Re-watching the Ewingverse ... alphabetically!

[James from London]

The Deadly Game (DALLAS, 17 Jan 86) v Dear Hearts and Gentle People (DALLAS, 23 Feb 90)

The Deadly Game is from that strange part of the Dream Season where almost everything has started to feel a bit drab. Sue Ellen is stuck behind a desk organising fund-raising dinners for Graison Research, Donna is learning sign language and Miss Ellie finds herself in a weirdly nonsensical plot where’s she keeps buying up Clayton’s failing businesses behind his back. Four years later in Dear Hearts and Gentle People, she and Clayton are involved in another storyline that’s as dumb as a box of hair as the beneficiaries of Atticus Ward’s will start dying like flies, but at least that one’s kind of fun.

The one remaining bit of glamour and mystery in The Deadly Game is provided by Angelica Nero and Grace. JR, smelling a rat in their convoluted Jack Ewing/Dimitri Marinos doppelgänger scheme, lays his half of the Marinos deal off on the cartel. It's exactly what he did with South-East Asian oil leases six years earlier, and the fact that they're falling for the same trick all over again makes them seem like real dum-dums.

As a glamorous businesswoman with a foreign accent, Stephanie Rodgers feels like a direct descendant of Angelica Nero. Her feud with JR in Dear Hearts, over his belief that she should be at home cooking dinner for her husband rather than conducting meetings in a wide-brimmed hat, feels pretty basic (no doppelgängers in this storyline), but they spark off each other really well.

Both episodes contain a not-very-promising plot about a business venture that has nothing to do with oil. In The Deadly Game, Pam is all excited about an emerald mine in Colombia, but it’s really because she’s still hung up on Bobby. In Dear Hearts, April is not as excited as she should be about her and Michelle’s nightclub venture because she too is still hung up on Bobby. While Pam’s decision to visit the mine in person is met with anger by Mark Graison (supplying the episode’s one moment of genuine conflict), April’s decision to abandon the nightclub deal and visit her mama in Springdale is met with frustration by her sister and partner, the lovely Michelle.

There’s a strange atmosphere at Southfork in The Deadly Game: everyone is wearing rictus smiles and being really nice to each other like they've quietly been replaced by the Stepford Ewings — everyone, that is, except Jenna, who just squirms and looks uncomfortable, and who can blame her? Conversely in Dear Hearts, things are so acrimonious at the ranch that JR can't even bear to be under the same roof as Cally. He moves into a hotel where he and Serena the hooker exchange double entendres about putting his key in her ignition.

Both episodes end with JR taking steps to rid himself of a pesky female, one in the office, one at home. In ’86, we discover that the whole emerald mine shebang is a plot of JR’s to get Pam out of Ewing Oil. In ’90, he takes a sharpie to Cally’s portrait of him that hangs in his office and scribbles over the word “Ewing” in her signature. Symbolic or what?

And the winner is ... Dear Hearts and Gentle People

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

A Death in the Family (DALLAS, 20 Feb 87) v A Death in the Family (KNOTS, 07 Jan 93)

The deaths in question are Jamie Ewing’s (caused by a random Mexican rockslide) and Mary Robeson’s (it was moider!). While Mary’s body isn’t discovered until the end of this KNOTS episode (“Oh my God!” gasps Karen), the news of Jamie’s demise actually reached Southfork at the end of last week's DALLAS. Nonetheless, both shows open with a scene between a brother and a sister: Pam breaking the bad news to Cliff about his ex-wife; Mary and Joe arguing over their impossible-to-follow scam which ends with her giving him a bundle of cash and telling him to get lost.

Even though Jamie died offscreen, having already been written out of DALLAS, most of the characters in this ep are in some way affected by her passing, from April Stevens to Ozwald Valentine, and even JR seems genuinely sorry — yet no-one’s too devastated and there’s no real attempt to pull on the viewer’s heartstrings. Instead, we get to watch Cliff wistfully trying to make sense of this bizarre incident, until the deliciously fun payoff in the final scene where it emerges that Jamie died without either signing a will or filing her divorce papers, which makes Cliff the heir to her five per cent of Ewing Oil. "God bless her!" he smirks.

There’s also a self-contained subplot where Christopher, while playing with John Ross, accidentally shoots at him with a real gun on the very cardboard patio where the lovely Michelle will deliberately mow down Sheila Foley in four years time. The incident leads to an in-depth discussion about gun control. Pam: “This never would have happened if there were no guns in the house.” Bobby: “There’s nothing wrong with guns.” The end.

John Ross and Christopher act their little hearts out, but whether they are more traumatised than little Meg Mackenzie after another visit from her evil fake granny is hard to say.

Foreshadowing of the week. "I feel like I’m in the middle of a tunnel with trains coming from opposite directions,” says Pam. It’s not quite “I feel like I’m about to collide with an oil tanker,” but it’s pretty darn close.

Eight years after taunting Pam by asking her, “How many men paid your bills before you found Bobby to pick up the tab?” Sue Ellen finally practices what she preached by paying for dinner with JR.

“You got the bun in the oven, the rock on the finger, the cash in the bank. Kick back - enjoy your life,” Greg advises Anne on KNOTS. Except hers is a phantom bun. She's also being blackmailed by the lovely Vanessa who has discovered her prescription for fertility pills. (We catch a fascinating glimpse behind Vanessa's cheerfully slutty persona here. “You people are so damn imperious,” she snarls at Anne.) Anne's solution is to put an end to her phantom pregnancy with a phantom miscarriage. Her accomplice in her previous schemes has been the incorrigibly naughty Nick Schillace. This time, her only confidante is her sensible, down-to-earth gynaecologist and it is through her alarmed eyes that we see what a poignantly (as opposed to zanily) desperate character Anne has now become.

And the winner is ... A Death in the Family (1987)

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

Deception (DALLAS, 06 Jan 89) v The Decline and Fall of the Ewing Empire (DALLAS, 26 Apr 91)

There are some interesting firsts and lasts in Deception. Detective Rattigan makes his debut appearance as New Harry McSween. Carter Mackay and Bobby meet for the first time. Initially, Bobby assumes Mack to be Tracey’s ex-husband, while Mack only realises halfway through their conversation that his daughter’s new boyfriend is the son of the family he’s at war with.

During their final conversation of the series, Sue Ellen comes as close to accusing Miss Ellie of enabling JR as she ever has: “That man has been cheating, lying and double-crossing everyone for years now, including you and Clayton, but you’re willing to just sit there and side with him no matter what.” (Indeed, it’s notable that as the range war at Southfork escalates, Miss Ellie and JR are of the same mind. She backs his decisions to send John Ross and Christopher to stay with Cliff rather than Sue Ellen and, despite objections from Bobby and Clayton, to hire mercenaries to guard the ranch.) During their last scene together for twenty-four years, Sue Ellen asks Cliff asks why he’s never had kids — each of them unaware he already has a daughter who’ll end up marrying both of the prepubescent boys currently playing tennis in the background. Sue Ellen’s more on the money in a later scene when she says to her ex, “I’m sure you have any number of children out there, JR, since you were so faithful to me during our marriage.”

Then comes the end-of-episode discovery that Mackay has secretly been working for Jeremy Wendell all along. “I want that oil under Section 40 on Southfork and whatever you have to do to the Ewings to get it, that’s what you do.” The rest of the storyline may not quite live up to this moment, but it’s still a great reveal.

The Decline and Fall of the Ewing Empire is the last “proper” episode of '80s DALLAS before the pointless series finale. Cliff, who inherited 5% of Ewing Oil from his first wife Jamie in A Death in the Family, now does his best to wrest control of the remainder of it from his second wife Michelle, presently in jail for murdering Sheila Hilary Foley Taylor. The first two-thirds of the ep is light, twisty-turny fun with Michelle managing to outwit both Cliff and JR from behind bars, with occasional scenes of Bobby consoling dweeby Jory Taylor over her stepmother's death. The final third is JR losing stuff: Sly quits, John Ross and Phyllis tell him to get lost and he’s tricked out of Ewing Oil and West Star by Carter Mackay and Dusty. For such a significant episode, it’s largely devoid of sentiment and must be one of very few where no-one mentions Jock or Daddy. The only reference comes at the very end of ep when JR takes a pistol out of a case that has Jock’s name on it.

JR contemplates shooting himself following a phone call from John Ross in England. It’s sort of the reverse of the scenario in 2013 when he calls John Ross from Nuevo Laredo just before he has himself shot.

And the winner is ... Deception

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

Dedicated to the One I Love (KNOTS, 27 Feb 92) v Deeds and Misdeeds (DALLAS, 03 May 85)

Dedicated to the One I Love is the one where we find out it was Paige, rather than Greg or Anne, whom Pierce Lawton shot at the end of the previous ep. She is taken to Ewingverse Memorial Hospital where she is caught between the same rock and hard place as Sid Fairgate was nine years earlier — risk life-or-death surgery or face certain paralysis. Surgery it is, but despite Karen telling Anne, “I went through this with my first husband … it gets to be a long night,” the episode lacks the clammy reality of Critical Condition (the ep where Sid died on the operating table) or even the nightmarish surreality of Abby’s Choice (the ep where Diana had her kidney transplant). Instead, it is full of the kind of tropes you'd expect to find in any generic hospital-based drama — sad music, sentimental flashbacks, a montage set to a mawkish ballad, even an “I can’t move my legs!” cliffhanger. There’s nothing uniquely KNOTSian about the episode all — unless you count the quality of the actors and the three-dimensionality of the characters (primarily Anne, Greg and Mack), who are substantial enough to breathe new life into old cliches.

Lurking on the outskirts of the show are Alex Barth and Vanessa Hunt who, rather touchingly, demonstrate their concern for Paige by having sex on Greg’s desk, and Pierce who does some exciting shaky-cam heavy breathing while looking suitably deranged. Oh, and Karen and Gary have a scene in the Mackenzie kitchen which kind of feels like a sequel to the Pollyanna scene in Dead But Not Buried. He asks her if Paige’s surgery has triggered memories of Sid’s and she claims not (“I laid his ghost to rest a long time ago”), but one wonders if maybe she’s still keeping Gary at bay regarding Sid, just as she did in Critical Condition all those years before.

Deeds and Misdeeds is the antepenultimate episode of a hugely long season of DALLAS (thirty episodes) and all kind of momentous-seeming things are happening: Donna is secretly pregnant, Sue Ellen is secretly drinking, Lucy visits Mitch in Atlanta, Cliff and Jamie marry, Pam dares to dream (no pun intended) of a future with Bobby, and Bobby pre-empts Wes Parmalee's Jock impersonation by two years when he pretends to be his daddy in front of Jock's first wife Amanda. This is DALLAS at its most super slick and confident. All of the women, even Jenna in prison, are so ravishingly glamorous, they look like they’re made of sugar.

Like Paige six years later, John Ross is in hospital (recovering from appendicitis). The scene where JR brings him a toy robot and then casually asks him to spy on his mama is, I think, one of the sweetest and funniest in all of DALLAS. Every one of John Ross’s line readings makes me laugh out loud.

And the winner is ... between classic era DALLAS and slightly generic KNOTS, this should be no contest, but because D2T1IL focuses on a single storyline, it perhaps lends itself better to being watched out of context, so it's … Dedicated to the One I Love

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

Deja Vu (DALLAS, 21 Dec 84) v Deliverance (DALLAS, 10 May 85)

A double bill from the 84/5 season.

In Deeds and Misdeeds, the most recent instalment of DALLAS I've watched alphabetically, the Ewing boys visited Jock’s first wife Amanda as part of their quest to prove that they own all of Ewing Oil. In Deja Vu, sixteen episodes earlier, Cliff visits his Aunt Maggie as part of his own quest to prove that he owns part of Ewing Oil. Both Amanda and Aunt Maggie were last seen in Wheeler Dealer six years earlier. (Very, very confusingly, the actress who plays Amanda in Deeds and Misdeeds made her last appearance in the episode immediately following Wheeler Dealer, A House Divided, but playing a different role.) Whereas Amanda is fragile and deluded, Aunt Maggie is warm and robust with a shrewd sense of humour. ("If I know my brother's son, he didn't drive all this way on a Saturday just to show me baby pictures!" she laughs.)

The “deja vu” in Deja Vu is Jenna jilting Bobby to run off with Naldo, just as she did years before — at least that’s what Bobby believes. It’s notable that while JR (correctly) suspects that Jenna has been kidnapped, Bobby’s first instinct is to assume that she has left of her own volition and so there's no point in looking for her, which is the same conclusion he'll reach when Pam disappears after her accident in three years' time. While this might be the first time one of Bobby’s brides has been kidnapped, it won’t be the last — but whereas Bobby will merely have to pretend to be married to April’s kidnapper, Jenna is forced to marry hers for real.

Both Deja Vu and Deliverance include an unusual scene between JR and Cliff. In Deja Vu, they meet secretly and make a pact to keep Bobby and Pam apart now that Jenna is no longer around to do it for them. Then in Deliverance, JR comes by Cliff’s office to offer him an out of court settlement prior to the hearing that will determine who owns Ewing Oil once and for all. Just as he anticipated, Cliff throws him out of his office, thereby making the Ewings’ victory in court, and Cliff's subsequent humiliation, all the sweeter.

Pam’s search for Mark Graison makes the papers in Deja Vu when she takes out a full-page ad offering a reward for information about his whereabouts. Seventeen episodes later in Deliverance, Bobby and Jenna make the front page when she is exonerated of Naldo’s murder, and her kidnap/murder/prison ordeal finally comes to an end. Both press items receive unwelcome attention: JR is inspired by Pam’s ad to feed her false hope that Mark has been spotted in Jamaica, while someone with blood-red fingernails claws angrily at Jenna’s newspaper picture at the end of Deliverance. As we already know from the last scene of Blow Up, when Lady Jessica scratched Miss Ellie’s head off a Polaroid snapshot, such symbolic destruction is Not A Good Sign.

At the party to celebrate the Ewings' victory and Jenna's freedom, Sue Ellen has fun minesweeping Sly's drinks. She is caught off guard, however, when Dusty Farlow materialises out of nowhere after an absence of three years. This is not the only penultimate episode of a season where Dusty will make a surprise reappearance. He'll repeat the trick in Decline and Fall of the House of Ewing, the second to last episode of Season 13, after an absence of five years.

And the winner is ... Deja Vu

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

The Deluge (KNOTS, 28 Feb 85) v Denial (DALLAS, 15 Jan 82)

The kings are dead, long live the kings. Denial follows The Search, the episode which ended with the Ewing brothers’ returning from the site of Jock’s helicopter crash without him. The Deluge begins with Paul Galveston flatlining, even though the character remains as off-screen as Jock Ewing has been all season. Out of the shadows steps Ruth Sumner Galveston, Paul's brand new widow (she married him on his deathbed). When Gary comes looking for him, she pretends he’s still alive, out of town on business. When Harve Smithfield tries to broach the subject of Jock’s will with his widow, Miss Ellie, she too insists that her husband is still alive. Ellie makes her case to son Bobby in an emotionally powerful scene at the end of DALLAS. “This house is still Jock’s house. This family is Jock’s family. You’re Jock’s son. And I’m Jock’s woman. And the rules we live by are the rules he made ... He's alive, Bobby. As long as I believe he's alive, he's alive.” Emotional isn’t the word one would use to describe the reunion between Ruth and her son Greg in front of Paul’s open casket: chilly, irreverent, compelling and unpredictable would be better.

As for who will be Jock’s and Galveston’s successors, it’s hard to say. JR, who’s interested in nothing but booze and hookers since his daddy’s death, suggests that maybe Bobby will lucky enough to cop for the lot when the will is read. Greg, meanwhile, is adamant he does not want to follow in his father’s footsteps — but doth he protest too much? “You were brought up to be powerful and you love it and you want it,” Ruth insists. “And now, baby, it can all be yours.” “Nuts to you, Mother,” he replies. "Nuts and bolts."

Elsewhere on KNOTS, Joshua literally steals Reverend Catherine’s TV show out from under him with a genuinely mesmeric sermon (“It’s not the way that is difficult, but difficult that is the way”). He is as brilliantly inspiring on camera as he is jaw-droppingly megalomaniacal off. These two aspects of him are indivisible. It’s riveting to watch him interact with Abby, his boss. It would be easy for Donna Mills to simply play Abby’s superior status in their scenes together — after all, she’s the bigger star playing the more powerful character who has the stronger grasp on reality — yet Abby is as much fascinated and impressed by Joshua’s total self-belief as she is amused and irked by it.

While Ellie insists that her dead husband is alive, Karen begins to entertain the idea that Val’s babies might not be as stillborn as everyone believes. “What if …?” she asks Mack. “What if …?” might well be embroidered on a tapestry hanging in the KNOTS LANDING writers room: imagine a wildly implausible scenario, then ask yourself “What if that were to happen in the relatively real world of Seaview Circle?” The ultimate “what if …?” emerges at the end of the episode when Greg is informed that whoever controls Empire Valley essentially controls the world. “Everybody is counting on you to help us out,” he is told. “Everybody. Everybody.” Gee, do you think that means ... you know ... everybody??

And the winner is ... The Deluge

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

Denial, Anger, Acceptance (DALLAS, 18 Aug 14) v Denials (KNOTS, 15 Dec 83)

Or: The One After the 2nd Southfork Fire and Pamela’s Sexy Overdose Versus The One After Chip Impales Himself on a Pitchfork. Phew, this is a very strong round.

There’s a glorious pileup of storylines at Ewing-verse Memorial Hospital in 2014 as John Ross rushes his comatose wife into the emergency room to find half his family already there suffering from smoke inhalation. The storytelling is as taut as the metaphorical noose tightening around Drew Ramos’s neck, with everything impacting on everything else. I’m not sure, but this may well be the very first episode of DALLAS with no mention of JR, yet in the scene where Bobby lectures his remorseful nephew as they stand in the ruins of Southfork, he could just as easily be talking to his big brother: “You justify and then you ignore all the destruction you leave in your wake … Words are cheap. You are what you do. You want to be a better man? Be one.”

DALLAS ends with the devastatingly brutal execution of Drew Ramos. Although his childhood friend Nicolas doesn’t actually pull the trigger, he nonetheless sanctions his death to save his own skin, but with customary New DALLAS ambivalence, does so with tears in his eyes. “With what I've done I'm going to Hell,” Drew tells him. “I’ll save you a seat.”

Thirty-one years earlier on KNOTS, the characters must deal with the passing of another young man — only it’s not Chip Roberts Tony Fenice's bizarre death they are trying to make sense of, but his bizarre life. Like Greg did his father in The Deluge, Lilimae visits Chip Tony at the crematorium and, while she doesn't prise a ring off the deceased's finger as Greg did, neither does she pull her punches: “That smile of yours hides the hardest heart I’ve ever known," she tells Chip Tony. "You were hard and cold — but were you? Did you ever have a moment, a private moment when nobody could see, when you felt sorry for what you’d done, when you realised the hurt you’d caused and felt something?” The preacher at Chip's Tony’s funeral evidently never met him, but nevertheless makes a valiant attempt to explain who and why and how he was: “He chose a name for himself — Chip — a small piece of something cut away from the whole — which is all Chip wanted, to be something special and apart, yet part of the whole. He cherished his individuality yet he wanted to belong.”

As both episode titles suggest, several characters are in denial: While Pamela denies her overdose was a suicide attempt (“I did what I did so that every time you think about screwing that piece of trash, all you'll be able to see is me on the floor with my eyes rolled back in my head — sexy, huh?” she snarls at John Ross), Diana refuses to believe Chip was the cold-hearted monster everyone else, including his own sister, knew him to be ("Chip and I had a love that nobody will ever understand!"). Then there's Sue Ellen and Karen, who spend most of their respective episodes wandering around in dressing gowns insisting they don’t have a dependency issue. When the doctor at Ewingverse Memorial Hospital tries to broach the subject of her drinking, Sue Ellen coldly denies she has a problem, while Karen is affronted when she overhears Val, Mack and Eric discussing her pill habit.

These are two brilliant, but very different episodes, yet Diana Fairgate and Judith Ryland deliver remarkably similar speeches. Judith is consoling Emma who has been dumped by John Ross. “I know you think I’m weak and stupid to care for John Ross, but I can’t help it. It hurts being cast aside,” Emma tells her grandmother. "On the contrary, my dear," Judith replies. "The ability to feel pain is a gift. Feel that hurt. Nurture that hurt. Feed that hurt till it’s powerful enough to take vengeance on those that have wronged you.”

Meanwhile, Abby tries to comfort Diana following the death of her husband. “I promise you there’ll come a day when it won’t hurt as much as it does now,” she tells her niece. “I want it to hurt," Diana insists. "I don’t want it to stop hurting, ever … because if it stops hurting I might forget and forgive and I don’t wanna forget and I hope I never forgive. As long as I hurt, I won’t be lonely because the pain will keep Chip with me and as long as I’m in pain I won’t forgive anybody who did anything to let this happen. I don’t wanna forgive. I wanna hurt and hate and keep him with me … I cherish the pain. It’s the only thing I have left of Chip and I’m not ever, ever going to let it go.”

And the winner is ... impossible to decide. There's just too much pain to cherish in both episodes.

BONUS BEATS:

 

[Willie Oleson]

o explain who and why and how he was: “He chose a name for himself — Chip — a small piece of something cut away from the whole

They explained a name. A name!

Nurture that hurt

I cherish the pain

A most versus-worthy comparison.

And the winner is ... impossible to decide

A versus cliffhanger!

 

[James from London]

Denials (KNOTS, 06 Feb 92) v Designing Women (DALLAS, 01 Feb 91)

An early ‘90s Ewing-verse double bill.

With both series so long in the tooth by this point, much of the drama is necessarily generated by newcomers poking the regulars with a stick. These take the form of familiar archetypes: the handsome opportunist (Alex Barth’s scruffy insouciance a ‘90s slacker variation on Chip Roberts’ and Peter Hollister’s steely ‘80s ambition), the short-skirted gold digger (while Vanessa Hunt All-About-Eves her way into the role of Anne’s assistant on KNOTS, DALLAS ends with JR learning that Michelle Stevens is the new owner of Ewing Oil) and the hate-filled, vengeful obsessive (where KNOTS has Pierce Lawton stalking Greg with a rifle, DALLAS has Lee Ann De La Vega — she’s meant to be hate-filled and obsessive too, but as played by the terminally perky Barbara Eden, is delightfully unconvincing. “If you want my company, JR, make love to me now, tomorrow and forever!” she trills bizarrely.)

Pretty much everyone in this episode of KNOTS is in some way impacted by Val’s decision to write Greg’s biography — even Frank is handling her publishing contract (an unlikely detail, perhaps, but a satisfyingly knotty one). Karen, Mack and Gary all have misgivings, to say the least, about this new venture, but put up a supportive, if slightly condescending, front. The underlying tension results in the Sad Laura Music recurring throughout the ep, which in hindsight seems to foreshadow Val’s imminent (temporary) demise. The highlight of the ep is Val and Greg’s “cigar smoke” scene — it’s their first proper conversation of the series and the chemistry between them is palpable. At this point, the storyline feels like it could run and run.

Karen and Paige have an interesting dynamic — never adversaries, but never quite at ease with each other either. A good example of this is the restaurant scene between Paige, Karen and Mack where there is a perceptible drop in temperature once the subject of Greg is raised. Karen puts her finger on an integral part of his enigma when she says, “Here’s a man who knows what decency is and yet he turns his back on it.” There’s an equivalent lunch scene in Designing Women between Vanessa Beaumont and son James where the inevitable topic of conversation is DALLAS’s resident bad boy, JR. He and Vanessa are engaged at this point and she wants to know if she can to expect him to remain faithful once they're wed. James isn’t optimistic: “JR can’t help cheating any more than a shark can help killing.”

Lee Ann sets a Holly Harwood/Kimberly Cryder-style honey trap for Vanessa to walk into, which she gracefully sidesteps, choosing instead to give JR the most romantic of elbows: “Perhaps we were only meant to be together for brief moments … I’m afraid if we did marry, our candle would never last the night.”

And the winner is ... Denials

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

Digger Redux (DALLAS, 25 Sep 87) v Digger’s Daughter (DALLAS, 02 Apr 78)

While re-watching Digger’s Daughter, it’s fun to spot the seemingly insignificant details that the series will return to repeatedly over the years: Jock’s three B’s, Lucy’s drunken daddy, oil under Southfork, Miss Ellie’s rule against “business talk with supper on the table”, the Red Files ... One could even draw a direct line between JR’s failure to heed Jock’s warning about the importance of subtlety (“A lack of it turns competitors into enemies and enemies into fanatics”) and the "Who shot JR?" mystery in two years time.

While Digger’s Daughter is all about building the world of DALLAS, Digger Redux asks whether that world can carry on in the face of what’s been lost. Can JR survive without Ewing Oil? Can Valentine Lingerie survive without Mandy Winger? Can Bobby and Cliff survive without Pam? Can Pam survive without Victoria Principal’s face? For JR, the solution is a simple one, “We keep moving forward and we don’t look back.” And there are a few indications that Life After Pam is a possibility: Bobby and April's first-ever conversation; the screen debuts of Nicholas Pearce and Dandy Dandridge. Cliff is in a bar when he overhears Dandy telling a remarkably a similar story to the one he and Pam find Digger telling nine years earlier, just before they break the news to him about Pam marrying a Ewing. Digger and Dandy each claim to have sniffed out the oil that somebody else — Jock in Digger’s case, a bunch of “geological ninnies” in Dandy’s — then got rich on. One of the barflies listening to their stories is the same in both scenes. He’s disappointed when Cliff and Pam interrupt Digger, but tells Dandy he’s talking a lot of crap.

The impression one gets when we first meet JR — the way he absently caresses Julie’s thigh in the office; his reminder to Jock that “you put me in your chair, Daddy” — is of a smugly complacent man who assumes his position within his family and business is unassailable. Bobby is pretty satisfied with his lot too (“I like my job — it’s people, it’s a good time”), even more so now he's just married the girl of his dreams. Sue Ellen may not be exactly satisfied, but she at least understands what her role is (“We got sort of a routine here, you know?”). This all changes with Pam’s arrival, of course, but these roles are the default positions that the characters will return to at the start of each episode until the show becomes fully serialised. It’s the opposite of New DALLAS where, far from feeling secure about their place in the scheme of things, both John Ross and Christopher are outsiders from the very beginning.

“Look at us — outside the gates, looking in. You and I are black sheep, Elena,” says John Ross in Changing of the Guard, New DALLAS's opening episode. “I always felt like I needed to earn my way into this family,” says Christopher in the same ep. One can see Christopher's sense of inferiority taking root in Digger Redux when he is told he isn't allowed to see his mother in the hospital, but can’t understand why. As Pam’s doctor says to Bobby, the stress “in a situation like this … can cause almost as much damage to the family as the injuries can to the patient.”

JR appears concerned about Pam’s condition in Digger Redux, but he's really more interested sneaking a peek at her will. The welcome he gives her when they first meet in Digger’s Daughter is just as phoney. “Who lives there?” she asks as he shows her around the ranch. “No-one now,” he replies. “That’s my middle brother Gary’s house. He used to live there with his little bride, briefly.” The mini-compound of houses they're looking at resembles a smaller version of Seaview Circle, with Gary’s empty house standing in for the one that Abby would move into in KNOTS Season 2.

In Digger Redux, Sly refers to “all the fighting” JR and Pam have done over the years — fighting which begins in Digger’s Daughter when he lets his Mr Nice Guy mask slip long enough to ask, “Did your brother put you up to this, Miss Barnes?” This question allows both Pam and the viewer to get our very first look at who we’re really dealing with here.

My favourite scene in Digger’s Daughter is where JR sticks his head around the newlyweds’ bedroom door and casually informs Bobby that his presence is required in Austin the following day. Bobby objects but then gives in, much to Pam’s quiet resentment. Little do they realise that this is part of JR’s plot to bust them up. Nine years later, after learning that Bobby will acquire control of Pam’s share of Wentworth Industries if she dies, JR once again uses business as a pretext to manipulate his brother. He shows up at the hospital where Bobby is keeping vigil over Pam and persuades him to leave her side long enough to inspect the new offices he’s bought for him. Again, this is part of a larger scheme, this time to get Bobby (and his Wentworth shares) onside for reasons that will become apparent later in the season. Of course, JR’s scheming here pales into insignificance compared to what we’ll eventually learn Cliff is prepared to do to gain control of his sister’s shares in Wentworth Industries Barnes Global. Meanwhile, one can only imagine what Katherine has in mind when she appears at Pam's bedside and says that she plans to take away everything that belongs to her.

While the prospect of Pam and Bobby having a child becomes a source of concern for JR in ’78 (“You best go see your wife, Junior,” Jock advises him, “If they get too much of a head start, my first grandson’s gonna be theirs!”), the reality is a source of lingering resentment for Katherine in ’87. “You’ve had everything you ever wanted, everything that should have been mine. You’ve had a home and a husband and child,” she says while rocking a very 2021-looking mask.

And the winner is ... Digger's Daughter

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

I had one job, to put the Ewing-verse in alphabetical order:

Dial M for Modem (KNOTS, 06 Apr 89) v Discovery (KNOTS, 28 Apr 88)

Digger Redux (DALLAS, 25 Sep 87) v Digger’s Daughter (DALLAS, 02 Apr 78)

And now I've gone and done it again:

Dire Straits (DALLAS, 14 Feb 86) v Deserted (KNOTS, 10 Nov 88)

On the plus side, as a result of my incompetence, I’ve ended up with a “Girls in Latin-flavoured Peril” double bill! While Pam is held hostage offscreen by some pesky Colombian bandits in Dire Straits, Deserted has Paige (along with Johnny Rourke, Michael and a smattering of Hispanic day players, including Salamanca from BREAKING BAD) trapped in the back of a boiling hot truck near the Mexican border for three days and nights. For a plot that was apparently cobbled together at the last minute when VP was taken ill, the DALLAS kidnap story is not too bad, if a bit vanilla. Mark Graison and Matt Cantrell’s macho competitiveness is entertaining and it’s fun to see Cliff thrust into the unusual role of peacekeeper. The KNOTS storyline is more inventive and interesting, while its premise — a group of people trapped inside a container in the hopes of achieving a better life, most of whom are turned away when they eventually reach their destination — has an even grimmer resonance today than was presumably intended at the time.

Whereas DALLAS doesn’t tell us anything about the conditions Pam has had to endure as a hostage (and no-one thinks to ask her when she is eventually released) , KNOTS does a great job of showing how its regulars cope in such a horrible situation. While Paige, only recently the plucky heroine of the Santa Tecla storyline, behaves like a prize cow (so much so that mild-mannered Michael threatens to punch her in the face), dodgy Johnny Rourke is surprisingly likeable. He also gets to accuse Michael of being a Pollyanna two years before Gary does the same to Karen.

Meanwhile, as those at home wait fretfully for news of the missing, Sue Ellen comes dangerously close to figuring out she’s living inside a soap opera when she says of Pam, “She’s the kindest person I know and the worst things in the world keep happening to her!” Anxious for word of Michael, Karen looks through old family photo albums with Val and regrets the Little League games and Tooth Fairy moments she missed out on when he was a kid. Val looks wistful — might she possibly be thinking of the things she never got to experience with her own firstborn? “You can’t make that time up to them,” Karen sighs. “I know,” she agrees. “I know you know,” Karen replies meaningfully and we realise that, yes, Val really was thinking about Lucy, who I don’t think has been mentioned on KNOTS for about four years at this point.

The main subplot in both episodes involves a female character everyone is convinced is seriously unbalanced. At Southfork, the Farlows and Krebbses — or rather, the sinisterly cheerful Stepford robots they have been replaced with — try to gaslight Jenna by telling she’s nuts to still be mourning the man she’s loved all her life less than a year after his death. “When you lost your baby, did I tell you how to grieve?” she asks Donna reasonably, but is undermined by plinky-plonky 'going mad' music on the soundtrack. “There is such a thing as much too much grief,” whirrs Cyber-Donna, decreeing that Jenna, having exceeded her allotted amount, must be sent to a doctor for reprogramming. Meanwhile, everyone on KNOTS thinks Val is nuts for (a) attempting suicide, (b) claiming Jill forced her to swallow pills at gunpoint and (c) throwing a plate of h'ors doeuvres in the air during Michael and Paige's welcome home party because she thinks everyone's talking about her (which if they weren't before, they certainly are now).

Whereas Abby being unusually nice to everyone at the party — offering Val moral support, playing with Julie’s hair, inviting Harold round for tea, even hugging Paige — is weird in an interesting way (hearkening back to the early years when she used to hang out with the neighbours even as she was sleeping with their husbands), Donna's intense concern for Jenna is weird in an annoying way. Even when she meets Tony, the ten-year-old deaf kid she and Ray will eventually take hostage adopt, the first thing she does is tell him how worried she is about Jenna. He’s a ten-year-old deaf kid — what the **** is he supposed to do about it?

And the winner is ... Deserted

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

Distant Rumblings (KNOTS, 13 Mar 86) v Divorce, Ewing Style (DALLAS, 15 Feb 80)

Sandwiched between Gary’s short-lived role as Paul Galveston’s protege (as seen in Distant Locations) and his temporary turn as a senatorial candidate (Distant Echoes) lies his even briefer phase as a driver of dangerously fast cars. Distant Rumblings finds him in hospital recovering from his latest prang when Val pays him a visit. “I know about dry drunks. Sometimes I think you still feel the need for the high,” she tells him insightfully. However, it’s Ben’s reaction upon learning of her visit that’s really fascinating: “I don’t think I know right from wrong anymore,” he tells her wearily. "Is it right for me to expect you not to care about the suicide course your ex-husband has set for himself? Is it right for me to resent you for going to visit him? … You could save his life. What is my resentment compared to that? You’re doing what’s right for you and I respect you for it. And if I also resent you for it, then I guess it’s my problem, isn’t it?”

Distant Rumblings also includes live coverage of Garbage Day, the weekly cul-de-sac event Anne Matheson found so mysteriously exotic in Deadly Combination. Val likewise manages to make a drama out of dragging a couple of trash cans to the kerb as she knocks one over and then breaks down sobbing over the state of her marriage. In the process of comforting her, Laura casually mentions that her marriage to Richard is officially over. I guess that’s what you’d call Divorce, Avery Style. The episode ends more dramatically with Gary asks Abby for a Divorce, Ewing Style.

The actual episode Divorce, Ewing Style is, alphabetically-speaking, the first instalment of the great 79/80 season and it’s one of my favourites — it's lean and mean and moves even faster than New DALLAS. The ep opens with Sue Ellen throwing a surprise anniversary party for JR at Southfork. Despite all previous evidence to contrary, everyone present, including the man himself once he’s had a few drinks, falls for her ever-lovin’ wife act. Only when they’re in the privacy of their bedroom does she gloatingly explain that it’s all part of her plan to divorce him and win custody of Little Josh.

Fuming, JR (who's in almost every scene of the episode and is really funny throughout) decides to fight fire with fire by making it look as if she’s back on the bottle so he can have her locked up again. Kristin, gleeful at the prospect of destroying her sister, agrees to help — on the strict understanding that she become the next Mrs JR Ewing once Sue Ellen is out of the way. Within three scenes of hatching their plan, they’ve got Jock and Ellie believing Sue Ellen's back on the booze, with Bobby and Pam following suit two scenes later. We're constantly reminded in later years how wise and shrewd Jock and Miss Ellie are, but here they’re gloriously gullible, swallowing every lie that’s put in front of them.

Sue Ellen, who began the episode on such a triumphant note, swiftly finds herself in an untenable situation. “I’m afraid to stay with JR and even more afraid to leave him,” she tells Dr Elby, who listens sympathetically but is ultimately powerless to help. In the final scene of the ep, she has to be restrained from physically attacking JR in front of the rest of the family who now think she’s gone completely round the bend. The freeze frame is of JR turning his face away so they won’t see what an absolute blast he’s having.

And the winner is ... Divorce, Ewing Style

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

Do You Love Me? (KNOTS, 02 Apr 92) v Do You Take This Woman ... (DALLAS, 14 Dec 84)

It’s an OK-but-nothing-to-write-home-about double bill!

Like Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate, Do You Love Me? is the penultimate episode of its season, but there are no dead senators in this one. Instead, there’s a sort of ‘picking up the pieces’ vibe as Paige, recovering from her Melrose Place style kidnapping-by-yacht, feels a bit sad when Greg doesn’t come to visit her. Turns out he had a one of those near-death white-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel experiences when he almost drowned rescuing her. The really interesting bit isn’t Greg’s white-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-experience — any ordinary vanilla TV character can have one of them — the really interesting bit is near the end of the ep when he allows Paige to watch him watching Laura’s goodbye videotape.

As Paige’s shooting/paralysis/kidnap ordeal courtesy of Pierce Lawton draws to a close in ’92, Jenna’s kidnap/murder/prison ordeal courtesy of Naldo Marchetta is only just beginning in ’83. He loiters outside her condo, in much the same as Mary Robseon loiters outside the Mackenzies’ house in Do You Love Me?, before abducting their daughter and forcing Jenna to jilt Bobby at the altar.

Elsewhere in Do You Take This Woman …, everybody is reeling from Jamie’s bombshell at the Southfork barbecue that the Ewings aren’t the sole owners of Ewing Oil. This storyline will get really good really soon, but doesn’t quite take shape here. Instead, the highlight of the ep is Pam being all vulnerable but tough in the face of much male scepticism as she intensifies her search for her supposedly dead fiancé. “Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to feel that Mark is alive and not be able to convince anybody else?” she asks Mandy, her only ally. Her closest equivalent on KNOTS nine years later is Val, another Ewing wife everyone thinks is a flake but who determinedly sticks to her guns as she continues her investigation into Greg’s background. She and Greg get a nicely soapy confrontation scene where she accuses him of doing bad things to Mary Robeson so that's almost something to write home about.

And the winner is ... Do You Love Me?

BONUS BEATS:

 

[James from London]

Double Jeopardy (KNOTS, 02 Mar 89) v Double Wedding (DALLAS, 21 Oct 78)

It’s a Double double bill!

Double Jeopardy does a great job of blending lots of disparate KNOTS ingredients into one big soapy stew. There’s straight ahead juicy melodrama (Gary’s arrest for Jill’s murder), neighbourly kitchen confessionals (Pat admitting her attraction to Gary, which elicits an intriguing response from Karen: “Every woman gets a crush on Gary once in her life”), unpredictable character moments (Val collapsing with hysterical laughter over Jill’s death), gritty procedural stuff (we attend Jill’s autopsy and learn she had a half-digested pizza inside her when she died) and some deliciously noir-ish backstabbing over at the Sumner Group where Paige secretly sabotages Greg’s mayoral campaign and Abby plays the supportive wife, but then forges an alliance with Ted behind Greg’s back.

There are some intriguing echoes of past and future episodes: Val is called in for questioning for the same murder Gary has been arrested for, just as she was following Ciji’s death in The Burden of Proof. The cop who then interviews her is played by the crooked detective Abby hired to find her after she disappeared in Distant Locations. And when asked why she threatened Jill with a pair of scissors, Val exhibits the same highly strung self-justification she will when questioned about why she stabbed Danny with a letter opener in Devil on My Shoulder.

In a way, Double Wedding is to Pam Ewing what Constant Companion was to Ginger Ward — a teen romance with a boy who went to Vietnam that had a major consequence she’s never told her husband about (an abortion for Ginger, a marriage for Pam) now returns to haunt her in the present. And Ed Haynes is a kind of a one-episode Naldo Marchetta prototype: a trouble-making ex-husband who shows up claiming he’s still in love with Bobby’s girl, but really wants to get his hands on some Ewing money.

Given that Double Wedding is a self-contained episode which focuses an incident never mentioned before or since, it might be regarded as dispensable. Indeed, when the BBC repeated the first two seasons of DALLAS on a nightly basis at the height of the “Who Shot JR?” hoo-ha, this is one of a handful that they skipped. But there is still a surprising amount of notable things going on in this instalment.

Ed is the first (but definitely not the last) person to get the Ewing brothers confused when he confronts JR thinking he’s Bobby and asks him what he knows about his wife’s past. “Mrs Ewing doesn’t have a past,” JR replies amusingly. When Ed then claims he and Pam are still married, JR is all ears. After he tried to make Pam look like adulteress in Digger’s Daughter, JR admitted that he “underestimated the new Mrs Ewing,” and vowed not to repeat his mistake. So when he brands her a bigamist in this ep, he makes sure to do so in front of Jock. In that same scene in Digger’s Daughter, Bobby declared that, “Pamela’s past is none of my business. She was not my wife in the past.” However, his anger when he learns that she had a secret husband foreshadows his anger when he finds out Ann had a secret daughter in New DALLAS.

This ep is the first time Cliff and Bobby spend any significant time in each other’s company when they’re obliged to work together to help Pam. Interestingly, Bobby is as uptight and angry as Cliff is clear-headed and humorous. (“Do you ever stop with the wisecracks?” Bobby snaps at him. “It’s in lieu of a bill,” Cliff assures him.) By the end of the ep, you sense they’re starting to like each other, thus setting the tone for their see-sawing relationship over the next 36 years.

It also marks the first time Cliff steps foot on Southfork, and his first of only two encounters with Lucy (“Hmm, you’re not bad,” she decides, looking him up and down). We’re shown a tougher side to Bobby’s personality than we’ve seen previously (he threatens to strand Ed’s accomplice in the Texas desert: “No water for miles, just plain dirt as far as the eye can see — a man left out there alone might not ever be heard from again”) as well as a nobler side to Digger’s (“Pamela’s marriage is very painful to me but I’m not about to see her suffer because of something I may or may not have done”).

Digger’s cigar box, in which he keeps various family photos and keepsakes, including Pam’s birth certificate, makes its debut appearance. It will resurface six years later in Do You Take This Woman? when Cliff searches for his daddy’s copy of the document splitting Ewing Oil into thirds, and again three years after that, in Brother, Can You Spare a Child? when he meets with Miss Ellie to end their family feud. Its New DALLAS equivalent would be Cliff’s safety deposit box, where Pam’s death certificate is discovered.

A stand alone episode this may be, but there are plenty of ongoing storylines simmering away in the background: Miss Ellie fussing over Jock as he recovers from heart surgery, Bobby juggling ranch work with starting his own construction business, Pam's new job at The Store, Cliff's upcoming election campaign and his ongoing flirtation with Sue Ellen. None of these story strands are developed in any significant way, but they do a good job of fleshing out the world of the Ewings.

Val and Danny, Paige and Pierce, Karen and Phil, Jenna and Naldo, and now Pam and Ed: there is certainly no shortage of Ewingverse women at the mercy of predatory men. Occasionally, they get to fight back as Val does with the letter opener. Here, Pam adopts a more devious approach when she calls Ed’s bluff and asks him to take her away from all this. “If I’d spent another day on that ranch, I’d have gone out of my mind,” she pouts, channelling the sex-starved wives married to boring old men played by Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity (and even Abby in Double Jeopardy). It’s as close as Pam ever gets to playing her own evil lookalike.

All this plus a cosily traditional TV ending where the rest of the family chortle over JR’s bemusement at finding Digger asleep in his office.

And the winner is ... Double Wedding

BONUS BEATS:

 

[Mel O'Drama]

when the BBC repeated the first two seasons of DALLAS on a nightly basis at the height of the “Who Shot JR?” hoo-ha, this is one of a handful that they skipped.

Oh, I love titbits like this. Do you remember any other details, like what time the nightly repeats went out, or which other episodes were skipped?

“Mrs Ewing doesn’t have a past,” JR replies amusingly.

Funnily enough, this also reminds me of a line of the now late Jill Bennett's when questions were raised about her background. She asked someone (Mack, I think) "Do you have a past?"

Taking these lines at face value, one could almost reach the conclusion that a past is optional for people of status in America. Perhaps being rid of such a burden is part of the great American dream.

 

[James from London]

Oh, I love titbits like this. Do you remember any other details, like what time the nightly repeats went out, or which other episodes were skipped?

Let's see, it was on BBC2, Mondays to Fridays over the summer, between the shooting of JR and the start of Season 3, at about 6pm. If memory serves, the ones they skipped were Winds of Vengeance, Old Acquaintance, Double Wedding, Runaway, Fallen Idol and Sue Ellen's Sister. I'm pretty sure Season 2 was left intact. The first I knew of those missing episodes' existence was the two line synopsis given to each of them in the back of the first Dallas annual.

Funnily enough, this also reminds me of a line of the now late Jill Bennett's when questions were raised about her background. She asked someone (Mack, I think) "Do you have a past?"

Yes, it was Mack:

Jill: Do you have a past, Mack? I mean, did you have a life before Karen?

Mack: Sure.
Jill: Well, I had one too.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Let's see, it was on BBC2, Mondays to Fridays over the summer, between the shooting of JR and the start of Season 3, at about 6pm.

Oh, that's a nice time. Later on I only ever remember BBC's summer repeats being either around 10am or 3pm

. If memory serves, the ones they skipped were Winds of Vengeance, Old Acquaintance, Double Wedding, Runaway, Fallen Idol and Sue Ellen's Sister.

Interesting, thanks. It would be fascinating to know the reasons for it. Some, as you said, were probably considered dispensable. I wonder if others were for different reasons.
Sue Ellen's Sister seems a pretty key episode when riding the Who Shot JR? wave, but I'd hazard a guess it was because of Kristin not being played by Mary Crosby. Who knows, perhaps that was the rationale behind Old Acquaintance as well, since Francine Tacker was the "current" Jenna.

And perhaps Winds Of Vengeance was considered too intense for the 6pm timeslot.

The first I knew of those missing episodes' existence was the two line synopsis given to each of them in the back of the first Dallas annual.

Oh wow.

Yes, it was Mack

Aha. Thanks.

 

[James from London]

Sue Ellen's Sister seems a pretty key episode when riding the Who Shot JR? wave

Although the character is kind of reset when Mary Crosby takes over. The only thing that sticks out is Lucy remembering that "she made a play for Bobby when she was here the last time."

And perhaps Winds Of Vengeance was considered too intense for the 6pm timeslot.

That's what I've always reckoned.

Oh wow.

Yes, I used to pore over those brief descriptions for years and wonder, until they were finally released on video in about '83 -- but then the only place I could find that sold them was HMV in Oxford Street in London, which meant saving up to get the coach down from Birmingham and then shelling out £27.95 for one cassette containing two episodes!

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Although the character is kind of reset when Mary Crosby takes over.

Yes, that's true.

The only thing that sticks out is Lucy remembering that "she made a play for Bobby when she was here the last time."

And I suppose even that works as a hint to Kristin's character. Just like the various remembrances of Jenna in Auld Acquaintance which referred to events before the series began.

the only place I could find that sold them was HMV in Oxford Street in London, which meant saving up to get the coach down from Birmingham and then shelling out £27.95 for one cassette containing two episodes!

That's real dedication to the cause. With my pocket money status at the time I dread to think how long it would have taken me to save for such a mission.

 

[Taylor Bennett Jr.]

And the winner is ... Double Wedding

ah, good! I was reading with bated breath, cheering for the dastardly Edison Faraday Haynes to have one small final victory!