Dallas Character Wes Parmalee story with hindsight

[Seaviewer]

Wes was Jock, nothing proves him not to be, but plenty proves him to be.

The timeline doesn't work out in Bobby's favour, no one could know someone's entire life story after a few hours of delerious talking - and it makes no sense that Wes knew all of his family and friends on sight.

Wes was absolutely Jock.

If the writers & production team say he wasn't then they simply don't know their own characters and material.

Well, it was a cheesy attempt at a recast, anyway.

They claim now that there never was an intention for Wes to be Jock but everything we see on screen does suggest exactly that but that at the last minute they got cold feet.

Perhaps strictly speaking it's true. Once Duffy returned, Wes was not going to be Jock - but Ben Stivers was.

 

[Luke_Krebbs_Ewing]

They claim now that there never was an intention for Wes to be Jock but everything we see on screen does suggest exactly that but that at the last minute they got cold feet.

Perhaps strictly speaking it's true. Once Duffy returned, Wes was not going to be Jock - but Ben Stivers was.

The intention was to still make Wes Jock but you are still right about one thing. Duffy's return in the same season probably had a negative effect on the Jock re-cast.

Watch season ten with an open mind & you'll see that up until the episode he disappears Wes was Jock.

It was because of a fan backlash that the Producers of the show got cold feet & reneged on the storyline. I've said that umpteen times before.

Fan's thought it was disrespectful to actor Jim Davis to recast his role. Personally speaking I thought it was more of a tribute to him to bring his character back.

I still think it was a shame because the last four years of the show would've been completely different & probably for the better if Jock's character had returned to Dallas.

 

[Chris2]

Yep - if you watch the episodes, up until Wes’ last episode, they are leading up to him being Jock. He passes every test, and he wins over all the skeptics with the exception of Bobby and JR themselves. They must have been planning that for Ben Stivers and sketched out the plot in detail. Then they tacked on the conclusion where Wes wasn’t Jock, but it did not really align with the tone of what had come before.

 

[CeeCee72]

The resolution of the Wes Parmelee story is one in a long line of examples of how season 10 started a downward slope for "Dallas" that it never recovered from.

The wrap up was ridiculous. He just decided to confess to Ellie and she wants to let the whole thing go? Why? After the damage he had done to her family, why does she want it just dropped?

I understand why they decided to NOT make him Jock. Fans were already ticked off about the dream season. Why tick them off further by doing something the majority was against? But the quick and tidy resolution was just so much lost opportunity. Imagine what COULD have been done instead?

Wes could have been murdered. Then we have a nice whodunnit. Clayton? JR? Bobby? Ray? Ellie? That would have been cliffhanger worthy.

JR could have found out SE had gone to Wes with an offer to help and that Wes had seen John Ross and SE had allowed it. Imagine the drama.

We could have seen some serious emotional fallout. Ellie and Clayton's marriage, Ray's guilt for believing that man might have been his father. JR's deep seeded need for revenge (I mean, after the way that Wes embarrassed the Ewings at the Oil Baron's Ball, you'd think JR would want some serious payback).

Instead, all we got was Clayton going after him once and Ellie fretting over that. Then everyone just moved on.

Shame.

 

[Laurie Marr]

It wasn’t so much the identity of Wes that was tested so much as the identity of those around him. That’s what made it such an engaging storyline. On paper it looks absurd, but the show handled it extremely well. I was genuinely intrigued by it at the time.

 

[Kenny Coyote]

As I remember it, Miss Ellie was the only one who thought he might be Jock. She was too emotional to think straight. Jock's sons would have loved for Jock to still be alive. They loved him. If they'd had any reason to believe that man could be their father, they would have been overjoyed. They had every reason to want to believe him but they would see he wasn't. Ellie maybe wanted to believe more than even them, so she did believe or at least thought it was possible. Someone who wasn't emotionally affected by the outcome, Jeremy Wendell, held a meeting with the fake Jock and as they were talking about selling Ewing Oil to Westar, Wendell called him Mr. Parmalee.

He passed the tests because he was a good con man. If he'd been a bad con man, there would be no point in doing it. If he fails the test then he's not Jock and it's over. Pointless story.

As I watched it, I wasn't thinking "is this Jock"' I was thinking "is this con man going to get away with it"? I kept thinking, I really hope they don't say he's Jock; that won't be good." To me that was the suspense: How much will this con man get away with."

I think it would have been very awkward to prove he was Jock and then have to have all his sons apologize to him and say how they were so sorry they didn't recognize their own father and they just don't know how they could have not realized it was him. I don't see any way it worked out in a way where the audience was satisfied with the idea that the Ewing boys would have all botched the search for Jock and that they didn't bother to check the hospitals in the area for anyone who had been in a helicopter crash. They would have left no stone unturned in their search for Jock.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

Ben Stivers was written by different producers than Wes Parmalee. Peter Dunne likely intended for Stivers to be Jock (and then have the story go nowhere) but Katzman/Paulsen were probably more interested in the Ewings' reaction to Parmalee's claims that he was Jock.

It appears the actors were told different things.

I argue that the ambiguity of the plot's cessation, though frustrating at the time, was deliberate. Leaving it up in the air was inevitable... Remember, Wes told Miss Ellie that he wasn't Jock right after Wendell told Wes he was planning to destroy the family.

Again, the brilliance of the storyline was that viewers had been exposed to enough red herring that they could comfortably assume Wes was/wasn't Jock, and take for granted that their opinion was supported by the evidence presented in the show.

It gave the plot a ghostly quality and, in its bizarre way, defined everything DALLAS was all about.

 

[Sarah]

I don’t believe for a second he was Jock but echo the sentiments it could have been so much more.

Like imagine when he goes to see John Ross. Sue Ellen and JR are angry - but imagine if that happened nowadays? What if he had been a kidnapping paedophile?

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

Let's remember for a second that all this is fiction.

What "makes sense" to us individually is all that matters, and the plotline permitted us to project our own logic and even wishful thinking onto it.

 

[Laurie Marr]

The boys loved their Daddy for sure, but I’m not so certain it was unaccompanied by ambivalent feelings. Daddy issues are not uncommon in most families, with the Ewing boys it was the neurotic driver of almost everything they did. That added another layer of intrigue to the Parmalee storyline.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

The boys loved their Daddy for sure, but I’m not so certain it was unaccompanied by ambivalent feelings. Daddy issues are not uncommon in most families, with the Ewing boys it was the neurotic driver of almost everything they did. That added another layer of intrigue to the Parmalee storyline.

Oh, absolutely. He turned his family into an internecine mess, and yet all they could do was mythologize him over it.

 

[Laurie Marr]

If we really push the Hamlet theme.....According to Ernest Jones’ theory the reason Hamlet hesitated so much in killing Claudius and thereby avenging his father’s murder is because Claudius has successfully enacted Hamlet’s own unconscious wish to kill his father. Wes allowed ‘the boys’ to enact their own unconscious fantasies in relation to Jock: be openly hostile to him, humiliate him, repudiate him ..... emasculate him.

 

[Luke_Krebbs_Ewing]

We never got to see Wes's final scene before leaving, he just disappears & the storyline is left ambiguously up in the air. Why would the writers do that instead of giving a definitive resolution to the storyline? Is it because they wanted to leave the possibilty that Wes really was Jock Ewing after all?

When Miss Ellie says he told me he wasn't Jock it's only after Donna comments did anyone notice the uninvited visitor after being questioned by Clayton? And this is presumably some time later after the event of Bobby's wedding. Why did Miss Ellie only volunteer this information so late in the day & not immediately after seeing Wes? There's something not right here.

As I've said before if Wes wasn't Jock, she should've been furious with him for upsetting her & the family. She would've had Wes escorted off Southfork. But she doesn't do any of that. Instead she get's angry at Clayton for wanting to go after Wes Parmalee. She wants it all over & to forget it all. She doesn't want Clayton going after Wes. Why?

Now as I've said before we never see the exchange between Miss Ellie & Wes. Although she says that he told her that he wasn't Jock, her reaction to Clayton going after Wes indicates otherwise. Clayton threatened to kill him at the Oil Baron's Ball & he made it clear in other confrontations with him that he didn't care if he was Jock or not as he'd grown to love Miss Ellie.

I'm firmly convinced that Wes Parmalee is Jock Ewing & Miss Ellie guessed the truth of this. She sensed there was something between them. If Wes did indeed say he wasn't Jock then he lied in order to protect his family & left so as not to put them through any more pain as they didn't believe who he really was. Maybe Wes held Ellie one last time, kissed her & then said goodbye to her one last time. Wes wasn't a conman, he took off right after Jeremy Wendell said he was gonna stick it to the Ewings. Wes did the only noble thing he left to spare his family any more pain, or rather Jock did.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

We never got to see Wes's final scene before leaving, he just disappears & the storyline is left ambiguously up in the air. Why would the writers do that instead of giving a definitive resolution to the storyline? Is it because they wanted to leave the possibility that Wes really was Jock Ewing after all?

Yes, I think so. And that was the correct choice even though, at the time, it was annoying and seemed as if they'd just dropped the plot and moved on for no reason.

It allowed the viewer, then and now, to mull over who Wes really was. That's part of the Shakespearean nature of the tale.

I just wished they'd made reference to it years later in some cryptic way. But with the messiness of the later years, it didn't really matter.

When Miss Ellie says he told me he wasn't Jock it's only after Donna comments did anyone notice the uninvited visitor after being questioned by Clayton? And this is presumably some time later after the event of Bobby's wedding. Why did Miss Ellie only volunteer this information so late in the day & not immediately after seeing Wes? There's something not right here.

As I've said before if Wes wasn't Jock, she should've been furious with him for upsetting her & the family. She would've had Wes escorted off Southfork. But she doesn't do any of that. Instead she get's angry at Clayton for wanting to go after Wes Parmalee. She wants it all over & to forget it all. She doesn't want Clayton going after Wes. Why?

Now as I've said before we never see the exchange between Miss Ellie & Wes. Although she says that he told her that he wasn't Jock, her reaction to Clayton going after Wes indicates otherwise. Clayton threatened to kill him at the Oil Baron's Ball & he made it clear in other confrontations with him that he didn't care if he was Jock or not as he'd grown to love Miss Ellie.

Good points all. And I think this was largely intentional, too.

 

[Kenny Coyote]

She wants it all over & to forget it all. She doesn't want Clayton going after Wes. Why?

It's strange isn't it? Is that unusual reaction of Ellie a carefully created idea by the writers, or was it the result of sloppiness?

I tend to think it was the same type of sloppiness that resulted in the story ending so abruptly. If not, then Ellie knows Clayton s furious at Wes, had vowed to kill him and then she's unable to stop him from going looking for him to kill him. If he succeeds in finding him and killing him, it's likely that Clayton kills him or dies trying to kill him. The one thing that would have stopped Clayton before he got into his car is saying: "He's Jock." But Ellie won't say it. If he was Jock don't you think she would?

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

It's strange isn't it? Is that unusual reaction of Ellie a carefully created idea by the writers, or was it the result of sloppiness?

I tend to think it was the same type of sloppiness that resulted in the story ending so abruptly. If not, then Ellie knows Clayton s furious at Wes, had vowed to kill him and then she's unable to stop him from going looking for him to kill him. If he succeeds in finding him and killing him, it's likely that Clayton kills him or dies trying to kill him. The one thing that would have stopped Clayton before he got into his car is saying: "He's Jock." But Ellie won't say it. If he was Jock don't you think she would?

I think this was largely intentional, not sloppiness. Although one wondered at the time.

 

[Luke_Krebbs_Ewing]

It's strange isn't it? Is that unusual reaction of Ellie a carefully created idea by the writers, or was it the result of sloppiness?

I tend to think it was the same type of sloppiness that resulted in the story ending so abruptly. If not, then Ellie knows Clayton s furious at Wes, had vowed to kill him and then she's unable to stop him from going looking for him to kill him. If he succeeds in finding him and killing him, it's likely that Clayton kills him or dies trying to kill him. The one thing that would have stopped Clayton before he got into his car is saying: "He's Jock." But Ellie won't say it. If he was Jock don't you think she would?

It wouldn't have mattered if he was Jock or not, Clayton told Wes that on the few occasions their paths crossed.

It's the very fact that she doesn't say "He's Jock!" which speaks volumes. Her initial reaction to Clayton going after Wes also speaks volumes too. She's very quick to demand of Clayton to let it go & leave Wes alone.

Sometimes people say a lot more with their body language & their reactions when they can't or probably in this case won't find the words to say how they're really feeling. I think Miss Ellie was torn between the feelings she has now for Clayton & the feelings she had for Jock. That may be another reason why Wes/Jock decided to leave. He could see the pressure the family especially Miss Ellie was under as a result of his return.

 

[Seaviewer]

He passed the tests because he was a good con man.

He couldn't have conned the physical tests.

I don't see any way it worked out in a way where the audience was satisfied with the idea that the Ewing boys would have all botched the search for Jock and that they didn't bother to check the hospitals in the area for anyone who had been in a helicopter crash.

It wouldn't have been the worst plot hole they ever perpetrated.

The boys loved their Daddy for sure, but I’m not so certain it was unaccompanied by ambivalent feelings.

I agree. In theory they would have wanted their father back but in practice, perhaps subconsciously, it would have been a very messy change to the status quo and their newfound independence.

 

[Luke_Krebbs_Ewing]

Wes Parmalee’s storyline was probably the last great one for DALLAS, as the show returned to form after the quasi DYNASTY dream season. IMHO Steve Forrest was an A* actor and he blended in nicely with the main cast. He would have been a very worthwhile addition to the principal cast in season 10 (DVD-11), had things worked out differently. He should have been cast as Jock’s brother Jason. I can understand how some fans believe he was Jock but nobody could replace Jim Davis.


The Southfork barbeque is underway. Ray (Jock’s illegitimate son) is drinking at the entrance bar, with his buddies. Wes Parmalee (Jock’s impersonator) appears for the last time, (a scene from season 9, DVD-10, 1986 – ’87):

Ray: “I just can’t believe you coming out here again. Especially knowing how people are feeling.”

Wes: “I need to see Miss Ellie.”

Ray: “I cannot believe the hurt you are causing this family.”

Wes: “Nobody is hurting any worse than I am.”

Ray: “Maybe but you’re the one that’s causing it. You’ve got Miss Ellie’s head all twisted around. You turned her sons against her. You put Clayton Farlow one of the finest men in the world through the ringer.”

Wes: “Move aside Ray. I need to see her!”

Ray: “You know at first I prayed that you were Jock. But now even if you are I don’t think even I care anymore. You’re not the man I loved. He would have disappeared off the face of the earth before he broke a family up like you have.”

Wes: “You’re a good man Ray. Any man would be proud to have you as a son.”

Parmalee struts away into the crowd and eventually into the mansion, to see Ellie.

When you actually think about it, this scene pre-empts what's about to happen.

In the original script before it was changed, Wes brings proof to Ellie that he is who he says he is, he is Jock.

Apparently the scene was filmed but subsequently cut.

Bobby then arrives from South America & tells everyone that Wes is Wyatt Haines not Jock.

So the insinuations are there in Steve Forrest's final episode for everyone to see, that despite the lukewarm reaction to the storyline from some of the fans, Wes Parmalee actually WAS Jock Ewing all along.

 

[DallasFanForever]

I really enjoyed the Wes Parmalee storyline and I would’ve had no problem with him turning out to be Jock. It really could’ve shaken the show up when you think about it. I have to admit it would be tough to see anyone else in that role besides Jim Davis but I would’ve been fine with it.