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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Knots Blogger" data-source="post: 79099" data-attributes="member: 392">Episode Title:  <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0621193/?ref_=fn_ep_tt_10" target="_blank">The Long and Winding Road</a>Season 06, Episode 30Episode 130 of 344Written by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0270570/?ref_=tt_ov_wr" target="_blank">Joel J. Feigenbaum</a> Directed by<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0801883/?ref_=tt_ov_dr" target="_blank"> Alexander Singer</a>Original Airdate: Thursday, May 23rd, 1985The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Greg keeps trying to call Laura, who hangs up on him. He follows her and explains that it was a stunt Ruth set up, so he kicked her out. Greg asks Laura to marry him, but she says she's already married. The police question Karen about Ackerman, while Mack goes to his office and finds Val's file. He sets the alarm off and is arrested. After Mack is out, they find a list in the file that has the names of couples who illegally adopted babies, but there are no addresses on the list. One name on the list, Harry Fisher, rings a bell. The next day at work Karen tells Gary the babies are alive. Mack remembers that he and Ben were at the Fisher's house, and they had twins. Mack calls Karen and tells her to meet him there. Gary goes with her. Harry Fisher rushes home and tells his wife Sheila to pack and that they have to leave on a vacation now. Sheila says she won't leave because she hasn't picked up the prescription for the twin's ear infections. Frustrated, Harry takes one of the twins and goes to pick it up while she packs. Abby receives the notebook pages via messenger. She picks up Val and tells her that she received a mysterious phone call meant for Val. She said they told her that the babies were alive and where to find them. Mack, Karen, Ben, and Gary arrive at the Fishers. Karen and Mack tell Sheila that the babies were adopted illegally and taken from their mother. Sheila says that's not true. Abby drives up with Val, who is surprised to see everybody there. Val hears the baby cry and starts to walk up to the door. Sheila is very distraught. Harry drives up and sees all the people outside of his house. Sheila yells at him, "Harry, they want to take the babies!" Harry speeds off.<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sDVi0_LiHOw/WTBwmGgI6qI/AAAAAAAACq0/FCBPTzXStn85RT_ioPQryUlA1e0lhk7egCLcB/s1600/long%2Broad.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sDVi0_LiHOw/WTBwmGgI6qI/AAAAAAAACq0/FCBPTzXStn85RT_ioPQryUlA1e0lhk7egCLcB/s400/long%2Broad.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a>                Welcome to The Long and Winding Road.  I confess that I’ve kinda been putting off writing this essay, and while a good reason for that is probably my own laziness and the fact that I’d rather just hang around the house or have sex or go to one of my naked places or do whatever it is that makes Brett happy, I think another part of it is that I’m almost sad to write about this ep because it will mean I’m done writing about season six of KL (pretty much; you’ll still be seeing my “Reflection on Season Six” essay a few days after this one goes up), and it’s been such a divine pleasure to re-explore this season and really get down to the nitty gritty by focusing on each and every ep.  Remember that this is episode thirty of a thirty episode season, and it continues to astound me at how amazingly the whole creative crew has managed to keep this season feeling unbelievably brilliant and exciting even when stretched out over the course of so many eps.  In any case, let’s dive right in and discuss the season six finale.                Well, after our usual thirty second preview and brilliantly brilliant scrolling opening credits, we actually get a pretty long recap of the end of last ep.  When I say “pretty long,” I mean, oh, maybe two minutes, but it feels kinda long when you just jump from the previous ep right into this one, as My Beloved Grammy and I did.  In fact, she actually said, “Oh, why do we need to see all this again?” and I reminded her that, in 1985, it had been a whole solid week since last ep and people probably needed a little reminder of what went down.  Also, you could argue that starting an ep with a man blowing his brains out is just a good way to hook those viewers in if they happened to miss last week for some reason, so it works in that regard, as well.  In any case, the ep starts up with Karen and Mack staring down Dr. Ackerman as he tries to focus on his bridge game, then also shows us him getting up to escape, the little car crash, and of course the slow motion of him grabbing his gun and buying the farm.  From there, we jump into the episode credits proper, playing over footage of someone, face unseen, frantically busting through Dr. Ackerman’s house and throwing files and papers everywhere and generally causing a big old mess.  They keep cross cutting from this person to shots of police cars rushing to the scene, since whoever it is that broke into Dr. Ackerman’s place also caused the alarm to go off.  Once the police arrive and do the usual “Freeze” routine, we reveal that it is, in fact, Mack who has caused this disturbance.  Why would Mack be raiding Dr. Ackerman’s place in such an obvious way?  Well, I find this easy to justify from a storytelling perspective, which is that he’s simply desperate now that Dr. Ackerman is dead and can’t confess to anything, so he’s just real fast trying to find any evidence in any way that he can, but I also learned of a behind the scenes story that explains this.  Apparently The Dobsonator injured his back filming the prior ep and they had to find a way to sorta shuffle Mack out of the story for a portion of this ep, and this is how they do it.  Honestly, it works for me and didn’t feel in any way inorganic when I was watching this; I only learned of the real reason after reading the trivia on TV.com.  <a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kL17pWaWm6s/WTGzDLfJiGI/AAAAAAAACro/VUaV04evKZUk_pHDNJxnCY0y1gAVqIsjwCLcB/s1600/m%2Bmarion.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kL17pWaWm6s/WTGzDLfJiGI/AAAAAAAACro/VUaV04evKZUk_pHDNJxnCY0y1gAVqIsjwCLcB/s400/m%2Bmarion.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a>Most of this episode will heavily focus on Val and her babies, but I wanna take a moment to mention Laura and Greg before I move on to all that stuff.  After the little scheme hatched by Ava and Abs in <a href="http://www.knotsblogging.com/2017/06/knots-landing-episode-129-of-344.html" target="_blank">Vulnerable</a>, Laura no longer wants to have anything to do with Greg and is refusing to answer his calls or talk to him in any way.  However, when he finally does manage to corner her and get her to speak with him (by driving up to her while she’s on the sidewalk and then just abandoning his car for a minute to get out and chase after her, which I found amusing), he does something that I really appreciated from a writing point of view; he tells her that the whole thing was a stupid setup by Abs and his mother.  I appreciated this so much because you just know that if this was some other series, the writers would really draw this out forever and make it take an eternity for Greg to figure out what really went down.  They would simply make his character dumber for awhile so they wouldn’t have to deal with him realizing he was tricked, but the KL writers do it in a way more organic way.  I remind you that all Greg saw last ep as he came walking outside was Abs and Ava sitting together while an angry Laura sped away; it wouldn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what was really going on.  The writers respect the intelligence of Greg as well as the audience enough to not dumb him down and keep this going on; they just have him go right up to Laura and say, “It was a trick; I know it was a trick.”  Yeah, Laura doesn’t believe him and doesn’t take him back, but that’s not my point; my point is that the writers let it be revealed good and quick that Ava and Abs were in cahoots to screw both Greg and Laura.  Oh yeah, and one last thing, which is that Greg tells Laura he shipped Ava off to Africa and that’s the last we’ll be seeing of her.  I’ll take one quick moment to reiterate how much I enjoyed Ava during her seven eps and I loved the energy she brought to proceedings; if she hadn’t sadly suffered that stroke and then passed away in 1990, I would have loved to see her return to stir up more trouble later down the line.<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-11UgXB_KW7k/WTGzXCaYSzI/AAAAAAAACrs/B4Yo8445plgNtvtfxFGWIfswLXfUd7MGwCLcB/s1600/one%2Bgreg.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-11UgXB_KW7k/WTGzXCaYSzI/AAAAAAAACrs/B4Yo8445plgNtvtfxFGWIfswLXfUd7MGwCLcB/s400/one%2Bgreg.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a>So let’s back to Val’s babies, the story that has provided the nucleus for this entire incredible season.  When we first catch up with Val and Ben, it’s a scene that I found positively delightful, because they are at Ben’s Plant House and Val is in bed and Ben is, for some reason, parading around the place in a kilt, playing bagpipes loudly.  What the hell is going on here?  The sheer strangeness of this image is what made me like it so much, and both My Beloved Grammy and myself actually laughed aloud, and quite uproariously, when we first saw it.  I again have to ask: What the hell was I thinking a few years back when I first watched the show and I so callously dismissed the character of Ben as “boring”?  We’ve now seen two of his four seasons on the series and he’s incredible.  Not only is he fabulously decent and just an inherently good person, but he has this fantastic dry wit about him and often gets these really killer sarcastic lines during the eps, plus he’ll randomly start playing bagpipes for no reason in the bedroom, and it’s astounding.  I feel like I oughta send a wine and cheese basket to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0790585/" target="_blank">Douglas Sheehan</a> along with a letter of apology for ever calling his character boring; I was absolutely 100% wrong in that regard and his character has just skyrocketed in my view, because he is so incredible.  I also like this bit because it’s just silly and rings true to the way couples will behave in their private lives.  One of the keys to a good relationship is to be able to be silly together, so my thighs would definitely melt for a guy that puts on a kilt and does a bagpipe solo performance for me.<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-g0huc3jA5Uo/WTGwW9EovbI/AAAAAAAACrY/uiO0Yv3OS9wp5EGJi3z4nAchtFPXBlICACEw/s1600/Sean%2BConnery%2BBen.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-g0huc3jA5Uo/WTGwW9EovbI/AAAAAAAACrY/uiO0Yv3OS9wp5EGJi3z4nAchtFPXBlICACEw/s400/Sean%2BConnery%2BBen.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a>In any case, Ben only gets to play the bagpipes briefly before the phone rings and he’s interrupted with news of Mack’s incarceration.  He leaves Val with some excuse or other and rushes to the police station to deal with this and we get another scene that I found rather fabulous.  Basically, Ben sits down and spends several minutes talking to this officer about what he thinks Mack could have been doing at Dr. Ackerman’s place, and then after a certain amount of time has passed, the officer reveals that he’s not holding Mack and that Mack is probably waiting for Ben outside at this precise moment.  Ben has this little moment where he says how clever it was for the cop to distract him and try to get information out of him this whole time, and I don’t know why, but I found the whole thing unbelievably cute.  I also like how the officer says he’s letting Mack go because he believes, if Mack was breaking into someone’s house, there has to be a good reason.  I like this sorta inherent trust the officer shows towards Mack, and it also reminds us that Mack is well respected in the community and can maybe, every now and then, get away with bending or even outright breaking the law if he needs to.Meanwhile, Karen is still stuck at the bridge tournament place waiting to find out where Mack has gone.  She’s all alone and we are told that Nurse Wilson has fled the scene, probably frightened by the sight of Dr. Ackerman or perhaps by what happened to him.  I honestly can’t remember if we ever see Nurse Wilson again and I am far too lazy to pull up her IMDb page and look to see if she’s got more eps to her credit (and we’ve also established that IMDb could very likely be wrong about such things, so it would be a futile waste of time in any case).  However, Nurse Wilson is not where my priorities lie at this point; I’m more interested in Mack and Karen and the whole gang, so I’m glad we’re mostly focusing on them now.  After awhile, Karen is reunited with Mack and he explains what happened and where he went and then everyone runs off together to go continue their research.TO BE CONTINUED</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =