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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 21140" data-attributes="member: 22">29/Jan/86: DYNASTY: The Accident v. 30/Jan/86: THE COLBYS: Thursday’s Child v. 30/Jan/86: KNOTS LANDING: Friendly Enemies v. 31/Jan/86: DALLAS: Shadow Games v. 31/Jan/86: FALCON CREST: Shattered DreamsThis week’s DYNASTY opens with a nifty bit of role reversal as Krystle impersonates her own impersonator in order to escape her kidnapper Joel. She then hotfoots it to Blake’s bedside at Soap Land Memorial Hospital — but how to convince him she’s really the Real Krystle? By recounting an intimate conversation that took place aboard his private jet, way back in the pilot episode, that’s how. Sable attempts a similar move on THE COLBYS in order to rekindle Jason’s ardour. She tries to recreate their first scene together (was it only two and a half months ago?) where she stepped naked out of the bathtub and he dried her off. This time around, however, he hands her a towel and lets her get on with it. Meanwhile on KNOTS, Mack recalls the beginning of that series, albeit unintentionally, when he delivers the male equivalent of Karen’s midlife speech from “Let Me Count the Ways" to explain why he has Jill Bennett’s hotel key in his pocket. (“One day I looked in the mirror and realised much of my life had gone by. The things I dreamed of doing I wasn’t going to do … It’s not about using the key, it’s about having it … It made me feel just a little more alive.") Karen is no more impressed by Mack’s efforts than Jason is by Sable's. Clayton Farlow has more success explaining his male identity crisis to Miss Ellie on DALLAS ("I left a lot of things behind so I could take up life with you at Southfork. I gave up Southern Cross, I left Houston … Farlow Industries is all I have left that I can point to and say, ‘That’s mine’”), even if their “scene from a marriage" takes place in the somewhat unconventional setting of a ladies powder room.Elsewhere on DALLAS, Jenna Wade would dearly love to return to the past. “Do you think if I wished hard enough, I could go back to before all the mistakes were made?” she asks Bobby at his graveside. “I wanna go back ... I just don’t know how to get there.” Over on FALCON CREST, the original Jenna, aka Jordan Roberts, has the opposite problem. She is haunted by nightmares of herself as a little girl dancing with her abusive father to a tinkling music box tune. It's like a more sinister variation of Val Ewing’s dream of waltzing with Gary when she was in Shula.There is much coming and going at Soap Land Memorial this week. While DYNASTY’s Blake and DALLAS’s Jamie each returns home from the hospital, THE COLBYS’ Constance remains behind, making slow progress after her collision with Sable’s car. Following an altercation on last week’s FALCON CREST when she and Dwayne surprised some bad guys who were after Chase’s wine shipment, Emma Channing is also admitted and, like Constance, diagnosed with a concussion. Over on KNOTS, Cathy is off work with laryngitis — a comparatively minor complaint which nonetheless sets in motion a chain of (somewhat contrived) events leading to the exposure of the undercover reporter in her midst.In the meantime, Lilimae continues to brood over the tabloid articles written about her son’s death. “Pretty soon they’ll find something else to write about,” Val assures her. Well, they will if Alexis Dexter has anything to do with it. “KRYSTLE CARRINGTON — LOVE SLAVE!” is the headline she pitches to the editor of the National Informer at the end of this week’s DYNASTY. “There’ll be a stampede to every supermarket in the country,” she tells him. Over on FALCON CREST, Jordan gloomily predicts that the New Globe’s next big front page story will be “THE BIG UNSOLVED MYSTERY OF JORDAN ROBERTS!” after Richard tells her he knows about her father abusing her. However, he promises her he won’t make the information public. (Let us call this soap karma — during Richard and Jordan’s previous incarnations on FLAMINGO ROAD, he took great delight in sadistically rubbing her face in her family's deep dark secrets.)With Ben Gibson’s foot still bandaged on KNOTS and Pam Ewing still largely absent from DALLAS (the facially obscured stand-in used for most of her scenes, while obvious, is nonetheless more convincing than Krystle and Rita’s bewigged stunt replacements during last week’s DYNASTY), I find myself on the lookout for other real life injuries and ailments that might have made it onscreen. While Cathy’s hoarse voice on KL certainly sounds authentic, it’s surely too integral to the plot to have been unplanned. The surgical dressing on Miles Colby’s hand, however, is another matter. It serves no narrative purpose and when Zach Powers comments on it in passing, Miles attributes it to an injury sustained during a brawl in the last episode. “I didn’t know I actually broke it until the day after,” he adds as if to explain away its sudden appearance. This suggests that Maxwell Caulfield might have fallen prey to the same off screen Soap Land curse as Doug Sheehan and Victoria Principal. Miles’s fight took place while he was slumming it in a merchant seamen’s bar, looking for evidence that Zach himself was behind the recent oil spill from one of Colby Enterprises’ tankers. Miles’s FALCON CREST equivalent, Lance Cumson, follows his lead this week, posing as a dock worker to find out information about Peter Stavros’s whereabouts. (Well, it’s more plausible than the tabloid reporter currently masquerading as a saxophonist on KNOTS.) By the end of the episode, Lance is preparing to travel to Monte Carlo to question Peter’s son-in-law Philippe, “a high-stakes gambler who doesn't like to lose.”Hopefully, Lance will have better luck than Jeff Colby who this week flies to Athens to speak with Captain Lavados, the man whom Zach blackmailed into doing his dirty work, only to find him dead in his apartment. Conversely on DALLAS, Angelica Nero’s accomplice Nicholas flies in from Athens with the news that another shipping tycoon, Dimitri Marinos, is also dead. Angelica’s instinctive response is not dissimilar from the “million dollar spit in the ocean” game that Fallon introduced Krystle to in DYNASTY’s first season (“the poor cut back in hard times — that’s why they’re poor; the rich know that’s the time to spend”). She takes to the stage at Sue Ellen’s charity auction and pledges a million dollars to Graison Research on behalf of Dimitri, whom she assures everyone is alive and well.Elsewhere at the party, JR gets the better of Cliff by outbidding him to the tune of $12,000 on a crystal duck which he then magnanimously donates back to the auction. This is a lighthearted variation on the recent art auction on THE COLBYS where Zach anonymously outbid Sable on a prized Matisse painting before presenting it to her as a gift. This week, Sable angrily orders him to take it back after she discovers his nephew has been using Bliss to spy on Jason: “I want your painting out of my collection and you out of my life immediately.” She slaps him, he slaps her, they passionately kiss, he exits the scene and she’s left smouldering in close up.Two of this week’s soaps contain a scene where a woman sides with a rapist against his victim. At JJ Roberts’ funeral on FALCON CREST, his wife Harriet blames their daughter Jordan for his suicide, despite being aware of the abuse he inflicted upon her as a child. The situation is a little different for Sable on THE COLBYS. When she accuses Fallon, whom she learns is planning to return to Denver, of deserting her son, she is unaware that Miles had raped her the night before.Like Kirby after her rape by Adam in DYNASTY’s third season, Fallon chooses to keep her ordeal a secret, at least for the time being. The viewer is kept at the same emotional distance as the other characters onscreen and so it is hard to get a real sense of her suffering (aside from a flash of anger towards Sable when she tries to persuade her to stay with Miles: “I’m not his property!”). In contrast, when Miles wakes up the morning after the night before, his shame and self-disgust are written all over his face. By Soap Land standards, Miles is a relatively complex figure whereas Fallon, due in part to her recast, her memory loss and subsequent identity crisis, remains something of a blank canvas. Weirdly, this puts the viewer in a position of being able to identify, and maybe even sympathise, more easily with a rapist than his victim. Intentional or not, this sense of imbalance, this moral lopsidedness where we're not quite sure who we’re meant to be rooting for at any given moment, is part of what makes THE COLBYS so fascinating and unique among the soaps.Over on DYNASTY, Jackie Devereaux explains to her mother Dominique that she has gotten herself expelled from her Swiss finishing school so that,“I can be near you … I love you and I want to get to know you more.” By way of contrast on this week’s KNOTS, Abby is obliged to wait outside Olivia’s school to even catch a glimpse of her. “I don’t want to talk to her,” Olivia insists. As Abby tries to explain about her participation (or lack thereof) in the kidnapping of Val’s twins (“I didn’t even know about it until after the fact”), DYNASTY’s Sammy Jo attempts to explain her role in Krystle’s abduction (“I was angry and I wanted my money ... but it got out of control.") While Olivia screams in her mother’s face, Krystle tells her niece she’s “so angry with you, I’d like to shake the hell out of you if I thought it would do any good.” However, she grudgingly agrees not to press charges against her and Sammy Jo’s genuine contrition seems to mark a turning point for her character.As one Soap Land heroine’s abduction ordeal ends on DYNASTY, another’s begins on DALLAS — and is it mere coincidence that just two days after Krystle’s kidnappers, Joel and Rita, mysteriously disappear (last known destination: South America), Pam Ewing is snatched by person or persons unknown in the jungles of Colombia?Also on this week's DALLAS, the disabled pupils from Donna's school enjoy a trip to Southfork. The kids themselves are sweet, their interactions with Ray, Clayton and the horses as cute and unaffected as you’d expect from any unscripted child performers. However, Donna and Miss Ellie’s responses to the children are so gushy and mushy, it kind of kills the sequence stone dead. THE COLBYS, meanwhile, uses the making of Wayne Masterson’s debut pop video to combine Soap Land’s ongoing interest in disabled characters with its current trend for MTV-style music montages. After the shoot, Monica raves about the video to Wayne — “Wait till you see it!” — then catches herself and apologises. Again, Wayne accuses her of pitying him his blindness and asks her to describe the video to him. This develops into a kind of romantic moment between them. Sure, it’s a little hokey, but it’s still preferable to the moments on DALLAS where Miss Ellie gets uncharacteristically teary listening to Donna rhapsodise about how “special” her kids are. While Wayne’s story is, to an extent, about Monica’s well-intentioned but patronising attitude towards him, the DALLAS equivalent simply is well-intentioned but patronising. Crucially, Wayne has a voice with which to challenge Monica’s behaviour (“Come on, girl, quit walking on eggshells because I’m blind”) whereas the Woodgrove kids must necessarily play second fiddle to Donna and her emotions.Questions have been raised over the past few weeks regarding the paternities of Jeff Colby, Peter Hollister and Hope Gioberti, but no one is quite sure who or what to believe. (It’s almost as if everyone involved was watching DALLAS when Angelica Nero suckered JR with her convincing yarn about Dimitri Marinos being Jack’s real father and has since realised such things can’t be taken at face value.) On THE COLBYS, Jeff flies to Rome to ask his mother the truth about Phillip’s letter from Saigon. She insists that Phillip “was exhausted, under pressure, sick with malaria” when he wrote it and that he is indeed his real father. Jeff seems satisfied, but the final line of the episode, delivered by Jason, puts a whole new spin on things: “Frankie, I have to know. Is Jeff my son?” “I’m your brother ... Paul Galveston was my father too,” announces Peter on KNOTS. He is somewhat unnerved at how casually Greg accepts the news. (“He said he believed me,” he tells his mother, “but what Greg Sumner says and what he believes are rarely the same thing.”) Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, the jury (or more specifically, the DNA analysis) is still out on who the heck fathered Robin Agretti’s kid.There is a broad selection of cultural references in this week’s Soap Land. On DYNASTY, Alexis compares Krystle to Patty Hearst to bolster her argument that she must have slept with Joel Abrigore while he held her captive in the attic. And while Zach Powers assures Sable that, “I’m not Machiavelli, I’m just a simple man who wants a very complicated woman” on THE COLBYS, Mack Mackenzie describes the realisation that “I was never gonna stand in a gin mill in Casablanca and watch Ingrid Bergman walk in“ during his midlife speech on KNOTS. Over on DALLAS, Cliff tells Jamie how “the scene with the mother” in Bambi “gets me every time” — which kind of makes it the Disney equivalent of Cliff’s own “scene with the mother", i.e., the one with Rebecca and the liquorice.And this week’s Top 5 are …1 (3) KNOTS LANDING2 (-) THE COLBYS3 (2) DYNASTY4 (4) DALLAS5 (1) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?