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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 169294" data-attributes="member: 22">29 Mar 90: KNOTS LANDING: Only Just Begun v. 30 Mar 90: DALLAS: The Smiling Cobra In the opening scene of this week’s DALLAS, JR is working late at Ewing Oil when the elevator door slides open and an unseen someone slowly makes their way towards his office door. The ominous music on the soundtrack and the camera assuming the intruder’s point of view suggest a scenario similar to the one at the end of Season 6 when Katherine Wentworth (as it turned out to be) stole into JR’s office and pumped Bobby full of bullets. But this is a misdirection. After hearing a noise, JR grabs a gun from his desk and comes out to investigate — only to find, instead of a vengeful shoulder-padded sister-in-law, a man named Schmidt who is an hour early for their prearranged meeting. For no particular reason, Schmidt is depicted as a klutzy, nebbish Jewish stereotype. “Go ahead, make my wife’s day!” he exclaims, looking at JR’s gun. “It’ll help explain to her why I’m late for dinner tonight … You don’t know Zelda. She’s a tyrant when it comes to her schedule!” This is the nearest DALLAS has yet got to the broad and profoundly unfunny comedy that blighted FALCON CREST during its sixth and seventh seasons.There are also reminders of Katherine Wentworth on this week’s KNOTS where Dianne Kirkwood delivers a truly impressive rant about how Karen stole her chance at onscreen stardom when she became the presenter of OPEN MIKE. “Oh come on, Dianne — you can’t be jealous?!” her assistant Jeff asks in surprise. “No?” she replies bitterly. “Can I feel resentful? Can I feel cheated? Can I pretend that she has a fraction of my experience — or am I supposed to erase twelve years of doing every local midday talk show from Boise to Bakersfield? … I did not, repeat not, do any of that to end up behind the scenes … OPEN MIKE was my shot, mine!” The end of this speech is underscored by some familiarly sinister plinky-plonky “going a bit mad” music. This piece has cropped up before on KNOTS, but is most closely associated with a bewigged Katherine lurking in her car outside Pam’s house during “Swan Song”. Katherine’s subsequent act of mowing someone down with that car will also be recalled at the end of this week’s KNOTS, but we’ll get to that.During their exchange, JR offers the unfunny Mr Schmidt a cash bonus for a job well done (we won’t find out what job Schmidt has done until later in the ep). “Take Mrs Schmidt to dinner on me,” he suggests. “She’d never go for that — tonight’s meatloaf,” Schmidt replies dejectedly. “Well, just remember,” JR tells him, “marriage is like a salad — a real man has to learn to keep his tomatoes on top.” Marital advice and references to meatloaf — both of these are recurring motifs throughout this week’s KNOTS.The topic of marriage is under discussion from the very top of the ep as Paige reacts to Tom’s proposal. “If I were going to marry someone,” she begins, “I would marry you … Things change. What if we fall out of love?” She offers to live with him instead, but that’s not enough for Tom. “A piece of paper makes all the difference?” she asks him. “Yes, it does,” he insists. “And it’s supposed to, Paige. It’s supposed to make you work for it. It’s supposed to make it harder to break up … You can’t blame me because other people have dumped on you. I’m not gonna do that to you. I wanna be faithful to you because I love you. I wanna be the best father to our children, the kind of father that you never had.”In some ways, Paige’s issues — a fear of commitment, of being hurt — are the same as those explored by Bobby and April on DALLAS over the past few weeks. In their case, those issues manifested themselves in the form of physical obstacles — the appearance of Pam’s lookalike, April retreating to her childhood home — that the couple had to confront before they could move on with their lives. On this week’s KNOTS, these issues are woven into the fabric of the episode so that Paige couldn’t avoid them if she wanted to. Everywhere she goes, people are discussing marriage and commitment — while meatloaf (microwaved meatloaf in particular) becomes a symbol of the kind of cosy domesticity she is so wary of (“I don’t wanna spend the rest of my life sitting in front of that TV eating leftovers that have been reheated in the microwave”) but that Tom is only too eager to embrace (“I am a homebody … Deep down, that’s what I am”).While having dinner with the Mackenzies, Paige’s ears prick up when she hears her father assuring Karen that the estrangement between Pat and Frank is temporary: “I know they take their marriage vows seriously. I know that their marriage licence is more than a piece of paper. I know how much they’ve invested in their marriage … so I know they’ll work it out.” Later in the ep, Anne offers her daughter the polar opposite view of marriage: “Nothing is permanent. It doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out … I was never bothered by the institution because, for me, it was a temporary solution to some very pressing problems. It was always more convenient for me to be married than unmarried — except when it was more convenient for me to be single.” This last remark seems to imply that Anne has had more than one husband. It recalls the casual but surprising reference on last week’s FALCON CREST to Michael Sharpe having had four wives. “You loved Mack,” Paige reminds Anne. “You could have married him.” “Yes,” she concedes, “but the prospect of sitting around every night eating meatloaf reheated in the microwave was just too much to comprehend.” “They didn’t have microwaves when you were young,” Paige points out. “Aren’t you wicked?” Anne smiles. This dovetails neatly with Mack’s earlier observation to Karen: “Have you noticed how meatloaf always taste better the next day?”Last week, Val, in spite of her string of broken marriages, advised Olivia to follow her heart with regard to Harold. Greg, who has been married as many times as Val, has a different perspective. “I married once out of ignorance, once out of love and once for business reasons,” he tells Paige. “All my marriages left me miserable. I’m a living breathing argument against marriage so don’t come to me for encouragement.”Danny Waleska has never crossed paths with Paige, but he too feels the need to venture an opinion on the subject, if only to his friendly neighbourhood bartender: “It sucks — you show me a married couple, I’ll show you a demented couple.”As part of his pitch to Paige, Tom gently suggests that she has her priorities wrong: “You’ll go to the office and talk about flow charts and spreadsheets and future projections and you know what? I think it’s more interesting and, in some ways more important, to talk about how much money to leave underneath the pillow from the tooth fairy.” Back on DALLAS, April comes to a similar conclusion after her business project with Michelle goes belly-up and she realises she’s relieved. “I don’t wanna be married to a five-year development deal. I wanna be married to you,” she tells Bobby.April and Bobby setting their wedding date generates further marriage talk in DALLAS. Cally wishes them the best, despite the fact that her own marriage is hanging by a thread — a thread JR intends to cut before the episode is over.The two-women-wearing-the-same-outfit is a familiar setup in Soap Land. Alexis and Krystle introduced it about seven years ago when they both stepped out of adjacent cubicles wearing the same party frock. And then April and Michelle repeated the scenario at the beginning of this season. In each case, it’s a visual gag that provides the opportunity for a few catty one-liners. KNOTS takes it to another level after Anne spots Paula buying an outfit and then deliberately turns up at the Sumner Group wearing one identical. In soap terms, her timing couldn’t better as Paula has just broken up with Greg only moments before. Throughout their relationship, Paula has matched Greg’s cool exterior pretty much quip for quip, even though we know she’s a lot kinder and more sensitive underneath. But when he makes no effort to dissuade her from accepting a job offer in Toronto, she finally snaps. “Nothing bothers you, nothing gets to you … My God, your own daughter gets murdered and not even that bothers you!” she shouts in the middle of the Sumner Group. Right then, Anne steps out of the elevator wearing the same dress and laughs with faux embarrassment. “Are you enjoying this?” Paula asks Greg. He just turns and walks away. On her way out of the series, Paula also finds time to weigh on Paige’s ‘to marry or not to marry’ dilemma. “Just in case you’re having second thoughts about Greg,” she tells her, “there’s the marrying kind and there’s the single kind, and … in the end, the single kind is monumentally, colossally boring.”While the Farlows are involved in a murder mystery on DALLAS, the Mackenzies are pondering how seriously to take the creepy letter Karen received at the end of last week’s KNOTS. In both cases, the wholesomeness of the Ewingverse matriarch is somewhat at odds with the lurid tone of the storyline. Up until now, Miss Ellie and Clayton have been mere observers in their mystery, but there’s a shift after Atticus Ward, having returned from the dead, dies all over again after drinking from a poisoned glass intended for Clayton. Meanwhile, Karen unwittingly signs a photo for Wayne, the author of the creepy letter, which we then see him add to the collection of Karen-related cuttings he has pinned to his bedroom wall. Even though the background music goes a bit loopy at this point, Wayne’s shrine is pretty modest by Soap Land psycho standards — only five pictures, as opposed to the countless photos of Lucy Ewing Roger Larsen used to have covering his walls — but hey, it’s early days.   Purely out of spite, Danny Waleska tells Bobby Gibson over the phone that his Uncle Gary is really his daddy. This eventually leads to very sweet, very funny and very touching scene up a tree where Gary essentially attempts to explain the past six seasons of KNOTS to his five-year-old son. “If this was a movie, I would have walked out of it because it doesn’t make any sense,” Bobby concludes. As the twins gain an extra father on KNOTS, their cousin John Ross is about to lose a second mother on DALLAS when Cally finally decides to leave JR. “Cally, please don’t go. Don’t you leave me too,” he pleads tearfully.In contrast, Julie is all smiles on KNOTS because Pat and Frank are reuniting after their episode-long estrangement. But as soon as Pat says the words “I’ve gotta get some ice cream”, your heart starts to sink. And then when Tom Ryan returns home to his apartment and puts ‘You Are So Beautiful’ by Joe Cocker on the turntable, you know it’s all over — that by the time we reach the end of this song, tragedy will have struck. Before then, however, we see Paige surprise Tom with the gift of some microwavable meatloaf — her way of accepting his proposal. Then we cut back and forth between Danny leaving a bar drunk, buying a bottle of liquor and getting behind the wheel of his car; and Frank and Pat each purchasing tubs of the same flavour ice cream from different stores and then getting into their cars — all three of them separately heading in the direction of Seaview Circle where Julie is setting the dinner table. While Pat and Frank both look happy, Danny is drunk and disorientated as he zig zags unsteadily through the streets. All we can hear is Joe Cocker — there are no diegetic sounds, no noise at all outside of the song — it’s as if the characters are all somehow locked inside of it, or inside Danny’s drunken head. So when Pat steps out of her car in front of her house and Danny drives straight into her, it really is like an out of body experience.Watching various characters and storylines slowly converge on a particular place to create one almighty climax is a narrative device unique to KNOTS in Soap Land. They did with the Belmar Hotel at the end of Season 5, the Fisher house a year later and then Empire Valley in Season 7 — but this is the first time they’ve chosen the cul-de-sac itself. DALLAS uses another classic approach for its final act this week: the domino effect, whereby the events of one scene lead to the next and then the next, steadily building in momentum.First, James learns that the person behind the sabotaging of Michelle and April’s business project was JR. (That’s the job JR was paying Mr Schmidt for in the opening scene.) During their subsequent father/son showdown, JR explains that he was trying to force a wedge between James and Michelle: “You really think I’m gonna sit idly by and let that gold-digging tramp lead you round by the nose?!” James retaliates by informing his daddy that he and Michelle are getting married: “Imagine breakfast every morning with you sitting across the table from that gold-digging little tramp!” An angry JR then returns to the ranch where he takes his frustrations out on Cally, accusing her of turning James against him. “It was a sorry day when you first set foot in this house … You just cost me my firstborn son.” It’s unclear as to whether he genuinely blames Cally for James's behaviour or is just using it as a way to finally drive her off the ranch. Either way, it works. Like on Paula on KNOTS, Cally just can’t take it anymore and packs her bags to leave. (In place of Anne turning up in the same outfit, Cally’s distress is compounded by JR having Serena call up in her sexiest voice and ask to speak to her husband.) Cally is almost across the Southfork threshold when John Ross comes running after her. “Dad, make her stay! Tell her how much we love her!” he begs his father who is watching from the balcony above. According to the rules JR has imposed on himself for this particular storyline, he is forced to comply. “Cally, I didn’t mean anything I said, darlin’. Please don’t go,” he tells her with fake sincerity. It’s really stupid and really enjoyable — and it’s laugh out loud funny, in a way the laboured comedy with Mr Schmidt at the start of the ep just isn’t.And this week’s Top 2 are1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (2) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?