Was there anything that anyone liked about the character or the storyline in which she was involved?
I like these things:
I like what Laurel symbolises. What Laurel is to Clayton, Jeanne O’Brien will be to Bobby in a couple of years time and arguably what Mandy Winger was to JR a couple of years earlier — an elusive beauty who first captivates him from afar (JR and Bobby fall for Mandy and Jeanne upon spotting them across a crowded room; Clayton becomes infatuated by Laurel as a nameless girl in a painting), then gets under his macho defences rendering him undone, before finally enabling him to resolve some greater issue in his life — Bobby's relationship with Jeanne allows him to say goodbye to Pam, while Clayton and Laurel's storyline eventually results in him becoming half-owner of Southfork and therefore, finally, an equal to Miss Ellie. Strictly speaking, it’s Sue Ellen more than JR who ultimately benefits most from Mandy's presence as she is the one who is transformed from drunken doormat to the Queen of Lingerie. The elusive women themselves each meet very different fates: Mandy becomes a star, Laurel a rape victim, while Jeanne is returned to her ordinary life as if “none of that happened.”
There’s something quite touching about Clayton’s ‘I’m Not in Love’ walrus-doth-protest-too-much crush on Laurel, and she’s kind of perfect as the young and lovely, but not quite real, object of his affections.
I really like Laurel’s gang too — painter David Shulton is an enjoyable variation on Jeff Farraday from Season 4 — another schlubby blackmailer whose murder gets pinned on someone in the opening credits. There’s a memorable restaurant scene between David and Laurel where, rather than picking daintily at his food like most characters do so they can say their lines without any food in their mouths, he just goes for it: managing to stuff his face
and deliver his dialogue — impressive! Then there’s Laurel's ex, Brett Lomax, a snobby Englishman (is there any other kind?). His xenophobic contempt for Texas and its inhabitants is really fun: “What is there for you here, living in this foreign place surrounded by people who … hardly speak our language?” he asks Laurel witheringly. And, of course, knowing that Brett will eventually transmogrify into FALCON CREST Anti-Christ Charley St James adds an extra level of interest to his scenes.
Then there are the consequences of Clayton’s potent but ultimately platonic relationship with Laurel, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Jock’s with Julie Grey. In fact, his explanation when Miss Ellie confronts him about it is almost a carbon copy of Jock's ten years earlier: “She made me feel like a man again. Everyone else was making me feel like a damned invalid, most of all you.” Whereas Ellie met Jock’s indiscretion with authority and stoicism, times have changed. Now she’s older, more vulnerable, more frightened. “What about me? What about me?” she keeps asking. It’s the most interesting she’s been all season. Plus, her drunk scene shows us an aspect of the character we’ve never really seen before and gives the actress a chance to really bust loose.
The interest JR takes in what is really a B-List storyline gives “Last of the Good Guys” (aka The One Where He Forces Himself on Laurel) the feel of a stand-alone instalment from DALLAS’s early days. Indeed, one could imagine the whole Clayton/Laurel/Shulton/Lomax/JR plot being edited rather neatly into one hour-long episode.
Ostensibly to shield her from the media scrutiny surrounding Clayton’s arrest, JR instals Laurel in the Ewing condo. Laurel is grateful, even more so when he tells her he can prove Clayton’s innocence. But then he drops the other cowboy boot. “If Harry doesn’t get a call from me,” he explains, pressing himself up against her, “he’s gonna put Lomax on a nonstop plane to London … Clayton’s fate is in your hands.” “So now the payoff,” she realises. “sex in return for freeing Clayton … You bastard!”
JR’s rape of Holly Harwood five years earlier had a similar dynamic: the woman makes her position clear (Holly: “Take your hands off me, JR — I don’t want this”; Laurel: “Don’t touch me — I can’t stand you”), only JR persists, not by using physical violence but a different form of coercion to force her into submission. The main difference between the two events is that this is not part of a bigger narrative for JR. Having dominance over Laurel isn’t tied to his season-long quest to take over West Star in the way that teaching Holly a lesson was a part of his ongoing efforts to win control of Ewing Oil. He rapes Laurel simply because he wants to. The show doesn’t refer to it as rape, of course. Instead, the episode ends on an ironic note with Clayton and Miss Ellie thanking him for saving the day. “My only motive was to help the family,” he insists. As far as everyone onscreen is concerned, it’s a happy ending. However, there remains a complicity between JR and the viewer — we alone understand the double meaning of his final line: “Oh Mama, you have no idea what getting Clayton off the hook meant to me.” And it’s this very complicity that first drew us to this man, this show, this genre, nearly a decade earlier and kept us coming back week after week, season after season. A lot has happened since then, of course — characters have grown older and softer, the spectacle of Rich People Behaving Badly has lost most of its shock value, and the genre as a whole has become increasingly familiar, even cosy at times. But as the frame freezes on an unrepentant JR chuckling, it’s almost,
almost as if the episode is reminding us of those early days and saying, “This is what you fell for back then. This is the monster you created.”
I used to think Laurel was somewhat inconsequential in the scheme of things, but her relationship with Clayton actually sets in motion a significant chain of events. She’s the catalyst for Clayton and Miss Ellie’s marriage crisis which is finally resolved by Miss Ellie giving Clayton part ownership of Southfork. This, in turn, leads to JR moving off the ranch and into the Ewing condo, the scene of his cliffhanging showdown with Sue Ellen and Nicholas Pearce. It’s hard to imagine that showdown happening anywhere else — Ewing Oil, maybe, except the windows don’t open so there’d be nothing for Nicholas to fall out of. He'd just bang his bouffanted head and that'd be that.
