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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 13604" data-attributes="member: 22">27/Feb/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: The Best Laid Plans v 29/Feb/84: DYNASTY: The Vigil v. 01/Mar/84: KNOTS LANDING: Silent Missions v. 02/Mar/84: DALLAS: And the Winner Is... v. 02/Mar/84: EMERALD POINT N.A.S.: Friends and LoversNearly all roads lead to a former spouse in this week’s Soap Land. Fallon is in a coma on DYNASTY — for it was she who was hit by the car at the end of last week’s episode — and it falls to ex-husband Jeff to keep a round-the-clock vigil at her hospital bedside. At one point, he has a flashback montage of happier times between them. There’s a similar moment on KNOTS LANDING when Val, waiting anxiously for news of missing fiancee Ben, looks fondly at a photograph of the two of them embracing happily. However, it is her ex-husband Gary to whom she gravitates in her time of need. “Maybe he can give her something the rest of us can’t,” suggests Karen to a disapproving Lilimae. Over on DALLAS, Pam finds herself confiding in her ex, Bobby, as to whether or not she should marry Mark. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. Have recently split with Abby and Jenna, Gary and Bobby are now both free to spend more time with their ex-wives, but while Gary encourages Val to lean on him, telling her to call him “even when you have nothing to say”, Bobby feels less comfortable in the role of Pam’s confidante. “I don’t think I’m the person you should be asking advice from,” he tells her. In the event, it’s sister Katherine to whom Pam turns once she has made her decision — but still her ex-spouse figures in her thinking. “Bobby’s still a part of my life,” she admits. "I couldn’t marry any man while I feel this way.” By turning down a marriage proposal, Pam is following in the footsteps of Alexis Colby and Angela Channing, both of whom have done the same thing in recent weeks.Two Soap Land women do agree to marriage this week: On EMERALD POINT, a head-over-heels Octopussy accepts Admiral Mallory’s proposal without hesitation (as Psycho David lurks creepily in the shadows) while a disillusioned Kirby finally agrees to marry Adam on DYNASTY even though she doesn’t love him — much to the fury of Alexis who is even more disapproving of this engagement than she was of Fallon’s to Peter de Vilbis.Just as Peter disappears from DYNASTY (in his last scene, we see him being dragged away by airport security, Walt Driscoll-style, after two large bags of coke are found in his attache case), so all the untrustworthy foreigners have now been written out of EMERALD POINT, and this week’s double helping of episodes feels all the livelier for their absence. In particular, Robert Vaughn finally gets the chance to spread his wings as the show’s senior villain Harlan Adams.Harlan has his eye on some land on which to build a Lotus Point-style development complex, but the Navy are also after it for their new runway. Harlan tries (but fails) to bribe an attorney into telling him how much his rivals are bidding for it. On DALLAS, JR is more successful in coercing Edgar Randolph into revealing the sealed bids in the offshore lease auction.The auction is one of two long-running business stories to reach a climax of sorts this week, the other being the Wolfbridge Group plot on KNOTS. While the two Ewing-verse storylines are quite different in tone, both manage to encompass a wide range of characters and Greg Sumner and JR each describe someone - Abby Ewing and Cliff Barnes respectively — as being "in over her/his head". However, perhaps the strongest parallels lie in the confrontation scenes between Gary and Greg on KNOTS and Bobby and JR on DALLAS. Up until now, Gary has been a political supporter of Greg’s, but when Greg drives out to the ranch and suggests it would be in everybody’s best interests for Gary to unfreeze his assets so that work on Lotus Point can continue, Gary grows suspicious and then hostile. Ironically, Greg is not motivated entirely by self-interest for once but is so compromised by his involvement with Wolfbridge that he cannot adequately explain to Gary how much danger he’s in. Meanwhile on DALLAS, JR and Bobby have been able to rub along together relatively well as equal partners at Ewing Oil this season. However, when Bobby discovers that JR has bid on one of the offshore tracts without his knowledge, he accuses him of trying to take over the company again. As with the KNOTS scene, there is irony in Bobby’s allegation — for while JR is guilty of subterfuge, he is actually innocent of what his brother is accusing him: it is Cliff, not Bobby, whom he is scheming against this time.While both storylines are great, I’d say DALLAS’s is, surprisingly, the more sophisticated of the two. Without a doubt, the Wolfbridge plot is exciting. With Greg, Abby, Laura and a dangerously impatient Mark St Clare each trying to persuade Gary to resume construction on Lotus Point at the same time that Mack - as part of his own vendetta against Wolfbridge - is advising him to do the exact opposite, everything is building towards one climactic moment at the end of the episode. The offshore oil story on DALLAS, meanwhile, has a much broader canvas, ranging from the comedy of JR goading and manipulating Cliff into sinking his entire fortune into the precarious offshore oil deal to the poignant conclusion of Edgar Randolph’s arc (which includes one of my all-time favourite — and for DALLAS, atypical — scenes, where Donna and Ray debate whether or not Edgar is worthy of their forgiveness). In-between these two extremes lies Ken Kercheval’s performance as Cliff which cleverly manages to incorporate both the comedic and the tensely dramatic aspects of his situation. The two coalesce beautifully in the moment where he has to call his secretary into his office to fix him a drink because his hands are too shaking too much for him to do so himself.In the final moments of this week’s KNOTS, a gunshot rings out on Gary’s ranch. With no shortage of characters in the vicinity, it looks like we’re in for another “Oh my God!” cliffhanger where we are left wondering who has been hit (just as last week’s DYNASTY ended on a freeze frame of Blake before we knew whether it was Fallon or Jeff that had been struck by the car). Instead, we hear Mack telling Karen unequivocally over the phone, "Gary’s been murdered.” Almost as disorientating, the line plays out over a close-up of an oblivious Val on her way to the ranch (another example of the significance of ex-spouses in this week’s Soap Land). Quite simply, this sequence is without precedence. There is nothing in the Soap Land Handbook to tell us how to process it or what we can expect to happen next.In contrast, there’s something comfortingly familiar about the end of this week’s DYNASTY. “Peter?” Fallon murmurs to Jeff when she regains consciousness, thereby acknowledging the Soap Land tradition of saying the most inappropriate name when emerging from a comatose state. She also then follows in the footsteps (no pun intended) of Chase Gioberti and Mickey Trotter, both of whom awoke from comas earlier this season to find themselves paralysed. “I can’t move my legs!” she exclaims.And this week’s Top 4 are …1 (5) DALLAS2 (1) KNOTS LANDING3 (-) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.4 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =