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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 20805" data-attributes="member: 22">22/Jan/86: DYNASTY: The Vigil v. 23/Jan/86: KNOTS LANDING: Alterations v. 24/Jan/86: DALLAS: Blame it on Bogota v. 24/Jan/86: FALCON CREST: Collision Course“I don’t like watching good people get hurt in the name of Falcon Crest … I will never go back there,” vows Christopher Rossini to his grandmother — but even as one illegitimate Soap Land son turns his back on his family legacy, another emerges to claim what is rightfully his. “Won’t it be great to see me sitting here, finally getting what’s due me — my birthright?” crows Peter Hollister while showing his mother around Greg's office on KNOTS. Adam Carrington echoes this sentiment on DYNASTY. Following his collapse at the end of last week’s episode, Blake Carrington spends most of this week’s ep lying unconscious at Soap Land Memorial Hospital where Adam visits him. "I am your son, a true heir. I am a Carrington and you owe me so don’t you dare die!” he commands, standing over his father’s bed.Alexis is concerned about Blake too, much to the annoyance of Dex who complains about having to “wait in line” for her attention. "I’ll leave you to your memories of Blake and your future with Galen,” he huffs. Mark Graison is in a comparable situation on DALLAS as Pam flies off to Colombia to look for emeralds with Matt Cantrell, but he deals with it very differently. "I have to let her get this trip of her system,” he explains to Sue Ellen. “She’s doing it for Bobby. It may be the last trip she needs to take or it may be only the first. I love her, but this is the only way for me to find out if I belong in her future.”Dex is also angered when Galen asks Alexis for another $2,000,000 to help him regain his Moldavian empire. Cliff Barnes, meanwhile, eagerly offers the exact same amount to become Pam’s partner in the emerald mine. Alexis and Cliff are both being duped. Galen, who has regained the use of his legs but contains to feign paralysis in order to take advantage of Alexis's hospitality, plans to dump her as soon as he is back in power, while JR uses an unsuspecting Mandy Winger to feed Cliff false information about the mine’s value — Cliff thinks he and Pam are sitting on a fortune when in reality it’s worthless.The Carringtons pace the floor of Soap Land Memorial while awaiting news of Blake’s condition just as the Ewings and Cliff did on DALLAS two weeks ago while awaiting news of Jamie's. The scene where Blake’s doctor tells Krystle, aka Rita, the good news (“Your husband’s going to be all right”) plays like a parody of the equivalent scene in DALLAS. Where the Ewings beamed smiles of undiluted joy for Jamie, Rita struggles to do the same thing when this prognosis is actually the last thing she was hoping to hear.Rita and Cliff are at Blake and Jamie’s respective bedsides when they regain consciousness for the first time since their ordeals. The scenes that follow, however, are very different. Blake is more frightened, more enfeebled than we’ve ever seen him as he finally realises the truth. “You’re not my wife!” he shouts weakly at Rita, who is possibly even more terrified than he is. In contrast, when Jamie wakes up on DALLAS, Cliff burbles on sweetly about how she’s going to be all right until they’re both in tears. It’s a touching little scene and, at the risk of damning with faint praise, probably the highlight of the episode. Indeed, I find myself rooting for Jenna Wade this week as she withdraws mentally from this strange new DALLAS in which she now finds herself — humming dreamily in an empty boutique instead of lunching with the beatific Donna; insisting on talking about Bobby at the Ewing dinner table when the rest of the family would sooner chit-chat about emerald mines or discuss day-trips to Southfork for disadvantaged kids.While this is by no means my favourite period of DALLAS, there are still small pleasures to be gleaned from it. There’s a nice scene where JR drops by Southfork in the middle of a working day, hoping to ascertain why his mother is making unusually large financial transactions. Miss Ellie isn’t giving anything away so he’s obliged to behave as if he’s simply there to enjoy her company. It’s as close to an unguarded moment between mother and son as I can remember. Also, the faded opulence of the hotel in Las Gatos where Matt Cantrell and Pam pitch up at the end of the episode is quite evocative (“What an odd place for the middle of nowhere,” Pam observes) while the dramatic emphasis placed on the warning Matt receives from the local chief of police just before the freeze frame (“The last time you did business in our city, you made many enemies. They remember you well. Be very careful, amigo”) is unusual and intriguing.I especially like the dynamic between Angelica Nero and her subordinates, particularly the amused glances she and Grace exchange while the humourless Nicholas fusses over the details of their master plan. FALCON CREST’s Angela now has a Grace equivalent of her own, a deviously efficient Girl Friday known as Miss Jones. As well as their ruthlessness and work ethic, Grace and Miss Jones share the same taste in knowing one-liners. “I’m a woman who enjoys her work,” Grace purrs, referring to her on-the-clock seduction of Jack Ewing. “I do like an incentive programme,” quips Miss Jones when Angela tells her how handsomely she’ll be rewarded for sabotaging Chase’s wine shipment.While Ben Gibson hobbles manfully back to work on this week’s KNOTS, Victoria Principal’s offscreen ailment means that Pam remains almost entirely absent from DALLAS. In fact, she doesn’t appear until literally the very last minute when she and Matt arrive in Los Gatos. As if to compensate for the Pam deficit, Soap Land arranges for her DYNASTY equivalent, Krystle Carrington, to have a knock down drag out fight with … herself. Yes, at long last the two Krystles come face to face and immediately pay homage to the show’s own past by knocking seven bells out of each other in Krystle’s attic prison just as Krystle and Alexis did in Alexis’s studio four years earlier. (This act of self-referencing is the DYNASTY equivalent of Bobby being shot in the Ewing Oil offices four years after JR was — while no one on screen acknowledges the allusion, any semi-regular viewer will get the gag.) The fight itself is a dizzying blur of drama, pastiche and unintentional comedy (the dish mop wigs obscuring the stunt-women’s faces), with echoes of '70s sci-fi (Jaime Sommers battling her own double on THE BIONIC WOMAN) thrown in for good measure. Plus there’s the same subversive kick that made the original Krystle/Alexis catfight worth referencing in the first place. The inelegant sight of two DYNASTY women scrabbling about on the floor — hair mussed, legs splayed, clothing torn — serves as an antidote to the very thing that gives the show its USP: the poise and glamour of its female protagonists. The one function the Krystle/Rita fight serves that the Krystle/Alexis original didn’t is to further the plot. Fake Krystle may have been the one who entered the attic when the fight began, but Real Krystle is the one who leaves it (having rendered her opponent unconscious) — only to run into her captor Joel just before the closing titles!A week after Sable delivered her ultimatum to Jason on THE COLBYS — “If you divorce me, I will tell the world just what kind of woman my sister really is” — Olivia Cunningham comes up with an equivalent (albeit more clumsily phrased) threat on KNOTS. Having decided she’d sooner live with the Mackenzies than her mother, she tells Abby, “If you force me to go back with you, I will tell any court in the world that you knew that Gary was the father of Val’s twins and you knew that they were alive and kidnapped and you didn’t do anything about it.” Olivia's accidental discovery (she overheard Greg threatening Abby over on the phone) serves two narrative purposes. On one level, it means that Abby’s chickens have come home to roost, and that's great — it’s always interesting to see Abby backed into a corner. On another, it functions as a Maguffin for Olivia to act like any normal fifteen-year-old who wakes up one morning and suddenly decides she hates her parents.Likewise, the ongoing tabloid interest in Joshua’s death serves as a dramatic catalyst for Lilimae to behave as irrationally as any real life grieving mother might. This week, she has something of a breakdown in a supermarket when she sees her picture plastered all over the front page of World Secrets. "People in the media have no sense of responsibility,” she complains. "We have got to stop these scandal papers telling lies about our family.” Her sentiments are echoed by Angela on FALCON CREST. “Chao Li, will you take that rag out and burn it?” she requests after the New Globe prints a gossipy article about Peter Stavros becoming a recluse. “The next Howard Hughes,” Lance suggests (or indeed, the next Dimitri Marinos — another Greek shipping magnate who has vanished mysteriously from public view). Angela proves more sanguine about the printed word elsewhere in this week’s FC, surprising Maggie by showing up at her book signing to request an autographed copy of her novel just as JR did at Val's on KNOTS three seasons earlier.Child abuse, a hot-button topic in mid-80s America due in part to the likes of Oprah and Donahue, has once again succeeded in penetrating the insulated walls of Soap Land’s fantasy world. While Greg Sumner jokes about being accused of such a crime while babysitting Laura’s two sons on KNOTS, Abby angrily informs the Mackenzies that her runaway daughter is “not some battered child that needs to be protected from a couple of monster parents” — a line that chimes with JJ Roberts’ question on FALCON CREST a couple of weeks ago: “Isn’t this whole abused children thing turning into another Salem witch hunt?”When Olivia runs away from home, she has a near miss with a sinister looking man who encourages her to get into his car. (The same thing happened the last time she made the crosstown trek from Gary’s ranch to the cul-de-sac.) This is yet another example, like Robin Agretti’s interaction with the pawnbroker on last week’s FALCON CREST or Sue Ellen’s misadventures during her lost weekend at the beginning of this season’s DALLAS, of how Soap Land's mean streets are paved with predators. However, the houses of the rich and respectable can just as perilous. As we discovered in Season 6 of DALLAS, it was behind such doors that Edgar Randolph molested Barbara Mulgravy, the daughter of his family’s housekeeper, and on this week's FALCON CREST, Jordan Roberts has an even worse story to tell. “His hands, his breath, they’re all over me. I can’t wash them off after all these years,” she tells Greg Reardon, referring to her own father — pillar of the community JJ Roberts.When Jordan speaks of the authority figures who failed her when she turned to them for help ("I tried to tell people when I was little, my mother and a counsellor and our minister. No one helped me, no one believed me”), one thinks of the similarly named Jonathan J. Rush on KNOTS — another respected member of his own community, another minister, another father who violently abused his own child. In that case, the abused became the abuser. In this one, the abused became Morgan Fairchild.Indeed, Jordan’s backstory resonates strongly with those of her previous Soap Land selves. “He gave me everything as a child,” she remembers, "beautiful dolls, beautiful dresses, a pony … He was the perfect father, so everyone said.” DALLAS's original Jenna and FLAMINGO ROAD’s Constance were both also largely defined by the pampering they received from their fathers — until Lucas Wade died, leaving his heiress daughter with nothing but debts, and Constance discovered Claude Weldon had been lying to her about her parentage for her entire life. And while Jordan’s wilderness period (“I went through a pretty self-destructive couple of years … too much dope, too much booze”) neatly coincides with Jenna’s jet-setting in Europe after she jilted Bobby, PAPER DOLLS was cancelled before we could learn the dark family secret Racine was running away from before she, like Jordan, reinvented herself as a successful career woman.That FALCON CREST, often so jaunty and trivial in tone, should prove capable of producing a character as utterly wretched and bleak as JJ Roberts (at least Jonathan J. Rush had his faith) is impressive. While JJ is cursed with a clear understanding of the horror he has inflicted upon his daughter, he continues to view himself as a victim. (“Don’t do this to me,” he pleads after Greg resigns from his political campaign.) In the final scene of the episode, he calls Jordan from his office. After apparently taking full responsibility for what he did to her (“You were just a child … You trusted me and I betrayed that … It was never your fault”), he commits the unfathomably cruel act of killing himself while she is still on the other end of the line.When the gun goes off, the camera freezes on Jordan and Greg’s reactions, just it did on Karen and Mack's after Dr Ackerman blew his brains out on last season’s KNOTS. This week, the baby-stealing gynaecologist resurfaces in his other guise of DALLAS banker Franklin Horner. Even though Horner predates Ackerman, such is the sinister impression he made on KNOTS that when Miss Ellie visits his office to request a loan, one can’t shake off the feeling that he’s about to reach across his desk and do something terrible to Mama.And this week’s Top 4 are …1 (4) FALCON CREST2 (1) DYNASTY3 (3) KNOTS LANDING4 (5) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =