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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 12318" data-attributes="member: 22">07/Nov/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S: Episode 7 v. 09/Nov/83: DYNASTY: Tender Comrades v. 10/Nov/83: KNOTS LANDING: Sacred Vows v. 11/Nov/83: DALLAS: Ray's Trial v. 11/Nov/83: FALCON CREST: The Last Laugh v. 12/Nov/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Breaking TrailThis week marks Soap Land’s first ever miscarriage of justice when the court-martial on EMERALD POINT finds Casey Denault responsible for the death of Tony from FLAMINGO ROAD. While there have been false accusations and subsequent arrests aplenty, this is the first time anyone has been found guilty of a crime they didn’t commit. That such an error should be committed by the US navy - an institution so revered on EMERALD POINT that the only characters to criticise it are depicted as neurotically unhappy women, unscrupulous businessmen or mercenaries for hire - is all the more unexpected.Casey is found guilty of voluntary manslaughter instead of murder which means he doesn’t have to go to jail. He is, however, dismissed from the navy which for him is just as bad. “My whole life is gonna be a prison from now on,” he states. Lilimae Clements, meanwhile, is subject to another kind of symbolic sentence on this week’s KNOTS LANDING when a very reluctant Val commits her to a short stay at the Soap Land Sanitarium. It's a legal manoeuvre to help her avoid a longer jail sentence for running down Chip, but Lilimae is nevertheless devastated. Still, at least her room has cable TV and she receives a warm welcome upon her arrival. “Lake Vale is going to be just like your home, Mrs Clements,” she is courteously informed. That’s more than can be said for Julia's new abode on FALCON CREST. "End of the line, sister. Garden party's over!” she is told when she arrives at the state penitentiary to begin her life sentence for murder. There follows the customary removal of jewellery - previously undergone by Val and Sue Ellen Ewing after their arrests - a ritual to symbolise the stripping away of any remaining vestiges of Soap Land glamour or privilege.On a more celebratory note, there are no less than three weddings in Soap Land this week. First Steven and Claudia do the deed on DYNASTY, then Gary and Abby tie the knot on KNOTS, and finally Cole and Linda are fused together on FALCON CREST. The first two couples have known each other for three whole seasons - quite a feat in Soap Land's fasting moving world. While neither union is exactly a cold-hearted business transaction (“I’ve loved you for such a long time,” says Steven, in bed with his new bride. “From the first minute I ever saw you I wanted you,” says Abby, in bed with her new groom) there are ulterior motives at play in both cases. By marrying Claudia, Steven gets to keep custody of his son (the suit over Danny is dismissed when the happy couple show up in court waving their marriage certificate) while Gary’s marriage to Abby ensures that she’ll keep a share of his Ewing Oil inheritance in the event of a break up.Unlike last season’s elopements - Karen and Mack’s on KNOTS, Kirby and Jeff’s on DYNASTY - Steven and Claudia’s is played entirely straight. There's no wackily eccentric Justice of the Peace or nervously fumbling bride. Abby and Gary’s ceremony at the ranch is a slightly grander affair, while still modest by Soap Land standards, with only Abby’s kids, Laura and Jim Westmont in attendance. Cole and Linda’s on Lake Tahoe is the prettiest of the three. Again it’s a low-key ceremony, with Chase and Maggie the only guests. In another Soap Land first, Cole and Linda recite their own wedding vows - all “nurturing" this and “spiritual" that. Steven, meanwhile, erring on the side of tradition, quotes Robert Louis Stevenson to Claudia: "Teacher, tender comrade, wife.” On KNOTS, the romance of Gary and Abby’s nuptials is undercut by some clever crosscutting between their ceremony and Val’s tearful farewell to Lilimae at the sanatarium. Back and forth we go until you can’t tell where the emotion of one story ends and the other begins - an appropriately ambiguous response to Abby marrying a man she seems to love half an episode after we saw her smooching Greg Sumner.On the night of Steven and Claudia’s elopement, Alexis wakes up in her penthouse, thinking she’s heard an intruder. Frightened and alone, she calls Steven’s apartment, unaware that he is Reno marrying Claudia. There is a parallel scene in KNOTS when Val returns home to an empty house after placing Lilimae in the sanitarium. Upset and alone, she calls Gary’s ranch, unaware - until she speaks to Olivia - that he and Abby are on their honeymoon, having just got married.Also on this week’s DYNASTY, Krystle accepts Blake’s offer of a job as Head of Public Relations at Denver Carrington. Following in the high heels of Pam Ewing, Laura Avery, Claudia Blaisdel and Maggie Gioberti, she is now the season’s fifth working girl to land an executive position in one of her show’s biggest businesses. It goes without saying that none of these women had to apply for these positions. Heck, most of them aren’t even qualified for the job in hand. ("It's all instinctive with you," Blake assures Krystle.) In the Soap Land job market, it’s all about who you know (in these cases, an ex-husband, a brother, a former neighbour and a couple of in-laws respectively). As well as a way for Soap Land to pay lip service to sexual equality, this trend is also an opportunity for the women to start power dressing - plus it makes dramatic sense for a soap to have several of its characters working in the same business. Certainly, Laura’s screen time on KNOTS is now entirely dependent upon her proximity to Gary and Abby.After learning that Jeff and Fallon are digging into his past to see if he can be linked to Jeff’s poisoning, Adam tricks Alexis into signing a phoney document - much the same way Katherine did Pam on DALLAS four weeks ago. And just as Katherine delivered a cryptic for-our-ears-only clue as to what she was really up to (“You may have just signed away your marriage, sister dear”), so Adam does the same thing: (“Alexis Colby - this’ll put an end to mercuric oxide”). But while this week’s DYNASTY ends before we can get to the bottom of Adam’s plan, we still get equivalent scenes of Katherine reading Bobby Pam’s fake letter and his subsequent doomed meeting with Pam - they just take place on KNOTS LANDING instead.In place of Katherine’s fake concern for Bobby and Pam, we get Laura’s genuine concern for Gary and Val. Sincere she may be, but Laura's advice to Gary is the essentially the same as Katherine’s was to Bobby: that he should let go of the woman he loves for her own good. “Don’t you see? You are Val’s obsession,” she tells him. "If you were to start up with her again, it would be the cruellest thing you could ever do - unless you plan on going back with her again." Laura’s words also resonate with what she herself was told by Richard’s therapist at the end of Season 3, counsel she failed to heed.The KNOTS' equivalent of Thanksgiving Square, the place where Pam met up with Bobby on DALLAS, is a coffee shop where Val has arranged to meet Gary. Like Pam in that earlier scene, Val arrives optimistic about a reconciliation. The two women are dressed similarly too. Each in sleeveless summer dresses, they both look girlish and vulnerable. While Bobby breaks Pam’s heart in person, Gary lets Val down from a distance, watching her inside the shop from his car parked across the street, then driving away. By sacrificing this opportunity to declare his true feelings to the woman he loves, each Ewing brother is creating a situation that will run and run (lovers destined to be together yet kept apart by words unspoken). Both then seal the deal with a definitive legal action - Bobby divorces Pam and Gary marries Abby.In the meantime, there’s a new generation of star cross’d lovers emerging. As well Mr. Caproni’s vocal disapproval of his daughter Linda’s involvement with a Gioberti on FALCON CREST, there’s also the first date between Mandy Winger and Roy Champion on this week’s YELLOW ROSE. “Here we are - a Montague and a Capulet,” jokes Mandy.Another long standing grudge is revealed in this week's FALCON CREST when, rather brilliantly, it turns out that prison guard Corinne Powers has a score or two to settle with Julia and her family. "I’ve known you and that royal family of yours for a long time,” she informs her. "You never noticed me in school. I was the fat kid in the hand me downs that you and the other rich kids made fun of ... My daddy Ben used to work at the vineyards up at Falcon Crest - that is, until he had his first heart attack ... After he recovered, your mommy didn’t hire him back so he died broke.” The episode ends with a classic Soap Land threat from Corinne to Julia: “By the time I get through with you, you’re gonna wish you’d gotten the gas chamber!” The shadow of the death penalty also looms in this week’s DALLAS as Ray goes on trial for his cousin Mickey’s murder. “I do not believe a prison sentence is punishment enough. This crime cries out for the maximum penalty that the law allows!” declaims the prosecuting attorney in his opening statement.This Soap Land season is only six weeks old, but already we’ve seen Laura Avery, Alexis Colby, Angela Channing, five Carringtons and a couple of girls from EMERALD POINT testify in court. This week, it’s the turn of the Ewings - Bobby and Lucy - to take to the witness stand. “I didn’t wanna hurt Ray,” Lucy insists after admitting under oath that "Mickey wanted to live, he really did". Her courtroom conflict - she is torn between her loyalties to her family and to the man she loved - mirror Diana’s on KNOTS LANDING. As Chip lies in a coma, both the police and her brother Eric pressure her to come forward with what she knows about Ciji’s death, for the sake of her family and friends (“A lot of people are paying a pretty heavy price for your silence”). Meanwhile on DALLAS, defence attorney Paul Morgan puts pressure on Ray to allow Mickey’s fragile mother to testify to what about she knows about Mickey’s death.Towards the end of this week's KNOTS, with Chip’s condition now looking as hopeless as Mickey’s did two weeks ago, Diana makes the painful decision to testify against him. But while she is turning herself into the police, Chip - displaying a perfect sense of Soap Land timing - starts to show signs of life. Meanwhile, as Mickey’s mother Lil is called to the stand on DALLAS, Ray springs to his feet in protest. “No you can’t! You can’t do that!” he shouts as the music swells, the camera zooms in on his face and the frame freezes - thereby providing Soap Land with its most dramatic courtroom moment since Alexis made her entrance at Blake’s trial on DYNASTY.By contrast, the final scene of this week’s KNOTS has a laugh-out-loud audaciousness about it that reminded me of Bobby Ewing's return from the dead in DALLAS Season 8. In the same way that Pam wakes the morning after her wedding to Mark to see her dead first husband alive and well in the shower, Gary is in the honeymoon suite the night of his wedding to Abby when he sees … well, at first he doesn’t notice anything unusual when the maid arrives with the room service dinner tray. He doesn’t even look at her - she’s just the maid - just as Gary himself (well, not this Gary, the first Gary) was just the bell boy when he surprised Bobby in his Vegas hotel room back in “Reunion” (DALLAS Season 1). Actually, something similar happens to Bobby again in this week’s DALLAS - there’s a waitress he orders a beer from whom he fails to recognise until she turns to him and says, “Hello, Bobby.” “Jenna,” he murmurs in surprise, “Jenna Wade.” In fairness, we had also failed to recognise the waitress as Jenna - that’s because she’s played by a different actress now. Conversely, we do recognise the maid in Gary’s hotel room before he does - that’s because she’s played by the same actress who played the now dead Ciji. But while New Jenna recognises Bobby, Former Ciji doesn’t seem to know Gary, even as he stares at her, open-mouthed. “What’s a nice girl like me doing waiting on tables?” says Jenna, anticipating Bobby’s question upon seeing her in a cowboy bar. “What’s a dead girl like Ciji doing anywhere?” seems to be the question on Gary’s mind, judging by his bewildered expression at the end of this week’s KNOTS.Minor trend of the week #1: Nicholas Sgarro, who directs both EMERALD POINT and KNOTS LANDING. The only distinctive visual link I noticed between the two eps was a couple of gratuitous shirts-off scenes of Casey Denault and Gary Ewing respectively. Meanwhile, on THE YELLOW ROSE, Colleen peeks on Chance taking an early morning skinny dip in the lake. “You’d make some centrefold,” she says admiringly, which leads us to ...Minor trend of the week #2: Poolside lust. When Peter Richards and his blue speedos execute a perfect dive into the Southfork pool on this week’s DALLAS, Sue Ellen’s appreciative glance lingers for just a little longer than necessary. In a later scene, after observing JR's amusingly unsuccessful attempts to teach John Ross to swim, Sue Ellen stands provocatively by the water’s edge in a red bathing suit, taunting her husband by showing him what he cannot have. Over on FALCON CREST, Lance is the one in the water, watching as Melissa vamps by the pool in just a pair of stilettos and the tightest of swimsuits. Unlike Sue Ellen, this isn’t just for show. After uttering the immortal line, "Early morning swims are like tangos - they don't count unless you do them with someone”, Melissa joins her husband in the pool, and ends the sexual drought that has existed between them since the small matter of his mother murdering her father was revealed.The last will and testament of Julia’s other victim, Jacqueline Perrault, is read on this week’s FALCON CREST. Jacqueline’s death serves the same dramatic function here that Rebecca Wentworth’s did on DALLAS. Just as the fight for Ewing Oil required a few significant fatalities to give it gravitas, so Julia’s shoot-out at the end of last season wouldn't have had the same impact without the death of an important character. In each case, Rebecca and Jacqueline were the ideal choices. Each a supporting figure with blood ties to two of the main characters, not to mention a legacy to bequeath, they are significant enough for their deaths to have an impact, but not so essential that their absence would create logistical problems for their respective show as a whole. Ultimately, from a dramatic standpoint, Jacqueline and Rebecca are worth more dead than alive.As with Jock and Rebecca on DALLAS and Cecil Colby on DYNASTY, the most lasting impact of Jacqueline's death is the huge wealth and power it leaves the members of her immediate family. Chase, Maggie and Cole Gioberti now join the list of Soap Land characters - which includes Alexis, Pam, Cliff, Gary and (by extension) Abby - that have all become incredibly rich in the past year or so. As with the recent outbreak of lady executives, this pattern seems to be part of an ongoing homogenisation in Soap Land, whereby nearly all the characters in all the shows are slowly becoming equally wealthy (give or take a few million bucks) and equally glamorous.Of course, it wouldn’t be a Soap Land will reading without someone's nose getting put out of joint. The vast share of Richard’s inheritance ($25,000,000) won’t be made available to him for another year, and even then only with Chase’s approval. To add insult to injury, the will also obliges him to vacate the fancy house he has occupied since last season. Not surprising then, that his post-will rant to Melissa (“My mother gave with one hand and took away with the other! … My mother chose Chase over me!”) sounds a lot like the one Gary made to Abby after the reading of Jock’s will (“All my life my father made me feel worthless. Now that he's dead, I'm still feeling it!”). In addition, Jacqueline makes like Holly Harwood from beyond the grave when she bequeaths Angela a key to a hotel room. There, Angela finds a note on the pillow from Jacqueline stating that this was where "Phillip Erickson and I last made love.” (So is this another affair retroactively created by the writers, like Carlo and Julia's, or as Phillip insists, the fantasy of "an evil deranged woman” - also like Carlo and Julia?)Meanwhile, THE YELLOW ROSE continues to wend its own idiosyncratic way. Above and beyond the striking visuals - which this week includes an excitingly filmed cattle stampede (if DALLAS had had the wherewithal to make its action scenes look this good, the Season 11 range war could have been amazing) - it’s the series’ combination of grit and warmth that continues to give it its own distinct flavour.And this week’s Top 6 are …1 (3) KNOTS LANDING2 (1) THE YELLOW ROSE3 (2) FALCON CREST4 (4) DALLAS5 (5) DYNASTY6 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?