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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Knots Blogger" data-source="post: 64022" data-attributes="member: 392">CONTINUEDLater, Abs and Joshua have a little one-on-one and we can definitely see that Abs has started to create a monster.  By boosting Joshua’s ego so consistently and always telling him how special and amazing he is, she has allowed him to become somewhat out of control, and now he’s not wanting to listen to anybody.  For instance, she offers to fire Reverend Kathryn (which truly hurts me; I don’t want to see this nice man treated so badly), and Joshua is very cavalier and says something about how he can handle these things himself; he doesn’t need the help from Abs.  I should take this moment to say that things are playing out quite a bit differently than I remembered.  I don’t know if this gets into SPOILER TERRITORY, but whatever; in my mind, I sorta had a very even division where I thought of “season six Joshua” as nice and sweet and “season seven Joshua” as nasty and wicked, but it’s certainly not such a clear divide; you don’t start season seven and suddenly the dude is pure evil.  Rather, we have spent the season seeing this change take over him, and I again remind the reader how f***ing much I relish the length of this season.  By having thirty episodes in the season instead of, say, fifteen, the way a show would probably do it nowadays, it really gives us the proper space to let storylines unfold organically.  So even though Joshua arrived at the start of the season looking fresh-faced and innocent and now he’s starting to turn into a monster, it doesn’t feel inorganic; it feels like it’s a natural progression of the character and really remarkably natural, not rushed at all.<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--5Lvpk3uVNU/WPjjP7VGBHI/AAAAAAAACb4/CxTO9YNRU6gH0xf7RjLMNwJdgGBc2jc3gCLcB/s1600/young%2Bhairy%2Bbaldwin.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--5Lvpk3uVNU/WPjjP7VGBHI/AAAAAAAACb4/CxTO9YNRU6gH0xf7RjLMNwJdgGBc2jc3gCLcB/s400/young%2Bhairy%2Bbaldwin.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a> This parlays nicely into Joshua’s controlling and domineering relationship with Cathy.  In this ep, he tells Abs that he’d like to have Cathy sing on his show (hymns, of course, no<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(band)" target="_blank"> Journey</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Springfield" target="_blank">Rick Springfield</a> covers allowed on a religious program), although he doesn’t precisely ask; rather he sorta announces it.  When he shares this with Cathy, she says she doesn’t want to sing at Pacific World Whatever, that she’s perfectly happy singing at Isadora’s and doesn’t want to change that.  This is just another manifestation of Joshua’s need to control her; in our last ep, we saw him keep her busy with a picnic as a way of keeping her away from practice with her band, and now we see him trying to move her away from the band and the world of Isadora’s in order to sing on a show that he can monitor and control.  It’s scary stuff, and personally I would really like to see Cathy be a little more aggressive in her refusal, but she’s still being sorta timid.  I guess when you’re in love with someone, it’s harder to stand up to them directly (I’ve only been in love twice), so that’s probably the issue Cathy is having at this moment.  If it was me, of course, I’d tell Joshua exactly where he can put his religious program, and then I’d leave him and start sleeping with some barely legal Asian, but that’s me, and me and Cathy are different people.Perhaps the most notable thing about this ep is the introduction of a new character played by a gigantic movie star and icon, and that’s done very organically as part of Sumner’s storyline.  If you’ll recall, we saw Paul Galveston suffer a stroke in the closing moments of Fly Away Home (“Call him yourself, Cookie”), and then we spent Rough Edges and The Emperor’s Clothes with Galveston in a coma (which is helpful for pinching the pennies, as we just see the vague outline of a body lying in a bed throughout these eps and the producers didn’t have to pay <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003318/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Howard Duff</a> for a guest star performance).  Also, in The Emperor’s Clothes, we witnessed the arrival of some mysterious new woman in town, a woman wearing big hats and dark clothes that worked very well for hiding her face and, again, saving the producers from having to pay those big guest star bucks.  Later, we saw this mysterious lady getting married to the incapacitated Galveston as he lay dying in his hospital bed.  Who is this lady and why is she here and what does she want?  We start to get answers to all those questions this week.See, early in The Deluge, we see Galveston’s little heart monitor beepy line thing start to beep and make squiggly lines and then the lines turn straight and, since I have watched a lot of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER_(TV_series)" target="_blank">ER</a>, I am able to infer that he is dead.  Of course, I don’t have to infer too long, because later on, one of Galveston’s little lackeys (My Beloved Grammy and I just refer to him as “Mack-lookalike” because, well, he looks a whole hell of a lot like Mack) tells Sumner that Galveston died.  Of course, Sumner is hardly crying over it, as we have seen that he has a, shall we say, fractured relationship with his biological father.  Later, Gary heads up to Galveston’s ranch to try and find the guy (he doesn’t know he’s dead yet) and is instead greeted by this mysterious woman, still draped in shadows.  However, she quickly emerges out of the shadows and introduces herself as Ruth Galveston, and we see that she is, GASP, Special Guest Star <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001257/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1" target="_blank">Ava Gardner</a>!<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NogHadQNJwk/WPjk8evmhZI/AAAAAAAACcE/-AHxDeVDrokrNhvRKsyfwWou512tEnCMQCLcB/s1600/gardner%2Bava%2Bgardner.png" target="_blank"><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NogHadQNJwk/WPjk8evmhZI/AAAAAAAACcE/-AHxDeVDrokrNhvRKsyfwWou512tEnCMQCLcB/s640/gardner%2Bava%2Bgardner.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a> Now, I’m gonna take a moment to reveal some things about myself.  I talk a real big game when it comes to movies, and I’m always sucking my own d*** for being a pretentious film douche who goes to see old movies in the cinema and Bob Loblaw, but there are still tons of holes in my film douche research, and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001257/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1" target="_blank">Ava Gardner</a> here is a big one.  I confess that I know the name, I know she’s a big deal, I know she was like this huge movie star, but I’ve never seen a single <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001257/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1" target="_blank">Ava Gardner</a> movie and I’m not entirely sure why she’s a big deal.  Make no mistake; I know that she is a big deal, and I know that the KL folks managing to get her for a handful of eps must have been quite a thing back in 1985, but I just don’t personally really know why she’s a big deal.  This reflects badly on me, not her, and certainly when she showed up onscreen, My Beloved Grammy was like, “Wow, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001257/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1" target="_blank">Ava Gardner</a>, she must have been a big get for the show.”  My Beloved Grammy was born in 1935, so <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001257/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1" target="_blank">Ava Gardner</a> would have been a movie star during all of her formative years, but embarrassingly I had to look at her Wikipedia page to figure out what her big, important movies were.  <a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4AcwjRgbsHc/WPjldHFB1mI/AAAAAAAACcM/9_nvn-B75GQ5fo4_mw9rFbDM3b6-DjIwwCLcB/s1600/killers.png" target="_blank"><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4AcwjRgbsHc/WPjldHFB1mI/AAAAAAAACcM/9_nvn-B75GQ5fo4_mw9rFbDM3b6-DjIwwCLcB/s400/killers.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a> However, right away I think she fits in well with the proceedings and brings a nice level of sophistication and class to the show.  Let’s not forget that the ‘80s nighttime soaps would often attract the talent of these real old-school ladies who had been working in Hollywood for decades (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000895/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Barbara Bel Geddes</a> over on Dallas and<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0943837/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1" target="_blank"> Jane Wyman</a> on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Crest" target="_blank">Falcon Crest</a> as just two examples that spring immediately to mind), so this seems to be molded in the same style, although I certainly find Gardner much more appealing than Bel Geddes (haven’t seen <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Crest" target="_blank">Falcon Crest</a> yet so can’t comment on <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0943837/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1" target="_blank">Jane Wyman</a>, although one day I’ll watch that whole series and, probably, just wind up concluding that KL is much better).  I think Ava brings a real Old Hollywood feeling to the scene; she has that classic, sexy, throaty cocktails-and-cigarettes voice going on and it works very well.  Plus, and I have no way of knowing how she actually felt while she was filming this, but I don’t get the sense that she thinks this is beneath her.  She seems to be game to be a part of proceedings, and she also interacts well with<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001137/?ref_=tt_cl_t2" target="_blank"> William Devane</a> as Sumner.<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YzFE0QziYHc/WPjgVt8uUyI/AAAAAAAACbg/8CojxBIAGNAwnj7jZQQkCN6paJXIeFq6QCEw/s1600/ava%2Band%2Bgary.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YzFE0QziYHc/WPjgVt8uUyI/AAAAAAAACbg/8CojxBIAGNAwnj7jZQQkCN6paJXIeFq6QCEw/s400/ava%2Band%2Bgary.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a> Speaking of which, the two are reunited when Sumner visits a funeral home to take one last look at the body of his biological father.  He’s all alone in the funeral home, and then Ruth approaches from behind and is like, “Hello, Gregory,” and we learn that she is, in fact, Sumner’s mother, the one who was married to the pilot guy but was screwing Galveston on the side and all that good stuff.  Sumner and Ruth spend the rest of the ep together, talking and catching up.  It’s a rather fascinating dynamic, but then Sumner is a rather fascinating character, and I particularly love the way we are slowly revealing the different aspects of his life and backstory.  All this drama with the truth of Galveston as his father and his mother suddenly showing up in town to marry the man on his deathbed could seem terribly trashy or sensationalistic, but in typical KL style, it still manages to feel bizarrely grounded, and I still am not quite sure how they manage to do it, but I must say it has to be these great actors and the styles they bring to proceedings.  I wish I could elaborate better, but I guess it’s that combination of Old Hollywood class that Ava provides combined with Devane’s wonderfully sarcastic and snarky way of delivering most of his lines.  The basic gist of their talks is that Ruth wants Greg to recognize his birthright, to seize full control of the Empire Valley project, that this is what Galveston would have wanted, that Greg deserves this, Bob Loblaw.  Greg is not swayed, reminding Ruth that, for him, Galveston was just this a**hole dude that his mom was shagging on the side, desecrating the memory of the man he thought was his father, the heroic pilot guy.  At this moment, Greg is not interested in his birthright; he’d rather continue to do things his own way, do the senate thing, try to use his powers in that capacity, and so on and so forth.TO BE CONTINUED</blockquote>

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