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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 31916" data-attributes="member: 22">14 May 86: DYNASTY: The Triple-Cross v. 15 May 86: THE COLBYS: Anniversary Waltz v. 15 May 86: KNOTS LANDING: The Longest Night v. 16 May 86: DALLAS: Blast From the Past v. 16 May 86: FALCON CREST: Captive HeartsTwo shootings, three kidnappings, a couple of explosions, a wedding, a long lost daughter and an apparent return from the dead — with the season finales of DALLAS and KNOTS LANDING and the penultimate eps of DYNASTY, THE COLBYS and FALCON CREST, it’s been an eventful week in Soap Land.The centrepiece of this week’s DALLAS is Mark Graison and Pam Ewing tying the knot in a fancy ceremony which bears the distinction of being the series' most harmonious wedding to date. Thanks to the truce engineered by Jamie, even JR and Cliff are getting along. Elsewhere, Angela interrupts Emma and Dwayne’s wacky Vegas wedding (“I want you to come back to Falcon Crest and be married there, where you belong,” she insists) and DYNASTY’s Dominique plans a party at La Mirage (now run by Abby Ewing’s former consigliere James Westmont) to celebrate her forthcoming nuptials to Garrett Boydston.Over on THE COLBYS, Sable throws a surprise wedding anniversary party for Jason in spite of the fact that they are on the brink of divorce. (“Mom’s hoping it’s gonna bring them back together,” Miles tells Bliss.) Sue Ellen pulled a similar move in Season 2 of DALLAS — i.e, surprising JR with an anniversary party whilst hiding a secret agenda. Just as Sue Ellen also managed to get one over on her sister Kristin (aka JR’s mistress) by announcing that she would soon be returning to California, Sable likewise pulls a trick on her sister Frankie (aka Jason’s love interest) by ensuring that while the rest of the guests are done up to the nines, Frankie is dressed quite plainly. As a consequence, Frankie is rendered virtually invisible — no one at the party even acknowledges her presence. At the end of the DALLAS party, Sue Ellen revealed to JR how the evening was all part of a campaign for her to gain custody of her son by appearing to be a perfect wife and mother. Here, the situation is reversed: it is Sable who is surprised when Jason drags her into a private room and presents her with a tape of a compromising conversation between her and Zach Powers (“Sorry I didn’t have time to wrap it”). The scene that follows is another of those brilliant Jason/Sable confrontations that is somehow melodramatic and gritty both at the same time. Even though Jason clearly wants rid of Sable, he is still devastated by what he perceives as her betrayal. By the end of the scene, both actors have tears in their eyes. As fantastic as Larry Hagman and Linda Gray are together, they’ve never had a scene quite like this.An interesting sense of history recurs throughout this week’s episodes. “What a waste my life has been — twenty-nine years of loving you, and you loved her all the time," Sable tells Jason with magnificent bitterness. “It’s taken us fourteen years to get to a point where our marriage stands half a chance of working,” Sue Ellen tells JR on DALLAS. “Full circle, huh?” muses Gary on KNOTS and he and Val sit huddled together by the ocean. “Here we are on the beach, first place we came when we got to California.” “… What a mess we’ve made of our lives out here, Gary,” Val replies tearfully — an observation that causes Gary to start laughing hysterically. Less directly, Miss Ellie also reaches back into the past. "You’ve been like a daughter,” she tells Pam touchingly just prior to her wedding to Mark. Elsewhere on DALLAS, I find it very intriguing that when Ben Stivers is in the Southfork living room looking at individual photographs of Miss Ellie’s three sons, it is Gary’s picture which he picks up for closer inspection. Maybe he can finally identify with the outsider.Following her fight with Jason, Sable seeks refuge on Zach Powers' yacht. At the end of a season in which the shipping business has had such a strong, if mostly offscreen, presence — Marinos Shipping in DALLAS, Stavros Shipping on FALCON CREST, Powers Shipping on THE COLBYS — it’s fitting that the climax of at least one of these shows should have a nautical setting. (Granted, this isn’t quite the season finale of THE COLBYS, but it sure feels like it.)Zach and Sable are below deck when he presents her with a replica of “the dress you were taking off on Jason’s yacht the day I walked in on you” three decades earlier. He has her recreate the moment first by putting the dress on and then by slowly taking it off again as he watches. There’s more sexy stripping on KNOTS as Abby looks on approvingly while Peter Hollister slowly undresses for her benefit. Alas, both encounters are interrupted — Zach and Sable's by the noise of an intruder (which turns out to be Jason climbing aboard the yacht), Abby and Peter's by the sound of a car (Gary returning home unexpectedly with Olivia in tow).Dominique Devereaux aside, each of Soap Land's singers bids a bittersweet farewell this week. Both THE COLBYS’ Wayne Masterson and KNOTS LANDING's Cathy Geary admit to wearing romantic blinkers which now have been removed. “A blind man only sees what he wants to see, not what’s there. My eyes are open now and I can see the truth,” Wayne tells Monica after realising that she’s in love with someone else. “I fell in love with you and ever since the moment I did, whenever that was, I haven’t been able to think straight," Cathy tells Ben. “You came through for me, not just as an artist, but as a friend," Monica tells Wayne tearfully. “I'm never going to be able to tell you what these last couple of weeks have meant to me,” Ben tells Cathy, as much in sadness as in gratitude.Just as Wayne intends “to take some time and drive around the country and see what I’ve been missing for the past few years”, DALLAS’s Jack Ewing is also off "to parts unknown.” He consequently pulls out of his business partnership with Clayton and Ray, but refuses to recoup his original investment. "You guys are gonna have to break both my arms for me to accept a dime from either one of you,” he chuckles. This from the man who swaggered into town a year earlier and immediately sold his sister out for ten percent of Ewing Oil. And while Lee Ying says goodbye to her father before returning to China on FALCON CREST, THE COLBYS’ Constance also has her cases packed. Ostensibly she’s off on a quick business trip to San Francisco, but the air of finality during her farewell exchange with Fallon (not to mention the sheer amount of luggage she’s taking) suggests otherwise.Trend of the week: the sighting of a car as a key plot point. On THE COLBYS, it emerges that Miles’s old Ferrari, which he totalled earlier in the season, holds the key to his innocence in the Mahoney murder case. He and Jeff join forces to track down what remains of it, finally forging a brotherly bond in the process. And it's after Eric spots Karen’s car abandoned at Lotus Point on KNOTS that the riddle of her disappearance suddenly becomes a lot more serious. “Let’s call the cops,” says Mack gravely. Elsewhere in the same episode, Gary’s discovery of Peter’s car outside his house leads him to correctly surmise that he and Abby are sleeping together. Meanwhile, Bomb Expert Guy reappears on DALLAS, this time masquerading as a valet at Pam and Mark’s wedding. The unexplained interest he shows in Jack’s car is paid off in the closing minutes of the episode.Whereas Mack takes out his frustrations over Karen’s disappearance on stepson Michael, Chase leans on his son Cole following Maggie’s abduction on FALCON CREST. (Like Jeff and Miles on THE COLBYS, Cole also plays detective, flying to Oregon to speak to the parents of Wainwright’s murdered fiancee.) Over on DALLAS, Sue Ellen doesn’t hear about JR’s joyride-at-gunpoint with Angelica Nero until it’s over. Police involvement in each incident differs. On KNOTS, the law moves more swiftly than it has done recently — Mack’s police connections mean the cops are willing to bend the rules and launch an investigation into his wife’s disappearance even before she’s been missing the requisite twenty-four hours. Conversely, even though it’s clear from the outset that Maggie has been kidnapped and by whom, Chase still has to wait the full amount of time for the FBI to get involved in the case. JR, meanwhile, refuses to tell the police about his encounter with La Nero. “Angelica may have something I need to keep Ewing Oil afloat,” he explains to Sue Ellen. "Now if the police scare her off or pick her up, I may lose the only chance I’ll ever have to turn things around.” It’s only in the penultimate scene of the episode, after JR and Angelica have met at his office to complete their business transaction and she has boasted of killing Grace and Nicholas, that the police burst in and arrest her.Even as he holds Maggie hostage in his cabin, Jeff Wainwright refuses to acknowledge that she is there against her will. Oblivious to her distress, he enthusiastically seeks her creative input on how best to finish his novel. In this regard, his behaviour echoes that of Roger Larsen, the photographer who kidnapped Lucy on DALLAS four years ago and had her pose for pictures even as she begged to be released. (Come to think of it, a significant number of Soap Land’s most dangerously obsessive characters come from either a creative or media-related background: DALLAS’s Lucy and FLAMINGO ROAD’s Lute-Mae were both stalked and raped by photographers, KL’s Cathy was nearly murdered by her televangelist husband while Ciji was murdered by her publicist. On EMERALD POINT, Maud Adams was kidnapped by an obsessive novelist. As a publicist and a would-be novelist, Jeff Wainwright is doubly qualified.)By chance, Roger Larsen pops up on this week's FALCON CREST as a one night stand of Jordan Roberts — or rather, her self-destructive alter-ego Monica. This time, with pleasing Soap Land karma, it is Roger who is held against his will as Monica follows in the tyre tracks of Lance Cumson, Miles Colby, Gary Ewing and Amanda Carrington to become the latest dangerous driver of the season. With Roger trapped helplessly in the passenger seat, she tears off at breakneck speed on a reckless drive through the California mountains. The sequence is very reminiscent of Miles and Fallon’s similar excursion on THE COLBYS earlier in the season, but with the genders reversed. It almost goes without saying that Jordan/Monica's car is another red-for-danger convertible, just as Lance’s, Miles’ and Gary’s were.There are no less than four variations on "the wrong character in the wrong place at the wrong time” scenario in this week’s Soap Land. Two years ago, the season finales of KNOTS and DALLAS ended with Karen and Bobby both taking a bullet meant (or apparently meant, in Bobby’s case) for someone else. Likewise this week, Sable Colby and Chase Gioberti are each unintentionally gunned down during a showdown between two other parties —  Jason and Zach on THE COLBYS; the police and Jeff Wainwright on FALCON CREST.Both scenarios are familiar in different ways. Zach and Jason struggling over the same gun recalls Krystle and Claudia’s similar scene in DYNASTY Season 2 (even down to the enjoyably made-for-TV clumsiness of its staging), only this time the bystander becomes the victim rather than a witness. Meanwhile, the excitingly cinematic use of slow-motion during the FALCON CREST shoot-out recalls the climax of last season’s DALLAS finale when Katherine hit Bobby with her car (another variation on the “unintended victim” scenario). Only after Chase has been shot does the scene return to normal speed as Maggie crawls across the ground towards him and cradles his head in her arms in the same way Pam did Bobby's. She even says the same words — “Oh no!” — but this time in a whisper instead of a scream.Speaking of FALCON CREST’s Maggie, last season ended with her caught in a bomb explosion intended for someone else. At the end of this season's DALLAS, Sue Ellen and Jamie are similarly innocent victims caught in explosions rigged by Angelica to kill JR and Jack. (Hence Bomb Guy’s fascination with Jack’s car.)The traditional Soap Land cliffhanger is one where the drama steadily builds and builds, culminating in one event that somehow seems both shocking and inevitable — "Who shot JR?" being the classic example. This time around, however, both Ewing-verse finales deviate from this blueprint. Nothing that’s gone before prepares us in any way for what we’re presented with at the end of this season’s KNOTS and DALLAS. After remaining offscreen for the first two-thirds of this week's KNOTS, Karen finally appears, groggily regaining consciousness in a darkened room, her face and hands bruised. We have no idea where she is and from the expression on her face, nor does she. Then, just as the horror of what is happening begins to dawn on her, the scene is over. The effect is disorientating — it’s as if we’ve been sitting on the remote control without realising it and accidentally switched channels to some TV slasher movie starring Michele Lee.We cut back to Karen a few more times during the remainder of the episode. As she starts to take in her surroundings, it gradually becomes apparent that she has joined DYNASTY’s Krystle, DALLAS’s Pam and most recently FALCON CREST’s Maggie to become the latest wholesome leading lady to be held hostage this season. (Interestingly, this season also began with several female characters — Alexis, Krystle, Sue Ellen, Melissa — being locked up against their will.) Karen is trapped in a basement even more ominous than the attic that contained Krystle. While Maggie makes her nerve-jangling escape in the final scene of this week’s FALCON CREST by stealing Jeff’s keys while he’s asleep and trying to unlock the door without waking him, Karen attempts to lever open a window using an iron bar. She does not see a man (represented on screen by an arm in the foreground of the shot) watching her. "I wouldn’t,” he warns. She turns and dashes past him up the basement steps, only to realise when she reaches the top that the door is locked. “You want out, Mrs. Mackenzie?” asks the unseen man and right there the season ends. At least when Krystle and Maggie were kidnapped, we knew beforehand who had taken them and why — here, we’re as much in the dark as Karen is.There’s a similar “rug pulled out from under us” feeling at the end of DALLAS. Having remained offscreen since we watched him die a year earlier, Bobby Ewing is suddenly standing in Pam’s shower, smiling and telling her good morning. And just as there was no cutaway to the man speaking to Karen at the end of KNOTS, there is no reaction shot of Pam before the freeze frame, no clue as to how she, and therefore we, are meant to process this moment. As cliffhangers — and probably television moments in general — go, it simply has no precedent.And this week’s Top 5 are:1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (-) THE COLBYS3 (3) FALCON CREST4 (-) DYNASTY5 (2) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?