether or not Abby would have ultimately submitted to his demands we’ll never know because that’s where Paul Galveston gets involved ...

… whereupon an interesting parallel emerges between the situation unfolding on KNOTS and the one being simultaneously played out between Melissa, Joel McCarthy and Richard Channing on FALCON CREST. At the end of last week’s FC, Joel admitted to Richard that Melissa had paid him to discredit Lance (which resulted in Lance getting arrested for the attempted murder of his grandmother). On this week's KNOTS, under duress, Freilich confesses to Paul Galveston that Abby paid him to keep silent about Val’s whereabouts. (In exchange for his information, Richard spared Joel from the hoodlums who were after him for unpaid debts and instead shipped him off to a kill-or-cure rehab centre. Galveston is less generous — he has Peter Freilich beaten up for the hell of it.)

I have a soft spot for small-time hustlers like McCarthy and Freilich — seemingly insignificant characters whom their shows’ major players (in this case Melissa and Abby) underestimate at their peril and who end up playing a pivotal role in their respective show’s narrative.

As a result of these juicy plot twists, Richard Channing and Paul Galveston now know that Lance didn’t really try to kill Angela and that Val’s babies didn’t really die. Will they go public with the good news? Will they hell. Instead, both men use their newly acquired knowledge to further their own agendas. This leads to a great scene on KNOTS where Abby, in an equivalent scenario to the one in DALLAS where Holly Harwood was summoned to JR’s office after hours, nervously waits for Peter Freilich in her own office after the rest of the staff have gone home. Instead of Freilich, however, Paul Galveston himself appears. “I’m not sure what I have in mind for you yet,” he tells her. "I’ve found Val. Now I’m going to find the babies. Then I’m going to find out what the hell you had in mind when you started all this … Then, unless you give me an incredible explanation, I’m going to turn it all over to Gary!" By comparison, the parallel scene in FALCON CREST where Richard uses Joel’s information as leverage to force Melissa into selling him her share in a racehorse she co-owns feels a bit anti-climactic, but perhaps the other shoe has yet to drop.

Whereas Tom’s eventual recognition of Dominique as a Carrington feels like a big pay off in this week’s DYNASTY, JR finally acknowledging that Jamie is a Ewing in this week’s DALLAS is so thrown away, one would be forgiven for missing it altogether. ("Is she really a Ewing?" Mandy asks him. "Well, I guess that's true enough," he shrugs, before changing the subject.) In any case, by the end of their respective episodes, Dominique’s and Jamie’s relationships to their new families could not be more different. As far as she is concerned, Dominique has finally got what she is entitled to — one-third of her father’s fortune. “It's time for us to face the fact that we're all one big family now,” she tells Alexis firmly. Meanwhile, Jamie has moved off Southfork, quit her job at Ewing Oil and given Sue Ellen back the keys to the car she bought her a few weeks earlier. "The way I feel right now, I don't want to have anything to do with any of the Ewings, and that includes you!” she tells her.

Freeze frame-wise, Mack’s thumbs-up to God after Karen gets the all clear at the end of this week's KNOTS always makes me cringe slightly, while Cliff’s crooked smile of delight when Jamie agrees to join forces with him against the Ewings at the end of DALLAS never fails to make me laugh.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

1 (3) DYNASTY
2 (4) DALLAS
3 (2) KNOTS LANDING
4 (1) FALCON CREST

As the most Christian of non-churchgoing Catholics, I absolutely understood and identified with both scenes in the Church. When else in this busy, modern world do we call out a higher power for personal communication? Mack, being Irish, is more likely than others to reach for that relationship when overtaken by fear and guilt.

 

[Stillwitty]

One bit that has always bothered me about KL's "not-quite-dead" Paige:

The camera panned across "Paige"'s tombstone dramatically, showing her buried alongside several Matheson family relatives. This really doesn't jive with the established history, which states that Anne was only briefly married to "Mr. Matheson" (I don't think they even gave his name) when Paige was little. After the divorce, Paige was raised at the Winston mansion with her grandparents as Anne led a jet-set lifestyle (and wishing to remain unencumbered by a small child). After the divorce, Mr. Matheson had no real contact with step-child Paige. If Paige died in a boating accident as the Winstons were led to believe, it would make more sense that Paige would be buried in the Winston family plot, not among a bunch of Mathesons who were basically strangers. Not that there was a body to bury in any case...

Good catch. Also, when Paige confesses her reasoning for faking her death, she insinuates her step-father molested her ("If you knew what he did to me") which conflicts with Anne's short marriage.

It's also worth reminding everyone that while this 180-degree turn for Ben seems abrupt and more than a little mind-blowing, it played out a bit more believably (a BIT more, not a lot more) in the original, one-episode per-week format. It added some time to digest the individual plot points. Or, put another way, gave you some time to talk yourself into believing it might actually happen.

The limited appearances of Constance McCashin in the story were disappointing for me. At the time I just assumed she was not being used as much due to her pregnancy, but I did not know the proverbial knives were out behind the scenes. When she did appear, her character was well-used, and of course Laura was as observant and witty as always; her absence from so much of the action was glaring when you take into account how much more of an ally/confidant Laura was to Greg when suddenly...she wasn't. The producers/writers proved that they could put Greg into a front burner story threatening his life and not have his own wife play a significant role. Can you picture such a story written for Mack and not have Karen playing a major role in the story?

After watching the entire 14 Season run, it kind of amazes he that Mack was never the target of an attempted assassination in his capacity as federal investigator and going after as many big shot bad guys as he did. Not once did we see Mack laying up in a hospital bed, Karen wringing her hands in agony. Seems like a missed opportunity

 

[Stillwitty]

12 Nov 87: KNOTS LANDING: Love In v. 13 Nov 87: DALLAS: Hustling v. 13 Nov 87: FALCON CREST: Sweet Revenge

Bobby may consider Pam “a closed subject” following her request for a divorce, but there’s still a gaping hole in DALLAS left by her absence. In contrast, FALCON CREST has absorbed the loss of Chase Gioberti very smoothly — by pushing Richard together with Maggie and making Angela his mother, the show has effectively sealed the gap Chase previously occupied.

Though visibly wounded, DALLAS staggers manfully on. Of this week’s shows, it’s the one that sticks most closely to its traditional format with JR continuing to marshal his forces in order to launch a revenge attack against West Star later in the season. FALCON CREST, on the other hand, has become a show that’s as much about a revolving door of vaguely motivated guest characters trying to kill off the main stars as it is about the core cast interacting with each other. KNOTS LANDING, meanwhile, somehow manages to make each episode feel freshly inventive, with its own tone and sense of identity.

This week’s KL is a romantic soufflé of an ep which unfolds leisurely over the course of an evening. It starts with Abby accepting a dinner invitation from her old flame Charles and ends with them sitting across from each other in a restaurant a few hours later. In-between, the episode cuts back and forth between Abby getting ready at home while chatting to Olivia, and other regular characters, either in couples or as families, eating dinner and/or hanging out together. I think the last Soap Land episode to be structured around such a concentrated time period was the DYNASTY ep immediately preceding the first instalment of THE COLBYS, which took place over a single, stormy night.

This week’s KNOTS even comes with its own catchphrase. “It’s not a date, sweetpea — we’re just going out for dinner,” Lilimae insists as she waits for Al to pick her up for the evening. “Mama, it’s not a date with Gary … He’s just coming over here to see the kids,” clarifies Val. “Honey, it’s not a date really — it’s just dinner with an old friend,” Abby tells Olivia. Even the twins get in on the act: “Mommy, are we on a date?” Bobby enquires over dinner. “No, honey, we’re not — we’re just having a nice time together,” Val replies, smiling at Gary. Contrarily on DALLAS, Bobby surprises Miss Ellie by announcing: “I’m taking you out on a date!” Clayton plays along: “I got strict rules about the curfew — no later than midnight, Bobby!” Bobby whisks his mama off for hot dogs where the forced jollity briefly recedes. “I’ve got a lot of things inside me now that I just don’t feel like I wanna talk about right now,” he admits, “but … everything’s gonna be all right.” Then it’s back to the faux flirting. “More than any other woman, you look dynamite in denim!” he tells her.

While out dancing, Al asks Lilimae to marry him. “Marry you? I don’t even know you!” she exclaims. “Well, we’re bound to get acquainted if you marry me,” he replies logically. Over on DALLAS, Jenna decides to follow Miss Ellie’s advice (“Marry a good man and wait for the bells to ring later”) and so finally accepts Ray’s proposal. Meanwhile, there’s news from Washington of Donna’s engagement to Senator Dowling.

When Melissa travelled to Australia on last week’s FALCON CREST, she was surprised to find Cole with a new wife, Kathleen. When Eric arrives home from college on this week’s KNOTS, Karen is utterly gobsmacked to find that he too has a bride, Linda. While Kathleen was a minor character with only a few lines, the same cannot be said for the awesomely opinionated Linda. Put her and a lovestruck Eric on one side of the Fairgate/Mackenzie dinner table, Michael and his uninhibitedly affectionate new girlfriend Jodie on the other, and a traumatised Karen in the middle trying desperately to bite her tongue, and hilarity — genuinely, for once — ensues.

In-between courses, Karen seeks refuge in the kitchen where Mack tries to console her: “You haven’t lost a son, you’ve gained a —” “Spokesperson for the FDA,” she interrupts. She even threatens to “open the oven, blow out the pilot, turn on the gas.” Mack argues that a bad first impression doesn’t mean Karen has to kill herself. “I’m not talking about me,” she explains. “Call those two women in here, then we’ll run out and toss in a match.” Where the suicide/murder mislead is a fun gag on KNOTS, it’s a grimly bizarre reality on FALCON CREST.

Just as Pam is officially “a closed subject” on DALLAS, the story of FC’s Dina, another former aerobics instructor horrendously injured in a car crash, also comes to an end this week. Poor, poor Dina: having narrowly escaped death at the hands of one homicidal maniac (an ex-boyfriend who tampered with Lance’s car), she is then placed in the care of another, entirely unrelated homicidal maniac (her nurse) who manipulates her into writing a suicide note and then force-feeds her a fatal overdose of pills. Even by Soap Land standards, that’s pretty bad luck.

The other major aspect of this week’s KNOTS is its flashback sequences. Just like last season’s, they are set in 1967 and accompanied by a Motown soundtrack, but instead of focusing on Mack and Anne’s teen romance in New York, they're about Abby and Charles’s love story in Philadelphia. We also get to see Young Karen (still campaigning) and Young Sid (still tinkering with engines). In truth, these sequences aren’t quite as evocative as last season’s, but they’re interesting nonetheless and it’s especially nice to see a youthful version of Sid. There’s another blast from the past on FALCON CREST where Michael Channing’s second birthday party (a far grander affair than the twins’ bash on last week’s KNOTS) is juxtaposed, GODFATHER-style, with Richard’s henchmen abducting Carlton Travis’ associate Colonel Anand so that Richard can interrogate him over the reasons behind Travis’ vendetta against him. Anand explains, in the first Pakistani accent we’ve heard in Soap Land, that Travis wishes to avenge the wrongs done to him by Henri Denault, Richard’s late guardian. “The sins of the father are visited on the sons,” says Richard ruefully, echoing Sean Rowan, echoing Zachary Powers, etc., all the way back to Michael Tyrone, i.e., Richard himself.

Travis claims he wants to call a halt to the feud, but then Anand keels over with a heart attack while in Richard’s custody, and the episode ends with Travis holding both Richard and Angela at gunpoint. There is also talk of a ceasefire between JR and West Star on DALLAS. JR even invites Wilson Cryder and his wife Kimberly to dinner where, in the episode’s final scene, he suggests they “let bygones be bygones.” “You must know that Wilson has no intention of giving up the feud,” Kimberly tells JR once they are alone together. “Of course I do,” he replies, “but the way I figure — if he’s free to go after whatever’s mine, I’m free to go after whatever’s his.” He and Kimberly clink champagne glasses and exchange knowing looks as the episode ends. KNOTS concludes similarly. Like JR and Kimberly, Abby and Charles are sitting opposite one another in a restaurant. “Tell me that … your life has been miserable and leaving me was the biggest mistake you ever made,” Abby asks. Charles replies by proposing a toast. “To the most miserable man in the world — me.” Then the clink of champagne glasses, the knowing looks, the freeze frame.

And this week’s Top 3 are …

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (3) FALCON CREST
3 (2) DALLAS

Much more importantly, Mack's gray sweatpants return as he helps Karen set the table. The woman must have ice in her veins if the spoons and forks ended up in the right place...

I'm sure she would have done a great job, but personally I'm not eager to watch a long, slow cancer-death.
I don't mind crying a little (or a lot) when I watch my stories, and the whole implication of her departure and how it was done was sad enough imo.
But when it's so overwhelmingly sad and depressing it could even take the melodrama out of it. I like the sad moments ,but dying of cancer is too much of a process and I'd end up waiting for that final moment.

Having lived through a good friend dying of a brain tumor at 44, leaving behind a husband and 3 daughters, I can attest to its tragedy, but in the world of TV Soaps, the opportunity for dramatic storylines is undeniable.

 

[James from London]

it kind of amazes he that Mack was never the target of an attempted assassination in his capacity as federal investigator and going after as many big shot bad guys as he did. Not once did we see Mack laying up in a hospital bed, Karen wringing her hands in agony. Seems like a missed opportunity

I guess the image of Karen collapsing in Mack's arms, having being shot as a result of his most notorious investigation, would have been a tough act to follow. Like Paige getting shot in Season 13, it might have seemed a bit vanilla in comparison. Granted, Gary and Greg both took a bullet (or at least, appeared to) with juicily dramatic results, but both of those storylines were far knottier than a straightforward "good guy opposes bad guys; bad guys attempt to off good guy" situation. Sid driving off the cliff pretty much had that scenario covered. (Now I think about it, Mack did take a beating at the hands of the Wolfbridge Group in Season 5 and that felt satisfying brutal.)

 

[Stillwitty]

I guess the image of Karen collapsing in Mack's arms, having being shot as a result of his most notorious investigation, would have been a tough act to follow. Like Paige getting shot in Season 13, it might have seemed a bit vanilla in comparison. Granted, Gary and Greg both took a bullet (or at least, appeared to) with juicily dramatic results, but both of those storylines were far knottier than a straightforward "good guy opposes bad guys; bad guys attempt to off good guy" situation. Sid driving off the cliff pretty much had that scenario covered. (Now I think about it, Mack did take a beating at the hands of the Wolfbridge Group in Season 5 and that felt satisfying brutal.)

Yeah, I remember that beating - but he reciprocated some episodes later when he saw one of the perps, ran him off the road, and beat the crap out of him while Ben attempted unsuccessfully to stop him. His Kojak training kicked in...

17 Dec 87: KNOTS LANDING: Weak Moment v. 18 Dec 87: DALLAS: Daddy's Little Darlin' v. 18 Dec 87: FALCON CREST: Twist and Shout

This week’s KNOTS and FALCON CREST are both named after songs that feature during their respective episodes. KNOTS opens with ‘Weak Moment’, a country number that plays over a montage of Gary leaving Val’s bed and getting dressed, and Abby taking receipt of some flowers from Charles Scott and throwing them onto an open fire. On FALCON CREST, a generic version of ’Twist and Shout’ is playing at The Max as Eric Stavros sends his wife Vicky off to dance so that he can talk to FC’s latest murderous guest star in private. ‘Twist and Shout’ is the latest example of Soap Land’s preoccupation with sixties pop music. Classic Motown tracks accompanied both KNOTS LANDING’s recent run of flashback sequences and Melissa’s farewell party on FALCON CREST, while DALLAS's Ray and Jenna returned from their honeymoon last week to find Charlie and Brad Pitt cavorting to the sound ‘Mony Mony’, a 1968 hit for Tommy James and the Shondells. Given that it’s pretty much unheard of for DALLAS to use well-known music in its scenes, it felt like a significant choice. The song gave a kind of retro vibe of Charlie and Randy’s relationship which continues in this week's ep. The scene where Ray gives Randy a fatherly talking to before allowing him to escort Charlie to a dance feels like something out of the fifties. “I don’t want Charlie in any car where the driver’s been drinking,” he tells him firmly — might he be thinking back to Mickey and Sue Ellen’s fateful car crash five years earlier?

DALLAS makes several other references to its own past this week. The ep opens with Bobby flashing back to the moment in Season 4 where he bought Christopher from his real father. (As with pop music, flashbacks might be commonplace on the other soaps, but are something of a novelty on DALLAS.) His subsequent visit to Sue Ellen at Valentine Lingerie to tell her “there’s a girl in Dallas who claims she’s Jeff Farraday’s sister … and she’s suing me for custody of Christopher” echoes their conversation in her townhouse six years earlier when he admitted that Kristin was Christopher’s real mother. In both scenes, Bobby uses the phrase “it’s a long and complicated story” to skim over any unnecessary exposition. “If this goes to trial,” he warns Sue Ellen, “a lot of Ewing dirty linen is gonna be aired all over again … I’m worried about you and JR.” Bobby’s previous revelation had left Sue Ellen in bits, but she’s not the same lip trembling pushover she was then. “Believe me, nothing could come up in the trial that would change our relationship,” she assures him coolly. Her parting line to Bobby, “I told you before, I married the wrong brother” recalls another conversation between them, this time at Brooktree Sanatarium at the end of Season 1. “If I’d only met you first, Bobby, I’d have married you instead of JR,” she told him then.

Back at Southfork, Miss Ellie hosts a DOA meeting, just as she used to in the show’s early days. This leaves Clayton, still recovering from a heart operation, feeling as redundant as Jock did following his bypass surgery in Season 1. Whereas Jock gravitated towards a younger woman (Julie Grey), Clayton is drawn to a painting of a young woman hanging in an art gallery. “It’s almost haunting,” he murmurs. So taken is he that he buys the picture for $6,000 — small potatoes next to the $35,000 Laura shelled out for the Fuentes painting on KNOTS shortly before her death. Greg returns to the gallery where Laura bought the painting during this week’s ep and the owner informs him that, thanks to Laura’s generosity, Fuentes has been able to quit his job and take up painting full-time. “I hope I get first crack at what he produces,” Greg replies. “I’m very interested in this man’s work,” echoes Clayton with regard to his up and coming artist. To my untrained eye, both paintings are very pretty — the Fuentes looks more like "art" art while Clayton’s is kind of "soap opera" art.

This being Soap Land, however, aesthetics take second place to matters of commerce. On DALLAS, the gallery owner assures Clayton he has made a sound investment: “The artist will be famous one day.” On KNOTS, the gallery owner’s assistant — who just happens to be Paige Matheson — is more circumspect. “He’s got a lot of potential,” she says of Fuentes. “Artistic potential or investment potential?” asks Greg. “Investment art would be nice.”

Only a week after we heard Laura refer to Greg as Ace for the final time, Paige calls him Pops for the first time. He looks amused — and a new double act is born. There’s a similar “out with the old, in with the new” vibe on FALCON CREST where Lance, on his way home from pushing his dead girlfriend’s car off a cliff as a sort of symbolic tribute (or maybe just as an excuse for a cool explosion), meets his next romantic interest, Shannon, who just happens* to have broken down by the side of the road. Meanwhile on DALLAS, it’s Pam who? “I am getting on with my life now,” Bobby tells April just before they share their first kiss.
(*In other words, she's been planted by Lance's grandmother.)

Whereas DALLAS is full of familiar moments, there is a strange reversal of roles on KNOTS. It's as if Laura’s passing has somehow upset the series’ delicate “earth, wind and fire” ecosystem, causing "wind" and "fire" to swap places. Val is now the other woman while Abby has claimed the role of the victim. “You could give lessons in manipulation to Abby Ewing,” Jill tells Val (the KNOTSian equivalent of Afton Cooper’s kiss-off line to Cliff: “You make JR Ewing look like a saint”) after learning that she and Gary have been sleeping together. Abby, meanwhile, is plagued by romantic indecision over Charles Scott. “I was the real victim of your lousy decision,” she cries towards the end of the episode, “the woman who loved you, who trusted you, who would have done anything for you, the little coed who cried herself to sleep every night for weeks and weeks and weeks because of what you did to her!” There’s also a tinge of Alexis Colby’s irrationality in this unfamiliar version of Abby as she allows her personal feelings for Charles to influence their business dealings. And it’s somewhat dismaying to catch her reading a novel by slimy old Jeffrey Archer (come on, Abs — you’re better than that!). This must be the first reference to a Tory politician in Soap Land, in spite of a hastily applied piece of tape across the cover of the book in a vain attempt to conceal the author’s name (come on, KNOTS prop department — you’re better than that!) Another Soap Land first is the use of “thought bubbles”, i.e., voiceovers that allow us to hear what the characters are thinking even as their dialogue suggests the opposite, in a scene between Charles and Abby. For such a fascinating character, Abby’s thoughts are disappointingly generic: “God, his eyes are blue!” By the time we find her in Charles’s bed at end of the ep, Abby has become a kind of Judith Krantz mini-series version of herself, her jagged edges rubbed away in order to fit more smoothly into this extravagantly romantic storyline.

Val, Gary and Jill are the new Frankie, Jason and Sable. After leaving Val’s place, guilty Gary goes home to break the news to Jill. “I guess I don’t love you,” he admits. Jill reacts bitterly (“Well, there’s backbone — you can’t even commit to non-commitment!”) before giving Val the kind of tongue-lashing Sable would have approved of: “You’re the one who keeps this victim routine going, Valene. Everyone thinks you’re so sweet, so put upon, so all alone in the world, so victimised, so damn pathetic.” Whereas Sable proved impossible to dislodge from the Colby mansion, Jill is packed and gone from Gary’s ranch within a matter of screen minutes. By the end of the episode, however, she’s back, suitcase in hand. “I don’t wanna beg,” she tells Gary who looks as helpless as Charlton Heston used to.

Soap Land has been in the party mood of late — the Ewing barbecue and Alexis’s English fair last week, and now a black-and-white themed surprise party in honour of Maggie and Richard’s engagement on FALCON CREST and the second annual Lotus Point Christmas party on KNOTS. (As has become customary, KNOTS is the only soap to acknowledge the Yuletide season.)

The final scene of this week’s DALLAS — the first meeting between JR and Dr Herbert Styles, the country doctor who wound up owning fourteen percent of West Star — is great: darkly lit and full of atmosphere. The doctor’s proposition to JR — that he’ll help him assume control of West Star on the condition that he divorce Sue Ellen and marry Kimberly — is another DALLAS déjà vu moment, strongly echoing Leslie Stewart’s similar ultimatum to JR back in Season 3. A wheelchair-bound despot playing God with his children’s lives, Dr Styles reminds me of Martin Peyton in PEYTON PLACE (who, in turn, reminded me of Angela Channing at her most ruthless). But then the final twist of the ep suggests that Dr S is simply following his daughter’s orders (“How’d I do, darlin’?” he asks after JR has gone. “Perfect, Daddy. Just perfect,” replies Kimberly, emerging from the shadows) and that she is the real power behind the wheelchair.

It’s a bit of a stretch perhaps, but I’ve always thought that as an ageing Texas belle with daddy issues, Kimberly is the closest DALLAS gets to an archetypal Tennessee Williams’ heroine. During this re-watch, I’ve also noticed some implications regarding her marriage to Wilson that add an extra layer of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof-style complexity to their situation. In last week’s episode, there was the couple’s obvious discomfort as Sue Ellen gushed over what a passionate marriage they must have and now here’s Dr Styles, voicing his distaste for his son-in-law: “Never thought Kimberly should have married him ... Man pays too damn much attention to the way he looks.”

Styles might be played by a minor member of the DALLAS repertory company (he previously appeared in a small role as a retired senator in Season 5), but he exudes a kind of effortlessly sinister authority that KNOTS LANDING’s Charles Scott and FALCON CREST’s revolving door of ruthless tycoons, for all the big name castings, lack. FC’s latest big bad, a European high roller by the name of Dimitrov, is an honourable exception. He’s played by Theodore Bickel who is as charismatically menacing towards Eric Stavros as he offers him a way to pay off his gambling debts as he was to Dominique Devereaux following the Moldavian massacre. The ultimatum he gives Eric — commit murder or we'll kill your entire family (“I have seven passports. I can be in Bulgaria before the police can even identify your wife’s body”) — is the same one Jean Hackney gave Ben on last season’s KNOTS. I have to admit, I’m kind of a sucker for these reluctant assassin stories. Surprisingly, Eric’s intended target isn’t a central character like Greg Sumner (my money was on Richard Channing) but a judge we’ve never previously heard of.

And this week’s Top 3 are …

1 (2) DALLAS
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) FALCON CREST



Yeah, it wasn't as much of an ordeal as I remembered. And the teddy bear turning its head 360 degrees like Linda Blair in The Exorcist was kind of fun.



I really do! I dislike her far more than any other Soap Land character I've encountered this time around. It's such a shame because in the first three seasons especially, she's just great.



I don't know ... in her scenes with Melissa and Emma, it feels like Angela's stuck, repeating the same eye-rolling punchline over and over, like a character trapped in the same scene of a never-ending sitcom. But in her scenes Richard and Maggie, and to a lesser extent Lance and Dan, she's still reasonably interesting.



Aw thanks!



You should -- it's really fun!



What a good idea -- and then you could watch TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN alongside New DYNASTY — what an amazing double bill that would be

17 Dec 87: KNOTS LANDING: Weak Moment v. 18 Dec 87: DALLAS: Daddy's Little Darlin' v. 18 Dec 87: FALCON CREST: Twist and Shout

This week’s KNOTS and FALCON CREST are both named after songs that feature during their respective episodes. KNOTS opens with ‘Weak Moment’, a country number that plays over a montage of Gary leaving Val’s bed and getting dressed, and Abby taking receipt of some flowers from Charles Scott and throwing them onto an open fire. On FALCON CREST, a generic version of ’Twist and Shout’ is playing at The Max as Eric Stavros sends his wife Vicky off to dance so that he can talk to FC’s latest murderous guest star in private. ‘Twist and Shout’ is the latest example of Soap Land’s preoccupation with sixties pop music. Classic Motown tracks accompanied both KNOTS LANDING’s recent run of flashback sequences and Melissa’s farewell party on FALCON CREST, while DALLAS's Ray and Jenna returned from their honeymoon last week to find Charlie and Brad Pitt cavorting to the sound ‘Mony Mony’, a 1968 hit for Tommy James and the Shondells. Given that it’s pretty much unheard of for DALLAS to use well-known music in its scenes, it felt like a significant choice. The song gave a kind of retro vibe of Charlie and Randy’s relationship which continues in this week's ep. The scene where Ray gives Randy a fatherly talking to before allowing him to escort Charlie to a dance feels like something out of the fifties. “I don’t want Charlie in any car where the driver’s been drinking,” he tells him firmly — might he be thinking back to Mickey and Sue Ellen’s fateful car crash five years earlier?

DALLAS makes several other references to its own past this week. The ep opens with Bobby flashing back to the moment in Season 4 where he bought Christopher from his real father. (As with pop music, flashbacks might be commonplace on the other soaps, but are something of a novelty on DALLAS.) His subsequent visit to Sue Ellen at Valentine Lingerie to tell her “there’s a girl in Dallas who claims she’s Jeff Farraday’s sister … and she’s suing me for custody of Christopher” echoes their conversation in her townhouse six years earlier when he admitted that Kristin was Christopher’s real mother. In both scenes, Bobby uses the phrase “it’s a long and complicated story” to skim over any unnecessary exposition. “If this goes to trial,” he warns Sue Ellen, “a lot of Ewing dirty linen is gonna be aired all over again … I’m worried about you and JR.” Bobby’s previous revelation had left Sue Ellen in bits, but she’s not the same lip trembling pushover she was then. “Believe me, nothing could come up in the trial that would change our relationship,” she assures him coolly. Her parting line to Bobby, “I told you before, I married the wrong brother” recalls another conversation between them, this time at Brooktree Sanatarium at the end of Season 1. “If I’d only met you first, Bobby, I’d have married you instead of JR,” she told him then.

Back at Southfork, Miss Ellie hosts a DOA meeting, just as she used to in the show’s early days. This leaves Clayton, still recovering from a heart operation, feeling as redundant as Jock did following his bypass surgery in Season 1. Whereas Jock gravitated towards a younger woman (Julie Grey), Clayton is drawn to a painting of a young woman hanging in an art gallery. “It’s almost haunting,” he murmurs. So taken is he that he buys the picture for $6,000 — small potatoes next to the $35,000 Laura shelled out for the Fuentes painting on KNOTS shortly before her death. Greg returns to the gallery where Laura bought the painting during this week’s ep and the owner informs him that, thanks to Laura’s generosity, Fuentes has been able to quit his job and take up painting full-time. “I hope I get first crack at what he produces,” Greg replies. “I’m very interested in this man’s work,” echoes Clayton with regard to his up and coming artist. To my untrained eye, both paintings are very pretty — the Fuentes looks more like "art" art while Clayton’s is kind of "soap opera" art.

This being Soap Land, however, aesthetics take second place to matters of commerce. On DALLAS, the gallery owner assures Clayton he has made a sound investment: “The artist will be famous one day.” On KNOTS, the gallery owner’s assistant — who just happens to be Paige Matheson — is more circumspect. “He’s got a lot of potential,” she says of Fuentes. “Artistic potential or investment potential?” asks Greg. “Investment art would be nice.”

Only a week after we heard Laura refer to Greg as Ace for the final time, Paige calls him Pops for the first time. He looks amused — and a new double act is born. There’s a similar “out with the old, in with the new” vibe on FALCON CREST where Lance, on his way home from pushing his dead girlfriend’s car off a cliff as a sort of symbolic tribute (or maybe just as an excuse for a cool explosion), meets his next romantic interest, Shannon, who just happens* to have broken down by the side of the road. Meanwhile on DALLAS, it’s Pam who? “I am getting on with my life now,” Bobby tells April just before they share their first kiss.
(*In other words, she's been planted by Lance's grandmother.)

Whereas DALLAS is full of familiar moments, there is a strange reversal of roles on KNOTS. It's as if Laura’s passing has somehow upset the series’ delicate “earth, wind and fire” ecosystem, causing "wind" and "fire" to swap places. Val is now the other woman while Abby has claimed the role of the victim. “You could give lessons in manipulation to Abby Ewing,” Jill tells Val (the KNOTSian equivalent of Afton Cooper’s kiss-off line to Cliff: “You make JR Ewing look like a saint”) after learning that she and Gary have been sleeping together. Abby, meanwhile, is plagued by romantic indecision over Charles Scott. “I was the real victim of your lousy decision,” she cries towards the end of the episode, “the woman who loved you, who trusted you, who would have done anything for you, the little coed who cried herself to sleep every night for weeks and weeks and weeks because of what you did to her!” There’s also a tinge of Alexis Colby’s irrationality in this unfamiliar version of Abby as she allows her personal feelings for Charles to influence their business dealings. And it’s somewhat dismaying to catch her reading a novel by slimy old Jeffrey Archer (come on, Abs — you’re better than that!). This must be the first reference to a Tory politician in Soap Land, in spite of a hastily applied piece of tape across the cover of the book in a vain attempt to conceal the author’s name (come on, KNOTS prop department — you’re better than that!) Another Soap Land first is the use of “thought bubbles”, i.e., voiceovers that allow us to hear what the characters are thinking even as their dialogue suggests the opposite, in a scene between Charles and Abby. For such a fascinating character, Abby’s thoughts are disappointingly generic: “God, his eyes are blue!” By the time we find her in Charles’s bed at end of the ep, Abby has become a kind of Judith Krantz mini-series version of herself, her jagged edges rubbed away in order to fit more smoothly into this extravagantly romantic storyline.

Val, Gary and Jill are the new Frankie, Jason and Sable. After leaving Val’s place, guilty Gary goes home to break the news to Jill. “I guess I don’t love you,” he admits. Jill reacts bitterly (“Well, there’s backbone — you can’t even commit to non-commitment!”) before giving Val the kind of tongue-lashing Sable would have approved of: “You’re the one who keeps this victim routine going, Valene. Everyone thinks you’re so sweet, so put upon, so all alone in the world, so victimised, so damn pathetic.” Whereas Sable proved impossible to dislodge from the Colby mansion, Jill is packed and gone from Gary’s ranch within a matter of screen minutes. By the end of the episode, however, she’s back, suitcase in hand. “I don’t wanna beg,” she tells Gary who looks as helpless as Charlton Heston used to.

Soap Land has been in the party mood of late — the Ewing barbecue and Alexis’s English fair last week, and now a black-and-white themed surprise party in honour of Maggie and Richard’s engagement on FALCON CREST and the second annual Lotus Point Christmas party on KNOTS. (As has become customary, KNOTS is the only soap to acknowledge the Yuletide season.)

The final scene of this week’s DALLAS — the first meeting between JR and Dr Herbert Styles, the country doctor who wound up owning fourteen percent of West Star — is great: darkly lit and full of atmosphere. The doctor’s proposition to JR — that he’ll help him assume control of West Star on the condition that he divorce Sue Ellen and marry Kimberly — is another DALLAS déjà vu moment, strongly echoing Leslie Stewart’s similar ultimatum to JR back in Season 3. A wheelchair-bound despot playing God with his children’s lives, Dr Styles reminds me of Martin Peyton in PEYTON PLACE (who, in turn, reminded me of Angela Channing at her most ruthless). But then the final twist of the ep suggests that Dr S is simply following his daughter’s orders (“How’d I do, darlin’?” he asks after JR has gone. “Perfect, Daddy. Just perfect,” replies Kimberly, emerging from the shadows) and that she is the real power behind the wheelchair.

It’s a bit of a stretch perhaps, but I’ve always thought that as an ageing Texas belle with daddy issues, Kimberly is the closest DALLAS gets to an archetypal Tennessee Williams’ heroine. During this re-watch, I’ve also noticed some implications regarding her marriage to Wilson that add an extra layer of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof-style complexity to their situation. In last week’s episode, there was the couple’s obvious discomfort as Sue Ellen gushed over what a passionate marriage they must have and now here’s Dr Styles, voicing his distaste for his son-in-law: “Never thought Kimberly should have married him ... Man pays too damn much attention to the way he looks.”

Styles might be played by a minor member of the DALLAS repertory company (he previously appeared in a small role as a retired senator in Season 5), but he exudes a kind of effortlessly sinister authority that KNOTS LANDING’s Charles Scott and FALCON CREST’s revolving door of ruthless tycoons, for all the big name castings, lack. FC’s latest big bad, a European high roller by the name of Dimitrov, is an honourable exception. He’s played by Theodore Bickel who is as charismatically menacing towards Eric Stavros as he offers him a way to pay off his gambling debts as he was to Dominique Devereaux following the Moldavian massacre. The ultimatum he gives Eric — commit murder or we'll kill your entire family (“I have seven passports. I can be in Bulgaria before the police can even identify your wife’s body”) — is the same one Jean Hackney gave Ben on last season’s KNOTS. I have to admit, I’m kind of a sucker for these reluctant assassin stories. Surprisingly, Eric’s intended target isn’t a central character like Greg Sumner (my money was on Richard Channing) but a judge we’ve never previously heard of.

And this week’s Top 3 are …

1 (2) DALLAS
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (3) FALCON CREST



Yeah, it wasn't as much of an ordeal as I remembered. And the teddy bear turning its head 360 degrees like Linda Blair in The Exorcist was kind of fun.



I really do! I dislike her far more than any other Soap Land character I've encountered this time around. It's such a shame because in the first three seasons especially, she's just great.



I don't know ... in her scenes with Melissa and Emma, it feels like Angela's stuck, repeating the same eye-rolling punchline over and over, like a character trapped in the same scene of a never-ending sitcom. But in her scenes Richard and Maggie, and to a lesser extent Lance and Dan, she's still reasonably interesting.



Aw thanks!



You should -- it's really fun!



What a good idea -- and then you could watch TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN alongside New DYNASTY — what an amazing double bill that would be!

Baby Meg is wicked cute, but if my husband gifts me a vacation to Tahiti, we gone...

30 Mar 88: DYNASTY: Colorado Roulette v. 31 Mar 88: KNOTS LANDING: Mother Knows Best v. 01 Apr 88: DALLAS: Never Say Never v. 01 Apr 88: FALCON CREST: Flying Blind

The same lakeside cabin where Lute-Mae Sanders fought off her rapist on FLAMINGO ROAD and Chase watched Dr Lantry take a fatal overdose on FALCON CREST this week becomes a hideout on DYNASTY for Sean Rowan, who has snatched Adam’s baby, aka “Blake and Alexis’s precious little grandson.” Leslie is his accomplice-cum-hostage who gets on his good side by serving up a breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast. “I never knew you were such a good cook,” he remarks — which is probably the nicest thing he’s ever said to her. This is one of several noteworthy breakfasts in this week’s Soap Land. On KNOTS, Mack whips up a romantic feast of blueberry pancakes for Karen which she runs out on because of a prearranged breakfast meeting with Manny Vasquez. That breakfast takes an unexpected turn when Manny kisses her. The following morning, Karen cooks breakfast for Mack in return and he jokingly accuses her of having a guilty conscience. He doesn’t know how right he is. “I enjoyed it,” she confesses to Pat, referring to Manny’s kiss. On FALCON CREST, the mere sight of Garth’s home-cooked breakfast has Maggie, undergoing alcohol withdrawal, running for the bathroom. On DALLAS, it isn’t breakfast but dinner that is the significant meal as Connie, aka “the lady with the flat tyre”, shows up at Ray’s door with groceries and offers to cook for him. Feeling lonely and abandoned in Jenna’s absence, he accepts.

When Sean overhears Leslie revealing their whereabouts over the phone, he becomes demented with anger. As the character teeters on the verge of madness so the man playing him, James Healy, reaches the edge of his acting abilities. Consequently, there’s an out-of-control quality to his performance that is quite compelling. Healy reminds me of George Lazenby, the weakest actor to play James Bond who nonetheless starred in the best Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Just as Lazenby’s limitations worked for that film (or at least didn’t impede it), Healy has proven a perfect fit for this B-movie revenge storyline. Ergo, Sean Rowan is the George Lazenby of Alexis’s husbands. (Broadly speaking, that means Blake is Sean Connery, Cecil is Roger Moore, Dex is Pierce Brosnan and New Blake is Daniel Craig.)

Sean then beats up Leslie in Soap Land’s most overt display of male-on-female violence yet. It’s brutal without being very realistic and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.

The Farlows on DALLAS have been married almost as long as the Mackenzies on KNOTS and there’s a sense that both couples have been taking each other for granted of late. Last week, when Karen told Mack that Manny had been flirting with her at Lotus Point, she was disappointed by his lack of reaction and miffed by the suggestion that Manny’s attentiveness might simply have been a business tactic. Whereas Karen and Mack’s relationship insecurities result in small moments of character observation (Mack comparing Manny’s dress sense with his own) and humour ("What'd you do?" asks Pat when Karen tells her about Manny's kiss. "I shot him," she replies), Clayton and Ellie’s marital disharmony manifests itself plot-wise. Clayton’s discontent was first signified by his preoccupation with a painting. This led to the introduction of a whole new subset of characters, resulting in blackmail, accusations of an affair, a marital separation and now Clayton being arrested on a murder charge.

“The Ewing family has always banded together against trouble from the outside,” Ellie says when Clayton thanks her for standing by him following his arrest. That attitude is reflected on DYNASTY where Adam and Steven finally bond after banding together to rescue Adam’s baby. “I never thought I needed you,” Adam tells his brother. “You’ve always struggled to belong and in my own way, so have I,” Steven replies.

Towards the end of this week's DYNASTY, Steven leaves an envelope addressed to Blake in the library. We’re not privy to its contents, but from the “Goodbye, Dad” he utters to an empty room, we can make a pretty good guess. KNOTS kicks off with the discovery of another letter. “My housekeeper found a note from Olivia saying she and Harold had run off to get married,” Abby informs Manny Vasquez before ordering him to stop the wedding. There’s more letter action elsewhere in the ep as Jill drops by the airport and persuades a man on his way to Honduras to mail a letter addressed to Val once he arrives. Over on FALCON CREST, in the Swiss prison where she and Eric are being held without trial as if they were starring in a unisex version of Midnight Express, Vicky goes to even more circuitous lengths to send a letter to Maggie — of which more later.

Three of this week’s soaps include a scene where one female character visits another to discuss a man with whom they are mutually involved. “You called?” asks Fallon sarcastically after being summoned to Delta Rho by Sammy Jo. “I know I should have called first, but it was hard enough for me to come over here at all,” Jill says after surprising Val in the cul-de-sac. “If you’re looking for Clayton, he’s at the office,” says Miss Ellie after Laurel Ellis shows up at Southfork. Sammy Jo, Jill and Laurel each then offer an olive branch. “You don’t like me and I don’t like you, I wouldn’t be so dumb to suggest we’d ever become friends, but we can’t be enemies,” says Sammy Jo to Fallon. “I’m not saying that I think we could ever be friends, but I would really like to try to stop being enemies,” echoes Jill, extending her hand to Val. “It’s you I want to talk to,” Laurel explains to Miss Ellie, “to tell you the truth about Clayton and myself … Nothing ever happened between us … I’m truly sorry I’ve been responsible for any of this.” While Fallon is unconvinced by Sammy Jo’s words (“You wanted to be a Carrington so you married Steven — now you wanna be a Colby so it’s Jeff’s turn,” she replies), Val is taken in by Jill’s and agrees to a truce (“Maybe when Ben gets back, we can all go for pizza,” Jill suggests wickedly). Meanwhile, Ellie’s discussion with Laurel about Clayton mirrors one she had with Julie Grey about Jock a decade earlier. “There aren’t many women who intimidate me — you’re one of them,” Julie told her back then. These days, Ellie cuts a less imposing figure. “At my age, it’s hard to put your dreams back together once they’ve been shattered,” she tells Laurel.

Laurel’s visit to Southfork serves another narrative purpose — it brings her into the orbit of JR, who immediately propositions her and later has Harry McSween bring her to his office where he can behave like even more of a pig. “I don’t know about Clayton, but if you’d have been with me, you would have been properly and frequently bedded, my dear,” he leers. JR’s on excitingly obnoxious form this week.

Following her scene with Sammy Jo, Fallon winds up in bed with Jeff. They are enjoying a full-blown montage sex scene (the first we’ve seen since Greg and Laura’s last night together) when the doorbell goes — it’s Sammy Jo accepting Jeff’s proposal! Meanwhile, Johnny Rourke and Paige are rolling around in bed in the Mexican village of Santa Tecla when the phone rings — it’s Manny Vasquez ordering Johnny to prevent Harold and Olivia’s marriage! Later in the same episode, Paige is the one who does the interrupting when she finds Johnny in bed with Debbie, a sexy archaeologist whose interest in pre-Colombian artefacts Paige shares. Refreshingly, Paige takes Johnny’s dalliance in her stride and by the end of the ep, they’re canoodling once more.

The penultimate scene of this season’s DYNASTY includes a moment that couldn’t be soapier if it tried — Alexis is taking a bubble bath when the champagne glass she holds is shot at point blank range by her back-from-the-dead husband. “That’s for my father!” he snarls. A struggle over the gun then ensues between her third and fourth husbands as Alexis, now clad demurely in a peach bathrobe, watches in alarm. Suddenly the gun goes off! But before we can see who took the bullet, Claudia or Krystle — I mean, Dex or Sean — it’s all over. Bye-bye, everyone; see ya next season. But wait! There’s one more scene to go! Back at the mansion, Blake finds his and Krystle’s bedroom in a state of disarray. (In reality, it’s no more untidy than the average teenager’s. However, this is Soap Land.) Jeanette tells him that Krystle left the house a little while ago and he swears her to secrecy. But it’s the season’s final line — “My God, Krystle, I thought we had more time!” — that pulls the narrative rug out from under us, in the same way that Bobby Ewing’s “Good morning” and the disembodied voice asking, “You want out, Mrs Mackenzie?” did at the end of the 1985/6 season.

The ailing Dr Styles is also running out of time on DALLAS. In this episode’s penultimate scene, his daughter Kimberly brings Cliff Barnes to meet him in the hope that he will join forces with them to defeat JR. But Cliff no longer seems to care about winning. “You know what I hope?” he asks the doctor. “I hope this war between you and JR just explodes and blows the both of you all to hell and back.” He flounces off and Styles reaches for his oxygen supply. “I think we’ve lost,” he tells Kimberly. She then goes to JR and essentially begs him to spare her father’s life. “I’ll convince my daddy to back you. You can have West Star,” she promises. (Anyone else getting a vaguely Shakespearean vibe from all this?) “What about you?” JR asks. “You don’t have to marry me,” she replies. “I’ll be yours whenever you want.” “What makes you think I want you at all?” he sneers. “And as far as calling it off, I’m afraid that’s impossible … Your daddy wanted a war and he got one. There’ll be no truce. I want an unconditional surrender. I’m gonna break him and take West Star away from him.” As one Soap Land war rages on, another is declared. At the end of last week’s FALCON CREST, Richard learned, to his alarm, that the Thirteen are “plotting the economic destruction of the United States … There are going to be riots in the streets, people are going to be killing each over a slice of bread. You’ll be destroying everything this country stands for and for what?” “For us,” Rosemont replied simply. (Anyone else getting a not so vaguely Trumpian vibe from all this?) This week, Richard decides to stop them. “I will do whatever is necessary,” he vows. “Very well — so shall we,” counters Rosemont.

While Vicky Stavros is in Geneva bribing a prison orderly into mailing a letter to her mother, Paige Matheson is in Santa Tecla “making a donation to the preservation of Mexican national treasures”, i.e., bribing the local police into delaying the construction of a highway through the site of the archaeological dig. The political system in Washington proves no less corrupt as Kay Lloyd introduces Bobby to Senator O’Dell, with a view to getting the Ewing Oil name back. In his previous Soap Land incarnations, O’Dell was Titus Semple on FLAMINGO ROAD and Paul Galveston on KNOTS LANDING and appears to share their amoral streak. And like Galveston, he’s not particularly keen on discussing business matters with women, referring Kay as “a mighty pretty little thing” (at least he didn’t call her Cookie) and instructing her to leave him and Bobby to talk man-to-man. “I was mighty fond of your daddy,” he tells him. “Some of my fondest memories are of deals that he and I put together — JR too, for that matter.” (Paul Galveston wheelin’ and dealin’ with JR and Jock — now there’s an image to conjure with.) “Yes, sir, the two of them really knew the bottom line when it came to making a deal,” he continues. Whereas Galveston encouraged Gary to believe himself the equal of his Ewing brothers, O’Dell challenges Bobby to show his true Ewing mettle by forking out for “a little retirement place” — a castle in the Scottish Highlands worth $2,000,000. (This rare Soap Land reference to Scotland partially compensates for Karen describing Mack to Manny as “a smiling Irishman who makes terrific blueberry pancakes.” When he first arrived in KNOTS, Mack identified himself as Scots-Italian.)

After a full FALCON CREST hour of sleep-walking, sweats, nightmares and mood swings, Maggie Channing appears to licked her four-episode booze problem and she and Richard are happy once again. Back on KNOTS, Gary and Jill have their first argument about her drinking. “Do you think I have a problem?” she asks challengingly. “You tell me,” he replies. “You’re the one that’s been sitting around here all day drinking — alone.” This culminates in Jill holding out a glass of wine to Gary, inviting him to drink with her. (“That’s an incredibly sick stupid way of trying to get my attention.”) Jill’s gesture is mirrored by Maggie in the final scene of this week’s FC when Richard returns home to find her nursing a bottle of brandy, as yet unopened. What has happened? She’s received Vicky’s letter, that’s what. (“Eric and I are in jail in Geneva,” it reads. “I don’t know anyone but Richard who could be doing this to us.”) Bitterly, she opens the bottle, pours a drink and raises it towards Richard, just as Jill did her glass to Gary: “What we need here, Richard, is a toast — to my daughter in Switzerland.” Then she spills it on the floor.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

1 (-) DYNASTY
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (2) FALCON CREST
4 (-) DALLAS

Very minor point, but I do believe Mack was Scots-Irish/Italian. He did in fact quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, arguably the most famous non-Kennedy Irish-American, at Laura's funeral: To be Irish is to know, in the end, the world will break your heart. Sumner responded something to the effect that the Irish are only happy when they're sad. Another time, referred to Mack as "shanty Irish". Oh, and his Italian side was Sicilian - a very distinct subspecies according to my Sicilian friends...lol.

14 Apr 88: KNOTS LANDING: Just Desserts v. 15 Apr 88: DALLAS: Top Gun v. 15 Apr 88: FALCON CREST: King's Gambit

Following her father’s fatal collapse at the end of last week’s DALLAS, Kimberly Cryder wastes no time in assigning blame. “You killed him, you bastard! You killed him!” she yells at JR in this week’s opening scene. Somewhat creatively, JR then shifts the responsibility to Sue Ellen. “If you’d have given me a divorce when I asked for it, that old man would be alive today,” he tells her.

Underneath her anger, the person Kimberly really blames is herself. “I feel so awful, responsible,” she admits later in the ep. “If hadn’t tried to force [JR] to marry me, then maybe …” Self-recrimination is a bit of a trend in this week's Soap Land. “This whole thing between Shulton and Lomax was entirely my fault,” Clayton tells Laurel Ellis, somewhat bizarrely, in her final scene. Meanwhile on KNOTS, characters are lining up to take the blame for Olivia’s suicide attempt. “I should have spent more time with her … All the symptoms were there and I didn’t do anything,” frets Michael. “I should have seen it coming, I should have known,” insists Karen. “She did this because of me,” concludes Abby. All this angst is nicely undercut by Manny Vasquez who dismisses Olivia as “some screwed-up little teenybopper with a hormone problem … As far as I’m concerned, anyone stupid enough to try to commit suicide should succeed.” Perhaps to discourage any screwed-up little teenyboppers watching from trying the same thing at home, when Olivia is found following her overdose there is dried vomit around her mouth and nose. There was no evidence of anything so unglamorous when Amanda Carrington or Anne Matheson or even Cliff Barnes OD’d.

Abby and Kimberly are each burdened by guilt. While the former keeps a vigil at her daughter’s bedside, Sue Ellen finds the latter praying in a Catholic church. (This is the Ewingverse’s second venture into Catholic territory this season following Meg’s baptism on KNOTS.) Both women attempt to atone by pulling out of a business venture. Abby, who has been cooking up a shady takeover scheme with Greg, changes her mind at the last minute. “It’s just not right,” she declares. “Right? What the hell has right got to do with anything?” asks Greg, baffled. Meanwhile, Kimberly chooses to withdraw from the battle for West Star just as it is about to reach its climax — until, that is, Sue Ellen persuades her otherwise. “JR’s drive to get West Star is what killed your daddy and that’s why we have to stop him,” she insists. “If we let JR win, it’ll be as if your father died for nothing.”

Just as Abby appears to have drawn a moral line in the sand on KNOTS so Richard Channing does the same thing on FALCON CREST. Having contacted the FBI at the end of last week’s ep, he now warns them about “the economic holocaust” the Thirteen are planning to unleash upon America. There’s only one problem: all evidence of his association with Rosemont — in fact, all proof of the Thirteen’s existence — has been mysteriously erased, leaving the FBI with no-one to prosecute but Richard himself.

Back on KNOTS, Jill Bennett is also wiping evidence. Having copied a key, she lets herself into Val’s house and proceeds to erase the recording of Ben’s fake phone message. How tense when Val and the kids arrive home unexpectedly and she has to make a dash for it! There’s more home invasion on DALLAS when clingy Connie steals into Ray’s house in the middle of the night, climbs the stairs to his bedroom and playfully puts a pillow over his face. He is not amused. An unusually ugly scene follows where Connie refuses to get the message and Ray has to spell it out for her: “I don’t want you, now or ever!” Even then, she gets the last word — the following morning, he finds a big red heart with both their initials painted on his front door. Like Ray, FALCON CREST's Maggie is asleep when she too is disturbed by an intruder. This time, it’s husband Richard and there is a happier outcome: he comes clean about the mess he’s in and promises to not keep any more secrets from her, and she agrees to return home with him.

With David Shulton dead, Brett Lomax behind bars and Laurel on her way back to England, it’s farewell to the artsy youngsters on DALLAS and hello to a whole new set on KNOTS as Paige joins the archaeology dig in Santa Tecla. The two guys, Chava and Joel, immediately have the hots for her (“That woman’s gonna marry me and bear my children!” "I saw her first!") while the two girls, Rebecca and Debbie, roll their eyes as soon as her back is turned. (“I wonder how long she’s gonna last?” “Till she breaks her first nail.”)

Among other things, this plot serves to show that, contrary to appearances, there’s more to Paige than just being a spoiled princess. Her interest in the dig seems genuine, she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty and, in order to keep the excavation from being closed down by the authorities (who are in the pay of Manny Vasquez), is resourceful enough to steal a piece of sculpture from the gallery where she works, smuggle it into Mexico and plant it on the site to make it look like “a genuine pre-Colombian artefact finally found in Santa Tecla.” None of which prevents her and Johnny from being caught red-handed by Chava in a really well-staged scene at the end of the ep. The handheld camera work, the fire set by Johnny to cause a distraction, the general sense of chaos and urgency all serve to turn a potential non-event (why, exactly, should we care about any of this?) into something quite exciting.

While most foreign settings in Soap Land are depicted by little more than an establishing shot and a couple of hotel ceiling fans, we’re given what looks like an entire village to represent Santa Tecla. With its array of secondary characters (the young students, a corrupt police official, a kindly professor), it feels like a soap-within-a-soap — a Mexican version of the Hot Biscuit in DALLAS or Shula, Tennessee in KNOTS, if you will.

“It’s probably gonna sound like it’s out of a movie,” Nicholas Pearce tells Sue Ellen before filling her in on his family’s Witness Protection Programme storyline. “It sounded like science fiction,” scoffs one of the FBI agents Richard is trying to convince of the Thirteen’s existence. Of course, Soap Land adapting scenarios from cinema and other literary sources is nothing new: William Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams and Alfred Hitchcock have all proved recurring influences over the years. The current Ray/Connie storyline on DALLAS, as well as being a gender reversal of the familiar stalker scenario (Jeff Wainwright and Maggie Gioberti, Roger Larsen and Lucy Ewing) echoes both FATAL ATTRACTION (a hit movie only the previous year) and PLAY MISTY FOR ME. Even more blatant is the resemblance between a current plot on FALCON CREST — Dan Fixx, strapped for cash, agrees to drive a truck of highly explosive nitroglycerin across the country — and that of the 1953 movie THE WAGES OF FEAR — Yves Montand, strapped for cash, agrees to drive a truck of highly explosive nitroglycerin through the mountains. FC being FC, there’s an obligatory murder/revenge twist tacked on for good measure. On the plus side, this means a groovy explosion, and as with Paige in Santa Tecla, an opportunity for Dan’s kid sister Carly to show her moxie as she rides to his rescue, but otherwise it’s just more anonymous would-be killer filler.

Two devious faces from the past resurface unexpectedly this week. Jeremy Wendell makes a victorious return to West Star at the end of DALLAS — turns out he’s joined forces with Kimberly and Sue Ellen to stop JR getting his hands on the company. Meanwhile, Ursula Andress’s Madame Malec pops up in the back of a limousine with Eric Stavros on FALCON CREST — turns out she’s connected to the Thirteen and they have assigned her and the enjoyably unpredictable Eric to silence Richard once and for all!

And this week’s Top 3 are …

1 (2) KNOTS LANDING
2 (1) DALLAS
3 (3) FALCON CREST

Interestingly enough, this episode was written by William Devane and directed by Kevin Dobson...

 

[James from London]

I do believe Mack was Scots-Irish/Italian.

Yes, that makes sense. For some reason, it never occurred to me before that Mack could be Scottish and Irish.

 

[Stillwitty]

Yes, that makes sense. For some reason, it never occurred to me before that Mack could be Scottish and Irish.

Yeah, after doing a lot with Ancestry.com, I've found that the Irishmen have really gotten around-seems like everyone has a spot of their DNA...Which is particularly interesting since they're also noted for marrying later in life for the first time. Demographics are fun...lol

I recall at the end of the episode, Mack and Karen are in bed, post-lovemaking.
Karen: "Dear Ann Landers...if the sex was any better---"
Mack (interrupting): "I'd be a dead man!"

Which kinda proved out Karen's theory of quality over quantity apparently cause she had waaay too many headaches and distractions for Mack's taste...

30 Nov 88: DYNASTY: She's Back v. 01 Dec 88: KNOTS LANDING: Sex and Violence v. 02 Dec 88: DALLAS: Road Work v. 02 Dec 88: FALCON CREST: Tuscany Venus

In the opening episode of this season’s DYNASTY, Blake spotted a woman with Krystle-style hair standing with her back to him. Believing her to be his missing wife, he approached her. She turned around — and was revealed to be someone else entirely.

The back-of-the-head tease is one we’ve become familiar with in Soap Land over the years. FALCON CREST deployed it twice towards the end of last season. “I thought you were dead,” said Maggie to a man with his back to the camera. “When are you gonna tell Maggie you’re alive?” Angela asked another, likewise positioned. In both cases, the show was playing with audience expectations of a genre in which the dead do not necessarily stay dead by implying that Chase Gioberti might have risen from his watery grave. In both cases, this turned out to be a red herring.

(Ironically, this soap trope actually worked against FC two weeks ago when it wanted to show John Remick’s execution on screen, but due to the actor’s unavailability, could only show him from behind. Our hardened Soap Land instincts told us this must be a back-of-the-head tease, and so even after we were told the dead man was Remick, we were still waiting for a twist — only this time there wasn’t one.)

This week’s DYNASTY opens with Blake waking up in Virginia’s house and looking for Krystle in the room where she apparently spent the previous episode resting. She’s not there. He calls her name. No answer. He walks into the backyard to see … a woman with familiar-looking shoulder-length blonde hair, her face turned away from the camera. Again, our soapy instincts kick in and we steel ourselves for another impostor or maybe even a recast. Even Blake himself looks wary. But no, she turns around and this time it is really her, it is really Krystle, back on screen for the first time in eight months and looking as radiantly serene as ever — seemingly unaware that circumstances surrounding her (including her own history) have significantly altered in the intervening time. Now, as we observe her saying and doing the same old lovey-dovey things she always has, it’s as if we’re doing so from a distance, through a piece of gauze. The effect is oddly poignant and slightly surreal.

This feeling of surreality continues in a more nightmarish way on DALLAS where JR has suddenly landed in a TV spinoff of COOL HAND LUKE (the 1967 prison movie for which the Ewings’ new neighbour, Carter McKay, won an Oscar), full of downtrodden prisoners, chain gangs and sadistic prison wardens. “This is your only world and I am your only God!” bellows the man in charge known only, as was his equivalent in COOL HAND LUKE, as the Captain. And the penal camp JR now finds himself in really does feel like a fully-realised, self-contained world — the setting, location and the casting all solid and believable. Perhaps the least believable element is JR himself. Like Krystle, he remains fundamentally unchanged in spite of his change in circumstances, intent on bragging and bribing his way back to freedom. Eventually, however, the physical reality of their respective situations catch up with both Krystle and JR.

Krystle’s return to the mansion is marked by a family dinner, a typically ornate Soap Land occasion where a typical Soap Land argument is underway (Sammy Jo and Fallon are accusing Adam of burning Steven’s letters). Almost unnoticed at first, Krystle begins to lose control. “Please stop,” she whispers, trembling and clutching at the tablecloth, pulling it towards her. (Disrupting the place settings in a show that some would say is all about place settings? How blasphemous!) “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” she finally cries, as if she were somehow malfunctioning, rejecting the trappings of the Soap Land world in the same way Jaime Sommers rejected her bionics on THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN. JR, meanwhile, is brought to his knees, literally, when he is locked overnight in a tortuously confined space known as “the box” (another plot element familiar from COOL HAND LUKE).

If the penal camp is a direct lift from COOL HAND LUKE, then Emma’s story on FALCON CREST owes something of a debt to Daphne du Maurier’s REBECCA. The forbidding housekeeper speaks of RD Lang’s dead wife in the same reverential terms that Mrs Danvers spoke of the first Mrs de Winter. (“No-one has played this piano since Mrs Lang died.”) And like Mrs de Winter, Mrs Lang died in a mysterious boating accident caused by her husband. FC even goes so far as to name the housekeeper Mrs Anderson, a likely nod to Judith Anderson, the actress who played Danvers in Hitchcock’s movie adaptation of REBECCA.

The bodybag tease, a lesser-known variation on the back-of-the-head tease, is deployed in the opening moments of this week’s FALCON CREST when someone’s corpse is wheeled out of Richard’s house following on from last week’s “Who did Maggie shoot?” cliffhanger. It comes as no surprise to learn that she hit her target, Senator Ryder, rather than her husband — although that’s not much comfort to Maggie herself in the immediate aftermath. “How do I ever live with myself?” she sobs. “I’ve done the most horrible thing one human being can do to another!” This is more remorse than JR, Sue Ellen, Dex Dexter and Jill Bennett combined have shown for the people they killed (or almost killed) at the end of last season.

While Maggie is freaking out over killing someone, Krystle is starting to freak out that she may have killed someone. No sooner has her dinner table outburst subsided (“What happened? I don’t know what happened to me!”) than Sergeant Zorelli arrives to question her about the body at the lake. The scene where the Carringtons meet Zorelli by the mansion staircase is filmed in a strikingly interesting way, with the characters shot from below. Even though Zorelli is courtesy itself, the low-angles makes him an imposing, ominous presence. These shots and the hand-held camera that follows a panicky Krystle up to her bedroom evoke feelings of urgency and claustrophobia, which is very different from the stately camerawork we’re used to seeing on DYNASTY. Conversely, a sense of wide-open space help to sell the big set-pieces on this week’s DALLAS. As well as the scenes in the penal camp, the sequence where Clayton, on horseback, finds that Carter McKay has dammed up the river that runs between their two ranches and is then shot at from a helicopter (“Mr Farlow, you are on Mr McKay’s private property! Please leave at once!”) is very impressively staged.

Lance Cumson is also discovered to be trespassing this week, but when Nick Agretti, now the executor of Melissa’s estate, finds him sitting by the Falcon Crest river, he reacts more magnanimously than Carter McKay’s foreman did. “You don’t need an excuse [to be here],” he tells him. “When Melissa and I were teenagers, this used to be our favourite spot,” Lance recalls. Pilar later reminds him that they too used to swim there — in such a way as to suggest swimming wasn’t all they got up to. Along with the Carrington lake on DYNASTY and the Southfork/McKay river on DALLAS, this becomes the third stretch of water to be imbued with historical significance this season.

As well as Krystle, a re-energised Angela Channing also returns this week — with a new target in her sights. “Everyone has a skeleton in their closet,” she tells an underling. “You find Nick Agretti’s and make sure that skeleton rattles.” Two notable female characters are absent, however. While Alexis is in Africa, wheeling and dealing, Miss Ellie is upstairs. (“Grandma still isn’t feeling well,” Christopher explains.) Whereas there is so much going on in DYNASTY that you don’t really notice Alexis isn’t there, Southfork is looking so underpopulated these days (“I remember when this place used to be packed before dinner — where is everybody?” asks Bobby) that it needs all the familiar faces it can get. Poor Sue Ellen has to resort to taking her real-life daughter out to lunch in order to have someone to confide in.

Three weeks ago, JR Ewing seduced a woman young enough to be his daughter. Last week, Paige Matheson seduced a man old enough to be her father. “It’s just a cultural hang-up,” she shrugs. “What difference does twenty years or so make?” Her seduction technique involved skinny-dipping in Greg’s pool, a move which echoed the flashback scene from a couple of years ago when Paige’s mother (also played by Paige) fooled Young Mack into thinking she was swimming naked, but then lifted herself out of the water to reveal the skimpiest of bathing suits. However, when Paige stepped out of the water in front of an appreciative Greg, there was little doubt that she was completely naked — as is Pilar Ortega when Nick Agretti finds her taking a late night swim on this week’s FALCON CREST. Later in the same ep, she and Lance decide to go skinny-dipping for old time’s sake and there are some rather daring close-ups of jeans being unzipped and underwear sliding down legs followed by what looks like the briefest glimpse of bare Soap Land buttock before they jump into the water. Over on DALLAS, Casey Denault suggests to Lucy that they likewise take an impromptu dip in the pool. While he strips to his underwear, Lucy chastely dives in in jeans and a T-shirt. Whereas Lance and Pilar make post-swim love on the riverside, Lucy explains to Casey that she’s “not ready for that just yet.” He smiles understandingly, then calls her a bitch as soon as she’s out of earshot.

Also on last week’s KNOTS, Mack challenged Paige to a game of one-on-one basketball. She claimed to be a novice but turned out to be suspiciously adept. Something similar happens on this week’s DALLAS when Bobby and Cliff encounter a sexy pool hustler called Tracy. When her opponent turns nasty and refuses to pay up, she declines Bobby’s offer of help. “I can handle Mr Macho myself,” she assures him before whacking Mr Macho in the nuts with a pool cue — a Soap Land first. Another notable moment follows when Tracy asks Bobby if he and Cliff are “an item.” Bobby laughs in reply, without any of the moral indignation that greeted previous suggestions that DALLAS characters (Cliff in Season 1, Peter Richards in Season 6) might be gay.

Speaking of basketball, Nick Agretti’s son Ben and Pilar Ortega’s kid brother Gabriel bond while shooting hoops, forging a narratively useful connection between their two families. There’s something surprisingly appealing about FALCON CREST’s new batch of wholesome, down-to-earth characters. After that long succession of glitzy but ultimately hollow guest stars, they're a welcome change.

The Williamses’ Witness Protection Programme plot reaches a climax of sorts on this week’s KNOTS. When Nicholas Pearce’s cover was blown during his equivalent storyline on DALLAS, April’s nosiness was to blame. This time, Julie’s literacy is the cause, as her success in a local spelling bee leads to unwanted exposure for the family. The parts of the episode where they are terrorised in their own home and Pat is blackmailed at the bank where she works are really gripping, but after Mack rides to their rescue, the story becomes hopelessly far-fetched. While I’ll happily go along with underground satellite surveillance systems at Empire Valley or Ben Gibson being ordered to assassinate someone, I draw the line at Mack posing as a movie director and talking knowledgeably about cold reads and Stella Adler. As for the annoying Peggy mugging furiously as his assistant — as unfunny comedy goes, her performance ranks alongside FALCON CREST as its lamest.

Dead bodies play an unusually prominent role in two of this week’s soaps. In the final scene of DYNASTY, Krystle views the corpse found at the lake to see if it triggers any memories for her. “I’ve never seen him before,” she declares. However, from the expression on his face, it’s clear that Blake has. The second body shows up on KNOTS, somehow planted by Mack and Frank in the apartment of Vincent Donnelly, the hospital orderly-cum-actor-cum-extortionist who’s been menacing Pat and Frank all episode long. Frank uses the same gun Mack tricked Donelly into firing at an audition to shoot the corpse and — oh, it’s just ridiculous really.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

1 (-) DYNASTY
2 (1) FALCON CREST
3 (-) KNOTS LANDING
4 (2) DALLAS

FYI: Zorelli on Dynasty later has a significant role on Sopranos as Carmine Lupertazzi Jr aka Brainless the 2nd, according to Tony Soprano...lol

30 Nov 88: DYNASTY: She's Back v. 01 Dec 88: KNOTS LANDING: Sex and Violence v. 02 Dec 88: DALLAS: Road Work v. 02 Dec 88: FALCON CREST: Tuscany Venus

In the opening episode of this season’s DYNASTY, Blake spotted a woman with Krystle-style hair standing with her back to him. Believing her to be his missing wife, he approached her. She turned around — and was revealed to be someone else entirely.

The back-of-the-head tease is one we’ve become familiar with in Soap Land over the years. FALCON CREST deployed it twice towards the end of last season. “I thought you were dead,” said Maggie to a man with his back to the camera. “When are you gonna tell Maggie you’re alive?” Angela asked another, likewise positioned. In both cases, the show was playing with audience expectations of a genre in which the dead do not necessarily stay dead by implying that Chase Gioberti might have risen from his watery grave. In both cases, this turned out to be a red herring.

(Ironically, this soap trope actually worked against FC two weeks ago when it wanted to show John Remick’s execution on screen, but due to the actor’s unavailability, could only show him from behind. Our hardened Soap Land instincts told us this must be a back-of-the-head tease, and so even after we were told the dead man was Remick, we were still waiting for a twist — only this time there wasn’t one.)

This week’s DYNASTY opens with Blake waking up in Virginia’s house and looking for Krystle in the room where she apparently spent the previous episode resting. She’s not there. He calls her name. No answer. He walks into the backyard to see … a woman with familiar-looking shoulder-length blonde hair, her face turned away from the camera. Again, our soapy instincts kick in and we steel ourselves for another impostor or maybe even a recast. Even Blake himself looks wary. But no, she turns around and this time it is really her, it is really Krystle, back on screen for the first time in eight months and looking as radiantly serene as ever — seemingly unaware that circumstances surrounding her (including her own history) have significantly altered in the intervening time. Now, as we observe her saying and doing the same old lovey-dovey things she always has, it’s as if we’re doing so from a distance, through a piece of gauze. The effect is oddly poignant and slightly surreal.

This feeling of surreality continues in a more nightmarish way on DALLAS where JR has suddenly landed in a TV spinoff of COOL HAND LUKE (the 1967 prison movie for which the Ewings’ new neighbour, Carter McKay, won an Oscar), full of downtrodden prisoners, chain gangs and sadistic prison wardens. “This is your only world and I am your only God!” bellows the man in charge known only, as was his equivalent in COOL HAND LUKE, as the Captain. And the penal camp JR now finds himself in really does feel like a fully-realised, self-contained world — the setting, location and the casting all solid and believable. Perhaps the least believable element is JR himself. Like Krystle, he remains fundamentally unchanged in spite of his change in circumstances, intent on bragging and bribing his way back to freedom. Eventually, however, the physical reality of their respective situations catch up with both Krystle and JR.

Krystle’s return to the mansion is marked by a family dinner, a typically ornate Soap Land occasion where a typical Soap Land argument is underway (Sammy Jo and Fallon are accusing Adam of burning Steven’s letters). Almost unnoticed at first, Krystle begins to lose control. “Please stop,” she whispers, trembling and clutching at the tablecloth, pulling it towards her. (Disrupting the place settings in a show that some would say is all about place settings? How blasphemous!) “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” she finally cries, as if she were somehow malfunctioning, rejecting the trappings of the Soap Land world in the same way Jaime Sommers rejected her bionics on THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN. JR, meanwhile, is brought to his knees, literally, when he is locked overnight in a tortuously confined space known as “the box” (another plot element familiar from COOL HAND LUKE).

If the penal camp is a direct lift from COOL HAND LUKE, then Emma’s story on FALCON CREST owes something of a debt to Daphne du Maurier’s REBECCA. The forbidding housekeeper speaks of RD Lang’s dead wife in the same reverential terms that Mrs Danvers spoke of the first Mrs de Winter. (“No-one has played this piano since Mrs Lang died.”) And like Mrs de Winter, Mrs Lang died in a mysterious boating accident caused by her husband. FC even goes so far as to name the housekeeper Mrs Anderson, a likely nod to Judith Anderson, the actress who played Danvers in Hitchcock’s movie adaptation of REBECCA.

The bodybag tease, a lesser-known variation on the back-of-the-head tease, is deployed in the opening moments of this week’s FALCON CREST when someone’s corpse is wheeled out of Richard’s house following on from last week’s “Who did Maggie shoot?” cliffhanger. It comes as no surprise to learn that she hit her target, Senator Ryder, rather than her husband — although that’s not much comfort to Maggie herself in the immediate aftermath. “How do I ever live with myself?” she sobs. “I’ve done the most horrible thing one human being can do to another!” This is more remorse than JR, Sue Ellen, Dex Dexter and Jill Bennett combined have shown for the people they killed (or almost killed) at the end of last season.

While Maggie is freaking out over killing someone, Krystle is starting to freak out that she may have killed someone. No sooner has her dinner table outburst subsided (“What happened? I don’t know what happened to me!”) than Sergeant Zorelli arrives to question her about the body at the lake. The scene where the Carringtons meet Zorelli by the mansion staircase is filmed in a strikingly interesting way, with the characters shot from below. Even though Zorelli is courtesy itself, the low-angles makes him an imposing, ominous presence. These shots and the hand-held camera that follows a panicky Krystle up to her bedroom evoke feelings of urgency and claustrophobia, which is very different from the stately camerawork we’re used to seeing on DYNASTY. Conversely, a sense of wide-open space help to sell the big set-pieces on this week’s DALLAS. As well as the scenes in the penal camp, the sequence where Clayton, on horseback, finds that Carter McKay has dammed up the river that runs between their two ranches and is then shot at from a helicopter (“Mr Farlow, you are on Mr McKay’s private property! Please leave at once!”) is very impressively staged.

Lance Cumson is also discovered to be trespassing this week, but when Nick Agretti, now the executor of Melissa’s estate, finds him sitting by the Falcon Crest river, he reacts more magnanimously than Carter McKay’s foreman did. “You don’t need an excuse [to be here],” he tells him. “When Melissa and I were teenagers, this used to be our favourite spot,” Lance recalls. Pilar later reminds him that they too used to swim there — in such a way as to suggest swimming wasn’t all they got up to. Along with the Carrington lake on DYNASTY and the Southfork/McKay river on DALLAS, this becomes the third stretch of water to be imbued with historical significance this season.

As well as Krystle, a re-energised Angela Channing also returns this week — with a new target in her sights. “Everyone has a skeleton in their closet,” she tells an underling. “You find Nick Agretti’s and make sure that skeleton rattles.” Two notable female characters are absent, however. While Alexis is in Africa, wheeling and dealing, Miss Ellie is upstairs. (“Grandma still isn’t feeling well,” Christopher explains.) Whereas there is so much going on in DYNASTY that you don’t really notice Alexis isn’t there, Southfork is looking so underpopulated these days (“I remember when this place used to be packed before dinner — where is everybody?” asks Bobby) that it needs all the familiar faces it can get. Poor Sue Ellen has to resort to taking her real-life daughter out to lunch in order to have someone to confide in.

Three weeks ago, JR Ewing seduced a woman young enough to be his daughter. Last week, Paige Matheson seduced a man old enough to be her father. “It’s just a cultural hang-up,” she shrugs. “What difference does twenty years or so make?” Her seduction technique involved skinny-dipping in Greg’s pool, a move which echoed the flashback scene from a couple of years ago when Paige’s mother (also played by Paige) fooled Young Mack into thinking she was swimming naked, but then lifted herself out of the water to reveal the skimpiest of bathing suits. However, when Paige stepped out of the water in front of an appreciative Greg, there was little doubt that she was completely naked — as is Pilar Ortega when Nick Agretti finds her taking a late night swim on this week’s FALCON CREST. Later in the same ep, she and Lance decide to go skinny-dipping for old time’s sake and there are some rather daring close-ups of jeans being unzipped and underwear sliding down legs followed by what looks like the briefest glimpse of bare Soap Land buttock before they jump into the water. Over on DALLAS, Casey Denault suggests to Lucy that they likewise take an impromptu dip in the pool. While he strips to his underwear, Lucy chastely dives in in jeans and a T-shirt. Whereas Lance and Pilar make post-swim love on the riverside, Lucy explains to Casey that she’s “not ready for that just yet.” He smiles understandingly, then calls her a bitch as soon as she’s out of earshot.

Also on last week’s KNOTS, Mack challenged Paige to a game of one-on-one basketball. She claimed to be a novice but turned out to be suspiciously adept. Something similar happens on this week’s DALLAS when Bobby and Cliff encounter a sexy pool hustler called Tracy. When her opponent turns nasty and refuses to pay up, she declines Bobby’s offer of help. “I can handle Mr Macho myself,” she assures him before whacking Mr Macho in the nuts with a pool cue — a Soap Land first. Another notable moment follows when Tracy asks Bobby if he and Cliff are “an item.” Bobby laughs in reply, without any of the moral indignation that greeted previous suggestions that DALLAS characters (Cliff in Season 1, Peter Richards in Season 6) might be gay.

Speaking of basketball, Nick Agretti’s son Ben and Pilar Ortega’s kid brother Gabriel bond while shooting hoops, forging a narratively useful connection between their two families. There’s something surprisingly appealing about FALCON CREST’s new batch of wholesome, down-to-earth characters. After that long succession of glitzy but ultimately hollow guest stars, they're a welcome change.

The Williamses’ Witness Protection Programme plot reaches a climax of sorts on this week’s KNOTS. When Nicholas Pearce’s cover was blown during his equivalent storyline on DALLAS, April’s nosiness was to blame. This time, Julie’s literacy is the cause, as her success in a local spelling bee leads to unwanted exposure for the family. The parts of the episode where they are terrorised in their own home and Pat is blackmailed at the bank where she works are really gripping, but after Mack rides to their rescue, the story becomes hopelessly far-fetched. While I’ll happily go along with underground satellite surveillance systems at Empire Valley or Ben Gibson being ordered to assassinate someone, I draw the line at Mack posing as a movie director and talking knowledgeably about cold reads and Stella Adler. As for the annoying Peggy mugging furiously as his assistant — as unfunny comedy goes, her performance ranks alongside FALCON CREST as its lamest.

Dead bodies play an unusually prominent role in two of this week’s soaps. In the final scene of DYNASTY, Krystle views the corpse found at the lake to see if it triggers any memories for her. “I’ve never seen him before,” she declares. However, from the expression on his face, it’s clear that Blake has. The second body shows up on KNOTS, somehow planted by Mack and Frank in the apartment of Vincent Donnelly, the hospital orderly-cum-actor-cum-extortionist who’s been menacing Pat and Frank all episode long. Frank uses the same gun Mack tricked Donelly into firing at an audition to shoot the corpse and — oh, it’s just ridiculous really.

And this week’s Top 4 are …

1 (-) DYNASTY
2 (1) FALCON CREST
3 (-) KNOTS LANDING
4 (2) DALLAS

Mack didn't mention either of those - the actor character mentioned repeatedly it was a cold reading and Stella Adler...

25 Jan 89: DYNASTY: Ginger Snaps v. 26 Jan 89: KNOTS LANDING: Mrs. Peacock in the Library with the Lead Pipe v. 27 Jan 89: DALLAS: The Two Mrs. Ewings

Will Krystle survive her operation? Will Greg and Abby’s wedding actually take place? These were the burning questions we were left with at the end of the last episodes of DYNASTY and KNOTS LANDING. This week, however, neither show is in much of a hurry to answer them. We’re four scenes into DYNASTY before we learn that Krystle’s surgery took place two narrative weeks earlier and that she’s been in a coma ever since. “Blake, it’s over,” says Dr Walt Driscoll flatly. “Her heart’s still beating, but she’s dead … You’ve got to accept it. She’s gone.” He urges Blake to return home from Switzerland and get on with his life. “So I’m supposed to just leave, not even take time to mourn?” Blake asks. It’s an interesting question — and the point at which DYNASTY’s audacious decision to set Krystle’s prognosis at some unspecified point in the past really pays off. With the honourable exception of the year Karen Fairgate took to mourn Sid on KNOTS LANDING, Soap Land’s never been very comfortable when it comes to portraying the grieving process (Jeff Colby reprimanding his wife Kirby for not being over her father’s suicide on the day of his funeral being a prime example). “Blake, you’ve been mourning her for three years now, ever since I first told you about her condition,” Dr Walt points out. Combine this argument with the terms of Krystle’s living will (“She knew it might come to this and she wanted freedom for both of you”) and it’s clear that DYNASTY has learned from the not-so-final finality of Bobby Ewing’s death and the clunky exit of Pam Ewing two years later and even found a way around the awkward questions surrounding Laura Avery’s decision to die alone, and come up with the departure of a major Soap Land character that gets to have its cake and eat it too — a “death” that feels satisfyingly conclusive while still leaving the door open for a possible return.

As a consequence, the scene where Blake gathers the Carringtons to tell them that “Krystle is gone [and] I am determined to carry out her wish, that our lives must go on” feels far less jarring than the equivalent moment in last season’s DALLAS where Bobby told the Ewings to consider Pam “a closed subject.” The loss of the family matriarch might be the single most tragic thing to have happened to the Carringtons since the series began, but in the spirit of moving on, Blake goes directly from this scene into a furtive meeting with Dex about an entirely different, more dramatically pressing matter.

Indeed, now that Krystle is dead on DYNASTY, Greg and Abby are married on KNOTS and the range war is over on DALLAS, it’s time for other storylines that have been simmering quietly in the background — involving the repercussions of JR’s adventures in Haleyville, Jill’s attack on Val and the discovery of the body at the lake — to take centre stage once again.

DYNASTY’s ongoing mystery, which has already shifted from “Who is the dead man at the lake?” to “Who killed Roger Grimes?”, now expands to include “What else is Blake trying to hide?” His cryptic conversation with Dex provides more questions than answers. “If what happened at the bottom of the lake ever came to light … it would put shame onto the families,” says Dex. “We have to protect that secret,” Blake concurs.

There’s a great twist on KNOTS, meanwhile, when David Lamb, the guy Jill picked up on the night of Val’s overdose, resurfaces to accuse her of giving him syphilis. (“Do you know how many times I’ve been unfaithful in fifteen years? Once … and I have the stinking luck to do it with a slut that’s got VD!”) Perhaps surprisingly, KNOTS was a little more circumspect than DALLAS and DYNASTY when the soaps started making reference to AIDS and safe sex about a year ago, but it now gives us a lecture that’s practically ‘STDs 101’ — but with a strong sense of irony running through it. Lest we forget, Jill didn’t sleep with David even though he thinks she did. However, for the sake of her alibi, she is obliged to put herself and an extremely pissed off Gary through the indignity of getting tested. In the process, Gary inadvertently learns of Jill’s prescription for secobarbital “and she got the prescription filled the same week she went to San Francisco,” he tells Mack. Watching them finally start to put the pieces of the puzzle together is immensely satisfying.

Abby and Greg appear only a couple of times on this week’s KNOTS. The first is on their wedding night, which is when we realise that the ceremony must have gone without a hitch. It also becomes apparent that, unlike Richard Channing and Terry Ranson who got married for similar reasons on FALCON CREST a few years ago, they fully intend to consummate their union. “It’s not like we haven’t made love before,” Abby reminds Greg. “Yeah, but that was a long time ago. It doesn’t count,” he tells her. “You mean this is gonna be like the first time — exploration, discovery?” she says provocatively as she starts to unbutton his pyjamas.

If there’s a certain innuendo in Abby’s delivery of the word “discovery”, it’s pretty mild in comparison to the following exchange on DYNASTY. “As you know, I’m expanding rapidly,” says Dex, explaining his reason for offering Joanna Sills a job with his company. “Yes, I noticed that the other night,” she purrs in reply. For ‘80s Soap Land this is pretty racy stuff and very much in keeping with the ramped up sexiness that’s been on display of late. Likewise on DALLAS, the (brilliant) line JR delivers following a spat with Bobby — “Mama shoulda had her tubes tied together right after I was born” — seems to belong specifically to this era. (It also paves the way for the kind of explicitly gynaecological dialogue we now hear on New DYNASTY almost as a matter of course. New Alexis’s recent putdown — “You low-level vaginal climber" — springs most immediately to mind.)

Unlike Abby and Greg’s honeymoon, JR and Cally’s new marriage is very much about separate bedrooms. “You’re not gonna sweet-talk me into bed again,” says Cally. “Either you tell everybody I’m your wife or you can just stay away from me.” Whereas Jock encouraged JR to “see to your wife” on Pam’s first night at Southfork ten years ago, Miss Ellie is on hand to make sure JR doesn’t see too much of Cally on hers.

Greg has another reason to be excited on his wedding night. “Tomorrow morning, I’m finally gonna see what you look like without your eye makeup,” he tells Abby. It’s not like we haven’t seen Abby without her eye makeup before, but maybe that was so long ago it doesn’t count either. Ultimately, she manages to keep one step ahead of both Greg and the cameraman when she steps out of the shower the following morning mascara intacta.

Makeup — or more specifically, makeovers — play a specific role on this week’s DYNASTY and DALLAS as well. Just as Sable insisted on glamorising a reluctant Virginia prior to Krystle and Blake’s wedding, so Lucy volunteers to do the same for Cally in preparation for her first family dinner at Southfork. (She starts by taking her clothes shopping: “I’m gonna teach you the only two words you need to know … ‘Charge it.’”) When Sable presented Virginia to the wedding guests as “the sleeping beauty who has awakened”, everyone was thrilled. When Lucy presents Cally, looking more like a baby fawn disguised as a hooker, everyone is stunned.

Cally’s fish-out-of-water situation is funny — it’s not every day you see a Ewing wife reminiscing fondly about pig-feeding or searching for the nearest laundry tub — but it’s not Cally herself we are laughing at. Well, OK, maybe it is — especially when she tries to sit down in that too tight, too low-cut black dress Lucy has wickedly picked out for her (a moment reminiscent of Karen’s “slave to fashion” faux pas on last season’s KNOTS) — but we’re rooting for her nonetheless. She may be a cornpone archetype on paper, but she’s also as vulnerable and real a character as anyone else in Soap Land right now. And while the tone of her storyline is as lighthearted as DALLAS has ever been, the behaviour of nearly all the remaining Ewings is reassuringly in character. By tarting Cally up, Lucy is revelling in the family’s embarrassment just as she did when Bobby first brought Pam back to the ranch and she encouraged Ray to kiss the bride. As for JR, his reaction to seeing his new wife so gaudily attired is the same as when Sue Ellen tried to impress him with sexy lingerie back in the mini-series. “What the hell is that?” he asks in dismay before running for the hills: “Mama, I’ll be having dinner in town tonight.” Most resonant of all is Miss Ellie bestowing on Cally the same lecture she gave Pam in Season 1: “The Ewing men are very tough and the Ewing women have to be even tougher. I had to take a horsewhip to the boy’s father before he’d do right by me and you may have to do the same thing.” I really love how the horsewhip tale recurs all the way through the Ewing saga: from “Old Acquaintance” in ’78 to “The Early Years” in ’86 to this episode in ’89 to, albeit less directly, Cally’s reappearance as a middle-aged woman at JR’s memorial service in 2013.

Interestingly, the one Ewing who doesn’t react to Cally’s arrival as one might expect is Bobby. In place of moral indignation at JR having taken advantage of an innocent young girl there’s a kind of amused detachment, as if he were a viewer watching at home. This results in some fun exchanges between the brothers. “She’s nothing but a little hillbilly,” JR insists. “She’s hillbilly with a marriage license,” counters Bobby. “Well, I’m gonna take care of that soon enough,” JR replies. “Yeah, I guess you’re right — divorcing her would be a lot kinder than staying married to her,” quips Bobby. This last line is essentially a jokier version of the point Greg made to Paige just before his wedding to Abby last week: “If we spent any time together, the way you feel right now is the way you would always feel.”

Back on DYNASTY, cousin Virginia undergoes a second makeover in as many episodes, but this time it’s all her own handiwork. After exhibiting an unexplained hostility towards Dex, she shows up at his apartment. “You really don’t remember, do you?” she asks him. While he is distracted by a phone call, she swiftly applies some Abby-style eye makeup, redoes her hair and slips off her raincoat to reveal a dominatrix-style variation on Cally’s tight black dress. “Do you remember now? … I used to call myself Ginger,” she pouts. Dex’s slack-jawed response suggests that he certainly does remember.

As if one redheaded relative who answers to the name of Virginia was not enough, another arrives in Soap Land this week — Val’s Aunt Ginny Bea on KNOTS. Like her DYNASTY namesake she has secrets, but hers involve homemade cookies and beat poets rather than prostitution and eating out of trashcans. The cookies are those she’s been feeding to Bobby and Betsy on the sly, while her claim that she has never previously visited California turns out to be a fib. “I visited California in the fifties,” she admits to Karen. “I used to listen to Ginsberg read poetry at City Lights.” The real reason for her current visit is to check on Val. “Honey, I didn’t want her to think I was spying on her,” she explains.

While Ginny has Val’s twins literally eating out of her hand, their cousin John Ross is less receptive to the new relative in his midst. At first, he mistakes Cally for a friend of Lucy’s, but soon learns to follow his father’s lead and regard his new stepmom with contempt: “Don’t expect me to call you Mother … I already have a mother who looks and acts like a mother, not like one of the girls in my class.”

John Ross putting Cally down feels like a turning point as significant as Olivia calmly standing up to her mother on last week’s KNOTS. Whereas Olivia finally seems to be emerging from her brat phase, John Ross is now entering his. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that these character developments are happening just a few months before Abby and Sue Ellen’s respective departures from Soap Land. Both Olivia and John Ross have been very much defined by their relationships to their moms and without them around, they’ll need to be established as more independent personalities.

During a talk with Christopher, John Ross admits to a certain ambivalence regarding Sue Ellen: “She shot my dad. But she’s my mom. I don’t know what to think about her.” Needless to say, these mixed feelings will carry over into their relationship on New DALLAS. Over on DYNASTY, Adam makes a similarly interesting admission about Krystle. “We didn’t get that close, but now that she’s gone I miss her,” he tells Virginia.

Elsewhere on DYNASTY, Zorelli endears himself to Fallon when he shows up at her son’s skating lesson and takes a tumble on the ice. This is a near-identical scenario to Bobby and Lisa Alden’s meet-cute on last season’s DALLAS. One might chalk this up to coincidence if David Paulsen, himself a former ice skater, was not the producer of both episodes. This time around, however, Paulsen resists the urge to make a cameo appearance as a skater unsteady on the ice, leaving the prat falls to Zorelli instead.

Zorelli and Fallon wind up back at his place for a taking-off-each-other’s-clothes scene that’s a more sweetly uncertain variation on Sue Ellen and Nicholas’s breathy strip from last season’s DALLAS. Zorelli’s apartment isn’t as fancy as Nick’s. Its exposed-brickwork-and-dartboard decor more strongly resembles Mack’s new office space on KNOTS — a suitably “authentic” environment for two macho yet caring Italian-American justice-seekers who don’t always play by the rules. Mack’s realtor makes sure to play the authenticity card in her sales pitch: “This is the original hardwood floor. It’s a real neighbourhoody neighbourhood — no strip shopping centres, no big national chains.” Mack’s first order of business as an attorney-for-hire is a pro-bono case on behalf of a group of homeless people, which he wins with ease. (Krystle would surely have applauded.) The bad news is that despite changing his job, he still hasn’t been able to ditch his perpetually gurning, aren’t-I-just-adorable secretary, Peggy, who has replaced FC’s Melissa as the one Soap Land character who makes me swear irrationally at the screen.

Other Zorelli/Mack parallels: While Fallon nicknames Zorelli Zorro, Mack recalls “a deli that was on the block when I was growing up on New York called Lazorro’s and I played Zorro because I was always ripping off apples and carrots and stuff.” And just as Mack made a song and dance about finding anchovies on his pizza a few weeks ago, Zorelli also proves somewhat particular on the subject: “A pizza should be hot and dripping with onion and cheese and anchovies, if a person likes that kind of thing.”

Alexis, a no-show for the second DYNASTY episode in a row, is proving to be a more impressive business woman off screen than on. “She has managed to put out most of the fires we started at her overseas offices,” complains Sable. Sue Ellen, meanwhile, appears impressively assertive onscreen, coolly announcing her intention to own and run a Hollywood movie studio. However, she does lose serious business points for rolling her eyes at a guy who tries to pitch the concept of an ATM machine to her (“We’re gonna go world-wide with these Automatic Teller Machines! They’ll take any credit card, any bank card and they’ll automatically compute the rate of exchange in foreign countries!”) “From now on, I don’t wanna see any more people like that coming in for financing,” she informs her secretary dismissively.

As an heiress with no discernible talent for business, DALLAS’s Lucy serves pretty much the same purpose as Emma on FALCON CREST — to deliver wisecracks at family functions and get her heart broken on a regular basis. As this role is not compatible with a lasting relationship, it makes sense that Emma should be written out of FC immediately following her wedding to RD Young at the end of last week’s episode. Likewise, Lucy’s return to DALLAS must necessarily spell the end of her marriage to Mitch and thus she receives her final divorce papers in this week’s ep.

Lucy’s too upset to attend the annual Oil Barons Ball which is a shame because it’s the last Ball of the series and the most fun one since 1983 when Cliff was voted Oil Man of the Year and the Barneses and Ewings beat each other up. This year’s party plays like an extended version of the powder room scene from that Ball when Pam, Jenna, Katherine, Afton and Sue Ellen all came face to face. Here, sparks fly when various combinations of female characters who are or have been involved with Bobby (Tracey, Tammy, April), JR (Cally, Sue Ellen, April again) and even Cliff (Tammy, Marilee Stone) interact. Unlike DYNASTY and FALCON CREST, DALLAS has never been all that interested in bitchiness for its own sake, so each of these confrontations feels specific and dramatically juicy. The best of the lot is the first meeting of Cally and Sue Ellen which, in turn, leads to a showdown between Sue Ellen and her ex-husband: “JR, you got that little girl into bed by telling her that I was a drunk, a cheat and I neglected my child!” She then lands a punch on him even more impressive than the whack Sable gives Jeff Colby at the end of this week’s DYNASTY when he accuses her of trying to get her claws into Blake: “Ever since my father had the good sense to get rid of you, you’ve been on the prowl for a new coat of arms.”

While DYNASTY ends on a shot of Sable seething and KNOTS with Jill looking scared after realising Gary may be onto her, DALLAS concludes with a great freeze frame of the Ball in disarray, with various characters looking or heading in different directions following the news that Carter McKay is the new Head of West Star. “It won’t be long before we’re wishing Jeremy Wendell was back!” predicts JR.

And this week’s Top 3 are …

1 (3) DALLAS
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (-) DYNASTY

Zorelli, quintessential Italian-American who later played "Brainless the second" Carmine, Jr on Sopranos, but MACK, although he says he "has some Sicilian" and yells a lot, is more typically identified as Scots-Irish...

I recall at the end of the episode, Mack and Karen are in bed, post-lovemaking.
Karen: "Dear Ann Landers...if the sex was any better---"
Mack (interrupting): "I'd be a dead man!"

And there is a mysterious hole in the headboard that wasn't there at the beginning of the episode...Karen definitely concentrated for a change...

 

[Stillwitty]

Mack's new offices on Knots had previously been a karate studio. That explains why they had a punching bag hanging in the office, and I assume was the impetus for Peggy's attempts to turn the place into a ficus-tree Vietnam. It probably smelled pretty ripe. No one ever explained why they had an old-fashioned barber's chair in the office, though. With all due respect, Mack's hair would not be in need of a trim....ever. And whatever happened to the rowing machine from his days in the governors office? He did some of his best investigations on that thing.



He says jealously

Fallon on NuDynasty would have owned it: "Both of them, actually. And you couldn't even get a parking ticket."

I'm more concerned with why the heavy bag mysteriously disappeared after a few episodes and Mack never threw another dart in the office: Definitely did his best brooding while aiming at something...

I'm a bit puzzled by the Peggy-bashing, myself. She was pleasant, brought a little light relief, didn't make much more of an impression on me.

I took her to be Mack's surrogate mother figure - the adult in the room, if you will, when Karen wasn't around...

08 Feb 89: DYNASTY: Tankers, Cadavers to Chance v. 09 Feb 89: KNOTS LANDING: Without a Clue v. 10 Feb 89: DALLAS: He-e-ere's Papa! v. 10 Feb 89: FALCON CREST: And Baby Makes Three

As Pam Ewing learnt to her cost way back in the DALLAS mini-series, barns can be dangerous places in Soap Land — and never more so than this week. DYNASTY opens with the stables at Delta Rho not only on fire but with Sammy Jo and her assailant Gibson unconscious inside, each wounded after shooting the other. Over on KNOTS, Jill steals into Gary’s barn and sabotages his saddle. The last person to play such a trick was Sable on THE COLBYS as part of a scheme to gaslight her sister-in-law Constance. We’ve already seen Jill shopping for a wheelchair (“My fiancee broke his leg,” she informs the shop assistant) so she presumably has a more Misery-inspired scenario in mind. (Although the movie version of Misery had yet to be released in early ’89, the original novel had been a big hit the previous year.)

It’s an unwritten Soap Land rule that characters trapped in a fire must be rescued by one of their show’s leading men rather than an anonymous member of the emergency services. So it is that Jeff Colby joins the heroic likes of Mark Jennings, Bobby Ewing and, most recently, Lance Cumson as he drags Sammy Jo to safety. Gibson makes it out of the barn on his own and, like Sammy Jo, winds up at Soap Land Memorial Hospital where KNOTS LANDING’s Mrs Bailey is also in residence. Whereas Jill is satisfied that Mrs B no longer poses a threat to her (“They can ask you all the questions they want, you’re never gonna be able to answer,” she gloats during one of her thought bubble thingies), Gibson remains a thorn in Sable’s side. “You’ve got something to hide from somebody,” he tells her over the phone. “Either you get me out of here fast or I’m gonna spread my name and yours in every newspaper in this city.”

Mrs Bailey may not be able to incriminate her verbally, but Jill suspects she has “a lot of interesting things at home — I bet you’re the type of woman that holds onto all sorts of thing that should have been thrown away.” Mack reaches the same conclusion, but while he’s waiting for a warrant to search her apartment legally, Jill simply lets herself in. Back on DYNASTY, there’s a parallel scenario as Adam, intrigued after seeing Dex hand Virginia a letter (“I put some thoughts down on paper — please look it over, maybe you’ll understand what I did”), sneaks into her room to look for it. He and Jill each rifle through the drawers of a bureau (the place where Julie Grey once hid her key to the Red Files), but without success. Jill then finds a shoebox under the bed (Digger Barnes’s hiding place of choice for various legal documents), but this also proves a red herring. Adam eventually hits pay dirt when he locates the letter in a bedside dresser (the same place Jessica Montford and Caress Morelle hid their own highly confidential documents) while Jill gets lucky when she finds copies of Mrs Bailey’s forgeries in a hatbox (where Sue Ellen used to secrete her booze). Before either has time to savour their victories, they hear the sounds of voices and approaching footsteps. Hark, it is Mack arriving with his warrant and Virginia returning to change clothes. Tension mounts: are Adam and Jill about to be caught redhanded? Not likely — while he dives into a wardrobe, she makes her exit through a conveniently placed back door.

We don’t get to see what is in Dex’s letter, but it apparently contains enough about Virginia’s unhappy past for Adam to pull the same “we’re both outsiders” shtick he used on Kirby in an attempt to get her into bed. Over on FALCON CREST, Anna Cellini uses nostalgia to try to rekindle the passion between her and Nick Agretti. “Let’s be seventeen again,” she suggests. Virginia and Nick each succumb to these methods of seduction. Jill, on the other hand, becomes only further isolated from her former KNOTS friends. Following Mrs Bailey’s all-too-convenient stroke, neither Mack nor Gary bother to conceal their suspicions about her. Ironically, this allows her to play the “Poor Jill” victim card. “It’s Val, isn’t it? … She sucked one more person into her little fantasy … What you think I did, Mack? Do you think I had Mrs Bailey write her suicide note?” she asks indignantly over the phone while burning the very papers she swiped from Mrs B’s closet (and wearing one of her hats for good measure).

“What do I have to do to prove to you people I’m innocent — take a lie detector test?” she continues. And so Jill Bennett becomes the first Soap Land character to submit such a test since Wes Parmalee on DALLAS two years ago. Just like Wes, she passes with flying colours. In both cases, there is no explanation as to how the character has been able to outwit the machine, beyond a reminder that it is not a hundred per cent accurate. Karen’s suggestion, “Maybe Jill’s so far gone, she actually believes what she said was true”, echoes a similar line about Wes (“Maybe he went back to a time in his mind when he believed he really was Jock”) and is as close as we get. When the results of the test fail to convince anyone of Jill’s innocence, she begrudgingly agrees to see a shrink of Gary’s choosing, played by the same therapist who counselled Sue Ellen during her stay at the Dream Season Sanatarium. Dr Gilbert, as she is now known, turns out to be as wrong about Jill (“It is my considered opinion that she is not a danger to anyone”) as she was perceptive about Sue Ellen (specifically, her tendency to blame others for her problems). Lie detectors, shrinks and psychics — ultimately, they are as accurate as Soap Land’s plots require them to be.

Just over a year ago, FALCON CREST’s anti-hero, Richard Channing, became a respectable married man when he wed the wholesome Maggie Gioberti. More recently, his Ewing-verse equivalents, Greg Sumner and JR Ewing, have followed suit by marrying Abby and Cally. Whereas JR is unhappy with this state of affairs (“Marriage was not on my agenda and married I do not wanna be,” he informs his new bride, who responds by planting a cream pie in his face), Greg appears to embrace it: “I didn’t think I’d ever get a shot at a life like that again. I didn’t want one. Things have changed. I feel like I’m part of a family now.” Both he and Richard make a public display of their new “family man” image this week.

Mack watches briefly while Greg and Abby are portrayed as “the perfect American family” during a TV interview before turning his attention to Meg’s diapers: “I’d rather change it than listen to it.” On FC, Maggie has other concerns when she watches Richard being interviewed alongside Pilar Ortega on the 6 O’Clock News regarding his role as “benefactor of the new community centre.” “I told Richard not to wear that purple tie,” she frets. Richard goes on to explain that his newfound altruism is due to “the example set for me by my wife Maggie, to whom generosity is second nature.” Beneath the public facades, however, lie more complicated questions. “Is there anything going on between you and Pilar Ortega?” Maggie asks. Richard assures her there isn’t. “Did you know Pilar before she came back to the valley?” she continues. Again, he says no. Neither answer is the full truth. Back on KNOTS, Ted Melcher broaches an even thornier subject: “Why did Greg Sumner give up his baby?” “… Who cares? It doesn’t relate to the issues,” Greg replies. “That’s what Dukakis said when Bush started to talk about the pledge of allegiance,” retorts Ted.

This is Soap Land’s first reference to George Bush Sr, who was sworn in as President of America just three weeks before this episode originally aired (Ronald Reagan having held the office since the day before Abby first met JR until the day after she married Greg). In another sign of the times, Michael Fairgate and his latest unrequited crush Ellen more or less invent the internet — or at the very least Google. “First, you start with your knowledge base which is kind of like a library of facts … then you write a programme called an inference engine which uses the knowledge base to draw to conclusions,” Ellen explains. “You guys must have been eating your Wheaties,” marvels their professor. Over on DALLAS, Sue Ellen, after rolling her eyes at the concept of an ATM machine a couple of weeks ago, claws back a modicum of credibility by introducing the term “significant other” to Soap Land. “That’s what they’re calling them these days,” she informs a slightly baffled Carter McKay. (DALLAS seems to be setting McKay and Sue Ellen up as future allies, but I think this ep is the last time we see them together.)

While Clayton and Miss Ellie are off screen “having a wonderful time” in Europe for the second week in a row, Alexis is finally back from Natumbe. As this is her first appearance since Krystle’s poignant departure, one might have expected an acknowledgement in the same “let bygones be bygones” spirit of JR’s parting words to Ray Krebbs on DALLAS two weeks ago (“Right now, I only remember the good times”). Instead, Alexis’s sole reference to her former bête noire occurs as she is taunting Sable for trying to move in on Blake. “What a pity that Krystle’s still alive; that does cramp your style rather. Maybe you should send one of your henchmen to Switzerland and pull the plug on her,” she suggests. Sable is genuinely taken aback: “I don’t know another soul on earth that would make a remark as low as that.” Maybe not, but JR comes close as he quizzes Sue Ellen about Nicholas Pearce’s background, the first time he’s mentioned the man since killing him at the end of last season: “You two must have talked once in a while — couldn’t have spent all your time in the sack.” But even this remark pales in comparison to what he says after a vengeful Joseph Lombardi abducts him and demands to know who should be made to pay for his son’s death. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s my ex-wife Sue Ellen,” he insists. “If it hadn’t have been for her, your boy would still be alive.”

The standout scene on this week’s DYNASTY is a mano-a-mano confrontation at the mansion. In front of the assembled Carrington clan, Zorelli angrily accuses Blake of using his influence with the police department to have him removed from the Roger Grimes case. “They put me behind a desk, took my gun … Do you have any idea what that means to a cop?!” he yells. “Sounds a bit like castration, doesn’t it?” snipes Adam on the sidelines. Blake is outraged by the allegation, Jeff and Adam take his side, Fallon defends her boyfriend, Virginia attempts to play peacemaker and pretty soon everyone’s shouting over each other, the camera’s shaking and Blake has to be restrained from physically attacking the younger man. “Get him out of here before I kill him!” he shouts. The whole thing is thrillingly out of control, in a KNOTS Season 4 type way.

Just as Jill is now an outsider on KNOTS, Fallon’s decision to side with Zorelli places them on one side and the rest of the Carringtons on the other. After all the convoluted romances and storylines Fallon has experienced over the past nine years, it’s kind of remarkable that this relationship should feel as important as it does. While it obviously helps that their affair is tied into a much bigger storyline and that Fallon herself has been revamped so successfully this season, another crucial ingredient is Zorelli — arguably the show’s most rounded and certainly most down-to-earth male character since Matthew Blaisdel back in Season 1.

KNOTS’ best scene is also a face-off between two men. Whereas Blake and Zorelli’s encounter is loud and chaotic, Greg and Mack’s is measured and controlled and takes place in the privacy of the latter’s office. In place of raised voices and snide remarks, there is small talk (Greg: “I was surprised to hear you were leaving the government” Mack: “I was surprised to hear you wanted back in”), prevarication (Greg: “Time has a tendency to change your perspective” Mack: “When did you become so philosophical?”) and an unspoken tension which is finally broken by Mack saying what Greg cannot bring himself to: “You want Meg back.” It feels significant that for this scene, Greg is dressed the same way he was for the speech in “Bouncing Babies” last season when he formally handed Meg over to the Mackenzies (camel brown overcoat, slicked-back hair). But whereas he stared directly into the camera lens back then, he now hides behind dark glasses, suggesting an inability to look either Mack or himself directly in the eye.

At one point, their conversation turns to Laura’s death. “You looked like it didn’t matter,” says Mack. “Just because I didn’t flip over backwards and break into tears on the casket doesn’t mean I didn’t care,” Greg replies. The same accusation could be levelled at Sue Ellen following the death of Nicholas Pearce. She hasn’t flipped over backwards either, even though we’ve previously seen her dissolve into a self-piteous heap over far less. Maybe she’s done her grieving in private, away from both the other characters and the audience — as if she’s already started receding from our view, in preparation for her departure at the end of the season. A simpler explanation is provided by Sue Ellen herself in the last and best scene of this week’s DALLAS which, like Mack and Greg’s, is an office-based encounter. “I wanted to shut it out, to forget that evening ever happened,” she tells Joseph Lombardi, who wants to know if her account of the events leading up to Nick’s death matches JR’s. “You’re the only one left who can speak for my son,” he tells her poignantly.

Given Lombardi’s “eye for an eye” philosophy, Sue Ellen essentially holds JR’s life in her hands — will she blame or exonerate him regarding his role in Nicholas’s death? The scene is also her only opportunity to express her grief on screen and Linda Gray makes the most of it, managing to imbue even a line as clunky as “I hated JR so much, I shot him and when he survived, I was furious” with genuine emotion. Proving how far she’s come since that Dream Season therapy session with Jill Bennett’s doctor, Sue Ellen ultimately takes the high road and admits responsibility for her own role in what occurred: “Nicholas loved me, he’d do anything for me, and because of that, he’s dead … If only I hadn’t insisted on him helping me look for John Ross, if only we hadn’t gone to JR’s condo that night, if only I had stopped the fight between JR and Nicholas before it got so violent. If only, if only — they’re such empty words.” It’s a little gem of a speech.

FC also saves its best scene for last. Pilar sees Lance’s revelation that Cookie Nash is carrying his child and raises him a nine-year-old-daughter he never knew he had. Heck, he doesn’t even remember it being conceived. In circumstances remarkably similar to Adam and Dana’s backstory on DYNASTY, Pilar was a high school girl from the wrong side of the tracks with a big crush, Lance was a troubled teen too inebriated to know what he was doing, and together they made a baby. While Dana had an illegal abortion, Pilar went the unofficial adoption route (as did Greg with Meg) and gave the kid to her aunt to raise as her own.

Minor trend of the week: witches. Dex Dexter alludes to Macbeth when he finds himself face to face with Sable and Joanna. “Now all we need is one more witch and a cauldron,” he quips. Meanwhile, Jill Bennett evokes Arthur Miller’s The Crucible during a wonderfully indignant speech to Gary: “During the Middle Ages, if they thought a woman was guilty of witchcraft, they’d bind her hands and feet and throw her in some water and if she sank, she was innocent — she was pretty much dead, but she was innocent — and if she floated, she was guilty. So they took her out, dried her off and burnt her at the stake. It was a no-win situation. Gary, I know exactly how those women felt.”

And this week’s Top 4 are …

1 (2) KNOTS LANDING
2 (1) DYNASTY
3 (3) DALLAS
4 (4) FALCON CREST



I hope I'm not guilty of "Peggy-bashing" as that wasn't my intention and I have no objection to her role as Mack's sidekick, I just find her heavy-handed approach to comedy quite grating (which, given that she mainly functions as light relief, is not ideal!). I don't know if you're familiar with a character from The Good Wife (and its spinoff The Good Fight, which I haven't seen) called Elsbeth Tascioni, but she reminds me of Peggy an awful lot. The main difference is that her self-consciously whimsical wackiness is acknowledged by the other characters, which in theory, should make it slightly less irritating.

From the beginning, I've always thought that the scenes shared between Sumner and Mack were the most powerful of the entire series. Their back story, history and competitive nature as frenemies comes through powerfully via these two great actors.

 

[Stillwitty]

02 Nov 89: KNOTS LANDING: When Push Comes to Shove v. 03 Nov 89: DALLAS: Fathers and Other Strangers v. 03 Nov 89: FALCON CREST: Soul Sacrifice

Ecology is a hot topic in this week’s Ewing-verse. On KNOTS, Paula and Greg meet cute in the Sumner Group elevator and immediately start bickering about the ruination of California. Greg then goes on to debate fossil fuels with Karen in the more formal setting of OPEN MIKE, a TV talk show. “I suppose I’m in favour of hydro-carbons — I prefer driving to walking,” he ruminates beforehand. After the show, he runs into Paula again and she congratulates him on his performance: “For an opportunist and a huckster, you managed to side-step the issues pretty well.” There’s more moral indignation on DALLAS where “a West Star tanker has just had some sort of accident. It’s leaking oil all over the Gulf.” “This day is turning out better than I thought it would!” laughs JR, revelling in Carter McKay’s misfortune. “That’s not funny, JR,” admonishes Bobby. “You know what that’s gonna do to the Texas coastline, not to mention the pollution in the Gulf?” ”… This isn’t a comedy, it’s a tragedy!” adds Cliff. “What’s a few dead ducks?” JR shrugs, calling for champagne. Interestingly, the Ewing-verse’s younger generation, represented by Michael Fairgate and James Beaumont, seem to side with Greg and JR’s more conservative views. “He’s making a lot more sense than she is,” Michael observes while watching Greg debate his mother on TV. James, meanwhile, chuckles happily at JR’s jokes.

Michael and James’s respective mothers are worried about the influence these two powerful men are having on their sons. As if Michael working at the Sumner Group wasn’t bad enough, he then splashes out $1,200 on a watch which just happens to be identical to Greg’s. “This is not extravagant spending, Mom — it’s investing,” he argues after Karen voices her disapproval. “Oh, is that what your new boss is telling you?” she asks. “I don’t need Mr Sumner to tell me how important appearances are,” he replies. “The problem with Michael is, he’s too young to realise what you represent,” Karen later tells Greg.

Vanessa Beaumont, meanwhile, scolds James for “taking off for Dallas, not telling me.” “I don’t have to ask your permission every time I want a piece of candy,” he insists. “And this is quite a piece of candy, isn’t it?” she retorts. Her chief cause of concern is, of course, different to Karen’s. “You were worried I’d tell JR he’s my father,” says James. Notably, this game-changing bombshell is dropped not in the episode’s final scene, but a third of the way through, just as the discovery that Ray was Jock’s son was also revealed midway through an ep. “What if you decide to stay here permanently?” Vanessa worries. “What if you like being JR’s son? What if he likes being your father? I’ve already lost one man I love to this damn city, I don’t want to lose another one!”

As for Greg and JR, they each seem uncharacteristically taken with the young man who has entered their respective orbit. Greg tells Karen that Michael is “a fine young man … he’s bright, he’s attractive and he’s got a great new watch.” JR, without realising that James is his son, describes him to Vanessa as “delightful … a man after my own heart.” While Michael’s situation brings out Karen’s self-righteous side (“Oh gosh, to think all my life I thought people were judging me on my actions and not on my watch!”), James suggests that Vanessa might have ulterior motives for showing up in Dallas: “Were you really looking for me or was I just an excuse for you to look up JR again?”

In the same way that Karen takes a dim view of her son’s extravagance (“He may not be in college but thank goodness he has an impressive timepiece”), so FALCON CREST’s Walker Daniels disapproves of his brother-in-law Michael showing up with expensive gifts for the children in his care. “You really think an eight-year-old boy needs a Mercedes Benz?” he asks, referring to a replica toy car. “No, but then I don’t think a forty-year-old man should be driving a garbage pail on wheels either,” Michael snaps back, alluding to Walker’s beat up old van. Walker would be even less thrilled if he knew that his wife Lauren has been taking the kids to see their real father, Richard, behind his back. (By the way, how Richard’s son, also called Michael, qualifies as “an eight-year-old boy” when he was only born four seasons ago is unclear. Perhaps it’s something they’re putting in the Soap Land water — over on this week’s DALLAS, Bobby feels obliged to talk to his son Christopher about the birds and the bees, which seems a little premature given that Christopher was born in 1981 and so should only be eight years old — or even seven, if you subtract the year that turned out to be a dream.)

Since returning to the Sumner Group, Paige has gone from being the pursuer to the pursued in her relationship with Greg. This has led to a workplace game of cat and mouse between them, which mostly entails Paige politely declining Greg’s invitations to dinner in favour of working late, usually with a tall, young and handsome client named R. Peter Christopher, Greg then observing their body language from the other side of his and Paige’s adjoining glass-walled offices, and later sabotaging her plans for the weekend with a last minute assignment that simply can’t wait. Nowadays, this would probably have #MeToo stamped all over it, but in 1989 it has the wit and sophistication of a Hepburn/Tracey movie.

DALLAS has its own office flirtation storyline this week. The Ewing Oil set isn’t as an expansive as the Sumner Group's so it takes place on a more modest scale (DALLAS’s corporate offices are now smaller than KNOTS LANDING’s? When did that happen?), with a nice little running gag that starts with James suggesting to Sly that she invite him over for a home-cooked meal. “Sorry, my microwave is broken,” she tells him cheerily. Later on, he stops by her desk with a cookbook: “My favourite recipe’s on page 21 and you don’t need a microwave to cook it.” A few scenes after that, JR passes by and notices her reading said book. “You’re not going domestic on me, are you?” he checks. “No, I still have a black thumb when it comes to baking,” she assures him. “I’m glad to hear that!” he chuckles. Meanwhile, poor old Kendall is left out in reception, wondering if and when James is ever going to call her following their night together.

Last week’s KNOTS introduced us to Oakman Industries, yet another corporation run by shadowy, sinister figures. Unlike the Wolfbridge Group or Empire Valley storylines, however, this one was not initiated by a wicked, wicked blonde with blue eyeshadow and limitless ambition, but a random friend of Val’s Aunt Ginny, a sixty-three-year-old “minimum wage worker who could never even afford a home of her own” named Jeri Maddux. In her very first scene, Jeri swiped $17,000 from the company safe, which she later insisted was the pension she’d been cheated out of. She was subsequently arrested. Mack took her case, but the episode ended with her lying dead outside her apartment building, having either jumped or been pushed out of a window. The last time a minor Soap Land character met such fate, Roger Grimes’s son turned out to be the guilty party, but the fact that he’s now trapped in a disused mine shaft for all eternity gives him a firm alibi this time around.

Instead, the finger of suspicion points at Aunt Ginny herself. Aunt Ginny — a killer? It sounds ridiculous — but then Val finds her wearing a solid gold bracelet of Jeri’s. She claims she and Jeri had made a pact (“Whoever went first, the other one could choose whatever they wanted”), but helping oneself to a dead, or potentially dead, woman’s jewellery is an act that one has come to associate with those of evil intent: Charley St James on FALCON CREST (Maggie’s ring, Angela’s necklace); Tommy McKay on DALLAS (April’s pendant). While Mack is convinced that Oakman bagman Mark Baylor (a terrifically conflicted performance by Adam Arkin) is “the son of a bitch who did it”, Ginny is the one who ends up behind bars at the end of the episode.

Like KNOTS, this week’s FALCON CREST shows that you’re never too old to be suspected of cold-blooded murder. The mystery surrounding the death of Frank Agretti’s wife combines with Soap Land’s first ever Hallowe’en themed episode to create the nightmare sequence to end all nightmare sequences. As thunder roars, a hand-held camera follows Frank through a graveyard at night, a dead woman in his arms. He then falls into an open grave, the woman’s body landing on top of him. A demented Genele appears and proceeds to bury him alive while leering at the camera in a distorted, fisheye lens closeup that only serves to make look her even more insane. Frank wakes up in a cold sweat. What happens next isn’t a dream (at least I don’t think it is), but it still feels like one. Spooked by his nightmare, he drives to a forest and, armed with a shovel and a torch, searches for the shallow grave where his wife is buried. Meanwhile, disembodied screams and gunshots play on the soundtrack. “Renee, be there,” he pleads as he starts digging. Just as in his nightmare, Genele appears out of nowhere. “Looking to dig up the evidence, Frank?” she asks. “She’s not there anymore. I dug her up a long time ago. She’s in a box, safe and sound and as long as you do what I tell you to do, she’ll stay that way.” As she laughs, Frank cries, telling she’s “some kind of a witch from hell.”

It later transpires that Genele, rather than Frank, bumped off his wife/her sister (“I did it because I knew you loved me”) — but she used his gun and he helped her to bury the body (“the greatest mistake of my life”). Genele uses this to blackmail Frank into finishing off Angela so she can get her hands on his inheritance. “The courts say Angela won’t recover anyway,” she reasons. “She probably wants somebody to pull the plug.” As with Charley St James, it’s the sheer lack of respect for the show’s biggest star (an elderly woman, to boot) from a trashy, murderous outsider that both thrills and impresses. “Just a little air bubble. She won’t feel a thing,” Genele urges, handing Frank a syringe. He gets as far as Angela’s hospital room but ultimately can’t go through with it.

Back on KNOTS, the coroner in charge of Jeri’s autopsy turns out to be an old buddy of Mack’s from Vietnam. (“Well, if it isn’t the most laidback medic that ever crawled through a rice paddy. You know, we should have let you fight for the other side — we’ve have been out of there a hell of a lot sooner!” Mack joshes.) Just as it took until DYNASTY’s final season before we learned that Dex Dexter was a Vietnam vet, this is our first indication that Mack served in the same war.

Further military exploits are revealed on DALLAS as the riddle set by Jock’s old air service pal, Tom Mallory, is finally solved. Miss Ellie and Clayton’s search has led them to a Jewish family that Jock and Tom rescued from Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II and who have since settled in the States. The crux of DYNASTY’s recent Nazi-related story was Blake’s fear that the Carrington name would be forever tarnished. Here, that situation is reversed as the saved family explain that they have proudly adopted their rescuers’ names, Ewing and Mallory, in their honour. “None of these people would be alive today if it wasn’t for the heroism of Jock Ewing,” declares Sarah Ewing, introducing the Farlows to her extended family. This is an atypical story for DALLAS to be sure, but a nice one. Lest all this warm-hearted fuzziness prove too much, however, it is handily offset by the dysfunctional goings on back in Dallas itself.

“Will you really pay a small fortune to get Cliff outta Ewing Oil?” Michelle asks JR. “That’s probably the most serious offer I ever made to anybody in my life,” he replies. “Then it’s Michelle with two ‘l’s,” she grins. “I wanna make sure you spell my name right on that huge cheque you’ll be writing me!” There are similarly soapy shenanigans in the opening scene of FALCON CREST. A three-way family court battle is underway to decide who gets conservatorship of the winery while Angela is a coma. Her husband Frank, her son Richard and her grandson Lance have all thrown their hats into the ring.

“There’s a better than fifty-fifty chance the judge will hand Falcon Crest over to Frank,” Genele tells Richard before proposing a similar deal to the one Michelle’s just made with JR: “If Frank drops the suit and you end up with Falcon Crest, I wanna half a million dollars.” Unfortunately for Genele, such a deal proves irrelevant when Lance, prompted by Charley, persuades the judge to base her decision on Angela’s will, i.e., whomever Angela bequeathed Falcon Crest to after her death gets to control it while she’s on life support. Lance is confident it’ll be him.

Back on KNOTS, Danny the computer guy is angry because, thanks to Gary, Val now knows that he is married to, albeit separated from, Sally’s Friend, aka Amanda, and is refusing to talk to him. The scene from Danny and Amanda’s estranged marriage where he comes by her place late at night is very interesting. Because they’re not regular characters, their situation is allowed to be more messily complicated, more stuck-in-the-past than the relationships of those who are required to drive the show’s action forward. Their marriage might be over, but their lives and emotions are still intertwined. “You sleep with the cowboy yet?” Danny asks Amanda, before ranting sarcastically about what a catch he is: “My wife left me because I’m a stifling person … ‘Hi, I’m a jerk, obnoxious, oppressive. Would you like to be the next woman that I smother? Would you like to be the next woman that I systematically destroy?’” He then tells Amanda, “I would do anything to keep you. I hate this divorce.” “… You’re the one who’s dating,” she points out, “and oh boy, you’ve found the woman you’ve always wanted!” I love the description of Val that follows: “A housewife who cooks and cleans for you during the day and watches Johnny Carson with you at night, perfect makeup, perfect Miss Junior League, with kids to boot.” It’s the Valene we know, yet seen through the eyes of someone with her own issues and insecurities. “Why are you even over here?” Amanda asks. “For the same reason you haven’t filed the divorce papers,” Danny replies. When they wind up in each other’s arms, it feels less like some huge soapy betrayal of Gary and Val than simply unfinished business between the two of them.

The following morning, Val comes by Danny’s place. She’s in a conciliatory mood. “Every year,” she begins, “I vow to become a stronger person, a new me, every year, and then I slowly slide back into my old ways. I become more reclusive and I stop taking chances. You see, I’ve been hurt a lot and I don’t put myself out there to get hurt again … I cut you off because of one mistake … I’ve made a few mistakes myself before … but I think the biggest mistake that I could ever make would be not seeing you again.” Like Amanda’s description of her, this doesn’t really tell us anything about Val that we didn’t already know, but it somehow presents what we do know in a fresh way, and it shows her relationship with Danny as part of a bigger picture: her ongoing attempt to be something other than Poor Val.

Over on DALLAS, Bobby is given a speech that serves a similar purpose. It’s prompted by James, who is eager to know what makes his secret father tick. “JR’s gotta be a part of the company that Daddy built,” Bobby explains, “no matter what his position is … JR made Daddy his obsession … It tore him up when Daddy died. He lost all sense of direction, he had no drive.” “… What got him back on track?” James asks. “His son, John Ross … JR decided that if he couldn’t please Daddy anymore, he could be Daddy. He could build his own empire and pass it along to his boy.” Once again, none of this is new information, but hearing it anew through the ears of JR’s eldest boy adds a different perspective.

In the lieu of the annual Oil Barons Ball, the Ewing clan, plus April, James and Vanessa, assemble at the Oil Barons Club for a big family dinner. Bobby’s toast to absent friends is JR’s cue to start badmouthing Ray — whose conception is a timely reminder of one of Jock’s less heroic war efforts. “Daddy’s big mistake,” JR explains to the ever curious James, “a half-breed, born on the wrong side of the blanket … He’s a bastard in every sense of the word.” James’s response is brilliantly soapy. “I heard you wanted to take after your daddy in every way … Well, congratulations then, because you have … I’d like to propose a toast to JR Ewing — my daddy!” Cut to everyone’s individual reaction shot as they each turn to look at JR.

While Danny and April are still waiting for Val and Bobby to make up their minds, Charley St James becomes the latest Soap Land character to propose marriage. “Emma, my darling, my sun, my moon, my galaxy, make my universe complete and marry me,” he asks her. She sadly explains that she can’t because her divorce won’t be final for another six months. Next thing we hear, Emma’s ex has mysteriously committed suicide offscreen. She is suitably devastated for about a scene and a half, but then Charley cheers her up by pretending to rob a gas station. The final scene of the ep sees them arrive in court just in time to hear the judge rule on who gets Falcon Crest. According to Angela’s will, “the one person whose integrity I trust to take care of the family legacy” is Emma — who then tops that with a bombshell of her own: “I’m Emma St James. We just got married last night!” While Charley snogs his new bride's face off in the middle of the courtroom, Lance seethes. “The guy knew! He knew!”

And this week’s Top 3 are …

1 (3) DALLAS
2 (1) KNOTS LANDING
3 (2) FALCON CREST



Oh I really like Olivia and Harold's scenes from a marriage. They're a contrast to everything else on the show.

More time frame issues: When the hell did Mack MacKenzie have time to serve in Vietnam? According to the whole Mack/Greg/Anne timeline, it was Fordham Undergrad, law school and Wall Street. No time for Military service. But FYI: Kevin Dobson was, in fact, a Vietnam era Vet - MP.

30 Nov 89: KNOTS LANDING: Perfect Couples v. 01 Dec 89: DALLAS: Hell's Fury v. 01 Dec 89: FALCON CREST: Luck Wave


Everywhere you look in Soap Land this week, marriages are in crisis. Mostly, these involve couples to whom we’ve only recently been introduced — KNOTS LANDING’s Danny and Amanda, FALCON CREST’s Ian and Sydney, and Walker and Lauren. These relationships have been in trouble long before the characters arrived in Soap Land and now we are playing catch up, getting to know them just as their lives are falling apart.


Danny and Amanda have been separated so long one might have assumed their marriage was beyond the crisis stage, but when Amanda finally files for divorce at the beginning of this week’s ep, it seems to bring all their problems to a head. Danny calls Val to tell her the good news (“I am beyond happy! I’m thrilled! Let’s celebrate!”), but then breaks down in tears as soon as he’s off the phone. Then, after hearing that Amanda is planning to go away with Gary, he snaps. “I don’t want her to get a thing,” he tells his divorce lawyer. “I want the furniture, I want the books, I want the pictures, I want the record albums.” “You don’t even own a stereo,” the lawyer points out. “I don’t care!” he shouts. (The material stakes are somewhat higher than a few LPs for Charley St James who is after the $14,000,000 Emma will receive if he can persuade her to sell Falcon Crest to Michael Sharpe.) Amanda agrees to Danny’s demands (“That’s how much I want to get out of this marriage”), adding that all she wants are her grandmother’s dishes — which he promptly smashes. There is a similarly petulant outburst on FALCON CREST when Sydney returns from an afternoon walk that was not sanctioned by her husband. “You were with someone, weren’t you?” Ian insists, refusing to believe she was alone. (She wasn’t — she was with Chris Agretti.) “You’re hurting me!” she protests as he grabs her wrist. Then he chases her upstairs to their room where he breaks a doll she appears to hold as dear as Amanda does her grandmother’s dishes. Then he too breaks down. “Tell me my angel forgives me,” he pleads. When Sydney doesn’t reply, he repeats himself, only now there’s an angry edge to his voice. “Your angel forgives you,” she replies through gritted teeth.


While Ian doesn’t know who to be jealous of (“Who was he? Who was he?” he keeps asking), self-employed Danny and unemployed contractor Walker Daniels both have a target for their resentment: the rich supersoap businessmen who have recently entered their wives’ lives. “You can’t stand the fact that I’m making it on my own!” argues Amanda. “Your own? You got a millionaire cowboy picking up the tab!” Danny sneers. “Gary does not give me money,” she insists. “When you go out to dinner, who pays? Who you go to the movies, who pays? When you go on a trip, who pays?” he asks her. “You’re a bastard,” she replies. Walker, meanwhile, hits the roof when he discovers Richard Channing has been helping his family out financially. “What did you do to get him to pay these bills — did you sleep with him?” he asks Lauren angrily. “Well, you won’t sleep with me — maybe I should!” she yells. “Try being someone I might wanna sleep with instead of chasing after millionaires every day!” he yells back. Danny and Walker also accuse their wives of living in a dream world. While Danny dismisses Amanda’s singing career as “a going nowhere fantasy”, Walker criticises Lauren for walking around “in this lah-di-dah, Alice in Wonderland existence.”


Whereas Danny is pettiness personified in front of his estranged wife, he is far more generous towards his new girlfriend and her family. This week, he finally gains Bobby and Betsy’s affections by buying them a pair of bunny rabbits. Over on DALLAS, James uses the same tactic to win over the twins’ cousin when he presents John Ross with a Kawasaki four-wheel bike (product placement included). After making us feel so sorry for him in last week’s episode when he was worried James had replaced him in JR’s affections, John Ross delights in rubbing his new friendship with his big bro in Christopher’s face: “I’m really glad I don’t have to hang out with you, you little drip!” This leads a satisfying mini-fight between the two kids in the Southfork living room which JR and Bobby, ironically enough, are obliged to break up. Back on KNOTS, what Danny gives with one hand — the rabbits — he takes away with the other — Amanda’s dog Chester — whom he insists belongs to him.


The final scenes of KNOTS and FALCON CREST both deal with marital violence, but in very different ways. Having been persuaded to sell the winery to Michael Sharpe, Emma has a last minute change of heart, so Michael gives Charley and Ian an ultimatum. “Loan sharking is a tough business,” he tells them. “I admire the way you’ve kept one step ahead of the law in country after country … Within twenty-four hours, I want Mary Poppins’ autograph on this piece of paper or you two are gonna spend the next twenty years as prom queens in the nearest penitentiary.” Ian comes up with a plan: he’ll forge Emma’s signature on the sales agreement while Charley kills Emma and makes it look like a suicide. Accordingly, the episode ends with Charley entering the marital bedroom with the intention of blowing his wife’s brains out, only to be stopped in his tracks by the news that she is pregnant.


However, this is mild, even laughable stuff compared to the closing minutes of KNOTS where Amanda’s argument with Danny over the dog escalates into the most graphic and violent depiction of rape we’ve yet seen in Soap Land. When this season of KNOTS was originally broadcast by the BBC, the sequence was heavily cut, and this is only the second time I’ve seen the unabridged version. The sheer length of the onscreen assault still feels shocking, but not in the same way that, say, Charley’s suffocation of Angela on FC was shocking — there is no vicarious thrill in watching what Danny does to Amanda, nor is there meant to be. I’m not really inclined to rewind the scene in order to itemise each gruesome detail, but the moment that made the strongest impact this time around is when Danny is pulling Amanda across the floor and her skirt rises above her waist, exposing her underwear. This would be a horribly degrading moment under any circumstances but viewed in a Soap Land context, there is an added dimension to it. Amanda’s underwear is plain and ordinary, and utterly unlike the sexy lingerie female characters are invariably seen to be wearing whenever they are in a state of undress (the scene on this week’s FC where Michael Sharpe starts peeling off Genele Ericson’s dress only seconds after meeting her for the first time being a case in point). It underlines the fact that Amanda is as unprepared as she is unwilling for her body to be put on display. Unlike almost every other young (and not so young) woman in Soap Land, she does not dress to titillate at a moment’s notice.


The contradiction between the ordinary and the glamorous, the mundane and the escapist, between “us” and “them”, is a quintessential KNOTS paradox. There is another, far more trivial example elsewhere in this week’s ep. After splitting up with Tom Ryan in the opening scene, Paige returns to the Sumner Group where she continually asks Polly the receptionist if he has called. At the end of the working day, the two women share a friendly conversation. The following day, in the mistaken belief that they have now forged a sisterly bond, Polly drops by Paige’s office and offers her a chocolate bar: “When I’m depressed, chocolate’s the only thing that works.” “Who said I was depressed?” Paige asks. “Well, he didn’t call today either,” she replies. “Did I ask you if he called today?” Paige retorts haughtily, reverting to her default setting of ‘ice princess’ and thus making it clear that, whatever Polly may have assumed, they are not of equal status. After Polly makes her apologies and leaves, she unwraps the chocolate bar anyway and takes a bite — and so we see that, underneath her icy exterior, Paige is an ordinary girl after all! We assume that’s the punchline of the scene, but it’s not. When she tosses the wrapper into the trash can, we see it is already full of identical wrappers — at least a half dozen. That’s the punchline: she’s even more of an ordinary girl than we could have guessed! Except, of course, she can’t be: that amount of chocolate and the size of her waist simply do not compute. There’s yet a further element of unreality to the scene. Unlike DALLAS, which proudly displays the Kawasaki logo on John Ross’s new bike, KNOTS appears keen to disguise the brand of chocolate favoured by ordinary girls in their hour of need (it looks like Snickers to me), which would explain why Paige discards the wrapper before consuming its contents. While there’s something fundamentally sexy about Paige nibbling on a naked chocolate bar as she holds it between her fingers, it’s also an impractically messy thing to do, especially in an office environment.


Polly’s attempt to bond with Paige may have fallen flat, but she’s making good progress in other areas. Whereas it took Ewing Oil's receptionist Kendall seven years to achieve a close up and a one night stand with James Beaumont, Polly has only been at the Sumner Group for three weeks and she’s already dated Harvey the messenger guy, Paul from business affairs and now Jack from accounting, and she gets more screen time in this week’s episode than her big boss Greg. Meanwhile, the latest configuration of the Ewing Oil offices means that the desks of the secretaries, Sly, Phyllis and Jackie, now all face each other, which allows them to function as kind of a silent Greek chorus, exchanging knowing looks when an upset Cally shows up looking for JR, or when Bobby is taken aback by a surprise visit from Kay Lloyd.


While Tom and Paige have split, Soap Land’s other hot young couple, DALLAS’s James and Michelle, are having a great time together, both on the dance floor and in bed. “Isn’t life perfect?” Michelle sighs. “Almost,” James replies, before admitting that he’s worried about his mother. “She still loves [JR], Michelle. She should be with him … It’s not that I have anything against Cally … I just wish she’d go away somewhere, forever.” This last remark has a similar effect to the comment Abby once casually made about Val’s babies to Scott Eastman on KNOTS. While Michelle doesn’t go as far as kidnapping James’s stepmother and selling her to a childless couple, she does delight in confirming Cally’s worst fears after Cally spots her and JR together at a hotel. “Are you sleeping with my husband?” Cally asks her tearfully. “Yes, I am,” lies Michelle with a big smile on her face.


Just as Cally immediately jumps to the wrong conclusion about her spouse, so does Lance Cumson. Since watching Ned Vogel and Pilar’s sex tape last week, he has been licking his wounds in a sleazy bar in Juarez. Finally, he calls his wife — only to hear Richard Channing’s voice on the other end of the line. While DALLAS ends with Cally showing up at Alex Barton’s door looking for revenge (“I’m gonna hurt him, Alex, just like he hurt me”), Lance takes even more drastic action: he volunteers himself for a game of “Scorpion in the Slipper”, which is like Russian roulette, only instead of shooting yourself in the head, you run the risk of being bitten by a fatally poisonous arachnid. When Lance beats the odds and survives unscathed, it has a similarly reinvigorating effect on him as Jock’s letter did on JR at the end of last week’s DALLAS. “You caught a luck wave, man,” his hippy barfly pal tells him. “I'm gonna ride that wave home,” Lance replies.


While Mark Baylor is given three years for a murder he didn’t commit on KNOTS, DALLAS introduces us to Jack Bouleris, the captain who was allegedly drunk in charge of the Ewing tanker at the time of the collision in the Gulf. “I haven’t had a drink in four years,” he tells Bobby. Instead, like Baylor, he has become the fall guy for a big corporation: “I was railroaded out of my job. I was called a drunk, I was made a laughing stock in front of my family because you fired me.” But whereas Baylor is anxious that no harm should come to Mack (“I don’t want to fall out of a seven storey window. I don’t want Mack to either,” he tells Karen, urging her to persuade him “to give up his holy crusade against Oakman Industries” ), Bouleris is less magnanimous when Bobby asks him to help him get to the bottom of how the collision really happened. “You’ve got the noose around your neck and you want me to cut the rope?” he scoffs. “I hope I take you down with me!”


And this week’s Top 3 are …


1 (1) DALLAS

2 (2) KNOTS LANDING

3 (3) FALCON CREST

Hey, those candy bar wrappers are DEFINITELY Milky Way...

 

[Stillwitty]

Ok, was Anne Matheson not one of the most, if not the most, fun characters on all the soaps combined. I loved her and her wit. She was funny, but could still be taken seriously. She joked, but never became a joke. KL's most successful foray into comedy, imho.

Hated her character. She personified the antithesis of what women were still working to achieve in the 80's - definitely a creation of male writers....js

29 Mar 90: KNOTS LANDING: Only Just Begun v. 30 Mar 90: DALLAS: The Smiling Cobra

In the opening scene of this week’s DALLAS, JR is working late at Ewing Oil when the elevator door slides open and an unseen someone slowly makes their way towards his office door. The ominous music on the soundtrack and the camera assuming the intruder’s point of view suggest a scenario similar to the one at the end of Season 6 when Katherine Wentworth (as it turned out to be) stole into JR’s office and pumped Bobby full of bullets. But this is a misdirection. After hearing a noise, JR grabs a gun from his desk and comes out to investigate — only to find, instead of a vengeful shoulder-padded sister-in-law, a man named Schmidt who is an hour early for their prearranged meeting. For no particular reason, Schmidt is depicted as a klutzy, nebbish Jewish stereotype. “Go ahead, make my wife’s day!” he exclaims, looking at JR’s gun. “It’ll help explain to her why I’m late for dinner tonight … You don’t know Zelda. She’s a tyrant when it comes to her schedule!” This is the nearest DALLAS has yet got to the broad and profoundly unfunny comedy that blighted FALCON CREST during its sixth and seventh seasons.

There are also reminders of Katherine Wentworth on this week’s KNOTS where Dianne Kirkwood delivers a truly impressive rant about how Karen stole her chance at onscreen stardom when she became the presenter of OPEN MIKE. “Oh come on, Dianne — you can’t be jealous?!” her assistant Jeff asks in surprise. “No?” she replies bitterly. “Can I feel resentful? Can I feel cheated? Can I pretend that she has a fraction of my experience — or am I supposed to erase twelve years of doing every local midday talk show from Boise to Bakersfield? … I did not, repeat not, do any of that to end up behind the scenes … OPEN MIKE was my shot, mine!” The end of this speech is underscored by some familiarly sinister plinky-plonky “going a bit mad” music. This piece has cropped up before on KNOTS, but is most closely associated with a bewigged Katherine lurking in her car outside Pam’s house during “Swan Song”. Katherine’s subsequent act of mowing someone down with that car will also be recalled at the end of this week’s KNOTS, but we’ll get to that.

During their exchange, JR offers the unfunny Mr Schmidt a cash bonus for a job well done (we won’t find out what job Schmidt has done until later in the ep). “Take Mrs Schmidt to dinner on me,” he suggests. “She’d never go for that — tonight’s meatloaf,” Schmidt replies dejectedly. “Well, just remember,” JR tells him, “marriage is like a salad — a real man has to learn to keep his tomatoes on top.” Marital advice and references to meatloaf — both of these are recurring motifs throughout this week’s KNOTS.

The topic of marriage is under discussion from the very top of the ep as Paige reacts to Tom’s proposal. “If I were going to marry someone,” she begins, “I would marry you … Things change. What if we fall out of love?” She offers to live with him instead, but that’s not enough for Tom. “A piece of paper makes all the difference?” she asks him. “Yes, it does,” he insists. “And it’s supposed to, Paige. It’s supposed to make you work for it. It’s supposed to make it harder to break up … You can’t blame me because other people have dumped on you. I’m not gonna do that to you. I wanna be faithful to you because I love you. I wanna be the best father to our children, the kind of father that you never had.”

In some ways, Paige’s issues — a fear of commitment, of being hurt — are the same as those explored by Bobby and April on DALLAS over the past few weeks. In their case, those issues manifested themselves in the form of physical obstacles — the appearance of Pam’s lookalike, April retreating to her childhood home — that the couple had to confront before they could move on with their lives. On this week’s KNOTS, these issues are woven into the fabric of the episode so that Paige couldn’t avoid them if she wanted to. Everywhere she goes, people are discussing marriage and commitment — while meatloaf (microwaved meatloaf in particular) becomes a symbol of the kind of cosy domesticity she is so wary of (“I don’t wanna spend the rest of my life sitting in front of that TV eating leftovers that have been reheated in the microwave”) but that Tom is only too eager to embrace (“I am a homebody … Deep down, that’s what I am”).

While having dinner with the Mackenzies, Paige’s ears prick up when she hears her father assuring Karen that the estrangement between Pat and Frank is temporary: “I know they take their marriage vows seriously. I know that their marriage licence is more than a piece of paper. I know how much they’ve invested in their marriage … so I know they’ll work it out.” Later in the ep, Anne offers her daughter the polar opposite view of marriage: “Nothing is permanent. It doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out … I was never bothered by the institution because, for me, it was a temporary solution to some very pressing problems. It was always more convenient for me to be married than unmarried — except when it was more convenient for me to be single.” This last remark seems to imply that Anne has had more than one husband. It recalls the casual but surprising reference on last week’s FALCON CREST to Michael Sharpe having had four wives. “You loved Mack,” Paige reminds Anne. “You could have married him.” “Yes,” she concedes, “but the prospect of sitting around every night eating meatloaf reheated in the microwave was just too much to comprehend.” “They didn’t have microwaves when you were young,” Paige points out. “Aren’t you wicked?” Anne smiles. This dovetails neatly with Mack’s earlier observation to Karen: “Have you noticed how meatloaf always taste better the next day?”

Last week, Val, in spite of her string of broken marriages, advised Olivia to follow her heart with regard to Harold. Greg, who has been married as many times as Val, has a different perspective. “I married once out of ignorance, once out of love and once for business reasons,” he tells Paige. “All my marriages left me miserable. I’m a living breathing argument against marriage so don’t come to me for encouragement.”

Danny Waleska has never crossed paths with Paige, but he too feels the need to venture an opinion on the subject, if only to his friendly neighbourhood bartender: “It sucks — you show me a married couple, I’ll show you a demented couple.”

As part of his pitch to Paige, Tom gently suggests that she has her priorities wrong: “You’ll go to the office and talk about flow charts and spreadsheets and future projections and you know what? I think it’s more interesting and, in some ways more important, to talk about how much money to leave underneath the pillow from the tooth fairy.” Back on DALLAS, April comes to a similar conclusion after her business project with Michelle goes belly-up and she realises she’s relieved. “I don’t wanna be married to a five-year development deal. I wanna be married to you,” she tells Bobby.

April and Bobby setting their wedding date generates further marriage talk in DALLAS. Cally wishes them the best, despite the fact that her own marriage is hanging by a thread — a thread JR intends to cut before the episode is over.

The two-women-wearing-the-same-outfit is a familiar setup in Soap Land. Alexis and Krystle introduced it about seven years ago when they both stepped out of adjacent cubicles wearing the same party frock. And then April and Michelle repeated the scenario at the beginning of this season. In each case, it’s a visual gag that provides the opportunity for a few catty one-liners. KNOTS takes it to another level after Anne spots Paula buying an outfit and then deliberately turns up at the Sumner Group wearing one identical. In soap terms, her timing couldn’t better as Paula has just broken up with Greg only moments before. Throughout their relationship, Paula has matched Greg’s cool exterior pretty much quip for quip, even though we know she’s a lot kinder and more sensitive underneath. But when he makes no effort to dissuade her from accepting a job offer in Toronto, she finally snaps. “Nothing bothers you, nothing gets to you … My God, your own daughter gets murdered and not even that bothers you!” she shouts in the middle of the Sumner Group. Right then, Anne steps out of the elevator wearing the same dress and laughs with faux embarrassment. “Are you enjoying this?” Paula asks Greg. He just turns and walks away. On her way out of the series, Paula also finds time to weigh on Paige’s ‘to marry or not to marry’ dilemma. “Just in case you’re having second thoughts about Greg,” she tells her, “there’s the marrying kind and there’s the single kind, and … in the end, the single kind is monumentally, colossally boring.”

While the Farlows are involved in a murder mystery on DALLAS, the Mackenzies are pondering how seriously to take the creepy letter Karen received at the end of last week’s KNOTS. In both cases, the wholesomeness of the Ewingverse matriarch is somewhat at odds with the lurid tone of the storyline. Up until now, Miss Ellie and Clayton have been mere observers in their mystery, but there’s a shift after Atticus Ward, having returned from the dead, dies all over again after drinking from a poisoned glass intended for Clayton. Meanwhile, Karen unwittingly signs a photo for Wayne, the author of the creepy letter, which we then see him add to the collection of Karen-related cuttings he has pinned to his bedroom wall. Even though the background music goes a bit loopy at this point, Wayne’s shrine is pretty modest by Soap Land psycho standards — only five pictures, as opposed to the countless photos of Lucy Ewing Roger Larsen used to have covering his walls — but hey, it’s early days.

Purely out of spite, Danny Waleska tells Bobby Gibson over the phone that his Uncle Gary is really his daddy. This eventually leads to very sweet, very funny and very touching scene up a tree where Gary essentially attempts to explain the past six seasons of KNOTS to his five-year-old son. “If this was a movie, I would have walked out of it because it doesn’t make any sense,” Bobby concludes. As the twins gain an extra father on KNOTS, their cousin John Ross is about to lose a second mother on DALLAS when Cally finally decides to leave JR. “Cally, please don’t go. Don’t you leave me too,” he pleads tearfully.

In contrast, Julie is all smiles on KNOTS because Pat and Frank are reuniting after their episode-long estrangement. But as soon as Pat says the words “I’ve gotta get some ice cream”, your heart starts to sink. And then when Tom Ryan returns home to his apartment and puts ‘You Are So Beautiful’ by Joe Cocker on the turntable, you know it’s all over — that by the time we reach the end of this song, tragedy will have struck. Before then, however, we see Paige surprise Tom with the gift of some microwavable meatloaf — her way of accepting his proposal. Then we cut back and forth between Danny leaving a bar drunk, buying a bottle of liquor and getting behind the wheel of his car; and Frank and Pat each purchasing tubs of the same flavour ice cream from different stores and then getting into their cars — all three of them separately heading in the direction of Seaview Circle where Julie is setting the dinner table. While Pat and Frank both look happy, Danny is drunk and disorientated as he zig zags unsteadily through the streets. All we can hear is Joe Cocker — there are no diegetic sounds, no noise at all outside of the song — it’s as if the characters are all somehow locked inside of it, or inside Danny’s drunken head. So when Pat steps out of her car in front of her house and Danny drives straight into her, it really is like an out of body experience.

Watching various characters and storylines slowly converge on a particular place to create one almighty climax is a narrative device unique to KNOTS in Soap Land. They did with the Belmar Hotel at the end of Season 5, the Fisher house a year later and then Empire Valley in Season 7 — but this is the first time they’ve chosen the cul-de-sac itself. DALLAS uses another classic approach for its final act this week: the domino effect, whereby the events of one scene lead to the next and then the next, steadily building in momentum.

First, James learns that the person behind the sabotaging of Michelle and April’s business project was JR. (That’s the job JR was paying Mr Schmidt for in the opening scene.) During their subsequent father/son showdown, JR explains that he was trying to force a wedge between James and Michelle: “You really think I’m gonna sit idly by and let that gold-digging tramp lead you round by the nose?!” James retaliates by informing his daddy that he and Michelle are getting married: “Imagine breakfast every morning with you sitting across the table from that gold-digging little tramp!” An angry JR then returns to the ranch where he takes his frustrations out on Cally, accusing her of turning James against him. “It was a sorry day when you first set foot in this house … You just cost me my firstborn son.” It’s unclear as to whether he genuinely blames Cally for James's behaviour or is just using it as a way to finally drive her off the ranch. Either way, it works. Like on Paula on KNOTS, Cally just can’t take it anymore and packs her bags to leave. (In place if Anne turning up in the same outfit, Cally’s distress is compounded by JR having Serena call up in her sexiest voice and ask to speak to her husband.) Cally is almost across the Southfork threshold when John Ross comes running after her. “Dad, make her stay! Tell her how much we love her!” he begs his father who is watching from the balcony above. According to the rules JR has imposed on himself for this particular storyline, he is forced to comply. “Cally, I didn’t mean anything I said, darlin’. Please don’t go,” he tells her with fake sincerity. It’s really stupid and really enjoyable — and it’s laugh out loud funny, in a way the laboured comedy with Mr Schmidt at the start of the ep just isn’t.

And this week’s Top 2 are

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (2) DALLAS

Anne's comment about Mack and Meatloaf (M & M?) reinforces what I always said: Anne blaming her parents for breaking them up was always deflection from the truth. A young Anne thought long and hard and realized Mack MacKenzie could never have supported her in the manner to which she was accustomed and she sold out him, Paige's childhood and her own salvation in pursuit of a life of decadent excess. Damn, I love the sound of judmentalism in the evening...

29 Mar 90: KNOTS LANDING: Only Just Begun v. 30 Mar 90: DALLAS: The Smiling Cobra

In the opening scene of this week’s DALLAS, JR is working late at Ewing Oil when the elevator door slides open and an unseen someone slowly makes their way towards his office door. The ominous music on the soundtrack and the camera assuming the intruder’s point of view suggest a scenario similar to the one at the end of Season 6 when Katherine Wentworth (as it turned out to be) stole into JR’s office and pumped Bobby full of bullets. But this is a misdirection. After hearing a noise, JR grabs a gun from his desk and comes out to investigate — only to find, instead of a vengeful shoulder-padded sister-in-law, a man named Schmidt who is an hour early for their prearranged meeting. For no particular reason, Schmidt is depicted as a klutzy, nebbish Jewish stereotype. “Go ahead, make my wife’s day!” he exclaims, looking at JR’s gun. “It’ll help explain to her why I’m late for dinner tonight … You don’t know Zelda. She’s a tyrant when it comes to her schedule!” This is the nearest DALLAS has yet got to the broad and profoundly unfunny comedy that blighted FALCON CREST during its sixth and seventh seasons.

There are also reminders of Katherine Wentworth on this week’s KNOTS where Dianne Kirkwood delivers a truly impressive rant about how Karen stole her chance at onscreen stardom when she became the presenter of OPEN MIKE. “Oh come on, Dianne — you can’t be jealous?!” her assistant Jeff asks in surprise. “No?” she replies bitterly. “Can I feel resentful? Can I feel cheated? Can I pretend that she has a fraction of my experience — or am I supposed to erase twelve years of doing every local midday talk show from Boise to Bakersfield? … I did not, repeat not, do any of that to end up behind the scenes … OPEN MIKE was my shot, mine!” The end of this speech is underscored by some familiarly sinister plinky-plonky “going a bit mad” music. This piece has cropped up before on KNOTS, but is most closely associated with a bewigged Katherine lurking in her car outside Pam’s house during “Swan Song”. Katherine’s subsequent act of mowing someone down with that car will also be recalled at the end of this week’s KNOTS, but we’ll get to that.

During their exchange, JR offers the unfunny Mr Schmidt a cash bonus for a job well done (we won’t find out what job Schmidt has done until later in the ep). “Take Mrs Schmidt to dinner on me,” he suggests. “She’d never go for that — tonight’s meatloaf,” Schmidt replies dejectedly. “Well, just remember,” JR tells him, “marriage is like a salad — a real man has to learn to keep his tomatoes on top.” Marital advice and references to meatloaf — both of these are recurring motifs throughout this week’s KNOTS.

The topic of marriage is under discussion from the very top of the ep as Paige reacts to Tom’s proposal. “If I were going to marry someone,” she begins, “I would marry you … Things change. What if we fall out of love?” She offers to live with him instead, but that’s not enough for Tom. “A piece of paper makes all the difference?” she asks him. “Yes, it does,” he insists. “And it’s supposed to, Paige. It’s supposed to make you work for it. It’s supposed to make it harder to break up … You can’t blame me because other people have dumped on you. I’m not gonna do that to you. I wanna be faithful to you because I love you. I wanna be the best father to our children, the kind of father that you never had.”

In some ways, Paige’s issues — a fear of commitment, of being hurt — are the same as those explored by Bobby and April on DALLAS over the past few weeks. In their case, those issues manifested themselves in the form of physical obstacles — the appearance of Pam’s lookalike, April retreating to her childhood home — that the couple had to confront before they could move on with their lives. On this week’s KNOTS, these issues are woven into the fabric of the episode so that Paige couldn’t avoid them if she wanted to. Everywhere she goes, people are discussing marriage and commitment — while meatloaf (microwaved meatloaf in particular) becomes a symbol of the kind of cosy domesticity she is so wary of (“I don’t wanna spend the rest of my life sitting in front of that TV eating leftovers that have been reheated in the microwave”) but that Tom is only too eager to embrace (“I am a homebody … Deep down, that’s what I am”).

While having dinner with the Mackenzies, Paige’s ears prick up when she hears her father assuring Karen that the estrangement between Pat and Frank is temporary: “I know they take their marriage vows seriously. I know that their marriage licence is more than a piece of paper. I know how much they’ve invested in their marriage … so I know they’ll work it out.” Later in the ep, Anne offers her daughter the polar opposite view of marriage: “Nothing is permanent. It doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out … I was never bothered by the institution because, for me, it was a temporary solution to some very pressing problems. It was always more convenient for me to be married than unmarried — except when it was more convenient for me to be single.” This last remark seems to imply that Anne has had more than one husband. It recalls the casual but surprising reference on last week’s FALCON CREST to Michael Sharpe having had four wives. “You loved Mack,” Paige reminds Anne. “You could have married him.” “Yes,” she concedes, “but the prospect of sitting around every night eating meatloaf reheated in the microwave was just too much to comprehend.” “They didn’t have microwaves when you were young,” Paige points out. “Aren’t you wicked?” Anne smiles. This dovetails neatly with Mack’s earlier observation to Karen: “Have you noticed how meatloaf always taste better the next day?”

Last week, Val, in spite of her string of broken marriages, advised Olivia to follow her heart with regard to Harold. Greg, who has been married as many times as Val, has a different perspective. “I married once out of ignorance, once out of love and once for business reasons,” he tells Paige. “All my marriages left me miserable. I’m a living breathing argument against marriage so don’t come to me for encouragement.”

Danny Waleska has never crossed paths with Paige, but he too feels the need to venture an opinion on the subject, if only to his friendly neighbourhood bartender: “It sucks — you show me a married couple, I’ll show you a demented couple.”

As part of his pitch to Paige, Tom gently suggests that she has her priorities wrong: “You’ll go to the office and talk about flow charts and spreadsheets and future projections and you know what? I think it’s more interesting and, in some ways more important, to talk about how much money to leave underneath the pillow from the tooth fairy.” Back on DALLAS, April comes to a similar conclusion after her business project with Michelle goes belly-up and she realises she’s relieved. “I don’t wanna be married to a five-year development deal. I wanna be married to you,” she tells Bobby.

April and Bobby setting their wedding date generates further marriage talk in DALLAS. Cally wishes them the best, despite the fact that her own marriage is hanging by a thread — a thread JR intends to cut before the episode is over.

The two-women-wearing-the-same-outfit is a familiar setup in Soap Land. Alexis and Krystle introduced it about seven years ago when they both stepped out of adjacent cubicles wearing the same party frock. And then April and Michelle repeated the scenario at the beginning of this season. In each case, it’s a visual gag that provides the opportunity for a few catty one-liners. KNOTS takes it to another level after Anne spots Paula buying an outfit and then deliberately turns up at the Sumner Group wearing one identical. In soap terms, her timing couldn’t better as Paula has just broken up with Greg only moments before. Throughout their relationship, Paula has matched Greg’s cool exterior pretty much quip for quip, even though we know she’s a lot kinder and more sensitive underneath. But when he makes no effort to dissuade her from accepting a job offer in Toronto, she finally snaps. “Nothing bothers you, nothing gets to you … My God, your own daughter gets murdered and not even that bothers you!” she shouts in the middle of the Sumner Group. Right then, Anne steps out of the elevator wearing the same dress and laughs with faux embarrassment. “Are you enjoying this?” Paula asks Greg. He just turns and walks away. On her way out of the series, Paula also finds time to weigh on Paige’s ‘to marry or not to marry’ dilemma. “Just in case you’re having second thoughts about Greg,” she tells her, “there’s the marrying kind and there’s the single kind, and … in the end, the single kind is monumentally, colossally boring.”

While the Farlows are involved in a murder mystery on DALLAS, the Mackenzies are pondering how seriously to take the creepy letter Karen received at the end of last week’s KNOTS. In both cases, the wholesomeness of the Ewingverse matriarch is somewhat at odds with the lurid tone of the storyline. Up until now, Miss Ellie and Clayton have been mere observers in their mystery, but there’s a shift after Atticus Ward, having returned from the dead, dies all over again after drinking from a poisoned glass intended for Clayton. Meanwhile, Karen unwittingly signs a photo for Wayne, the author of the creepy letter, which we then see him add to the collection of Karen-related cuttings he has pinned to his bedroom wall. Even though the background music goes a bit loopy at this point, Wayne’s shrine is pretty modest by Soap Land psycho standards — only five pictures, as opposed to the countless photos of Lucy Ewing Roger Larsen used to have covering his walls — but hey, it’s early days.

Purely out of spite, Danny Waleska tells Bobby Gibson over the phone that his Uncle Gary is really his daddy. This eventually leads to very sweet, very funny and very touching scene up a tree where Gary essentially attempts to explain the past six seasons of KNOTS to his five-year-old son. “If this was a movie, I would have walked out of it because it doesn’t make any sense,” Bobby concludes. As the twins gain an extra father on KNOTS, their cousin John Ross is about to lose a second mother on DALLAS when Cally finally decides to leave JR. “Cally, please don’t go. Don’t you leave me too,” he pleads tearfully.

In contrast, Julie is all smiles on KNOTS because Pat and Frank are reuniting after their episode-long estrangement. But as soon as Pat says the words “I’ve gotta get some ice cream”, your heart starts to sink. And then when Tom Ryan returns home to his apartment and puts ‘You Are So Beautiful’ by Joe Cocker on the turntable, you know it’s all over — that by the time we reach the end of this song, tragedy will have struck. Before then, however, we see Paige surprise Tom with the gift of some microwavable meatloaf — her way of accepting his proposal. Then we cut back and forth between Danny leaving a bar drunk, buying a bottle of liquor and getting behind the wheel of his car; and Frank and Pat each purchasing tubs of the same flavour ice cream from different stores and then getting into their cars — all three of them separately heading in the direction of Seaview Circle where Julie is setting the dinner table. While Pat and Frank both look happy, Danny is drunk and disorientated as he zig zags unsteadily through the streets. All we can hear is Joe Cocker — there are no diegetic sounds, no noise at all outside of the song — it’s as if the characters are all somehow locked inside of it, or inside Danny’s drunken head. So when Pat steps out of her car in front of her house and Danny drives straight into her, it really is like an out of body experience.

Watching various characters and storylines slowly converge on a particular place to create one almighty climax is a narrative device unique to KNOTS in Soap Land. They did with the Belmar Hotel at the end of Season 5, the Fisher house a year later and then Empire Valley in Season 7 — but this is the first time they’ve chosen the cul-de-sac itself. DALLAS uses another classic approach for its final act this week: the domino effect, whereby the events of one scene lead to the next and then the next, steadily building in momentum.

First, James learns that the person behind the sabotaging of Michelle and April’s business project was JR. (That’s the job JR was paying Mr Schmidt for in the opening scene.) During their subsequent father/son showdown, JR explains that he was trying to force a wedge between James and Michelle: “You really think I’m gonna sit idly by and let that gold-digging tramp lead you round by the nose?!” James retaliates by informing his daddy that he and Michelle are getting married: “Imagine breakfast every morning with you sitting across the table from that gold-digging little tramp!” An angry JR then returns to the ranch where he takes his frustrations out on Cally, accusing her of turning James against him. “It was a sorry day when you first set foot in this house … You just cost me my firstborn son.” It’s unclear as to whether he genuinely blames Cally for James's behaviour or is just using it as a way to finally drive her off the ranch. Either way, it works. Like on Paula on KNOTS, Cally just can’t take it anymore and packs her bags to leave. (In place if Anne turning up in the same outfit, Cally’s distress is compounded by JR having Serena call up in her sexiest voice and ask to speak to her husband.) Cally is almost across the Southfork threshold when John Ross comes running after her. “Dad, make her stay! Tell her how much we love her!” he begs his father who is watching from the balcony above. According to the rules JR has imposed on himself for this particular storyline, he is forced to comply. “Cally, I didn’t mean anything I said, darlin’. Please don’t go,” he tells her with fake sincerity. It’s really stupid and really enjoyable — and it’s laugh out loud funny, in a way the laboured comedy with Mr Schmidt at the start of the ep just isn’t.

And this week’s Top 2 are

1 (1) KNOTS LANDING
2 (2) DALLAS

Terrific episode of KL: Using leftover microwave meatloaf as a metaphor for a happy marriage is absolutely brilliant writing...all culminating in Paige's marital decision-making...

I recall reading a gossipy "spoiler" when Michelle Phillips returned to the show that they intended to introduce a younger brother for Paige, the product of a brief marriage she had in the period after she had dumped Paige on her parents and moved to Europe. It never happened, obviously, but it would make sense that a flighty girl like Anne would have been involved with other men and (possibly) having other children when she was Paige's age. They would have easily had NS play Anne in the flashbacks, too. I always thought some of the elements of the Steve Brewer story (that involved Claudia) could have been the story they had dreamed up originally for Anne and her mystery kid. And mortal enemies Anne and Claudia would have been livid if Anne's son had gotten involved with Claudia's daughter Kate.

As it was, they made a conscious effort to avoid mentioning much of anything she had done during the period after she left Mack, likely to keep that period "free" in case they plugged in a secret kid, husband, etc. to give Anne something to do.

All excellent points and would have made much better storylines than, for example, Tidal Energy...

 

[Stillwitty]

I know I'm in the minority here but I liked the Henery the Eighth scene. Like the two characters I remember when the song was a bonafide hit and I thought it was a nice way for two old friends to blow off some steam.

Agree! And for good friends who share common history, not unheard of to jam out to a very inane childhood song. For us, it was "Joy to the World" by 3 Dog Night (Jeremiah was a Bullfrog - da da da - was a good friend of mine!) Michelle and Joan seemed to enjoy it so no harm, no foul...