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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 29187" data-attributes="member: 22">30 Apr 86: DYNASTY: The Rescue v. 01 May 86: THE COLBYS: The Reckoning v. 01 May 86: KNOTS LANDING: His Brother’s Keeper v. 02 May 86: DALLAS: Thrice in a Lifetime v. 02 May 86: FALCON CREST: Cease and DesistAlexis Colby rediscovers her maternal instinct on this week’s DYNASTY. First, she saves her daughter Amanda following a suicide attempt and then forgives her her affair with her own husband Dex. In the penultimate scene of the episode, she visits Amanda in her bedroom at the Carrington mansion. “I just want you to know that I love you and I’d give my life for you, darling,” she tells her tearfully. "You’re my daughter and you’re very, very special.” This is as unguardedly sentimental as we’ve ever seen Alexis (she’s certainly never had a conversation as intimate as this with Fallon), and the contrast between her demeanour in this scene and the one that immediately follows with Blake is striking. Ignoring her ex-husband’s angry calls, she sweeps imperiously down the Carrington staircase swathed in fur. Only upon reaching the bottom does she turn to face him and snarl her latest vow of vengeance: “Take a deep breath, Blake, because the children and this house and everything that belonged to me is going to be mine again!” Yes, just like her cousin Sable, Alexis now “wants the house.”In fact, Sable herself is involved a similar juxtaposition of scenes — a demonstration of maternal devotion followed by one of ruthlessness — near the end of this week’s COLBYS. First, we see her talking to her son Miles in his bedroom where she offers to supply him with a fake alibi for the night of the Mahoney murder. “You are my son,” she insists. "You come before anything — even the law.” A couple of scenes later, she is engaged in a bitter argument with her sister-in-law Constance regarding her marriage to Jason. “I love my brother and I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and watch you bleed him dry!” barks Connie. “He needs a settlement before he can get a divorce,” Sable retorts. "I can hang on for years — so many years, you’ll never live to see the day.”The mood at the end of this week’s DALLAS is very different, but also includes a display of parental intimacy. This time it’s JR, reading his son a bedtime story. Once John Ross is asleep, he continues to sit at his bedside. Then he is interrupted by Sue Ellen, who surprises him with a kiss on the lips.There are major turning points for Soap Land’s two disabled characters this week: blind singer Wayne on THE COLBYS and deaf kid Tony on DALLAS. When I watched the original run of THE COLBYS, I was so convinced that a blind actor had been cast in the role of Wayne that during the scene in this week’s ep where he tells Monica his sight has been restored, I genuinely thought the actor was only pretending he could see. (I also remember thinking that he didn’t do a very convincing job.) Over on DALLAS, there’s a nice scene where Tony hesitantly informs Donna that he has decided to accept her and Ray’s invitation to become a part of their family. It's the first time this storyline has focused on Tony’s feelings rather than the Krebbses’ and the young actor gives a sweetly touching performance. As if in response, Susan Howard dials down her own emotional intensity and seems more like her old down-to-earth self than she has in months.It’s not often that one finds DALLAS’s Donna and DYNASTY’s Alexis singing from the same hymn sheet, but each dispenses similar maternal advice this week. “It’s safer not to love, isn’t it?” Amanda asks her mother. “Maybe it is,” Alexis replies, "but it’s a lot emptier.” “You can’t be afraid, because loving is the best part of life,” concurs Donna during her scene with Tony.Two lines in this week’s Ewing-verse have always resonated with me. “I feel as if I were standing at the edge of my life, looking back at all the wonderful things that aren’t there anymore,” Miss Ellie tells JR during a touching scene on DALLAS. Meanwhile, during a conversation with Ben on KNOTS, Cathy makes a simple but achingly acute observation about his relationship with Val: “I know she doesn’t mean to, but she hurts you.”Cathy's isn’t the only interesting character observation of the Soap Land week. “While the rest of this family manipulates and turns brother against brother, you stand by, radiating this glow of passive acceptance,” Claudia tells Krystle in the best scene of this week’s DYNASTY. Patricia Shepard accused Miss Ellie of radiating a similar glow on DALLAS a few months ago: “Where were you when all this was happening?” she asked her, referring to the disintegration of JR and Sue Ellen’s marriage. “Sitting at the head of the big Ewing dinner table and watching?” In spite of Ellie and Krystle's objections (“I don’t deserve that!” protested Ellie then, “What has this family ever done to you besides loving you, supporting you?” Krystle asks Claudia now), there is a grain of truth in each of these accusations (even if DYNASTY is obliged to depict Claudia as a madwoman for daring to speak out in such a manner). Likewise, the speech Abby delivers to Karen on this week’s KNOTS, while not entirely fair, is not entirely unfair either: “You can’t stand the fact that Greg Sumner can deal with a problem that Karen Mackenzie can’t,” she says in regard to the contamination crisis at Lotus Point. "If you could admit for one minute that he can fix something that you can’t, we would be halfway to saving Lotus Point, but your idealism is getting all mixed up with your pride, Karen, and evidently your pride is more important than Lotus Point, and God knows, we have to save Karen’s pride — even if it costs us Lotus Point. That’s the bottom line, Karen. Admit it.”Cathy’s observation about Val aside, her affair with Ben isn’t quite as satisfying a storyline as I remember from previous viewings. Like her predecessor Ciji, Cathy has always been a passive character, mainly just reacting to the circumstances in which she finds herself. As long as the plots surrounding her have been sufficiently well-structured, she’s always been a highly watchable and sympathetic presence. Since Joshua’s death, however, she’s felt increasingly exposed — more a plot device than a real character. Rather than merely passive, she now seems a bit blank.She’s not the only one. Following her cliffhanging overdose at the end of the last ep, Amanda Carrington is the focus of attention on this week’s DYNASTY. Like Cathy, she isn’t the brightest blonde in the hair salon, but there again, nor is she meant to be. Like Lucy Ewing, Skipper Weldon and Bliss Colby, Amanda is one of those endearingly aimless Soap Land twenty-somethings with no real purpose other than to fall in love with the least appropriate person available. Alexis describes her this week as "a frightened, vulnerable little girl” and that’s about the size of it. Certainly, no one would ever mistake Amanda for a rocket scientist — or an earthquake seismologist, come to that, which brings us to Cathy’s and Amanda’s FALCON CREST equivalent in this regard, Chao Li’s daughter Lee Ying. Impressively intelligent she may be, but aside from delivering some carefully enunciated exposition in order set up the end-of-season cliffhanger, there isn’t a lot to her. Yet in spite of Lee Ying's lack of personality, Lance and Cole both seem utterly beguiled by her. If one recalls that the last woman they both became involved with was Melissa at her smouldering, femme-fatale peak then their reactions seem all the more incongruous. When it comes to depicting a young Asian woman on her first journey outside of her own country, FALCON CREST is understandably somewhat out of its comfort zone. In contrast, DYNASTY has been having fun for several seasons with the various Chinese ministers who occasionally pop up as part of the never-ending "China Seas oil lease" saga — the latest of whom, Mr Lui, has spent the last few eps being charmed by Alexis into doing her bidding. However, there’s a twist in the tale. As we learn this week, he is secretly in cahoots with Ben Carrington.Minor trend of the week: Mystery Bens. On DYNASTY, Dex meets Ben for the first time since the latter's arrival in Denver. “Where do I know you from?” he wonders. "I know your face, Carrington. I saw you once with a group of men … I promise you, I’ll dig to the bottom of the barrel till I find out who you are!” The scene ends with a close-up of Ben, a shifty look in his eyes. Over on DALLAS, old-timer Ben Stivers, a new character hired by Clayton and Ray to work on the ranch, gets a faraway look in his eyes when he is introduced to Miss Ellie. “You’re a lucky man, Clayton,” he murmurs enigmatically.Blank blondes and mystery Bens aside, if there’s one overriding theme in this week’s Soap Land it’s that the wheels of justice often grind excruciatingly slowly. On DYNASTY, Ben Carrington travels to Caracas, hoping to get the troublesome Caress extradited back to Venezuela in order to serve out the rest of her prison sentence. On THE COLBYS, Jason flies to Athens, hoping to prevent his son Jeff from being extradited on a murder charge. (Typical — you wait eight years for one Soap Land storyline involving extradition charges and then two come along at once.) “Extradition is a long and complicated legal process — it could take years,” the prison governor in Caracas informs Ben. “I’ll take care of the legalities,” he replies, producing a wad of notes. Jason doesn't kowtow to legal niceties to achieve his objective either — but instead of waving money around, he uses his status. "I’m simply making a reasonable request,” he assures the deputy minister in Athens after demanding access to the cab driver who claims to have taken Jeff to the scene of the murder, “and I’ll go on making it, all the way up to the prime minister if I have to.” (Ironically, while Jason succeeds in exposing the driver as a fraud, the very crime he himself gets away with scot free, i.e., suborning a witness, is described by Chase’s attorney on this week’s FALCON CREST as “one of the seven deadly sins” — and it’s this very “sin” which Chase now believes he has sufficient evidence to nail Angela and Richard for.)Enticed by the promise of a $50,000 payoff, Caress joins Ben one of those clandestine two-cars-pull-up-alongside-each-other-in-a-rainy-side-street scenes. There was a similarly staged blackmail scene between Melissa Gioberti and Pamela Lynch on FALCON CREST almost exactly a year ago. Ever the writer, Caress acknowledges the clichéd nature of the setting: “A parked car in a dark alley, Ben? This is a business deal — I’m not selling state secrets.” But then Ben has his henchman chloroform her, along with the following instructions: “She goes air freight to Caracas.”Meanwhile on KNOTS, the bureaucratic red tape facing the Lotus Point gang when they turn to government agencies for a solution to their pollution problem is overwhelming. “You may conservatively expect the appeals to last for years,” they are informed. “Because of the size of the thing and the insurance involved, the excavation alone will cost two and a half million dollars,” Laura explains. “Because of the contamination itself, Lotus Point isn’t good as collateral,” Karen adds. "They won’t even give us money to do the research to find out how bad the problem really is.” Nor is the law much use to the Giobertis in FALCON CREST. Even though Jeff Wainwright has already been linked to the murder of one woman, the local sheriff is powerless to protect Maggie from his attentions. “Harassment is hard to prove,” he tells her. A judge eventually issues a cease-and-desist order, “barring Mr. Wainwright from making any direct contact with Mrs. Gioberti” — but even this cannot prevent him following her at a distance, and the episode ends with Maggie and Chase watching Jeff watching them, scared yet powerless. "Until he breaks the law, there’s nothing I can do,” the sheriff explains.In my mind, DYNASTY’s Claudia and KNOTS LANDING’s Laura both occupy a similar space in Soap Land. Each is (or was) the most relatable, least soap-like female character on her respective show, and therefore receives less screen time than her more flamboyant contemporaries. Now, however, they are on divergent paths. While Laura’s recent marriage to Greg Sumner places her right at the heart of KNOTS’ current crisis, Claudia is intent on cutting her ties with the rest of the characters on DYNASTY. “I really feel caught in the middle here,” Laura tells Karen and Mack. “For the first time in my life, I really feel like I can make it on my own,” Claudia tells her former stepson Danny during a final visit to the Carrington mansion. As a three year old, Danny may not be the ideal confidante, but he’s literally the only person Claudia has left to talk to. And just as former allies Claudia and Krystle part as enemies so Laura finds herself on the receiving end of a couple of bitter jibes from her friends as the tension mounts over the situation at Lotus Point. “Gee, that’d keep it in the family, wouldn’t it, Mrs. Sumner?” snaps Gary when Laura points out the benefits of allowing Greg take over the cleanup. “So long as you’re happy,” sneers Mack when she tells him she believes Greg is genuinely sincere about his offer. “Poor Laura — she’s so confused,” says Karen, more sympathetically. “Well, that’s what happens when a nice person marries a jerk,” Mack shrugs.In the final scene of this week’s KNOTS, Karen learns that groundskeeper Charlie Lee has died of as a result of the arsenic poisoning at Lotus Point. Just like Dimitri Marinos on DALLAS, Charlie Lee has never appeared onscreen yet his death has significant repercussions. “I’m not gonna be responsible for any more sickness or any more death — I’m closing Lotus Point,” Karen declares. This is her equivalent of Miss Ellie’s “I’ve had enough of this insane competition between you two — I’m going to court to break Jock’s will and then I intend to sell Ewing Oil” bombshell on DALLAS a few years ago, albeit on a slightly smaller scale.This week, DALLAS is far more atmospheric than it has been of late. A sharper, more interesting script and Lance Rubin’a plaintive piano-based score are contributing factors. The highlight of the ep is a fascinatingly atypical, even subversive scene that takes place between a garrulously enthusiastic bomb maker-for-hire and Angelica Nero. Angelica does not speak in the scene — instead, she stands by looking enigmatic and chic in a Baader-Meinhof beret and raincoat ensemble while the bomb guy chatters on. He isn’t identified on screen —  although Angelica later refers to him as “a very patriotic fellow” — but IMDb lists him as ‘Freddie the Bomb Manufacturer' so let's go with that. “Motive’s important to most people, but me — I don’t have motive like you have motive,” Freddie is telling Angelica while putting the final touches to an attache case rigged with explosives for her. "For me, it’s my country. Always been that. Fourth of July, Vietnam — same thing. Lots of people don’t remember their first fourth of July … I couldn’t forget mine if I wanted to … I just couldn’t believe what you could do with a firecracker. I think I blew up everything by the time I was ten.” Then Angelica pays him for the rigged case and leaves. “‘In God we trust,’” Freddie calls after her. "You know we’re the only people that says that on our money? … Some country, huh?”Sure, Freddie’s a nut job, same as Claudia on DYNASTY, but just as Claudia’s paranoid speech contained an undeniably intriguing critique of Krystle (“You allow the treachery and that makes you the most dangerous Carrington of them all”), so the idea presented within Freddie’s crazy ramblings — that patriotism and war, religion and money, and violence and murder are all somehow inextricably bound together in the American psyche ("Fourth of July, Vietnam — same thing") — also contains an element of truth. If anything, the scene feels more pertinent than ever in late 2016.And this week’s Top 5 is …1 (1) THE COLBYS2 (2) KNOTS LANDING3 (3) DYNASTY4 (-) DALLAS5 (-) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?