The Mysterious era: 1964-1978

[ArchieLucasCarringtonEwing1989]

I kinda remember most of what I wrote in the original posting on the old forum, so please bear with me, this was my favourite post and a number of people liked it too, so I thought I'd revive for Snarky....ahem...I mean UnPrincipled especially ;-) so I am going to write it again and add some more thoughts, forgive me it's not in its entirety, I may save posts into notes in future.

As I remember saying Dynasty, like the 80s overall, had an obsession with the 1950s-60s era
Even though that those two decades are so completely different from each other they may as well be in different planets, after all the year 1951 has nothing in common with the year 1968 so I'm going to narrow this down to the years 1955-1964, the 70s on the other hand where completely ignored during that period in time (the years 1970-74 was sort of nostalgic in the mid to late 80s probably due to the fact that it was still "the sixties" albeit an extended bit) and similarily Dynasty also ignored the 70s, Dynasty never once explained anything that might've happened from the time Alexis was banished from Denver in 1964 to when Krystle arrived in 1978, just two and a bit years before she married Blake.

We know that Kirby left Denver for France in the mid 70s, it seems that she was gone away for some years before her return in 1982, but aside from this nothing.

Blake can't have been a lonely batchelor for 14 years and grieving the loss of his marriage to Alexis, early Blake was brusque in his manner and he rose above things.

Interestingly in season 9 Fallon mentions to Krystle that she alone brought them more closer as a family than they ever could have, this statement means to me that Blake hardly ever saw his children when they were teenagers.

So what could Blake have been doing all those years before Krystle?

Someone mentioned on the old forum that Blake and Alexis marriage matched an idealised time in America's history as they were married roughly around the Americana years, again I place this era to be mid 1950s to Kennedy's assassination/aftermath in 1963-64 when after that the sixties really "began".

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

Yes, I wish I could find my post(s) from that thread in particular. I seem to like the backstory discussion threads the most.

 

[ArchieLucasCarringtonEwing1989]

The backstory is so interesting especially since we know virtually nothing about Dynasty's past as its so vague, we are reminded of a glorious past every other episode in Dallas and Falcon Crest via JR and Angela, KL was sort of tied in with Dallas but even then we see flashbacks to Gary and Vals past and the Fairgates in the 60s.

Dynasty never provided us viewers with this, partly because it's so inconsistent and is fixated on one period in time: 1955-1964 nothing really from before 1955 and nothing from 1964-78.

At the same time however each era of Dynasty seems to pay homage or encapsulate a distant past era
Seasons 1-2 was very Roaring 20s, season 4 was gothic 40s and season 6/The Colby's came off like a camp 60s melodrama.

This is why I, like many others on here love season 9 as it does delve into the Carringtons history, properly, and not slap dashed, I also like to think that had season 10 gone ahead the mystery
Woman in the limo would've been a woman whom Blake was involved with in secret probably after Alexis left, but way before Krystle's time in Denver, someone who Fallon wouldn't remember much as she was away in Europe and the East Coast for at least half of a dozen of those years.

 

[Artur]

Those were 14 years of Joseph’s successful plotting against all the women, who were into Blake.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

Those were 14 years of Joseph’s successful plotting against all the women, who were into Blake.

Really? Artur?

The ~15 year "mysterious" era between the mid-1960s and the beginning of the '80s seems implicitly fundamental to DYNASTY's identity, imperfect and suffocated and misguided as the show and its execution often was. Those "shadows" feel somehow real, at least whenever they tapped into that, whether deliberately or not. DYNASTY as a series was both out-of-control but yet over-controlled, and the imbalance didn't always work, the Carrington saga, with its rich potential so desperate to be mined, a bit less than the sum of its parts.

One could maybe find a way to apply that same ~1965 to 1980 era thing to the other shows as well, the cultural meltdown that began in the middle of the '60s, the murky, nightmarish phantasmagoria of the climaxing Cold War that existed when JFK was assassinated, followed by the counterculture psychedelic desolation of the late-'60s, then the melancholy refractory period of the 1970s, and the reunion of all these soapy people in the acquisitive, revisionism of the 1980s.

Say, DALLAS... the record-setting rating for the Whodunnit? episode wrap-up to the "Who Shot JR?" global cliffhanger, an unprecedented TV event, occurring on 21 November 1980, some seventeen years to almost the day after an infamous real-life Dallas shooting -- one which would become arguably the greatest murder mystery in human history, the assassination of President Kennedy... That works for me in a weird way: many see JFK's death as the end of America as a democracy, such as it was, a literal coup d'état and a total capitulation to the military contractors and a federal government the corporations view as their business agents. And certainly the country has been moving consistently to the political right ever since (rhetorical leftist pretenses to the contrary), the decimation of the working class given its coup de grâce under the auspices of President Reagan in the '80s, a man who ravaged the unions and anti-trust laws while eliminating the progressive tax structure (where the more you make the more you pay). Making it impossible for most Americans to recapture the opportunities or the "cultural values" of the 1950s which Ronald Reagan so extolled and nostalgized.

And that led us to where we are now in the States: a warlike late-stage capitalist country with the #1 economy in the world yet is #37 in quality of life. And that's about money. Money endlessly re-routed from the working class (and the former middle class) to the point that the corporate-crony government is 100% corrupt and does nothing for its people (and is constantly scheming to do even less) unless those people are of the billionaire donor class.

So the factual shooting of JFK and the fictional shooting of JR, both in Dallas and both occurring or wrapping up on 21/22 November, separated by seventeen years, seems meaningful. At least in terms of drama. At least inside my head.

I'm sure Jacqueline Perrault was up to nightmarish no good circa 1964... I postulate elsewhere that her Cuban casinos were nationalized by Castro in 1959, so she funded the CIA/anti-Castro rebels in their attempts to assassinate the premier, eventually turning the conspiracy back onto "uncooperative Stateside politicians," and in her hydra-headed efforts, facilitating gain-of-function development of super-viruses to kill him, her wildly-powerful linear particle generator located under a New Orleans children's hospital utilized in the related lab experiments, the resulting Simian mutations somehow seeping into the general population (as devastatingly happened in the '50s with the earliest polio vaccine) and coming to pandemic fruition in the '80s. (i.e., Lana Turner killed Kennedy and released AIDS into the world, the glamorous toxic bitch).

But where were all these people from 1965 until at least the end of the 1970s?? Dropping acid with Timothy Leary?, profiting obscenely from the Vietnam war (the one they call "the American war" in Vietnam)?, engaging in hippie orgies along the walkways of Haight-Ashbury city parks?, protesting something at Berkley?, opening a Carnaby Street boutique?, or, inevitably doing something -- or anything -- somewhere in Paris? Burning out and winding up in a cocaine and THC-laden disco haze, multiple rehabs in their recent pasts, before all agreeing to re-invent and re-identify themselves by returning to Denver (or to Southfork, or Knots Landing, or to that most-shadowy corner of Napa known as Tuscany Valley) at the onset of the decade of the 1980s -- to regroup, to make some money, or just to be seen.

Especially now that Angela Channing's ex-husband was in the White House.

I still say Roger Grimes was an Oswald-ian low-level intelligence grunt who hired on to the Carrington estate reconstruction project in 1963 to locate that crystal skull der Fuhrer's recently-widowed spouse was so determined to reclaim as her own, with a little help from her buds at the CIA.