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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 211287" data-attributes="member: 22">Bouncing Babies (KNOTS, 25 Feb 88) v Boxed In (DALLAS, 15 Sep 14)In C21st parlance, Bouncing Babies is a game-changing episode of KNOTS. Its main focus is on Val and Greg, each of whom eventually overcomes their own self-interest to make an irrevocable decision for the sake of their kids. For Val, that means legally acknowledging Gary as the twins’ father. For Greg, it means giving Meg to the Mackenzies to raise on a permanent basis. The two storylines complement each other neatly.Boxed In is very different. It’s all action, with little time for introspection or soul-searching. Whereas Bouncing Babies focuses on existing conflicts between the main characters, Boxed In places the Ewings and the Rylands in a wider context, pitting them against a common enemy in another country. The KNOTS episode Boxed In most closely resembles is Borderline — two principal characters (Paige and Michael then, Ann and Emma now) are held captive in Mexico by gangsters who threaten to kill them unless their families ensure drugs are transported across the border on their behalf.The stakes feel even higher on Boxed In than they did on Borderline. There’s a whole layer of artifice missing. When Karen sat by the phone all night waiting anxiously for news of her loved ones, she still managed to look glamorous, When Judith Ryland does the same thing, she looks utterly demented with fear. It’s quite a performance. The moment where she, Harris and Ann are tricked into believing Emma has just been executed is especially harrowing. Whereas Paige was able to deliver sarcastic quips in captivity, Emma is far too terrified to come up with any clever one-liners — not after glimpsing a truck full of corpses in the backyard. This is very much the Ewingverse in a post-24 world. You also get a much stronger sense of the bigger picture than you used to during international storylines in ‘80s DALLAS — whenever JR financed an overseas revolution, it felt like an abstract notion with all the violence and bloodshed occurring off-screen in some unspecified location. Here, we are shown news footage of riots and civil unrest in Mexico City which is directly linked to the bad guys’ deal with the Ewings.Like Mack Mackenzie in Borderline, Bobby Ewing is the would-be rescuer wading into enemy territory to find his family, but there is none of the action man heroics he used to exhibit on Old DALLAS whenever the script required it. Instead, the ep ends with his anguished expression after he is given a Sophie’s Choice by the kidnappers. He can bring only one hostage home — Ann or Emma?And the winner is ... Bouncing BabiesBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]4AXxVp2pm4o[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

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