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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 20381" data-attributes="member: 22">08/Jan/86: DYNASTY: Suspicions v. 09/Jan/86: THE COLBYS: The Letter v. 09/Jan/86: KNOTS LANDING: Web of Lies v. 10/Jan/86: DALLAS: Twenty-Four Hours v. 10/Jan/86: FALCON CREST: ConundrumFreak accidents and social issues are the prevalent themes in Soap Land this week. Following the disaster that befell Jamie in last week’s DALLAS when a load of oil barrels randomly fell on top of her, much of the drama in this week’s ep centres around her worsening condition at Soap Land Memorial Hospital. Towards the end of this week's COLBYS, Constance is also whisked away in an ambulance after being knocked down by Sable's car. Less seriously, KNOTS LANDING’s Ben arrives home on crutches after an offscreen incident involving a swivel chair. As this arbitrary occurrence serve no narrative purpose, one assumes it was added to the script in order to accommodate a real-life injury sustained by the actor. Indeed, the non-dramatic way it’s dealt with — everyone’s just sort of amused by the whole thing — feels refreshingly naturalistic. (This isn’t the only real-life ailment to impact onscreen events this week. A back complaint suffered by Victoria Principal means Pam is conspicuous by her absence from several key scenes on DALLAS, most notably those at the hospital involving Mark, Cliff and Matt Cantrell where Sue Ellen seems to be filling in for her.)While Sable and Constance’s collision on THE COLBYS is partly a chance occurrence — eager to speak to her sister-in-law, Constance is running unseen towards her car when she is hit — it also arises out of the ongoing conflict between them. Certainly, Jason makes it clear that he holds Sable responsible. “I don’t want you anywhere near her,” he snarls when she attempts to accompany the rest of the family to the hospital. By contrast, all the central characters on DALLAS — be they Ewing, Barnes, Wade, Graison or Farlow — are united by Jamie’s accident. Indeed, the ongoing absence of inter-family conflict during this period of DALLAS renders it almost unrecognisable from the series it has been for the past seven years. However, viewed on its own terms, the episode’s “the next twenty-four hours are critical” structure, which is punctuated throughout by close-ups of ticking clocks as the Ewings embark on a race against time to locate Jamie’s brother Jack so that she can be given a life-saving blood transfusion, works well enough. Nevertheless, the story’s only real frisson derives from JR’s silent belief that Jack’s blood won’t be able to save Jamie because he isn’t her real brother.While this week’s DALLAS feels unfamiliar, FALCON CREST makes a pleasing return to its Season 1 roots with Angela and Lance sabotaging Chase’s harvest and the Giobertis fighting back with pluck and ingenuity. The main difference is that the characters are far more openly antagonistic now than they used to be. “I’m gonna bury you. Get out of my house!” Chase yells at Angela unambiguously.Issues of race, sexuality, disability, child abuse and even blood donation are all touched upon in this week’s Soap Land. This can sometimes feel a little incongruous — such as when Sue Ellen, aka Miss Self-Involved 1967, earnestly implores the rest of the Ewings to donate blood (“It won’t do Jamie any good, but it’ll help replenish the blood bank's supply”) or when The Bitch Formerly Known As Racine on PAPER DOLLS and Constance on FLAMINGO ROAD is depicted as a volunteer counsellor at a halfway house for abused children on FALCON CREST. While Donna Krebbs takes up sign language in preparation for her new volunteer position on DALLAS, singer Wayne Masterson accuses Monica on THE COLBYS of pitying him for his blindness. (“Hey, don’t feel sorry for me,” he chides. "I got a head full of visions and a way to make people see them … I can see without eyes, Ms. Colby, just like I can sing without your company’s help!”) More subtly, during a scene on DALLAS where JR is speaking to a police contact over the phone, there is a poster, strategically positioned on the wall behind the cop’s desk, of a black man in a police uniform with the heading, "Why not make a difference?” Doubtless it was this recruitment initiative that inspired New DALLAS’s Sheriff Derrick to take up a career in law enforcement.“Isn’t this whole abused children thing turning into another Salem witch hunt?” asks gubernatorial candidate JJ Roberts on FALCON CREST. In a way, this feels like a response to the recent trend for Soap Land characters (Joshua Rush, Greg Sumner, Sue Ellen Ewing) to blame their parents for the way they've turned out. The "I’m not your mama!”/“You don’t have a son anymore!" theme continues when JJ’s wife tells their daughter Jordan that her father is on the verge of disowning her following her announcement to the press that she won’t be voting for him in the upcoming election. “He disowned me when he forced himself on me, Mother,” Jordan replies angrily. "Three damn years of hell … Those nightmares never stop!” If Morgan Fairchild seemed out of place as a volunteering do-gooder, then the emotional force with which she delivers this revelation is all the more powerful for being so unexpected.Bart Fallmont’s public remarks about the Carringtons and the Colbys ("It’s time those people realised they don’t own this state, that they cannot put profits in their pockets at the expense of our quality of life!”) leads to an equally memorable confrontation on this week’s DYNASTY. The fight scene between him and Steven Carrington, who is outraged about this slur on his family’s good name, is fascinatingly bizarre. It takes place in an otherwise empty gym and culminates in the two men circling one another, each pushing against the other while gripping each other’s shoulders. The camera is placed in-between them, alternately representing each man’s point of view as they stare into each other’s eyes (i.e., down the camera lens). The struggle intensifies until both men’s faces contort in a grimacing climax. Then they collapse to the floor, Steven on top of Bart. He rolls off him and the two men lie next to each other as if coitally spent, still making lingering eye contact. To describe the sequence as homoerotic doesn’t really do it justice; it’s more surreal than that. The whole thing feels simultaneously coy and explicit as though the two men have just engaged in some kind of telepathic sex act right in front of us. The only other Soap Land fight scene this week is a martial arts session between Lance and Chao Li on FALCON CREST. Needless to say, it doesn’t carry quite the same sexual charge.Elsewhere on FALCON CREST, Soap Land’s least romantic, and probably funniest, wedding to date takes place when Terry blackmails Richard into marrying her. The ceremony takes place in his office, they impatiently skip over the vows and the minister has to cajole the groom into kissing the bride. (“At least give me that much,” he pleads.) When Richard finds Terry waiting in his bed on their wedding night, he points her in the direction of the guest room down the hall — thus making it clear that they will be joining Blake and “Krystle", Jason and Sable, Miles and Fallon, and JR and Sue Ellen on the “married couple, separate bedrooms” bandwagon. KNOTS LANDING’s Gary and Abby might still be sharing the same bed, but that’s about it. “There's no us,” Gary tells his wife this week. "There’s only you and what you want. That’s all there ever was.” Jason has a similar speech about his marriage on THE COLBYS, but it is spoken more in sadness than anger. "Sable’s happiness is a family fiction,” he tells Frankie. "We want her to be happy, we pretend she’s happy, but she isn’t and she never will be. Nothing’s ever right. Nothing’s ever enough."At the same time, other romantic partnerships are beginning to blossom. While Sable shares an illicit kiss with Zachary Powers in his New York penthouse, Gary Ewing has dinner with Jill Bennett in the same Hotel of Adulterous Liaisons previously frequented by JR and Kristin on DALLAS and Field and Lane, and Constance and Julio on FLAMINGO ROAD. Meanwhile, Sable's daughter Monica and her associate Neil Kitteridge mix business with pleasure and Peter Hollister flirts with Abby (albeit clumsily) in the elevator of Galveston Industries.While KNOTS’ Greg and Abby agree that their enduring association is forged on mutual suspicion (“I don’t trust you any more than you trust me,” he tells her. “That’s why it works — we have the perfect system of checks and balances,” she replies), FALCON CREST’s Lance insists that Richard and Terry’s marriage is based on love: “She loves his newspaper, he loves her vineyards.” “My sister is marrying my husband’s brother — I feel like I’m in a soap opera,” quips Maggie Gioberti, echoing Eric Fairgate’s observation from earlier in the season: “Living in this cul-de-sac’s like living in the middle of a soap opera.”There's more self-referencing with the introduction of DYNASTY's Caress Morelle whose forthcoming book, Sister Dearest, is "the true story of Alexis Morelle Carrington Colby Dexter, as told by her sister”. With Sudden Friendship, Maggie Gioberti’s fictionalised account of life in the Tuscany Valley, awaiting publication on FALCON CREST, it’s like 1982 all over again when Donna Krebbs’ biography of Sam Culver went head to head with Capricorn Crude, Val Ewing’s thinly veiled account of her experience with her Dallas in-laws. On this week’s KNOTS, Val’s sister-in-law Cathy reveals that she too has been approached to write a tell-all book (“the life and times of Joshua Rush”), but has declined the offer. She does, however, have a record deal. In contrast to her KNOTS predecessor Ciji’s recording contract, which was significant enough to fuel a season’s worth of storylines, this fact is mentioned only very briefly in passing. Nevertheless, it puts her on a par with Wayne Masterson, who signs with Titania Records on this week’s episode of THE COLBYS, and FALCON CREST’s Apollonia who bids a bittersweet backstage farewell to Lance on the opening night of her tour, even as the audience can be heard clamouring for an encore. It reminds me of the scene in DALLAS’s fourth season when Sue Ellen breaks up with Dusty upon his victorious return to the rodeo circuit.It’s a busy week for Adam Carrington who pulls a diabolical double shift on DYNASTY and THE COLBYS. On the parent show, he takes advantage of Blake’s ill health by “laying the legal groundwork to take over the entire company!" On THE COLBYS, he goes one better by showing Jeff an old letter sent from Philip Colby to his brother Cecil (and hidden in Cecil's Logan Rhinewood file, no less) that includes the following titbit: “And I know that the baby Francesca is carrying is not my child.” “It turns out you’re not even a Colby!” laughs Adam. Conversely on DALLAS, it turns out Jack is a Ewing after all, in spite of Angelica Nero’s claims to the contrary, when his blood proves a perfect match for Jamie’s.Angelica isn’t the only Soap Land female whose scheme suffers a serious setback this week. In fact, the final shot of each of the remaining four shows is of a woman faced with the consequences of a foolhardy plan she embarked upon some weeks earlier. At the end of DYNASTY, Sammy Jo, who conceived the idea of a Krystle lookalike in the first place, begins to suspect that Rita is poisoning Blake. On FALCON CREST, Melissa, who came up with an ill-thought through surrogate mother scheme at the end of last season, learns that her chosen surrogate has now absconded with the baby. Over on KNOTS, her attempts to keep the truth about Joshua’s death having resulted in the arrest of an innocent man, Lilimae finally goes to the police to change her statement. Best of all, Sable on THE COLBYS is shown appearing to do the right thing by praying for Constance’s recovery in front of her portrait (“I’ve never begged for anything in my life, but I’m begging you now — you mustn’t die. Please, oh please don’t die!”), but then finding the crumpled up letter which reveals that Philip was not Jeff’s father. Just before the freeze frame, her expression thrillingly transforms from one of tear-stained remorse into something harder and more calculating.It's the Rise of the Teenager in this week's Ewing-verse where Olivia Cunningham's request to wear coloured nail polish on KNOTS and Charlie Wade’s to go to boarding school on DALLAS are stonewalled by their respective mothers. "All the other kids are wearing it,” insists Olivia. “What all the other kids are wearing doesn’t matter,” replies Abby firmly. “Dana and Elizabeth are going to Whitley Academy. Can I go too?” pleads Charlie. “Absolutely not,” retorts Jenna. While it’s fun to see Jenna laying down the law to her cosseted daughter, I kind of miss Abby’s less conventional parenting style from the days when she was more likely to laugh at her children’s precocious behaviour than forbid it. Admittedly, her newly conservative stance makes sense given her change in social status. In any case, Olivia and Charlie each gets the last word by referencing her erstwhile Ewing father figure. “No wonder Gary doesn’t want to come home anymore,” Olivia huffs. “If Bobby were here, he would let me go,” Charlie pouts.And this week’s Top 5 are …1 (1) THE COLBYS2 (-) DYNASTY3 (2) KNOTS LANDING4 (3) FALCON CREST5 (4) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?