New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 3760" data-attributes="member: 22">19/Jan/81: DYNASTY: The Honeymoon v. 20/Jan/81: FLAMINGO ROAD: The Titus Tapes v. 22/Jan/81: KNOTS LANDING: A Family Matter v. 23/Jan/81: DALLAS: End of the Road (2)Two illustrations of just how scarily long ago these episodes first aired: On Monday, Cecil Colby, in an effort to impress upon Fallon how eligible a bachelor his nephew Jeff is, describes him as Denver's answer to Prince Charles. On Tuesday, Ronald Reagan is inaugurated as President. (Fortunately, the latter only happened in real life.)As well as swiftly establishing DYNASTY as having the least imaginative episode titles of the soap genre, "The Honeymoon" is also a misnomer - Blake and Krystle's vacation is cut short in the first scene when the Carringtons' foreign oil wells are seized in another of those non-specific revolutions perpetrated by "barbarians" and "fanatics." Yes, it's JR and South East Asia all over again, except this time it's in the Middle East, and instead of being plunged into the thick of the crisis as we were with JR, we're largely kept on the sidelines with Krystle, who finds the door to this part of her husband's life firmly closed in her face, and Fallon, quickly ushered from the room when found to be eavesdropping.Overall, DYNASTY's second instalment feels more modest in comparison to that epic pilot episode. This is a period of adjustment as characters establish themselves in new roles. Now partners in an oil rig, Matthew and Walter must win back the confidence of their crew and get them to return to work. In an attempt to prove he's more than Blake Carrington's son, Steven must persuade Matthew and Walter to give him a job. These two plot strands culminate in Steven getting into a barroom brawl with Robert Davi, later a bad guy in the second worst James Bond film ever made.On the domestic front, Matthew tries to ease Claudia back into "normality" by buying her a car. Much screen time is given to Claudia overcoming her fear and reluctance to get behind the wheel. Finally plucking up the courage, she drives out to the drill site to surprise Matthew. Instead, she has her first, very sweet, encounter with Steven Carrington. And so begins the gradual dismantling of the normal married life Claudia is trying so hard to build. Remembering what happens to Claudia and Lindsay in the last episode of this season, the introduction of the car in this episode could be read as some Big Old Foreshadowing.After Steven leaves her, there is a long, (and I mean long) lingering shot of Claudia at the drill site. Alone in her white dress clutching her picnic basket, she climbs some steps to a seating area and the camera slowly retreats, showing her dwarfed by both the mountainous scenery and the brute machinery of the rig. The juxtaposition evokes an unspecified wistfulness. It's not at all clear what the show is "saying" here, but that vagueness alone is reason enough for me to like it. (Let us perhaps think of it as a pre-Reagan moment that serves no purpose beyond itself, the like of which will be snuffed out soon enough.) Unlike the rest of the '80s soaps, early DYNASTY has no stand-alone episodes in which to test the boundaries of its form. In their absence, this shot stands as DYNASTY's experimental period.While Matthew encourages Claudia to get out of the house, Blake teaches Krystle how to become the mistress of hers. To this end, he summons all the servants from their beds in the middle of the night, bullies them in front of Krystle, and then fires his gardener of ten years for some perceived slight against his wife. When Krystle objects, Blake assures her that he will reinstate the gardener the following day, "and they will all say, 'Mr. Carrington is a hard man, but he's a fair man.'" Given the timid, docile performances by the actors portraying the staff, he's probably right. (The exceptions being sinister majordomo Joseph, who becomes more of a feature this week, and Michael the chauffeur, whom Fallon continues to delight in tormenting.)As "The Titus Tapes" suggests, Titus has been bugging Lute-Mae's for local pillow talk. The bugs are discovered, everyone knows he's behind it, but there's no proof against him. The mechanics of the plot are a bit dumb, but Titus is great, strutting around in his white sheriff's uniform and hat like a cross between Robert Mitchum in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and Boss Hogg in THE DUKES OF HAZZARD.Both "The Honeymoon" and "The Titus Tapes" save their best scenes for last. On DYNASTY, the romantically set business meeting between Cecil and Fallon is full of atmosphere. The nighttime riverside setting, her feather boa, his tux, her Clenet, their secret pact - that Fallon will marry Cecil's nephew if he bails out her father - all feels very "Great Gatsby" by way of Harold Robbins. Meanwhile, on FLAMINGO ROAD, a bored Titus is listening through his final batch of brothel tapes when his attention is caught by the sound of Lane Ballou blabbing about Her Big Secret, the one she will pay $5,000 to keep quiet. As Titus suddenly snaps into life, so does the episode. His one line soliloquy prior to the freeze frame, "Lane Ballou, you've just made your first mistake" carries the same portentous, declaration-of-war quality as JR's "I underestimated the new Mrs. Ewing, I surely won't make that mistake again" did at the beginning of DALLAS."A Family Matter" is my favourite DALLAS/KNOTS crossover so far. If "Community Spirit" acknowledged the incongruity of JR existing in KNOTS LANDING, then this episode downright celebrates it. Unfettered from his DALLAS story-lines, Larry Hagman is free to just play, and the resultant joys are many. I love his visit to Knots Landing Motors, his brief interaction with a disgruntled deaf customer ("Hey, old timer"), his shaking hands with Sid then discreetly wiping the grease off his palm.JR might be in town for some vague oil conference thingy, but Abby is the one responsible for bringing him into Gary's storyline. At this point in KNOTS, JR and Abby have never met before, and we're still getting know Abby ourselves. We know she likes men and she likes not doing very much, and just recently she's taken an interest in Gary's deal with Frank and Roy, but that's about it. So why is she so anxious to involve JR in Gary's deal? "That's what makes business exciting!" she says gleefully at one point. Ah ha, so business (and for "business", let's substitute the word "power") is a game for her, just like it is for the folks on DALLAS - but it's not for a game for Gary and Val. Deprived of raising their own child by JR, they're the human cost of his game playing. Meanwhile, Sid and Karen are simply a willing audience for JR/Larry's performance. So put all these different elements in one room, at Abby's dinner party, and get JR on the subject of Lucy's boyfriends ("the strangest bunch of human beings this side of New York City") and you get a really interesting cocktail of a scene. And I love how his toast at Abby's dinner table is upstaged, repeatedly, by Brian and Olivia's squabbling - talk about worlds colliding.This is David Paulsen's second foray into the Ewingverse and using JR as a mouthpiece, he articulates some pivotal home truths about Val, Gary and Abby that up until now have remained hidden (to the characters themselves as well as the viewers). JR identifies Abby as a kindred spirit ("You want my little brother Gary, honey"), Val as an albatross (“Gary’s got a noose around his neck and you’re hangin’ on to the other end, draggin’ him down”) and Gary's hunger for ... well, something other than what he has. "You're not talking Sid," JR tells his bro, "you're talking power." Cecil Colby also lectures a neophyte about the nature of power in DYNASTY: "Passion dies, power remains," he tells Fallon. For JR, however, power and passion seem to be the same thing: "You're talking adrenaline and how it surges through your veins when you've got something that everybody else wants ... You're talking about winning, winning like a Ewing wins."The sexual tension between JR and Abby, and Abby and Gary is fascinating, and made all the richer knowing that they're each involved with other people in concurrent storylines: Abby with Richard, Gary with Judy Trent, and JR with - at the last count - Sue Ellen, Louella and Afton. (He and Afton finally do the deed this week at Lucy's wedding and very fun it is too.)How audacious of JR - to skip over to KNOTS LANDING halfway through a DALLAS two-parter. "End of the Road, Part 2" discreetly accommodates the trip by keeping JR off screen for the first ten minutes or so, and then jumping the narrative forward a week.The central event of this week's FLAMINGO ROAD is a fundraising funfair in aid of Field's campaign. It's a bit weird. As the candidate's wife, Constance sets up a kissing booth. When Sam Curtis presents her with a hundred dollar bill, she rewards him with a full on snog, while everyone else stands around smiling as if this were perfectly acceptable campaign behaviour. Meanwhile, Eudora blows her genteel Southern matriarch cred by dressing up as a gypsy fortune teller, complete with black wig and cod foreign accent. Needless to say, you'd never catch Miss Ellie doing that (unless she were in her Donna Reed period, maybe).One thing Eudora and Ellie do have in common is a flair for the dramatic proclamation. In last week's episode of FLAMINGO ROAD, Eudora's husband Claude, acting out a watered-down variation on JR's mortgaging of his mama's ranch, secretly sold some sacred (if non-specific) land belonging to Eudora's family. Eudora's reaction, "I will never forgive you for this", was a more decisive version of what Miss Ellie told JR in Season 2: "I may never forgive you for this." This week, Ellie goes one better, vowing to Jock: "I'll never forgive you for what you've done to him... and to me." This is said in reaction to Gary's announcement that now that Jock has a son, i.e. Ray, running the ranch, he and Val feel able to remain in California permanently. Prior to this, it seems Ellie had it in her head that it was only a matter of time before Gary moved back to Southfork. I blame Abby. In an effort to motivate JR into loaning Gary the $50,000 he needs for his deal, she floats the idea of Val wanting to move back to Dallas - should things go sour for Gary at KLM, she reasons, JR might end up with another brother sitting across the breakfast table. JR sees through Abby's story, but her words seem to have floated across the Lorimar sound stages and ended up inside Ellie's head."End of the Road" features Soap Land's third big wedding in four weeks. Judged purely on aesthetic terms, Mitch and Lucy's is the lamest of the bunch. Despite the best efforts of the art department to disguise the fact, the wedding clearly takes place on the cardboard Southfork patio. And although Alex Ward gamely describes it as "the biggest event of the year", there's no denying it all looks kinda cramped. And what would Mr. Afferton, Blake and Krystle's fussy wedding planner, have said about the cheesy wedding band squeezed into rented tuxedos or Gary walking Lucy down the aisle to a taped organ version of the Wedding March? Neither is very au courant. The most fun moment is everyone making eyes at people they shouldn't during the exchange of vows (JR and Afton, Sue Ellen and Clint, Pam and Alex). The most touching is Donna's line to Ray, "It's just a shame the poets were wrong: love doesn't conquer all," which rivals Andrew Laird's quip to Fallon, "Most little girls realise by the age of six they can't grow up and marry their daddies," for Line of the Week.Shoulder pads of the week: Sue Ellen's humungous shiny ones at the wedding.And the winner is … KNOTS LANDING.2nd: DALLAS3rd: DYNASTY4th: FLAMINGO ROAD</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =