New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 108014" data-attributes="member: 22">28 Oct 87: DYNASTY: The Surrogate (1) v. 29 Oct 87: KNOTS LANDING: The Gift of Life v. 30 Oct 87: DALLAS: Last Tango in Dallas v. 30 Oct 87: FALCON CREST: Dead EndNot only does Laura’s imminent departure dominate every scene of this week’s KNOTS, it pretty much overshadows the rest of the week’s soaps as well. Her situation does, however, resonate curiously with storylines on the other shows. The last time we saw Adam Carrington, for instance, he had just made a grave discovery about his wife’s medical condition. At the end of last week’s KNOTS, Laura dropped her own bombshell on Greg. The opening scenes of this week’s DYNASTY and KL find both couples having very similar discussions.“Adam, do you know what it’s like for a woman to hear those words: ‘You cannot have a child’?” Dana asks her husband. “And now you are asking me to face more doctors.” “You’ve only talked to one doctor, you’ve only had one opinion,” Adam argues. Greg is equally sceptical when Laura tells him about her brain tumour: “It’s cancerous, it’s inoperable, it’s terminal.” “Just because one lousy quack says it’s terminal?” he counters. “What we have to do is find a decent doctor.” While Dana asks Adam to “face the fact that I cannot have a child”, Laura asks Greg if he’ll accept a terminal prognosis from another doctor. The men’s responses are pretty much identical. “I won’t accept it, dammit. I can’t,” says Adam. “No, I will not accept it,” replies Greg.Prior to this week’s KNOTS, Laura had already taken the decision to send her two sons to live with their father without consulting Greg. On this week’s DYNASTY, Jeff learns that Fallon has arranged for their two children to move from California to Denver without discussing it with him. “You’ve already made all the decisions,” he tells her angrily. “You’ve probably already made the funeral arrangements,” Greg tells Laura on this week’s KNOTS, and her silent response suggests that she has. Wives making life-changing decisions without telling their husbands — as well as Laura and Fallon, this also applies to Pam Ewing. The audience has been kept similarly in the dark. In the same way that we only learned of Pam’s decision to leave her family after it had already happened, we only hear of Laura’s plan to go away to die after she has told Greg. “I just don’t want you to watch me. It’s that simple,” she says. Pam gave a similar explanation to Bobby in her goodbye letter two weeks ago: “I couldn’t stand the thought of you or Christopher ever seeing me that way.” “I want to be alone. It’s my choice,” Laura continues. Greg’s response is what Bobby might have said had Pam given him the right of reply: “It is not just your choice … What the hell am I — nothing, a zero?” This question echoes Bobby’s lighthearted retort to Pam way back in the very first episode of DALLAS: “What am I now — a bowl of chilli?”Bobby finally voices his feelings during a visit to Wentworth Industries. “I am living a charade,” he tells Parker Ellison. “I’m trying my best to cheer up my son. I’m putting up a front to my mama, my brothers, the people I work with, explaining very logically to them how Pam has made the right decision when I can’t even explain it to myself … I want to see her.” Ellison responds by handing over documents from Pam that give Bobby control of her Wentworth shares. It’s one more example of a Soap Land wife pulling the rug out from under her husband, and Bobby acts like it’s the final straw. “I guess I’ve got my answer,” he says coldly. “She never really intends to come back.”Back on KNOTS, Greg continues to consult with doctors while Laura makes preparations for Meg’s baptism. It’s science versus religion. “Sounds like a lot of mumbo-jumbo,” Laura says, looking over Greg's shoulder as he ploughs his way through a medical encyclopaedia. “What am I supposed to do — go and watch some guy in a funny costume hustle his mumbo-jumbo?” asks Greg, opting out of the christening. “You’ve seen your last doctor, I’ve seen my last church.” Likewise on DYNASTY, Dana and Adam disagree on how best to address their dilemma. When she proposes adoption, he insists that “I want a child who’s my own flesh and blood!” The episode ends with her watching a talk show about surrogacy and then whispering to her sleeping husband, “You can have a baby, Adam. You can.” Ah, surrogate parenting in Soap Land — what could possibly go wrong?“Tests — that’s all that people talk about these days is tests!” That’s not Dana or Laura complaining, it’s DALLAS’s Dandy Dandridge as he tries to persuade Cliff to take a punt on his East Texas oilfield, even though, like Laura’s brain and Dana’s uterus, it has already been scrutinised by experts and found wanting. “It was a damn stupid test!” Dandy insists. “They couldn’t find oil in a gas station … but you, you’re Digger’s son, you should know better — you can’t find oil with tests, you find it with a drill.” Unlike Laura and Dana, Cliff is willing to indulge his friend’s fantasy. Not only does he finance further tests, but when they also come back negative, he hides the truth from him. “There’s no oil there [but] I’m gonna drill it anyway,” he tells April. “I’m just gonna humour him a little bit, give him his last hurrah.” Like Greg with his medical books and Laura with Meg’s baptism, Cliff is looking for meaning in something greater than himself: “Maybe if Digger is walking around up there looking down on me, he’ll know who I’m really doing it for.”While Cliff makes an altruistic gesture towards an old wildcatter, Laura makes one towards a young painter. About to purchase an expensive picture by a well-known artist for $37,000, her eye is caught by another painting by an unknown, worth only $400. Impulsively, she decides to buy this painting instead but insists on paying the original amount. Greg goes along with her decision without batting an eyelid. “Who do I make the cheque out to?” he asks the salesperson. It’s a small moment, but the first indication that he might be willing to see things from Laura’s point of view.There are two parties this week, Laura’s leaving do at Lotus Point and the annual Oil Baron’s Ball on DALLAS. In each case, the festivities are blighted by ill-health. Although Laura keeps her condition a secret from everyone but Karen, Clayton’s becomes public when he collapses onstage with an apparent heart attack while presenting Punk Anderson with the Oilman of the Year Award.Instead of attending the Lotus Point party,  Greg makes yet another discouraging visit to yet another doctor’s office. Upon leaving, he sees his car being towed away. For once, he is obliged to walk amongst the people, and it seems to be this change of environment that forces him to face the reality of Laura’s condition. Meanwhile, instead of going to the Ball, Bobby arranges to meet Lisa, the perky blonde from out of town who “accidentally” bumped into him at the skating rink at the end of last week’s DALLAS in the same way that Sean Rowan “accidentally” chanced upon Alexis in DYNASTY’s season opener. Thanks to her furtive interest in Christopher, we know that Lisa, like Sean, has a secret agenda. We just don’t know what it is yet.The first two marriage proposals of the Soap Land season occur this week. With the ink hardly dry on their respective divorce papers, DALLAS’s Ray and FALCON CREST’s Lance pop the question to Jenna and Dina, but in very different circumstances. While Ray offers Jenna a ring (“I went into Dallas and I bought this for you”) amidst the glitter and glamour of the Oil Baron’s Ball, Lance presents Dina with a ring (“Dad and I spent hours picking this out”) while she is in a hospital bed, her head clamped and unable to move following last week’s car crash. Neither man gets the answer he was hoping for. “The decision to be married is a big one,” Jenna tells Ray hesitantly. “Our situations are still so confused.” Dina is more direct. “I can’t marry you. I can’t marry anyone,” she tells Lance. The rest of the words she uses to push him away echo what Pam might have said to Bobby a couple of weeks ago had she been able to speak: “I can’t love you, not the way I want to. I may never walk again. We may never be able to make love. I may never be able to have a baby.”KNOTS lays on the symbolism on a little thick as the episode progresses — the band playing 'When I Get to Heaven, Will There Still Be Rock and Roll?' at Laura’s party, the skate-boarder whizzing past Greg in a 'Life is Hard ... and Then You Die' T-shirt, the unintentionally ironic leaving presents (travel clocks, desk calendars and things with lifetime guarantees) — but they can’t dilute the impact of the story.While Laura prepares to leave her old life behind, Maggie Gioberti finds that hers was destroyed in the explosion at the end of last week’s FALCON CREST. The two women have parallel scenes in which each holds her baby and tells them gently about their family history and all things they’ll never get to share with them. “You’re named after your grandmother, you know — Marguerite Catherine,” Laura tells Meg. “You’re a fourth generation redhead … I’m not gonna see who you take after … I’m not gonna be able to pass on all those things my mother said to me.” “I’ve lost all the things I wanted to give you — no pictures, no letters,” Maggie tells Kevin. “You know, your father wrote some very beautiful letters … I’m just gonna have to write everything down so I don’t forget and then when you come to me and you want to know about your dad, I’m gonna have everything right there at my fingertips.” As the women speak, they are each unaware of Greg and Richard hovering in the doorway, listening.There are two striking, unusually long love scenes in this week’s Ewing-verse — one depicts Laura and Greg’s last night together, the other Jenna and Ray’s first. The Greg/Laura scene is the kind of tasteful love-making montage we’ve seen a hundred times before, but the context makes it poignant. “In everyone’s life there should be one perfect night,” Mark Graison told Pam the night before he went off to die and this is in the same vein. Neither Greg nor Laura speak during the sequence and Jenna is also silent during the scene where she approaches and then slowly seduces Ray in the stables of his ranch. It’s a sultry, steamy scene by DALLAS standards — and the barn setting evokes memories of Ray and Lucy getting it on at the start of the series. (There’s an also a hint of ambiguity, thanks to the moment beforehand where we see Jenna looking at a picture of Ray and Bobby together — it’s not a hundred percent certain which Ewing brother she’s got on her mind.) “It’s always rough when you lose someone you love,” sing-songs perky Lisa on DALLAS. “Rough” doesn’t seem adequate to cover the final moments of this week’s KNOTS. After all the arguing, the partying, the christening and the love-making, it comes down to the moment where Laura picks up her suitcase, takes one last silent look at her husband holding their baby daughter, gets in her car and then drives away forever.“I just don’t want you to watch me …” “I couldn’t stand the thought of you or Christopher ever seeing me …” As well as being each woman’s own choice, Laura’s and Pam’s departures are motivated by the glossy aesthetic of Soap Land itself. There is simply no place on screen for the sight of a woman disfigured by burns or ravaged by disease. (DALLAS could make an exception for Miss Ellie following her mastectomy, partly because of her age and partly because the injured area would never be shown on screen anyway.) KNOTS' great achievement in this episode is making Laura’s departure feel like a believable character choice as much as a plot contrivance. Indeed, it’s consistent with the “I don’t know why, but I just don’t want to be touched” aspect of her personality that has run through the series. Likewise, there are examples from Pam’s past that are compatible with her decision to leave her family. "If I went away, you'd find someone else, someone who could give you a family,” she told Bobby following her breakdown in Season 4. “I’d probably run away if I could,” she admitted when struggling with Jenna’s pregnancy last year. Now she has gone away, but without the actress who played her around to help sell us on the idea, it’s that bit harder for the audience to believe in her choice. For me, what we'll learn of Pam’s fate in New DALLAS adds an extra dimension to her story. Albeit unintentionally, she has also gone away to die.And this week’s Top 4 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (2) DALLAS3 (3) FALCON CREST4 (-) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?