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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 260136" data-attributes="member: 22">25 Aug 14: DALLAS: Dead Reckoning v. 09 Nov 16: EMPIRE: One Before Another v. 08 Feb 19: DYNASTY: Even Worms Can Procreate“Who is to blame for Drew’s death?” replaces “Who sent Pamela the video of John Ross and Emma?” as the question everyone on DALLAS is asking, but to which viewers already know the answer: Nicolas.Whereas JR’s death was a suicide (of sorts) arranged to look like a murder, the Mendez-Ochoa cartel makes Drew’s murder look like a suicide. In both cases, a significant item is removed from the body to help achieve this deception: JR’s belt buckle and Drew’s St Christopher medal. It is the absence of the medal, which Drew always wore around his neck, that convinces his mother Carmen that his death was self-inflicted. “Suicide’s a mortal sin,” Elena reminds her. “Drew wouldn’t have been able to do it with it on.” The morgue scene where Drew’s family identifies his body is as wrenching as the one where the Ewings did the same for JR. Just as there were four Ewings present then (John Ross, Bobby, Sue Ellen and Christopher), there are four characters present now: Carmen, Elena, Bobby and Nicolas. (Nicolas, the murderer, looks as grief-stricken as everyone else). Drew’s coffin, like JR’s, is draped with an American flag and we see his mother weeping over it just as Sue Ellen did JR's. And also like Sue Ellen, Emma receives a posthumous, movingly written love letter from the deceased: “I saw a light in you, a goodness in you that I’m not sure you saw in yourself, but the truth is you deserve a better man than me. I’m sorry I didn’t fight harder to be that man.” Drew may have only around for a fraction of the time JR was, but the significance given to his passing makes it clear that, within the context of the series, his life mattered just as much.While Elena blames herself ("Drew is dead because he discovered the deed switch. He couldn’t live with that. If I had just told him the truth from the beginning …This is my fault”), Nicolas argues that “JR Ewing is the reason your brother is dead.” However, Emma believes her father is responsible. “It’s your fault Drew is dead," she tells Harris. "You hired him to blow up that rig and he killed himself over the guilt he felt for killing those babies.”Meanwhile, Pamela still maintains her overdose wasn’t an attempted suicide — it's just that her desire for revenge on John Ross meant more to her than her own life. A fine distinction perhaps, but one that would make sense to Shyne on EMPIRE. “If I gotta blow somebody up, I don’t care if I die with him,” he tells Lucious after declaring war on the Lyons. “What you need to come to terms with is that you were willing to throw your life away,” Sue Ellen tells Pamela gently. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t ready to — and that terrifies me,” Pamela finally admits. Sue Ellen can relate: “I didn’t die when I passed out drunk and set that fire, but I just as easily could have. That terrifies me.” Back when New DALLAS began, independent, career-minded Elena was the young female character with whom Sue Ellen identified  (“If I hadn’t met JR, I’d like to think that I could have been like you,” she told her then). Now, it's conflicted, self-destructive Pamela she has most in common with. The beauty of New DALLAS is that there’s enough room for both comparisons to apply; Sue Ellen is both strong and self-destructive; career-minded and conflicted.But the Award for Most Unequivocally Suicidal Character of the Week goes to DYNASTY’s Alexis who randomly decides to shoot herself in the mouth at the end of this week’s episode, but upon seeing New New Cristal out riding with her ex-husband Mark, suddenly decides to shoot her instead. However, it’s Mark who ends up taking a bullet while New-New does the whole thrown-from-her-horse-then-dragged-along-the-ground-while-pregnant thing.Pamela is released from Soap Land Memorial Hospital after solemnly promising to “make myself the priority.” She tells Sue Ellen that, as they never got a prenup, she intends to stay married to John Ross: “I can’t take the chance of him being awarded any part of my shares of Ewing Global.” Sue Ellen wonders how this qualifies as “making yourself a priority.” “I am making myself a priority,” Pamela explains, “because if I walk away from this marriage, John Ross wins and I’m not about to let that happen.” This is the same sort of soapy reasoning Sue Ellen herself applied back in the day when she told JR: “Hating you the way I do is enough to keep me sober.”“Maybe if Drew had never gotten involved with you then we would still be together and maybe I wouldn’t have slept with John Ross and maybe Pamela wouldn’t have tried to kill herself,” says Emma to her father, thereby illustrating “the domino effect” — that classic Soap Land storytelling device whereby one plot development sparks off another, then another — that New DALLAS is so good at: from Ryland trying to break up Drew and Emma to Pamela’s overdose in three moves. By comparison, EMPIRE’s plotting feels more fragmented. While some story strands disappear for weeks on end, seemingly forgotten about, only to resurface when you least expect it, other plots repeat themselves ad infinitum. I’ve lost track of how many times each of Lucious’s sons has turned against him and then returned to his side. Currently, Andre is back under his spell while Jamal is the angry outsider and Hakeem’s soul is up for grabs, but they might easily have all swapped positions in a few episodes’ time. It reminds me of how Angela was continually writing Lance in or out of her will on FALCON CREST, on almost on a weekly basis. But whereas FC often felt simply inconsistent, as if the writers were having trouble keeping track of what was going on, the Lyons’ repetitive patterns of behaviour — falling out, reconciling, falling out all over again for the very same reasons — feel true to real family life, albeit heightened to the extremes of soap opera — a soap opera where the characters feel compelled to express their conflicts both through the medium of hip hop and in a public arena. As Jamal says to his father this week, “You love this type of drama!”EMPIRE’s brand of exhibitionist soap opera reaches its ultimate expression this week as Jamal, in an attempt to combat his stage fright, collaborates with Hakeem on an intimate performance to be broadcast from his apartment on Empire XStream. As Jamal delivers a soulful number about unity and togetherness, full of “we made it through the storm and we’re still together” type sentiment, his mom and brothers look on supportively. Lucious, however, is busy monitoring the streaming numbers and isn’t impressed: “They need to go up. Hakeem’s audience ain’t even tuning in because they’re not here for this Kumbaya crap. We need some fire in here!” His solution is to drip poison in Hakeem’s ear about Andre’s new romance with Nessa, who Hakeem has also had his eye on. When it comes time for Hakeem to take the mic, he loses it and delivers an angry, homophobic rap against Jamal who he accuses of conspiring against him: “You got us doing this Mickey Mouse performance about brotherhood when you know Andre’s giant ass crushing my girl!” Lucious is thrilled and, as a shouting match between the brothers develops, he orders the cameras to keep filming. Cookie, however, pushes him out the way and starts pulling out plugs, and pretty soon, everyone’s screaming at everyone. “Petty ass dumb bitch!” “Shut your Frank Ocean wannabe ass up!” “Turn these cameras off!” We’ve seen plenty of public meltdowns on New DYNASTY — almost every time Blake or Fallon stand on a stage to make a formal announcement, they get drunk and start ranting on about something or other — and they’re all predictably farcical. This one, however, is visceral and thrilling.As the Lyons create chaos on their streaming service, there’s further online action on DYNASTY where Sam launches himself as an influencer on Instagram, only to be upstaged by cutesy footage of Anders and Bo (DYNASTY’s dog rather than DALLAS’s paralysed rodeo rider). This comedy subplot culminates in Anders telling Sam he loves him like a son and Sam learning his Lesson for the Week (which he’ll have inevitably forgotten by the next episode): Some Things in Life are More Important Than Seeking Approval from Strangers. Such mawkishly sentimental moments on DYNASTY always take me a bit by surprise: we’re meant to actually care about these people?It’s been a notable week for Soap Land’s underlings. As well as Anders going viral, the lovely Becky gets a bit of a storyline on EMPIRE. A few episodes ago, she was passed over for the position of Head of A&R in favour of smug Jewish white guy, Xavier. It’s interesting to note the casual racism thrown his way in this week’s ep by Cookie, who refers to him as ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, and Becky herself, who informs him testily that “this ain’t chutes and ladders, this is the music business. I thought you people understood what the word ‘business’ meant.” Xavier doesn’t respond to this jibe directly but later manages to make Becky look bad in front of Cookie and Tiana. “Why didn’t you have my back?” Becky asks him. “It’s just business,” he replies. She then has a mini tantrum at her desk which only makes her more adorable. (There’s more tit for tat rivalry in the workplace between Fallon and Culhane, both now involved with Blake’s football team, but that's all super boring and pathetically childish.)Back at Southfork, Carmen the cook is the only New DALLAS character whose role, beliefs and allegiances have remained unaltered since the series began — but that all changes this week. After it emerges that it was Drew, not Sue Ellen, who started the fire at Southfork, Elena feels obliged to tell her the real reason Drew wanted revenge on the Ewings: the deed switch JR perpetrated on their father all those years ago. Finally, Carmen realises that she is, as Nicolas once described her, "a servant for the people who caused [her husband’s] death and stole the millions that should have been hers.” She then reveals a surprise of her own. As well as making mole and fussing over her kids during the past three years, she has also been listening at keyholes and eavesdropping on staircases. She demonstrates this by flashing back to Bobby and Bum discussing JR’s top-secret letter on the day of his funeral, only now with an inserted shot of Carmen herself watching them unobserved. She then tells Elena that she also saw John Ross reading that same letter at the beginning of this very episode.And so, two episodes after Pamela seduced John Ross and Emma for revenge, Elena prepares to seduce John Ross to get her hands on that letter JR wrote to Bobby. Where Pamela downed a whole bottle of pills, Elena makes do with half a bottle of tequila. She finds John Ross sitting outside by the gazebo on Southfork, likewise drowning his sorrows over Pamela. “Every time something bad happens,” Elena reflects, “we think we’ll recover, but all those scars, they start to add up. It happens so incrementally, you don’t even notice until it’s too late and then one day you wake up, you look at yourself in the mirror and you don’t even recognise yourself.” This might be one of the most quietly profound things anyone on DALLAS has ever said. Lucious touches on the same theme, the corruption of the soul, as he describes the plot of a short story, 'The Criminal' by Kahlil Gibran, to Hakeem: “A young man who was very kind of heart … depended on the kindness of humanity in order for him to eat. But after some time, he felt himself starving to death, and right when you thought he was about to die, he realised his own true nature. You see, Keem, the nature of humanity isn’t love and peaceful, it’s dark and beastly and it’ll turn the meek and humble into a criminal, and the sons of peace into destroyers of men. He became a destroyer of men because he had to.”“As the patriarch of the family,” Lucious continues, now talking from personal experience, “you’re responsible for teaching your young ones how to survive in this cold world. Jamal don’t understand that. He thinks it’s all Kumbaya and love but he’s wrong. It’s kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.” This speech, familiar as it is, shows what separates the Lyons from the Ewings, the Carringtons and the rest of the traditional Soap Land dynasties. For them, the primary challenge has always been how to survive within their dysfunctional family: how to live up to the parental expectations and deal with the sibling rivalries inside that rarified world of privilege and power. But when Lucious talks about surviving “in this cold world”, he is talking about the real world, specifically as experienced by black people in America. The Lyons don’t have generations of wealth and heritage to insulate themselves with the way the Ewings and Carringtons do. Lucious is first-generation rich: poverty and prison are a none too distant memory for him, all of which gives his brand of patriarchal rhetoric a specific kind of urgency.“I don’t blame JR. I blame myself for trying to be JR,” John Ross tells Bum on DALLAS. “The sooner you accept that you are the younger version of me with a twist, the sooner you’ll … be your old self again,” Lucious tells Jamal on EMPIRE. “I am turning into my mother. I am gonna end up old and alone and surrounded by paintings of dogs,” realises Fallon on DYNASTY. John Ross and Lucious go so far as to add a bit of ropey science to their argument. “Having JR’s DNA in my blood is a curse.” “Jamal, you are 50% genetically disposed to become me.”Having bedded John Ross, Elena looks through his wallet while he’s asleep and finds the letter that proves the Ewings framed Cliff! As if this were not exciting enough, we can actually hear JR laughing from beyond the grave.There’s no reference to Jamal’s medication dependency this week, but Bo McCabe’s refusal to take any pain relief on DALLAS despite his broken back suggests his determination to turn over a new leaf is genuine. Meanwhile, the launch of Blake’s football team is upstaged when Culhane’s never previously mentioned “history of painkiller addiction” is leaked to the press. Even though he knows it will cost him his relationship with Heather, Christopher arranges for Bo to get the treatment he needs in Tel Aviv. “Bo needs Michael and Michael needs you,” he reasons. This leads to a very touching, beautifully filmed goodbye scene between him and Heather. "I guess it’s true, huh? We’ll always be connected to our first love,” Heather says tearfully, referring as much to Christopher and Elena as herself and Bo. “You never really do get over your first love,” echoes Alexis as she and Blake observe New New Cristal laughing with her ex-husband. “I didn’t.”Speaking of first loves, neither of Cookie’s previous on-screen boyfriends — the hunky bodyguard in Season 1 nor the hunky promoter in Season 2 — felt like serious competition for Lucious. Angelo Dubois, however, delivers an impressive speech this week which suggests that he might yet prove to be the Dusty Farlow to her Sue Ellen or the Dex Dexter to her Alexis: “I saw your boys tonight on Empire XStream and I realised something … Fighting is your family’s way of life. It’s like it’s in your blood, but somehow, y’all got the idea that I’m not a fighter … Baby girl, I’m not talking about fighting with you, I’m talking about fighting for you and if that means going up against Lucious, well, then so be it.”And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) EMPIRE3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?