In a way, it becomes a more tragic story in hindsight. If we still buy that Mark was alive when Pam was in Hong Kong and arranged for her to see the decoy instead of him, that means he was in remission but it didn't last (which parallels what eventually happens to Pam herself -- she travels to Abu Dhabi hoping to find a last chance cure for her cancer so she can return to Christopher, but then she doesn't make it either).
As the great comics writer Alan Moore once said, "they're all imaginary stories."
That's an understatement. But then I think somewhere Leonard Katzman is having the last laugh as we keep talking about his "light bulb" moment.
Best summary of the Dream Season I've ever read. For me that was the end of Dallas. I'm left to wonder, what happened to Sue Ellen, but I assume after years of recovery with JR by her side, they lived happily-ish every after. JR one day of course inherited South Fork and built Ewing Oil into Ewing Industries (a bit Koch Industries inspired) and one day John Ross inherited it all with Christopher as a future nemesis. To mean the dream started when Bobby turned around in the shower and Pam never did wake up. Or maybe that's my dream of what happened.
Probably best if you're going to continue past the dream season.
Good points. So you stop at the end of 10? Not a bad idea as things go. I wish they would have stopped at 9 and then had a really good movie years later but I can see giving it another college try and stopping at 10 with a good movie years later. And I'll agree 11 on - wow - then two movies which you watch just to watch, that then get written out - then 3 mini seasons of wtf was that? Was that really Dallas?I own Seasons 1 thru 8 and Season 10 (per DVD count). But for first-time viewing, I'd watch the dream season just to get a sense of how jarring the whole mess is and was at the time -- watching this, the most successful drama series in global television history, start its long trek of melting down like the Wicked Bitch of the West.
New writers in tow, the first half of the dream season is alright-ish, more experimental and a little self-consciously arty... But by the middle, the plots fail to begin coalescing, and the stories just meander and muddle. The glamour really does go through the ceiling with a mid-'80s kind of inevitability, and DALLAS is attempting to become DYNASTY almost literally, but DALLAS feels inappropriate dispensing this kind of narrative incompetence and pretention, while we've long gotten used to it on DYNASTY.
Then, when Pam wakes up at the beginning of Season 10 and she and Bobby tell each other that for the last 31 1/2 episodes she'd just been snoozing, it was, at the time, a reductive shock, the groan heard around the world, and a ballsily arrogant choice by the returning producers. The next 29 episodes are terrific fun, the closest DALLAS ever came to self-parody which actually worked, and became arguably the year with the most frequent re-watch potential, but the fans were mad about the use of the dream trick, and Lorimar was now cutting corners by avoiding the usual film lab work and instead using a cheapy computerized video post-production process which made the show look so bad it was almost breath-taking (and looked five times worse than the DVDs for S10 do today).
And if you leave out Season 9, the dream season, you won't find that the end of Season 8 and the beginning of Season 10 line up with each other any better than if you'd sat through the dream.
My point being: we suffered through it at least once. So shouldn't everybody??
"Gonna Jhirmack that man right out of my hair....!"
. I guess when you're that big you die really, really, really slowly.I like this idea - skip it but then go back and pick it up. When it ends you have this empty feeling - I mean if you stick through it from 11 to the end you really are in it to visit with old friends. So here's your chance to go back and get another ending with old friends, one where Bobby is dead and we don't get an answer to what happened to Sue Ellen but like Gone with the Wind, we don't need those answers (though I will say GWTW second sequel is much better than it's first).I actually did this on my most recent rewatch and the issue was just as split then when I asked what others thought of the idea
Skipping the Dream Season
I've heard the suggestion thrown around a few times but couldn't find a specific thread discussing the idea. I'm in the middle of a rewatch and skipped from Swan Song to Return to Camelot (and through the season) just to see how it flows as in previous rewatches I've found the transition from...tellytalk.net
I think it actually works to skip it and then go back and watch it separate to the rest of the show because it's a far better quality than the final season and it's pretty self-contained.
(GOD bless you internet creators) I now have access to the subsequent years. I've just watched the first 3 episodes after Bobby's death. Was someone a fan of Barbara Bel Geddes and Linda Gray? Their performances alone should have garnered Emmy nominations and wins. Their acting is phenomenal especially the scenes of Linda (Sue Ellen) in the prison cell followed soon after in the detox centre. Which begs the question.
