New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 90882" data-attributes="member: 22">04 Mar 87: DYNASTY: The Surgery v. 05 Mar 87: THE COLBYS: Return Engagement v. 05 Mar 87: KNOTS LANDING: Nightmare v. 06 Mar 87: FALCON CREST: Battle LinesThe most interesting scenes in this week’s DYNASTY-verse delve into the past to evoke themes of identity and betrayal. First, on DYNASTY itself, Adam visits Dr Edwards, that most reliable of recurring characters who pops up every season or two to doggedly recount the same old story of Adam’s unhappy childhood — an unhappiness due to some intuitive sense that he was an outsider (i.e., a Carrington) who didn’t belong in the backwoods of Montana. However, pressed by Adam this week, the good doctor admits that he has been lying all along, that he has always secretly believed Adam to be Michael Torrance. It’s a surprising admission that casts everything that went before in a new light. “You were playing with my life, do you realise that?” Adam/Michael barks at him. On the following night’s COLBYS, Jeff finally comes face to face with the man he grew up believing to be his dead father. Turns out he was wrong on both counts. “I knew your mother would raise you as my son,” Phillip tells him. “In the POW camps, I used to imagine a kid halfway across the world growing up in this house talking about his dad. Sometimes it hurt, sometimes it helped.”“This prison camp — how long did the Vietcong keep you there?” Jeff asks. “The first one? Twelve years,” Phillip replies. It occurs to me that, with the exception of Chase Gioberti, virtually all the Soap Land characters to have served in the Vietnam War have been depicted as morally twisted. The duplicitous Ed Haynes (Pam Ewing’s first husband who used his wartime internment as a ruse to pretend they were still married), the vengeful Nick Toscanni, Michael Brandon’s disturbed character on EMERALD POINT NAS and now Phillip Colby — they all carry a trace of Colonel Kurtz in their DNA.Phillip is a first-class Soap Land addition. Simply by his presence, without appearing to do anything, he pits the Colby family against itself. All of a sudden, there are newly divided loyalties, power struggles and love triangles everywhere you look. As for Phillip himself, he has a charismatically subversive presence reminiscent of Greg Sumner or Joshua Rush. The actor has a habit of looking downwards during conversations, averting his eyes from whomever he is speaking to. This is common enough human behaviour in the real world, but within the stylised environment of Soap Land where most scenes consist of close-ups of faces looking at one another, it feels quietly transgressive.In the same way that the appearance of Frankie’s first husband on last week’s COLBYS wrecked her wedding to Jason, the actions of Gary’s first wife on this week’s KNOTS scupper his plans to marry Jill. Only a few weeks after her former brothers-in-law took it upon themselves to shoot BD Calhoun on DALLAS, Val decides to the same thing to Jean Hackney (whom she thinks has murdered Ben) . However, Val being Val, and KNOTS being KNOTS, procuring a gun proves more complicated than it usually does when a Soap Land character is suddenly possessed by an urge for murderous vengeance. Throughout the episode, Val makes several thwarted attempts to obtain a weapon before finally ransacking Gary’s bedroom to find his gun. “It was my grandfather’s. I inherited it,” Gary later explains, neatly connecting this latest drama to the Ewing family backstory.Gary’s subsequent efforts to prevent his ex from doing something crazy prompts the second Mrs Ewing (Abby) to give the soon-to-be third Mrs Ewing (Jill) “a friendly warning: the first Mrs Ewing doesn’t go away. Ever.” The same, of course, could be said for the first Mrs Colby. When we initially encounter Sable this week, she is in a Moroccan hotel bedroom with Zach, claiming to have come to terms with the past. “I was reborn the moment I knew Jason and Frankie were finally married,” she declares. “I feel a sense of freedom, a release … What’s past is gone.” As soon she receives word that the marriage didn’t take place, however, her first instinct is to fly home to console Jason and taunt Frankie.“My sister’s about to say, ‘I do’ when the groom’s dead brother, coincidentally the bride’s ex-husband, returns from the dead,” Sable recounts mockingly. She’s not the only character to acknowledge the farfetched nature of recent events in Soap Land. “This just can’t be true! … That is insane! … I just don’t believe this! It’s crazy!” interjects Karen Mackenzie at regular intervals as Mack finally brings her up to speed on the Jean Hackney storyline with the aid of multiple flashbacks and reams of exposition-heavy dialogue that resembles the summation at the end of an especially complicated SCOOBY DOO episode.Phillip and his “widow” don’t meet until the end of this week’s COLBYS when Frankie comes out of her bathroom to find that he has let himself into the pool house. He proceeds to reminisce about the visits they made there years earlier. (“We used to come here in winter. Nobody would come near it then. You remember — just the two of us.”) The scene takes place at night, as did a similar encounter earlier in this season’s DALLAS. Then it was Miss Ellie who was surprised when her previously dead husband, Wes Parmalee, stole onto the Southfork patio and began recalling intimate moments from their marriage. (“That time that Punk lent us his lodge down at the lake for that second honeymoon I took you on … Neither one of us were kids then, Ellie, but it was like we were eighteen again.”) In each instance, the man’s words exert a power over the woman which has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with emotion and sensuality. Frankie’s hair is damp and she is clad in a simple bathrobe. Consequently, she looks more naturally beautiful and less like a Nolan Miller mannequin than she ever has before. It feels both shocking and inevitable when she and Phillip kiss. The wonderfully ridiculous living arrangements of the Colby household mean that Sable is just closing her bedroom window for the night when she spies them together across the grounds.Just as THE COLBYS concentrates on the fall-out from Phillip’s shock resurrection at the end of last week’s instalment, this week’s KNOTS focuses on the repercussions of Greg Sumner’s surprise reappearance at the end of its previous episode. As a result, this ep resembles a slightly less bloodthirsty version of recent FALCON CREST. Instead of Meredith Braxton bursting out of her own coffin, we have Ben Gibson discovered alive and well inside a body bag. In lieu of Meredith blowing away a bunch of bad guys with relative ease, we’ve got Jean Hackney bungling a last-ditch attempt to assassinate Greg during a faux seduction scene where he ends up pulling a gun on her. Meanwhile, Gary prevents Val from inadvertently shooting a cleaning woman.Ben finally makes it home in the third-to-last scene of the ep. Instead of Val fainting Frankie Colby-style when she sees him, she, Ben, the twins and Lilimae enjoy a touchingly emotional reunion reminiscent of the one that took place between Val and her babies after their kidnapping.The stolen twins storyline is also echoed on FALCON CREST. Such is the unsympathetic reaction Maggie receives from those around her as she agonises over whether or not to put her son up for adoption, it’s almost as if they were conspiring to force her to give her baby away. While Angela is characteristically cruel (“It’s amazing how much he looks like his father,” she sneers upon visiting the baby and threatening to one day tell him the truth about his paternity), Vicky is surprisingly callous, calling her mother “totally insane” to even contemplate keeping “Wainwright’s bastard.” Meanwhile, Emma’s insensitivity (“You don’t have to give Douglas up for adoption — you can give him to me!” she suggests excitedly) is matched by Chase’s — he chooses this week to begin sleeping with his younger girlfriend. And the cold efficiency of her adoption lawyer prompts to Maggie to exclaim that “we are talking a living breathing helpless little baby here, not some kind of a business merger!” Such behaviour allows Richard to emerge as the sole voice of compassion, suggesting to Maggie that they leave the valley and raise their sons together. However, she is not convinced and tearfully hands over her baby to a stern-looking nurse.Even though it’s never had quite the same impact on me as it did on first viewing, the final scene of this week’s KNOTS is very memorable. It takes place the morning after Ben’s return and begins with an establishing shot of the cul-de-sac looking idyllically peaceful. It then cuts to the happily reunited Gibsons lying next to each other in bed. “Good morning,” they say to one another. After promising to clean out the garage, Ben gets up and Val starts to follow him to the shower. (All the clues were there …) Suddenly Jean Hackney appears and pumps three bullets into Val. Ben rushes back to find his blood-splattered wife lying on the floor. Before we can process what has happened, Ben wakes up again, this time frightened, gasping and covered in sweat. This is his reality now. The sequence is kind of a metaphor for KNOTS itself: There’s no going back. This is no longer a show about everyday suburban folk who can contentedly revert to the mundane status quo once their latest storyline is over. Neither the characters’ own psyches nor the inflationary demands of Soap Land drama will allow it.And this week’s Top 4 are …1 (1) THE COLBYS2 (-) KNOTS LANDING3 (3) DYNASTY4 (4) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =