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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 22665" data-attributes="member: 22">12 Mar 86: DYNASTY: The Subpoenas v. 13 Mar 86: THE COLBYS: The Outcast v. 13 Mar 86: KNOTS LANDING: Distant Rumblings v. 14 Mar 86: DALLAS: Just Desserts v. 14 Mar 86: FALCON CREST: In AbsentiaThe masquerade balls may be over, but this week’s DYNASTY and DALLAS begin with the Carringtons and Ewings still in their party outfits as they mull over last week's events. In Denver, Blake broods (“It’s very private, very personal,” he says when Krystle asks about his feud with his brother), Alexis gloats (“We’ve won the first round, we have triumphed!” she crows) and Ben threatens (“I can be even more of an enemy to you than Blake ever was,” he warns Alexis). Meanwhile, in Martinique, JR, Jack and Grace sit around looking glum while being interviewed by a police inspector (Michael Ranson’s old hospital boss from FALCON CREST, sporting a different accent but the same gruff demeanour).Three long-established Soap Land characters announce their intentions to leave town this week: Dex Dexter (“Alexis, I didn’t come here to argue, I came to say goodbye”), Cathy Geary (“I need to get away from Knots Landing … I’m going stale here”) and Jenna Wade (“We are leaving Dallas and that is final”). As one ill-advised affair between a young blonde woman and an older married man ends on DYNASTY (“I don't love you … It was a mistake,” Dex tells Amanda), another is about to begin on KNOTS as Cathy and Ben find themselves kissing.Since abandoning her royal princess role a few weeks ago, it’s as if Amanda has been trying to reinvent herself in the mould of early Fallon. If Dex was her Nick Toscanni (an older man less interested in her than in one of her female relatives) and her choice of costume at the masquerade ball an unconscious homage to the one Fallon wore at the opening of La Mirage (1920s flapper girl), then her responding to Dex dumping her by blaming her father (“What did you do,” she asks him, "write him a cheque for a million dollars and say, ‘Lay off Amanda'?”) is the equivalent of Fallon accusing Blake of beating up Michael the chauffeur in Season 1. Of course, Blake is no longer the kind of man to have his daughter’s lover beaten up or bought off. “My God, how could you think I’d do a thing like that?” he asks her in dismay. It turns out Amanda isn’t very good at playing early Fallon after all and, rather sweetly, she and Blake end up weeping in each other’s arms. “Maybe this is what we both needed — a good cry,” he suggests.Blake isn’t the only patriarch in the DYNASTY-verse to exhibit an unusual amount of vulnerability when it comes to his children this week. While Buck Fallmont struggles to accept the fact that his son Bart is gay, Jason Colby is visibly moved when Jeff finally acknowledges him as his dad. Fatherhood — specifically step-fatherhood — is also a predominant theme on this week’s KNOTS. Karen pays tribute to Mack’s parenting skills (“I realise how lucky my kids are to have you”), Mack criticises Gary's (“You better make a decision, pal — you’re either gonna be in Olivia’s life or you’re gonna be out") and Ben lays claim to the twins as his own (“They’re in my blood”). Meanwhile on DALLAS, Ray broaches the subject of adoption with Donna after falling for deaf kid Tony.Just as LB’s bout of meningitis on THE COLBYS a few weeks ago was essentially a plot device to bring Fallon and Jeff closer together, his disappearance at the end of last week’s episode serves chiefly to bridge the gap between Jeff and Jason. This, in turn, leads to Jeff agreeing to wed Fallon in the Colby house. At this point in Soap Land’s evolution, one brother marrying the other’s former wife in the family home really shouldn’t be all that remarkable. After all, the concept of opposing characters coexisting under the same roof began in the very first episode of DALLAS when Bobby brought Digger’s daughter home to Southfork. Since then, the idea of feuding relatives, divorcees and former in-laws all living together has become increasingly commonplace. Earlier this season, DYNASTY had Steven Carrington living in the same house as both of his ex-wives (one of whom is now married to his brother) without anyone appearing to notice. If THE COLBYS were to follow this trend, then it would simply skate over the complications of the Miles/Fallon/Jeff and Sable/Jason/Frankie triangles. Instead, the show uses these conflicts as the basic fuel for its drama. “Here — in this house?? You can’t be serious!” exclaims Sable in disbelief when Jason fills her in on Jeff and Fallon’s wedding plans. "Miles brought Fallon to this house as his bride. If he sees Jeff marry her in this house, think what it’ll do to him!” Adding to the insanity of this situation is the tenuous nature of Sable and Jason’s own relationship. "This will always be my home,” Sable reminds Jason, "divorce or no divorce.” “You wanna go on playing Mrs. Jason Colby?” he responds. "Fine … but you’ll do it my way. This is going to be the best damn wedding Los Angeles has ever seen and you know why? Because my wife is going to see to it.”Back at the office, Jason contemplates giving Sable a quickie divorce. The far-reaching implications of such a move, as described by his lawyer Garrett Boyston, are fascinating. “She may ask for more than money,” he warns. "You control eleven major corporations. You put any of that voting stock into a settlement, you’re gonna scare a lot of people — banks, stock markets, governments … Colby Enterprises employs some sixty-thousand people all over the world, all of them depending on your success … This isn’t just any marriage.” Meanwhile on KNOTS, the end of another long-running Soap Land marriage is dealt with far more mundanely. “I’ve got some news that’ll cheer you up,” says Laura casually as she helps Val pick up some spilt trash from the sidewalk. “My divorce is final." In fact, divorce is very much in the air this week. “Our weary marriage is over,” Claudia tells Adam as she moves out of the Carrington mansion on DYNASTY, while KNOTS ends with Gary telling his wife, “I’m divorcing you, Abby.”Trend of the week: Ex-spouses delivering home truths. “You know people’s weaknesses, but you don’t understand them,” Dex tells Alexis on DYNASTY — a really interesting observation that Alexis attempts to shrug off, but which seems to get to the heart of her character. Over on THE COLBYS, Miles is beside himself with anger when he learns of Jeff and Fallon’s wedding plans and there’s an excitingly shot scene in the Colby garage where he grabs Fallon and shows her her own reflection in a car window: “Look at yourself — the girl who’d 'make something of Miles' and you did — a fool, someone to feel sorry for. Now you want to rub my nose in it!” Meanwhile on KNOTS, Val drops by Soap Land Memorial Hospital where Gary is recovering after crashing his racing car in last week’s episode. “I know about dry drunks,” she tells him. “Sometimes I think you still feel the need for the high." If she’s hoping her words will have the same kind of impact on Gary as they did when she visited him in jail at the end of Season 4, then she’s in for a disappointment. News of her visit does, however, result in a wonderfully sad speech from Ben that captures the emotional toll that living in a soap opera can take on an ordinary, decent man. “I don’t think I know right from wrong anymore,” he tells Val wearily. "Is it right for me to expect you not to care about the suicide course your ex-husband has set for himself? Is it right for me to resent you for going to visit him? … You could save his life. What is my resentment compared to that? You’re doing what’s right for you and I respect you for it. And if I also resent you for it, then I guess it’s my problem, isn’t it?”As a man caught between the woman he loves and her ties to her ex, Ben is hardly unique in Soap Land. DYNASTY’s Dex and DALLAS’s Mark Graison have both been in similar situations this season. Whereas Dex reacted to Alexis’s preoccupation with King Galen by losing his temper and storming off pretty much on a weekly basis (“I’m rarely in a mood to admit that somebody else might be right,” he concedes this week), Mark has coped with Pam’s need to honour Bobby’s memory with commendable fortitude (“Pam’s feelings for Bobby always stood between her and me,” he admits to Jenna, "but in the end, my love for Pam helped put that behind me.") In dealing with his own situation, Ben has occupied a middle ground between Dex and Mark. He’s emotionally intelligent enough to understand Val and Gary’s connection, but sufficiently flawed (i.e., human) to be jealous of it. This conflict makes him both the most relatable and the most interesting of the three men. Meanwhile, Mark’s patience pays off at the end of this week’s DALLAS when Pam offers to sell Christopher’s share of Ewing Oil back to JR. “The fight’s just not important anymore,” she says simply. While not the most soapily dramatic move Pam could have made, it does make sense given her character’s emotional journey this season. The time has finally come for her to put the past behind her and move on with her life. Meanwhile, after the extraordinary lengths to which JR has gone to gain control of the company over the years, there's something sweetly ironic and strangely touching about the way it just suddenly drops into his lap.In the final scenes of this week’s DALLAS and DYNASTY, each show’s leading man speaks aloud to a dead parent. JR’s father is represented by his portrait, Blake’s mother by her gravestone. “Well, Daddy, it’s taken a long time … but finally, it’s all mine,” a victorious JR tells Jock, while Blake recalls fondly how his mother used to chide he and his brother as children: “You’re both going to shape up. You will — by God, you will — or my name is not Ellen Lucy Carrington!” Blake's reverie is interrupted by the arrival of said brother Ben and the episode ends with Blake branding him as “the man who killed his own mother!” There’s an equivalent moment on KNOTS when Jill Bennett explains her preoccupation with Wesphall to Mack by revealing how Paul Galveston drove her father to suicide — but even that’s not the whole story. “What we’re doing is important and delicate,” Peter Hollister tells her mysteriously in another scene. "Clear-headedness is paramount.”Peter's concern is that, through her involvement with Gary Ewing, Jill has fallen prey to “the spy who loved me” syndrome — it’s what happens when one Soap Land character becomes sexually involved with another for duplicitous reasons only to then fall in love with them for real. Other recent cases include Cassandra Wilder losing her heart to Richard Channing on FALCON CREST, Sean McAllister becoming genuinely smitten with Bliss on THE COLBYS, and Grace falling in love with Jack Ewing on DALLAS and then betraying Angelica in order to save his life. “You don’t have to fall in love with everyone you sleep with,” Peter tells Jill. "It gets messy!” It sure does for Grace this week when Angelica shoots her dead as payback for choosing Jack over her — even if director Linda Gray ensures that any actual mess (i.e., both the shooting itself and Grace’s dead body) remains discreetly off-screen.There are several parallels between the Martinique storyline on DALLAS and the recent plot on FALCON CREST involving Peter Stavros’s abduction. Each centre on a foreign character (Angelica Nero, Philippe Hubert) who is willing to go to extraordinary lengths, including kidnap and murder, to assume control of a Greek shipping company. The climax of each story takes place in an exotic French-speaking location (the Stavros villa in Monte Carlo, the Caribbean island of Martinique) and ends with one co-conspirator killing another (Sofia shoots Philippe, Angelica shoots Grace). The main advantage the DALLAS plot has over its FC counterpart is Angelica herself. For a supposedly one-note femme fatale, she has managed to display several different aspects of her character. When she pulls her gun on Grace, for instance, she seems genuinely heartbroken over what she is about to do.When JR learnt a few weeks ago on DALLAS that Mandy was spying on him for Cliff, he didn’t confront her about it. Instead, he gave her a sable coat to keep her off balance. Having found out on last week’s DYNASTY that her sister Caress has been writing a tell-all biography about her, Alexis does exactly the same thing — she keeps quiet about it and gives her a sable coat. More specifically, she tosses the coat at her feet so that Caress has to bend down to pick it up. It's a neatly unspoken demonstration of Alexis's power over her sister. Over on THE COLBYS, Sable makes nice to her sister, inviting Frankie to Jeff and Fallon's wedding — but then adds a stinging proviso: “Stay out of my way and, if you can control yourself for a change, stay out of my husband’s bed too.” Meanwhile on KNOTS, sisters-in-law Karen and Abby come dangerously close to a rapprochement after Olivia comes clean about her drug use and agrees to join a support group. Smiles, hugs, and apologies ensue. “She’ll be all right — she’s got a good head on her shoulders,” Karen assures Abby. “At least she used to before she moved in with you,” Abby zings back.There’s nothing equivocal, however, about Pam and Jenna’s conciliatory embrace on this week’s DALLAS. Following a flashback scene where Jenna revisits her final conversation with Bobby — the equivalent of Krystle's return to the attic or Lilimae's pilgrimage to the roof where Joshua died — she is finally able to accept that her relationship with Bobby ended before his death. Watching the scene where Jenna explains all this to Pam, I found Pam’s response surprisingly touching. “It doesn’t matter anymore who Bobby was going to marry,” she says. "What matters is how happy you were when you were with him … and how lucky we both were.” It reminded me of the scene in New DALLAS where Sue Ellen and Mandy meet at JR’s memorial service — their long-standing rivalry seems to melt away and all that’s left is the common bond of having loved the same man. The scene where JR, after returning from Martinique, tells Sue Ellen how he felt "when Angelica pointed that gun at me” also takes on new significance in hindsight. "The one thing I feared most was that I was gonna die and you would never know how much I love you,” he tells her. This line never meant much to me before, but now it seems to foreshadow the letter Sue Ellen receives from JR after his death and then reads aloud at his funeral — he did get to tell her how he felt at the end after all.Now that Fallon and Jeff have found each other again after such a long separation, their position on THE COLBYS is somewhat reminiscent of Gary and Val’s at the beginning of KNOTS. Where Gary had previously been the more restless partner in that relationship but was now ready to finally put down roots in California, here that role is taken by Fallon: "I’ve been running away ever since I was old enough to open the front door, but … I really want to belong here. I think you do too.” Jeff, meanwhile, is like Val — cautious and slightly doubtful that this new spinoff series is where they belong.DYNASTY’s Dominique crosses over to THE COLBYS once again this week, this time to host Fallon and Jeff’s engagement party at her club. The dramatic climax of the party comes during a speech, just as it did during DALLAS and DYNASTY's masquerade balls last week. As a drunk and bitter Miles makes his way onto the stage ("I wanna say a few words. I got a right to”), everyone watching — characters and viewers alike — steels themselves for the same kind of humiliating toast Jeff himself made at his Uncle Cecil’s party during DYNASTY’s first season. Ultimately, however, Miles is just too heartbroken to go through with it. “To Fallon and Jeff, be happy,” is all he can manage. It’s a very touching way of subverting our expectations.Just as Pam and Jenna appear to be “letting go” of the past on DALLAS, Fallon is hopeful that Miles’s toast means that he is doing the same. Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, Maggie Gioberti assumes that now that her book tour is over, Jeff Wainwright is out of her life. Both women are mistaken. In the final scene of this week’s COLBYS, as Jeff and Fallon start to make love for the first time since their reunion, the camera pans to the window to reveal Miles watching them. “You’ll never be free of me, Fallon, never,” he murmurs, as he winds her scarf tightly around his fists. It’s creepy, sad and kinda hot, all at the same time. Over on FALCON CREST, Chase and Maggie are likewise getting amorous when they are interrupted by the latest in a succession of anonymous phone calls. At the other end of the line is Jeff Wainwright whom we learn has just moved to the Tuscany Valley. Over on KNOTS, it's Ben who can’t escape Gary. “Every time I turn around, he is there. He won’t leave us alone,” he complains to Mack.DYNASTY’s Ben Carrington and KNOTS LANDING’s Peter Hollister are each suing for a share of their respective father’s estate. As Blake and Dominique receive subpoenas regarding Ben’s $125,000,000 lawsuit, Greg Sumner makes Peter and his mother Sylvia a settlement offer of $5,000,000. (“With five million dollars, you oughta be able to afford an apartment with a window," Greg tell Sylvia in an amusing little scene.) While Dominique wonders what her newly acquired half-brother is up to on DYNASTY ("Would you please explain to me why your attorney expects me to testify on your behalf when I am one of the people that you are suing?” she asks Ben), Peter sees through Greg’s offer on KNOTS (“The five million dollars is bait,” he tells Sylvia. "He’s hoping we’ll bite and swallow it and relinquish all claim to the rest of the fortune”). Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, a different Greg and Peter (Reardon and Stavros) are also on opposite sides of a legal action as Greg R hands Peter S a subpoena in a bid to have his power of attorney to run Falcon Crest revoked. This is the third episode since Angela's mysterious disappearance and members of her family are beginning to suspect foul play. However, just as the Martinique police inspector describes Angelica Nero as "a very elusive criminal”, so FALCON CREST’s Judge Deeds regards Angela Channing the same way: “As far as I am concerned, Mrs. Channing fled the area to avoid prosecution.”The corporate fight may not be important to Pam Ewing anymore, but it still is to FC’s Peter who has gone to great lengths (including the possible abduction of Angela) to embezzle $30,000,000 from Falcon Crest — not, as Angela’s family suppose, to shore up his own company, but to buy the mortgage on Richard’s racetrack. Curiouser and curiouser.And this week’s Top 5 are:1 (2) THE COLBYS2 (4) KNOTS LANDING3 (1) DYNASTY4 (5) DALLAS5 (3) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?