I tend to vote that Katherine hired Angelica to kill Ewings through an anonymous employ-an-assassin connection through Europe and the orient, and when Katherine (who just can't wait) kills Bobby herself (while she's trying to kill Pam) Nero's team of assassins move in to Texas anyway because they have no idea the woman who'd contracted their services, Katherine, was now dead.
The entire stupid Marinos-Martinique plot was an elaborate scheme to get JR and as many Ewings as possible out of the country to knock 'em off, thus making an easier exit for Angelica had things gone as planned.
Bobby was hidden away, comatose for a while and not expected to survive, eventually recuperating. Miss Ellie was made aware by somebody -- Interpol?, the FBI? -- that a conspiracy was afoot, and she had the burden of keeping Bobby's survival a secret until the Nero plot and its danger was over. Even Bobby's will was probated with IRS cooperation.
JR's private eye was found in a hotel room with a knitting needle through his neck. "Perhaps he learned somethin' somebody didn't want him to know," federal lawmen observe.
Jamie left the car to idle and wasn't in it when it blew up. The bomb in JR's office was on the other side of his desk from Sue Ellen, so she just has to wear a bandage on the right side of her face for a couple of installments.
Donna finds out she's pregnant again as the Krebbs learn they're losing custody of Tony after all because of ... reasons. Donna moves back into Southfork.
Bobby, now healthy and aware Pam married Mark the day before, shows up at Jenna's door unannounced. Jenna is apoplectic, pulls Bobby into her room and closes the door, raping Bobby off-camera. She's impregnated but we won't know for a few weeks.
Angry, JR has to re-buy up the parts of Ewing Oil he thought he'd acquired before Bobby turned out to be quite alive, negating those sales. JR asks Harve if he can sue, but Harve cites some precedent that won't work in JR's favor, assures JR that a lawsuit will be time-consuming, expensive and ultimately fruitless -- especially since the feds were in on the thing.
And if we need to change Stivers' name to Parmalee, Wes can approach Ray and Clayton for the foreman job but simultaneously concede that he'd lied about his name because of previous problems ("men err after me") and volunteers to quit and leave Southfork for misrepresenting himself. But Ray and Clayton, impressed by Wes' seeming eleventh-hour candor (in the way real men do) ask him to stay and give him the job. If anything, they now trust Parmalee even
more than they did before!
All of which happens in the first episode.
And the shower? Well, the episode opens with a shot of the pink tile in Pam's bath, the camera pans down and Mark is dead on the floor by the drain.
At episode's end, Bobby leaves Jenna at Southfork once he hears on the TV that Mark Graison is dead. Pam goes to her bedroom door, opens it, sees Bobby, shakes her head in quiet disbelief and closes it again. Freeze frame on Bobby's darkened face.
Episode 2 opens up on a different kind of explanatory scene between Bobby & Pam in her bedroom: she realizes she saw Bobby in the crowd on the sidewalk across the street from her massive wedding the previous day, only registering on her subliminally. That and the shock of finding Mark dead in the shower caused her to momentarily hallucinate the image of Bobby, ever-so-briefly lathering up.
And now the '86/87 season is off and running.
In fact, later, when Wes Parmalee claims to be Jock publicly, Harve can warn the boys that Bobby's revival several months earlier can be used against them -- if not in court than in the court of public opinion -- because it's now established that the Ewings execute wills of family members they know to still be alive. (With a lot of, "... but Harve!!..."s from Bobby and JR).
Imperfect? Perhaps, but is all this so much worse than how they actually did it??
"But Bobby, that still doesn't explain why you're naked..."
