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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 350447" data-attributes="member: 23">Putting On The Ritz / The New Rich / Love Into Three Won’t Go continuedOn paper, the plot of Love Into Three Won’t Go is traditional soap. As the title suggests, it eventually unfolds into your archetypal love triangle and [spoiler alert] the series even ends with a cliffhanger visual that would later become associated with one of the Big Four nighttime soaps. The way it gets there, though, is another matter. I didn’t see any of the latter part of the episode coming because I was too wrapped up in the story. Anton Rodgers has been a bit of a revelation to me in the last months. Up until then I’d really known him as the middle-aged, middle-class cosy sitcom lead in Fresh Fields, its sequel French Fields and May To December.  I must confess I’d thought of him as rather stuffy. His appearance as the roué who painted Sarah in another classic b/w UpDown episode (the first regular episode, in fact: The Mistress And The Maids) begin to challenge my perceptions. And any old ideas were blown out of the water having watched Scrooge a couple of weeks ago and seeing him play cheeky cockney Tom, joyously singing Thank You Very Much and dancing (extremely well) on top of Scrooge’s coffin as it was pulled through the streets. Now he’s back in the world of UpDown and once again involved with Sarah. His character - Richard De Brassey - has a great arc. The first act of the episode feels extremely gothic . We open with the pair arriving at a rundown mansion at night in the pouring rain, to discover their new master as drunk and disagreeable as can be (indeed, he’s positively Dickensian once again). Then he has a horseback accident when a gun is fired (one of many Eighties soap precursors) and nearly dies. Sarah and Thomas stay to clean up both De Brassey and the house and things begin to change. He forms a bond with Sarah and reveals that his young daughter was killed in a house fire several years earlier and she is drawn to him. Thus comes the love triangle. What makes this triangle feel fresh even today are the shades of grey. Sarah is the unfaithful partner; De Brassey “the other man” and Thomas the injured party. However, none of these are played as archetypes. Sarah’s conduct feels the most questionable, but it’s not just a question of her infidelity so much as her motivation in moving her affair forwards. If anyone engineers the situation, it’s Sarah. One really feels she could be attracted to De Brassey because of the wounded bird thing he has going on while at the same time recognising that he’s a vulnerable and very wealthy man and Sarah is a natural schemer out to better herself. If anything, De Brassey feels like a victim in all this. Certainly, Thomas isn’t. Thomas’s response to the situation is perhaps the most refreshing of all. He begins his own game play, manipulating both Sarah and De Brassey with guilt trips and mind games, appearing at times to almost be enjoying it. The way he operates and the little looks he gives when nobody else can see bring to mind JR Ewing. Reinforcing this, also appears to be one step ahead of everyone else and his responses are extremely measured. There’s a terrific moment where, over breakfast, guilty Sarah and De Brassey break the news about their affair and De Brassey’s proposal and in the moment where the revelation comes, Thomas simply continues stirring his tea with no flicker of emotion until he’s ready to respond. I really like this unpredictable Thomas who feels very in step with the man we met back in The New Man. Before watching, I had a low-key spoiler in knowing that the series ended on a cliffhanger and that it involved fire but, even so, with this airing before end-of-season cliffhangers were really a thing (Who Shot JR? was still a year away when T&S ended), I was really not expecting it to be a life-and-death scenario where we don’t know who lives and who dies. But that’s exactly what we got. It was exciting enough that there was a fire in the barn, with Thomas said to be inside trying to rescue the horses. Ending there would have been a decent enough cliffhanger. But then De Brassey ran in to try and save him and both lives were in jeopardy as Sarah watched helplessly. This foreshadows perhaps two significant Dynasty cliffhangers as well as one seen in Sons And Daughters and probably Dallas too).  would have been a really good point for the cliffhanger. But then it goes all Falcon Crest on us… there’s a time jump and we cut to a funeral with a coffin being lowered into the ground as Sarah grieves. We don’t find out the name of the dead man, but neither Thomas nor De Brassey are present. I haven’t even seen the FC cliffhanger, but this moment is well-known enough for me to know of it (it was even voted Telly Talk’s #1 Eighties Soap Cliffhanger by us just three months ago) and this is pretty much exactly as I pictured that, frame-by-frame. Had it come a few years later, it would have seemed like a greatest hits of well-known season finale cliffhangers. Who’d have thought this short-lived British period drama would have done one of the first end-of-season cliffhangers before the format was popularised by the US soaps a short time later.Apparently a third series was not only planned, but had begun to be shot with some exteriors. Would I have liked more closure for the end to the world of UpDown. Yes. But I must admit that I wouldn’t have relished the idea of trawling through too many episodes and feel I’ve seen enough.And… since it finished with loose ends, it’s pleasing that it did so with such spectacular, inventive dramatic flair. I’m still reeling.</blockquote>

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