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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 2935" data-attributes="member: 22">21/Feb/80: KNOTS LANDING: Constant Companion v 22/Feb/80: DALLAS: Jock's Trial (1)KNOTS Season 1 is the gift that keeps on giving. Despite repeated viewings, however, "Constant Companion" is the one episode that refuses to yield its secrets to me. That said, I now find myself more kindly disposed to it than ever before. The crux of the episode is this: Who is sending Ginger all the weird presents and stuff? Is it Denny, the adorably cute black kid in her class who wants to know why boys and girls have to use separate toilets at school when they don't at home and can't pronounce chrysanthemums? Or is it the unusually tall school janitor who always reminds me of the giant in TWIN PEAKS, or the almost as tall mechanic who diagnoses Ginger's car as having a stolen hubcap, or Arthur the really, really small man who works at the same school, (doing what, one can only imagine) lives with his mother, possesses zero social skills and drives a tiny comedy car? (Part of me thinks the depiction of Arthur is kinda racist against small people, but on the other hand, don't small people have the same right to be depicted as hopeless emotional cripples as the rest of us? And however small Arthur is, he's taller than the singing dwarf who turns up at Ginger's front door. I sh*t you knot). The one conventionally-sized suspect is a cop played by Captain Furillo from HILL STREET BLUES. He's brilliantly sinister and eerily still, his spookiness aided by some groovily weird camera angles. The bit where he looms behind Ginger, and it isn't clear whether he's about to comfort her or peel off her face and eat it, is the episode's one genuinely scary moment. More importantly, it results in Ginger becoming the first person in the Ewingverse (and therefore the entire '80s soap genre) to call someone a bastard (that's not counting JR's use of the word to describe his unborn son in DALLAS Season 1).The combination of all of these never-before-seen weirdos results in a strange mixture of TWIN PEAKS and SCOOBY DOO. Re-watching the episode, I found myself wondering how it might have panned out had the men Ginger suspected of tormenting her been characters already familiar to her, i.e. her friends and neighbours. Richard, Eric and even Kenny would have made very interesting candidates. That these characters are all still relatively unknown to the audience at this point could have worked to the story's advantage. However, the episode seems to have been structured in order to give some of the regulars a bit of a break. Sid appears in only two scenes, the Averys in one, and Diana has a total of three words to say. Even the ubiquitous Karen only shows up in the last third of the show. This leaves Ginger, the least well developed member of the KNOTS ensemble, to shoulder the weight of an episode in a way no one else thus far has had to. And I gotta say, Kim Lankford, given what she has to work with, does a perfectly good job of acting befuddled and frightened. And I also found myself enjoying Kenny doing his smirky, not-really-sure-what's-going-on thing. There's a sweet subplot about Val taking her high school equivalency exam. It's lighthearted in tone (thus diluting the impact of Ginger's PG-13 slasher movie still further), but serves an early indication of both Val's feelings of inadequacy (she's self-conscious that the other wives have a college education while she never even finished high school) and her determination to prove herself - a combination that will eventually lead to her sitting next to Greg Sumner while he blows cigar smoke in her face. Priscilla Pointer gives a great performance as Ginger's tormentor, aka Judith Ryland in a kaftan. She is given as much to sink her teeth into in two scenes of KNOTS as she will be in the three years spent as Julie Gonzalo's grandmother on DALLAS. However, the use of once burning issues like abortion and the Vietnam War to explain the motivation behind Pointer's reign of chrysanthemum-based terror sits oddly with all the wacky girl-in-peril stuff that has gone before. And the fact that Ginger's mother "forced" her to have an abortion is a bit of a cop out.Here's a fab bit of synchronicity that totally justifies my foolhardy decision to watch all of everything chronologically: The night after Priscilla Pointer guest stars on "Constant Companion", her future DALLAS character gets her first mention in "Jock's Trial, Part 1". Or at least her initials, as engraved on Hutch McKinney's belt buckle, do: "To HM, with love RB," reads Rebecca's none-the-wiser son, Cliff, newly appointed to the district attorney's office. (This is the first of three crucial, if contrived, uses of an engraved belt buckle in DALLAS: In Season 9, Miss Ellie discovers Jock's buckle in Wes Parmalee's bunkhouse, and then there's the whole thing with JR's belt buckle after his death in New DALLAS which I still don't completely understand.) Cliff's interest in a twenty-eight year old corpse (or whatever age VP was claiming to be back in 1980) found on Southfork is that it's a way for him to avenge his daddy, currently residing at Dallas Memorial Hospital after one last binge. ("There's a lot of that going around," cracks JR, and indeed there is. Later in the episode, the news of Dusty's death will drive Sue Ellen back to the booze, just as JR's own death will thirty-three years later.) Of course, the huge irony of Cliff using the murder of Hutch McKinney to bring down the Ewings, specifically Jock, is that his actions will instead bring about the final humiliation of the man he is trying to avenge: poor old Digger. But an even bigger irony is that the truth of Hutch's murder will also unlock the door to Cliff's future fortune, i.e. Barnes Industries. Or Wentworth Global. Or Katherine Tool & Die. Or whatever we're calling this week. There's also a direct line between the increasingly vengeance obsessed Cliff we see here and the dementedly vengeful one we discover in New DALLAS. In other news: Baby Josh proves his innate sense of ironic timing by uttering his first word, "Mama!" at the precise moment Sue Ellen turns her back to abandon him. With JR making life at Southfork intolerable for her, Sue Ellen is caught between a rock and a hard place, and it's suddenly easy to understand why Valene and Gary made the decisions they did when faced with a similar situation eighteen years earlier (or however old Charlene Tilton ... etc.) And while Miss Ellie and Matt Devlin re-enact their own low key version of the Jock and Julie Grey story, JR and Bobby play out a dynamic that's now familiar from watching John Ross and Christopher in New DALLAS. First they battle over business, (foreshadow alert as Bobby threatens for the first time to challenge JR for control of Ewing Oil) and then over a woman, (now Sue Ellen's sole ally at Southfork, Bobby defends her from JR in front of the rest of the family) before putting their differences aside to heed a rallying cry of "Ewings unite!" from Jock. But their attempts to derail Cliff's investigation into Hutch's death come to nothing. Jock is arrested for murder. "TO BE CONTINUED!"And the winner is … soz, Ginger … DALLAS.</blockquote>

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