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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 18884" data-attributes="member: 22">20/Nov/85: DYNASTY: The Decision v. 20/Nov/85: THE COLBYS: The Celebration v. 21/Nov/85: KNOTS LANDING: Until Parted by Death v. 22/Nov/85: DALLAS: Suffer the Little Children v. 22/Nov/85: FALCON CREST: Storm WarningSandwiched between last week’s extended edition, which introduced the Colby clan en masse, and the debut episode of DYNASTY II: THE COLBYS, which begins with that family's return to California, this week's DYNASTY takes place over the course of a single stormy night, giving it an unusual, almost introspective atmosphere, reminiscent of those occasional editions of EASTENDERS where a handful of characters ponder their fates during a sleepless night in the Square. Here, that role is taken by Jeff, reconsidering his move to California after glimpsing Fallon at the end of last week’s episode.While Blake is worried by Jeff’s preoccupation with his ex-wife on DYNASTY, the Mackenzies have a similar concern on KNOTS. This week’s episode opens with them looking on anxiously as Gary steals a moment with his ex-wife just as she’s about to marry someone else. “Why can’t weddings ever go smoothly?” wonders Karen. “It’s the law of nature,” Mack replies. “Weddings and volcanoes never erupt smoothly.“ This time, however, they have nothing to fear. Dressed all in white, Gary looks and behaves like a benevolent ghost from Val’s past. All he wants to know is if she’s happy. When she assures him that she is, he wishes her the best and leaves. There’s an awful lot of emotion and a great deal left unsaid between Gary and Val here, but Karen's insistence that Val is doing the right thing by marrying Ben makes logical sense.Back on DYNASTY, the same thunderstorm that Jeff looks out onto forces Miles and Fallon, driving back to California to meet Miles’s family, to seek shelter at a motel where they finally become lovers. It’s a scenario similar to the one once described by Bobby and Pam on DALLAS — following their elopement, they drove back to Southfork during “the coldest winter in the history of Texas”, spending their wedding night in a motel along the way. Just like Pam and Bobby when we first saw them in DALLAS, Miles and Fallon are travelling in a red convertible and there’s even a scene in THE COLBYS where they stop at a gas station, just as Bobby and Pam did in “Digger’s Daughter”. But whereas Bobby and Pam were on their way from an elopement, Miles and Fallon are heading towards one. If Ben and Val’s wedding on KNOTS feels weighted down by the past, Miles and Fallon’s, revealed at the end of THE COLBYS, carries no historical baggage at all. How could it when the bride can’t even remember who she is and the groom doesn’t care?As well as announcing his marriage to Pam in that first episode of DALLAS, Bobby also declared his intention to start work at Ewing Oil. JR responded by sending him to Austin on a glad-handing mission. When Jeff reports for work at Colby Enterprises in the first episode of THE COLBYS, Jason reacts similarly, telling him he’s booked on a diplomatic trip to Hong Kong. Like Bobby before him, Jeff stands his ground. “I’m not your errand boy. I’m your partner, your equal partner,” he tells him. (Conversely, Jason’s daughter Monica, who combines the language skills of Kirby Anders, the diplomatic know-how of Ashley Mitchell and the untapped potential of early Fallon Carrington, is angry at not even being considered for the Hong Kong assignment.)At the end of the first DALLAS ep, JR admitted that he’d “underestimated the new Mrs. Ewing. I surely won’t do that again.” Now that Pam, as JR’s new partner, is in the situation Bobby was then, it appears that he has indeed learned from past experience. “Pam, I don’t like it but I’m willing to accept that you have a right to be here,” he tells her this week before going on to patiently explain his business methods in a way we’ve never really heard before: “I get five hundred offers a day come across my desk, everything from wacky inventions to racehorses, and if I think there’s any merit in these things, I try to get as much information as I can on them. I have my experts double check and triple check all the specs and if I think Ewing Oil should proceed with it, then and only then do I consult my partner.” By the end of the scene, he’s pretty much convinced Pam that they are on the same side.During the equivalent scene on THE COLBYS, Jeff wins his uncle’s grudging respect by reeling off the many, many assets of both Jason and his company in an impressively deadpan monologue ("Jason Colby, personal wealth 1.2 billion dollars ... Colby Enterprises, total gross assets estimated to be slightly more than 42 billion dollars …”). This useful bit of info-dumping leaves us in no doubt as to how formidable the Californian Colbys are. As Jason points out, “This is not like that cosy corner grocery you were used to over at Denver Carrington. This is Colby Enterprises, a somewhat larger undertaking." By contrast, JR has never sounded so self-deprecating as when he dismisses Ewing Oil as “just a little independent company, not bad for Dallas, but compared to the Seven Sisters and even West Star, we’re small potatoes” during a meeting with Angelica Nero and Jack this week.An unusual Soap Land trend has developed of late. Let us call it Songbird Interruptus. It began two weeks ago on FALCON CREST when Angela put a stop to Lance’s pool party by turning off a tape-recording of Apollonia’s latest song. Then in last week’s KNOTS, Joshua sabotaged the electrical equipment at the TV studio, thereby preventing Cathy from singing. And on this week’s DYNASTY, Dominique finds Garrett Boydston in her hotel suite listening to one of her LPs and indignantly turns it off. (Dominique silencing her own vocal performance? How very uncharacteristic.)There is no shortage of predatory males on the loose in this week’s Soap Land. A knife-wielding intruder breaks into Apollonia’s bedroom on FALCON CREST, a random drunk tries to rape Fallon in her motel room on THE COLBYS and Linda the waitress receives an unwelcome visit from her ex-boyfriend Ken on KNOTS. While Lance and Miles ride to Apollonia’s and Fallon’s respective rescue, Joshua sees off Ken — which, given that Joshua spends much of this week’s ep stalking his own estranged wife Cathy, is kind of ironic. Instead of a knight in shining armour, Cathy turns to Laura who invites her to move back into her house.When Laura tells her that “Joshua poses a physical threat” to Cathy, Karen’s first instinct is to turn the situation into a Movie of the Week (“Oh my God! … I should have known! … What are we gonna do?!”). Laura calmly assures her that “the hardest thing and the most important thing has already been done. She left him. Now all we can do is offer moral support and a safe place for her to be." If Laura sounds like she’s quoting from a pamphlet on domestic violence, then that's entirely in keeping with the situation. It's also part of a growing Soap Land trend towards a more “issue-based” — for want of a less all-purpose term — form of story-telling, which carries a message that there is information and help available to the characters (and by extension, the viewers at home) outside of their shows’ traditional parameters.Soap Land is now halfway through the '80s and so we’ve reached the Oprah era where buzz words like sharing and openness come into play — the direct opposite of the secrets and lies that have fuelled Soap Land’s drama for the first half of the decade. We see the change most clearly in the way Sue Ellen’s recent recovery from alcoholism has been depicted on DALLAS. When she was first committed to a sanitarium back in 1979, it was primarily to cut off her supply of alcohol and as a way for JR to ensure that she wouldn’t blurt out the “truth” of her unborn child’s paternity while drunk. There was no mention of AA, the Twelve Steps or the possibility that she might become a more well-balanced human being as a result of her treatment. Nor did we hear her talk about learning to love herself or becoming her own person, or any of the other self-help phrases that now come out of Sue Ellen's mouth every time she’s on screen. Likewise in ’79, when Pam Ewing was faced with the possibility that her baby could be born with neurofibromatosis, she was left to suffer in isolated anguish. By contrast, following the recent discovery that their unborn child had Down’s Syndrome, Ray and Donna have been surrounded by experts offering comfort, support, and real-life statistics. Lilimae tries to convey the same message to her son on this week’s KNOTS. “There is help for whatever problem you have. There are places —” However not all situations can be so neatly resolved. “Do you see any irony in a mother telling her son to go somewhere else, to go to someone else, for help?” Joshua asks her bitterly in reply.But what exactly is Joshua and Cathy’s story? Is it a domestic abuse storyline or is it a mental illness storyline? Or, deep down, is it just a good old-fashioned crazed-stalker/girl-in-peril exploitation storyline? Is it the plot of A Star is Born transposed to an '80s supersoap or simply KNOTS sticking to its original remit by portraying scenes from a marriage in extremis? (Indeed, the scenes where Joshua, unwittingly aided by Laura’s son Jason, traps Cathy in the Avery house recall the circumstances that led to Richard taking his family hostage in Season 3.) The story is a combination of all of these elements, but it also transcends them in the deeply poignant and beautifully acted kitchen scene between Joshua and Lilimae, which suggests that Joshua's present behaviour is rooted in his mother’s absence and father’s violence towards him when he was a boy. Whenever I think of Alec Baldwin’s description of working opposite Julie Harris ("She's like an emotional swimming pool, you just want to jump in when you act with her”), it's this scene that comes to mind. (Conversely, Larry Hagman's admission that there was one screen mistress with whom he disliked working always makes me think of JR and Angelica's mutual seduction scene in this week's DALLAS.)“I was too late, Cathy honey,” Lilimae tells her daughter-in-law. "Too late for him, too late for me ... I’m sorry for all you’ve been through and I’m sorry for my part in it … I knew something was wrong. I think a part of us always knows if we’d just admit it, but … there was just so much mixed up in my mind … hoping things weren’t as bad as I sort of knew they were. Forgive me.” Patricia Shepard is similarly contrite about her own child's marriage on DALLAS. “Power, money, all the prestige that went with being Mrs. JR Ewing, I thought that would make you happy,” she tells Sue Ellen. "I was wrong … It’s time for you to get on with your life, away from JR, away from Southfork … I just want you to be happy.”On last week’s KNOTS, Val ordered Joshua out of her house after witnessing his violent behaviour first hand. On this week’s FALCON CREST, Angela orders Lance from her house after learning that he has handed the New Globe back to Richard. Both men subsequently move in with their latest girlfriends — starry-eyed waitress Linda and ambitious star-to-be Apollonia. This isn’t the first time Angela has thrown Lance out and he doesn’t take her anger very seriously. Indeed, he’s back under her roof by the end of the episode. Things aren’t so simple for Joshua.“That show was all that I had,” he tells Cathy tearfully. "I came to Knots Landing with nothing … I came from a place that it would be hard for you to imagine. Things you presumed on growing up, I never had ... I only know the ministry.” Father Christopher is in a parallel situation on FALCON CREST. Like Joshua, his sheltered religious upbringing has left him ill-equipped for life in a prime time soap opera. “Maybe I shouldn’t have transferred here … Everything that’s happened since I came here has been pulling me away from the spiritual life and pulling me toward worldly things, worldly temptations." Intriguingly, FC’s priest-in-residence, Father Bob, takes Christopher’s dilemma in stride, suggesting that such struggles are a rite of passage for men of the cloth. “Just don’t go thinking you’re the first priest to ever question his commitment." (I’d love to know more about Father Bob’s own conflicts. It might help to make him more of a rounded character rather than just a dispenser of spiritual advice.)Father Christopher’s "worldly temptation” takes the lustful form of Melissa Gioberti. Presumably, the inspiration for this storyline came from THE THORN BIRDS, the hugely successful mini-series broadcast a couple of years earlier. Although I never watched it, I can still recall the trailer where an elderly Barbara Stanwyck demands that a young priest kiss her “on my mouth, as if we were lovers!” This week, in her new guise as tearful but tough Constance on THE COLBYS, it emerges that Stanwyck is involved in another unconventional relationship. While the rest of her family think she’s off doing charity work, Constance is conducting a secret affair with a younger (if not exactly young) cowboy named Hutch. As an added twist, he has no idea that she is a rich Colby. “You come and you go just like a will o’ the wisp,” he says to her. "I don’t know where you come from or where you go to. All I know is that you’re my mystery lady.” In contrast, FALCON CREST’s Emma is charmingly uninhibited about her equally unlikely romance with a sweet hillbilly called Dwayne, even in the face of her mother's disapproval. “He’s too young for you,” Angela barks. Angela refers to Dwayne as “that truck driver” in the same contemptuous manner that DALLAS’s Patricia speaks of Dusty Farlow as “that cowboy”.Without being issue-based in the same way as KNOTS and DALLAS, each of this week’s DYNASTY-verse episodes makes some attempt to place its characters in a wider societal context. While Alexis’s line to the Duchess of Branagh, "If people like your father would stop envying Americans and start trying to emulate them, Moldavia and its king would not be in this sorry situation,” sticks out like a sore thumb, the subject of sexual equality recurs throughout THE COLBYS’ first episode. "I seem to have sired a woman of the '80s, God help me,” says Jason after an argument with his daughter Monica.There is a very interesting scene between Sable and Monica which clearly establishes mother and daughter’s differing views on the gender divide. Sable: “There is nothing devious about using your femininity … When it comes to men, no two women are ever on the same team … There is no sexual equality. There never has been and there never will be, at least not as far as the men are concerned.” Monica: “I’m tired of being treated like a second class citizen, especially by my own father … Marriage isn’t going to be the end of the line for me, Mother. When a man gets married, he doesn’t give up his career, his ambitions, his dreams. I don’t see why it should be any different for a woman.”Sable is a fascinating mixture of contradictions — adversarial (“Handing Jeff half the Colby empire on a silver platter? Well, I am not going to let her get away with it!”) but also entirely dependent. “I’m here to share with you,” she tells Jason. "That’s my role. Without that, what am I?” This sounds like something Sue Ellen would have said only a few weeks ago (“I don’t know anything but being Mrs JR Ewing”). Sue Ellen isn’t the same woman she was then, however. “I’m not ready to put my life into somebody else’s hands again so soon,” she tells Dusty firmly. "I’m not gonna give up myself to get you.”Soap Land’s cultural references are noticeably contemporary this week. "You look like you’re going to a Madonna concert,” Jason tells his youngest daughter Bliss before adding, “I have a fella I pay just to keep me up-to-date on those names.” “You’ll probably have more airtime than Bruce Springsteen, how does that sound?” radio station owner Lance asks Apollonia on FALCON CREST. “It sounds like I’m gonna be a star!” she replies. “I think she’s going to be a big star,” echoes Linda the waitress on KNOTS, referring to Cathy. Even as she is beset by adoring autograph hunters, Cathy continues to hover somewhere between reluctant and ambivalent at the prospect of becoming a singing star, just as Ciji did before her. Apollonia’s unabashed desire for fame and fortune is kind of refreshing by comparison.At the end of this week’s KNOTS, Joshua watches Cathy singing on TV, but with the sound turned down. He doesn’t hurl a glass of blood red tomato juice at her image the way Katherine Wentworth did at Bobby’s at the end of last season’s DALLAS, but the way he smiles as he talks about her impending demise is even more eerie: “For as long as I could, I kept her from dying … She’s chosen a life that leads to spiritual death … The next time that she tries to kill herself, I won’t be able to stop her." This week’s DALLAS also ends with a husband threatening his wife. Upon receiving a lawsuit for custody of their son, JR warns Sue Ellen that if she succeeds in taking John Ross away from him, “there’s not enough room on this earth to keep you safe from me, honey.”All this plus a death by electrocution: The scene in KNOTS where a fatally inquisitive Frank Elliot infiltrates the broadcast centre at Empire Valley is creepily effective, the almost ALIEN-like atmosphere conveyed by little more than shadowy lighting and a subterranean, clanking sound design.And this week’s Top 5 are …1 (-) THE COLBYS2 (1) KNOTS LANDING3 (3) DALLAS4 (2) DYNASTY5 (4) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?