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Well if Kristin is anywhere in the episode, Pam has had a really looooong dream! lol
Katherine Was Unlikely To Have Killed Bobby Even If It Wasn't a Dream
- Thread starter Angela Channing
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Whoops, I'm always getting my psychotic killers mixed up...
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God! I hate this resolution. Put Bobby in a coma or never bring him back. The minute anyone heard Larry whining about bringing Patrick back, they should have said, "Ok, bucko, his salary comes out of yours!" and shut the hell up, HE'S DEAD!
Because she's crazy? And to hide her identity from the audience. I hate this storyline! It treated Katherine terribly. Instead of her being a killer; she tried to kill Bobby before, but that could have been cleaned up with her new found power- she married an even richer dude, he died and left her billions- she comes back as a corporate shark and takes back WENTWORTH TOOL & DYE. Puts Cliff through the ringer, forcing him to side with JR.... any goddamn thing than what we got!
Bobby is killed in another way or put in a coma? OR the dream was NOT Pam's but Bobby's traumatic event... he even imagined his mother looking slightly different! Instead of that stupid Shower good morning, we see the flatline.... bounce back to life! Everyone returns to the starting gate, even BBG, everyone stops crying and now laughing as Bobby pulls himself back from the brink... that would have at least been slightly more clever and made more sense... ---- what an easy way to bring him back!!!!!ALL of these are superior to what we got. My Dallas dies a little here and then totally when Pam leaves.
They should have asked me 40 years ago....
Kristin would have been a real beast going up against Katherine. Writing them crazy seemed like a lazy way to get out of making them strong. Even Pam, who stood up to JR got the crazy pill occasionally before ugly Christopher showed up.
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All DALLAS' sisters-in-law were "crazy". It was a thing. Like shootings and plane crashes.
But Kristin's character motives were clear. As were Lady Jessica's. Hence, they weren't just crazy -- Kristin was a brazen hussy (a grasping, prostitutional character) while Lady Jessica was a narcissistic grande dame (who had apparently been a grasping prostitutional character in her youth). Both of whom were capable of physical violence. Especially Jessica who, as we would soon learn, was no lady at all.
But we knew, and were told, what drove them.
The problem with Katherine, at least in retrospect, was that the script never informed the viewer as to what drove Katherine -- even as she drove over Bobby in Pam's driveway -- except that she was "in love" with her brother-in-law. There was never even any reference to the fact that Katherine had lost two-thirds of her inheritance to her new half-siblings, Pam and Cliff, and how much resentment that might have engendered.
The only thing that prevented Katherine from being a mere crazy-girl stereotype was that DALLAS was at its creative peak when she was on the show, so we just kind of accepted her and whatever her unspecified goals were (other than her obsession with Bobby). Did Herbert Wentworth diddle her as a child? Did he spoil her, and she therefore just couldn't understand boundaries?
Ray's fatal attraction stalker in Season 11 was equally nebulous in her jealousy mindset, but the series was showing signs of sliding by that point (and she wasn't a sister-in-law, so it didn't really count -- she was just a nutcase floozy he'd picked up in a bar, and who amongst us hasn't done that?)
A lot of Katherine's reasoning could have been delineated even after she'd temporarily died, but it wasn't.
There is some evidence that dark hair dye can seep into your scalp and make you sick, even instigating Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Perhaps that's why she died as the blonde she had once been.
"Why am I so unhappily homicidal??"
But Kristin's character motives were clear. As were Lady Jessica's. Hence, they weren't just crazy -- Kristin was a brazen hussy (a grasping, prostitutional character) while Lady Jessica was a narcissistic grande dame (who had apparently been a grasping prostitutional character in her youth). Both of whom were capable of physical violence. Especially Jessica who, as we would soon learn, was no lady at all.
But we knew, and were told, what drove them.
The problem with Katherine, at least in retrospect, was that the script never informed the viewer as to what drove Katherine -- even as she drove over Bobby in Pam's driveway -- except that she was "in love" with her brother-in-law. There was never even any reference to the fact that Katherine had lost two-thirds of her inheritance to her new half-siblings, Pam and Cliff, and how much resentment that might have engendered.
The only thing that prevented Katherine from being a mere crazy-girl stereotype was that DALLAS was at its creative peak when she was on the show, so we just kind of accepted her and whatever her unspecified goals were (other than her obsession with Bobby). Did Herbert Wentworth diddle her as a child? Did he spoil her, and she therefore just couldn't understand boundaries?
Ray's fatal attraction stalker in Season 11 was equally nebulous in her jealousy mindset, but the series was showing signs of sliding by that point (and she wasn't a sister-in-law, so it didn't really count -- she was just a nutcase floozy he'd picked up in a bar, and who amongst us hasn't done that?)
A lot of Katherine's reasoning could have been delineated even after she'd temporarily died, but it wasn't.
There is some evidence that dark hair dye can seep into your scalp and make you sick, even instigating Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Perhaps that's why she died as the blonde she had once been.
"Why am I so unhappily homicidal??"
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Yes. resenting Cliff or Pam would have been a lot more plausible and an understandable reason for driving her to murder and mayhem. If this was a Knots plot, they probably would have gone down that route instead. Perhaps because Dallas was written mainly by heterosexual men, they could only see the women being motivated by their need/desire for other men. Anything more sophisticated than that was beyond their radar.
If Abby Ewing had spent a few episodes in Dallas, she could have easily schooled Katherine in how to wreak havoc on her half-siblings, given her history with her in-law Karen Fairgate Mckenzie...
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The storyline for Katherine in her first bunch of episodes (DVD Season 5) was all about reconnecting with her newfound siblings and resenting Cliff for running her father´s first company, so I do think that the writers did their job well. The next year, when she returned after Rebecca´s death, she started scheming to keep Bobby and Pam apart, but then there also was the infamous Tundra Torque affaire, which proved that Katherine did have initiative regarding business. Of course, there was no continuation to that, and they focused on her obsession with Bobby and that fake letter, but the moment when Kathy darling jumped the shark was when she was caught trying to kill Bobby at the hospital. The whole confession was badly written and acted (sorry Morgan), and terribly swept under the rug after she was bailed out.
Could the character have come back again and prove she was "cured"? I highly doubt it. They tried when Pam´s accident happened, and the whole scene turned out to be highly laughable...
Could the character have come back again and prove she was "cured"? I highly doubt it. They tried when Pam´s accident happened, and the whole scene turned out to be highly laughable...
No doubt bout it, they wasted Katherine Wentworth like with Holly Harwood. I would have preferred instead of being obsessed with Bobby and having sex with JR, Katherine resending Cliff and Pamela in her father's company where they have no right too.
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I mean, besides the fact that they wouldn't drive fatally against a stuntman, there's a lot of ways you can die from fairly low impact car accidents from just being hit the wrong way and causing internal injuries/bleeding. It's like how people sometimes survive falls that should be all accounts be fatal - it's not about from where you fall, but how you land.
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Murders happen in escapist series. That, for me, isn't a problem. Un-murdering people is where it gets tricky.
The pall over DALLAS came months earlier when Miss Ellie's face-lift fell into that well on Section 40.
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Katherine's motives would have been made more explicit if she had actually had a fling with Bobby or they kissed, he rebuked her, maybe even misleading her to the point she took offense, thus the deadly attraction began. Why kill her off? She was in disguise- why not have the car drive away.... Katherine shows up later to offer help, condolences to sister dear.....time to mend fences.... Anything...
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Yes, precisely why she switched her efforts from eliminating rivals to offing Bobby himself was never really explained.
I don't think either the writers or the actor herself were particularly interested in exploring Katherine's motivations.
It's been interesting to hear Morgan Brittany talking about Katherine in interviews recently. Some actors who play 'baddies' are looking for ways to sympathise with them, or to explore or even justify why they do the things they do. Joan Collins always fought against being labelled as a mere 'bitch', and saw Alexis as a powerful woman, not a one-dimensional villain. Whereas Morgan's approach seemed to be that Katherine was just mad and bad.
She asked her make up artist to model Katherine's look at Snow White's Evil Queen, who is not a figure that you spend a lot of time empathising with!
She's also on record as saying to the writers: "You're not actually going to let her win, are you? You mustn't let her get Bobby!"
I think because of Morgan's own ethics, she wanted to see her own 'evil' character be defeated. (Whereas if it were me, as both an actor and a viewer, I'd have been much more interested in seeing her actually succeed - albeit maybe only temporarily - rather than just having Bobby drift into the anodyne arms of Priscilla Presley!)
As for why they killed her off alongside Bobby, Morgan was 7 months pregnant at the time, hence why she was hidden in a mac behind the steering wheel of the car. She wasn't looking to return to the show full-time, and if Katherine had survived and fled again, the writers would have needed the Ewings to track her down and bring her to justice. (It had already been a bit silly that after shooting and trying to poison Bobby at the start of the season, she skipped bail and everybody just forgot about her. Had I been Bobby, I might have been a bit anxious that my would-be murderer was still on the loose...) So it was just more straightforward to kill her off too and wrap up the whole storyline.
The one thing that has always intrigued me is the story-lining of the 84/85 season. The Jenna kidnap/Naldo murder storyline kicks off quite early in the season. Presumably the writers always intended Katherine to be the mastermind behind it all. At what stage did Patrick Duffy decide to leave, and when was that all tied in with the decision for Katherine to return and finally succeed in killing him? If Patrick had not quit, how would the Jenna/Naldo plot have been resolved, given Morgan was not available to return in any meaningful way, I wonder... Would Katherine have still remained a shadowy, off screen presence, and how believable is it, given the Ewings' resources that they wouldn't at least *try* to track her down!
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Upon Barbara Curran´s book, Patrick was unhappy with his role as early as in Season 6. He told the producers he would leave at the end of Season 8 on November 19, and they tried to talk him out of it. He turned off an $10.000 raise plus better stories for Bobby, and asked for a good way to exit, preferably getting killed. Oh Duffy Duck, if you just hadn´t been such a hetero star, wanting Bobby to do macho things and so on...