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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 37715" data-attributes="member: 22"> 01 Oct 86: DYNASTY: Sideswiped v. 02 Oct 86: THE COLBYS: Jason’s Choice v. 02 Oct 86  KNOTS LANDING: Past Tense v. 03 Oct 86: DALLAS: Pari Per Sue v. 03 Oct 86: FALCON CREST: AftershocksA week after the revelation that Pam Ewing dreamt an entire season of DALLAS, three more characters — Blake Carrington, Sable Colby and Maggie Gioberti — have vivid nightmares of their own. They share a common theme, that of an outsider invading the family home and usurping one of its members. “I dreamt that I was back at the old house and I was walking through the halls looking for you and every time I opened a door, Alexis would be there — laughing, mocking me,” Blake tells Krystle. Sable’s dream, which plays out onscreen, is very similar. She too returns to the family home where she finds Frankie’s portrait hanging where her own used to. Like Blake, she runs through the hallways, eventually opening a door to find her equivalent of Alexis — Frankie — in the arms of her own husband. “Get her out of here, sweetheart,” Frankie tells Jason, as the necklace Sable was wearing suddenly appears around her neck. Jason also tells Sable to go. “This is my house, MY house,” protests Sable as she wakes up. Maggie’s nightmare on FALCON CREST deals with a similar kind of domestic violation, but this time it’s Jeff Wainwright who is taking her away from her husband and son.Whereas Sable’s nightmare resembles a dream sequence from a Hitchcock movie (oblique camera angles, a theremin on the soundtrack and a scene-stealing turn from Enid the maid as Mrs Danvers from REBECCA), Maggie’s is in the style of a mid-eighties soft rock video (lots of dry ice, cross-fades and echoey voices, all set in an abstract no man’s land). This contemporary approach is in keeping with the synthesised musical score favoured by both FALCON CREST and KNOTS LANDING this season. Whereas the orchestral accompaniments still used by the other soaps hearken back to the melodramatic "women’s pictures" of the 1940s and ‘50s (and/or the western genre in the case of DALLAS), FC’s and KL’s new scores scream 1986. Instead of emphasising the emotional nature of a scene in the traditional Hollywood way, they lend an oddly clinical, detached quality. I suspect this is one of the reasons I find the scenes depicting Karen’s kidnapping ordeal on KNOTS strangely uninvolving.The theme of an angry and powerless “little man” lashing out at the rich and powerful recurs in three of this week’s soaps. On DYNASTY, a man named Thorpe blames Blake for the death of his wife in the La Mirage fire. On KNOTS, a schlub called Phil Harbert blames Mack for the loss of his wife after Mack refused to perjure himself on Phil's behalf years before. We have yet to learn the identity of the Ewing oilfield saboteur on DALLAS, but his motivation is explained to Bobby by another character (played by one of my favourite Soap Land character actors, Vernon Tuttle): “When you got no job to go to, when you got no pay cheque to bring home to your kids, that’s when you start to feel it — like whoever it was that set fire to your Navarro field … Whoever did that was hurting so bad, he just had to let that hurt out the best way he could.”While KNOTS LANDING’s flashbacks to 1967 continue, giving us the background to Phil’s grudge against Mack, DYNASTY flashes back to a year or so earlier and the source of Alexis's vendetta against Blake — him ordering her to leave their house after finding her in bed with Roger Grimes. It’s Alexis who relives that fateful night, and it’s curious that even though she has achieved her objective of becoming Mistress of the mansion, instead of revelling in her new position, she seems more haunted by the past than ever. So if evicting Blake from his house hasn't provided her with the catharsis or sense of closure she was looking for, what will? Driving him out of Denver as he did her seems to be the answer. It’s noticeable that Denver itself becomes more of a presence in Alexis’s dialogue this week than it has been previously. In her new role of publisher of the Denver Mirror she describes herself as "the city's conscience”, and while we’ve heard her recount the story of how Blake banished her from her children and from Denver numerous times, we’ve never heard her phrase it quite this way before: "You humiliated me in front of my children, in front of this whole city.” (Meanwhile on THE COLBYS, Sable describes her present situation in similar terms: “I can’t very well stay in this town, not with everybody laughing behind my back.”)"This time tomorrow I will own Denver Carrington,” Alexis tells her ex-husband. "There’ll be no reason for you to stay in Denver anymore so why don’t you save yourselves a lot of misery and leave now?” Blake’s response to this suggestion is as predictable as JR’s when Jeremy Wendell offers to buy his company on this week’s DALLAS: “I’m not gonna sell Ewing Oil to you and you know it.” “You’re never gonna drive me out of this city,” Blake tells Alexis. While Jeremy merely smiles enigmatically in response, Alexis resorts to blackmail: “You sent me into exile once, Blake. Well, now I’m doing the same to you, or else I’ll see to it that you spend the rest of your life behind bars for starting that fire."We’ve already had Phil Harbert, Michael Culhane, Channing Carter and Jean Hackney appear out of nowhere this season and now FALCON CREST makes the boldest introduction of a Soap Land character yet. Twelve minutes into the season premiere, the action moves away from the aftermath of last season’s earthquake to a restaurant in New York where a group of people we’ve never seen before are having drinks. A news report about the quake playing in the background is the scene's only link to what has gone before. Following some inconsequential chit chat, a man abruptly guns everyone down in slow motion — everyone, that is, but for a glamorous looking middle-aged woman (played by Kim Novak, replacing THE COLBYS' Barbara Stanwyck as this season’s big name Hollywood actress). This is followed by a scene where the same woman is seen sleeping in her car with a gun for protection. Then we’re returned to the Tuscany Valley and FALCON CREST as we know it. If the effect of Karen’s out of nowhere hostage scenes at the end of last season’s KNOTS gave one the disorientating sensation of having accidentally switched channels, then the sudden imposition of this unrelated storyline and its unknown characters makes it seem as if FALCON CREST were being taken over by an entirely different programme — let’s call it “The Perils of Kim Novak" — in front of our very eyes.Later in the ep, when Peter Stavros casually refers to an estranged step-daughter named Skylar whom we have never previously heard of, the rules of television grammar lead us to assume that Kim Novak’s character and Skylar must be one and the same. The show cleverly subverts this expectation, however. It transpires that Kim Novak isn’t Skylar at all, but Skylar's friend with whom she seeks refuge in Palm Beach when she realises "the mob” are after her. (Presumably, this is the same “the mob” Phil Harbert got himself involved with during KNOTS’ 1967 flashbacks.)Trend of the week: Characters hurriedly noting down a licence plate as a car drives away, with dangerous consequences. On DYNASTY, we see Thorpe hiding in the Denver Carrington car park and surreptitiously writing down Blake’s registration number as his chauffeur drives off. Over on KNOTS, Greg notes down Phil Harbert’s licence plate after figuring out that he is behind Karen’s disappearance. At the end of their respective episodes, an angry Thorpe and a panicked Phil resort to homicidal measures. Thorpe runs Blake’s car off the road, rendering Krystle unconscious in time for the freeze frame, while Phil burns down his house with Karen trapped inside. Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, Kim Novak, hiding out at Skylar’s apartment, gives Skylar her car registration slip and asks her to sell the vehicle on her behalf. This leads to a case of mistaken identity when Skylar gets into the car and the bad guys blow it up. The shot of the car bursting into flames echoes both Gustav Reibman’s similarly fiery demise in FALCON CREST’s fourth season opener and the end of last season’s DALLAS when Jamie Ewing was also the unintended victim of an explosive-rigged vehicle. Just as there was a striking shot of Jack Ewing’s horrified face set against the flames so there is an almost identical one of Kim Novak’s shocked reaction. In each of these storylines, the primary casualty — Krystle, Karen, Skylar — is yet another innocent female in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the crossfire of a battle she knows next to nothing about.With so much else going on on DYNASTY, Alexis taking control of Denver-Carrington (again) is almost glossed over. Unusually, this plot is advanced on the following night’s COLBYS when Dominique informs Jason that Ben is now running the company on Alexis’s behalf and that it has been renamed Denver Colby. In an attempt to persuade Jason not to continue the business dealings with Ben and Alexis that he started with Blake, Dominique does my job for me by making a direct parallel between Blake’s situation with Alexis and Jason’s with Sable. “He’s a good man,” she says of Blake. "He’s fighting a bitter vindictive woman. I’m surprised you can’t identify with that, Jason."Nor is that the only point of identification between the two DYNASTY-verse shows this week. Just as Steven Carrington resigns from Colby Co in protest at Alexis taking over Blake's company so Monica does the same thing when she learns that Dominique has sold Titania Records to Zach Powers. The most unexpected takeover of the week, however, occurs on DALLAS. Inspired by JR’s prudish response to an unsolicited lingerie catalogue she receives in the mail (an echo of his angry reaction when she returned home with a skimpy nightie way back in the original mini-series), Sue Ellen purchases Valentine Lingerie for $50,000.Curiously, this is the second instance in this season’s Ewing-verse of a lingerie-related storyline arriving in the mail. During the KNOTS opener, Jean Hackney's invitation to Ben, scrawled on the back of another lingerie ad, showed up in the Gibson mailbox. But where Jean’s lingerie business is a front for what she’s really up to, Sue Ellen wants her acquisition kept secret and so keeps the store’s former owner, Ozwald Valentine, on as her front man. (A sweaty little fat man, Ozwald's kind of the comedic equivalent of KNOTS LANDING’s Phil — and the chemistry between him and Sue Ellen is instant.) God alone knows where this storyline is headed — a lighthearted plot about an underwear shop is certainly new territory for DALLAS. There’s a similar unpredictability about JR’s preoccupation with the oil fields in Saudi Arabia. He's gone from joking about solving the Texas oil crisis by blowing them up to appearing to seriously contemplate the idea. Even he wouldn’t go that far … would he?DALLAS does a fascinating job of placing the current oil slump in a larger context — from those references to the Saudi Arabians ("damn tent-dwellers," as JR refers to them) to Jeremy Wendell sounding the death knell for the independent oil industry ("it’s like a tree dying”) to Bobby's visit to Pride, a once thriving oil community (and, according to DALLAS: "The Early Years", the place where the Ewing brothers and Digger first struck oil) now on its way to becoming a ghost town.FALCON CREST is similarly effective in conveying the wider impact of the earthquake on the Tuscany Valley. Just as last week’s DYNASTY made good use of its extras in showing the scale and urgency of the fire at La Mirage, so prolonged scenes of casualties lining the streets on stretchers and taking refuge in Father Bob’s church make us aware that it isn’t just the glamorous people in FC's opening credits who have been affected by this disaster. And while Angela addressing an ailing extra as “darling" and giving her her jacket might be viewed as grossly out of character (we’re certainly a long way from the coldly imperious matriarch of the show’s early years), it can also be read as an indication of the extraordinary situation in which the town now finds itself.Both Adam Carrington and Ray Krebbs return to the familiar theme of their outsider status on their respective shows this week. “He wouldn’t listen,” says Adam of Blake, explaining to Alexis why he has quit working for him. "It was like that time I came down from Montana and went to see him, told him I was his son. He wouldn’t listen to me then either. Only you believed me. You were the only one who stood by me … and said, 'Yes, Adam, you are my son.’” “I never felt too comfortable up there at the big house,” Ray tells Wes Parmalee, explaining why he has moved off Southfork and onto his own spread. "I always figured that was theirs. When it came to business, they’re the ones that followed in Jock’s footsteps … When Jock died, I guess I felt more like an outsider again.” While Alexis responds to Adam by giving him a job as director of her legal affairs, Wes responds to Ray by insisting, “I’ll bet your daddy was just as proud of you as he ever was of them.” It’s an odd thing for a virtual stranger to say, but also quite touching. And it seems to embolden Ray to stand up to Donna during a small but beautifully acted, terribly sad encounter that’s right up there with KNOTS LANDING’s finest scenes from a marriage: “All those years, you made me feel like if I could only get myself together, if only I could make something out of myself, then maybe you could be proud of me ... I realise now that you need your freedom and I’d be willing to give it to you, but I need something too. I need someone to be there for me. You’re no longer gonna be that person.”Meanwhile on THE COLBYS, Jason and Sable strike a rather unusual (if not downright insane) bargain regarding their own marriage. He’ll let her stay on in the mansion, even after he’s married her sister. "We’ll live here too, of course,” he clarifies. "There is a price. I want our divorce to be uncontested. It should be now, right here in California.” There’s a similarly logic-defying moment on DALLAS when Pam casually mentions that she and Bobby will be living at Southfork after they remarry. While JR tactfully points out the practical disadvantages of her decision (“You won’t have the room here you have at your own place”), Frankie hits the roof at the prospect of living with her husband's ex-wife and offers him an end of episode ultimatum: “Dammit, Jason. You can’t have it both ways. You’ve gotta choose!”Last week, Michael the chauffeur returned to DYNASTY after an absence of five years. This week, Vicky Gioberti does the same thing on FALCON CREST after an absence of three. The last time we saw Vicky was in her father’s hospital room where he was recovering from a gunshot wound sustained at the end of the previous season. Rather neatly, Vicky’s first reappearance also takes place in her father’s hospital room …  where he is recovering from a gunshot wound sustained at the end of the previous season. That’s where the similarity ends, however — just as like Amanda on DYNASTY, Vicky has a new head. But whereas the aloof, aristocratic Amanda has been transformed into a much more amiable, girl-next-door version of the character, Vicky’s metamorphosis has gone in the opposite direction. The original freckle-faced Vicky, who looked a bit like someone we'd all gone to school with, has now been replaced with a far more glamorous, sophisticated model. (Meanwhile, KNOTS sneaks in its own recast as the Notorious BAG makes a silent, under-the-radar debut as a new version of Abby’s twelve-year-old son Brian.)Last season’s Soap Land cliffhangers claimed two significant fatalities — DYNASTY’s Claudia, who died in the fire at La Mirage, and FALCON CREST’s Terry, killed in the Tuscany Valley earthquake. Fragile Claudia and bitchy Terry didn’t have much in common when they were alive, although each did marry her brother-in-law last season with a view to upping her status. (Whereas Claudia sought to become independently wealthy of the Carringtons, Terry was after respect within the Tuscany community). While Adam was shown frantically searching for Claudia during the fire in last week’s DYNASTY, Richard discovers Terry’s body almost by chance in the aftermath of the quake in this week’s FALCON CREST.Blake was arguing with a member of the press when Adam arrived at his office with the bad news: "Claudia’s dead. I’ve just come from the morgue.” Maggie is similarly preoccupied with Chase’s condition when Richard arrives at the hospital to tell her what’s happened to Terry. However, Richard doesn’t need to say anything for Maggie to realise the truth. The onscreen response to both deaths is somewhat truncated — Claudia simply hasn’t been mentioned since Adam and Blake’s conversation (although I swear I could sense her unacknowledged presence hovering over Adam's short-lived reconciliation with Steven this week) while Maggie goes through at least three of the seven stages of grief in the space of twenty seconds — first shock (“Oh, Richard!”), then denial (“No, no, no!”) and then acceptance (falling into Richard’s arms). Despite the odds, it’s a really touching scene.Whereas Claudia didn’t have a funeral (“No funeral — celebrate my life, don’t mourn my death,” she apparently told Adam), Terry’s takes place towards the end of this week’s FC. The ceremony is interrupted when Richard is arrested for Chase’s shooting. This feels like a natural end to the episode (just as Miles being arrested for murder at Jeff and Fallon’s wedding was on last season’s COLBYS), but instead we return to “The Perils of Kim Novak” where the explosion is followed by Novak’s character altering her appearance to resemble Skylar's and then calling Falcon Crest ...And this week’s Top 5 is ...1 (1) DALLAS2 (-) FALCON CREST3 (2) THE COLBYS4 (3) DYNASTY5 (4) KNOTS LANDING</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?