New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 3844" data-attributes="member: 22">02/Mar/81: DYNASTY: Krystle's Lie/The Necklace v. 03/Mar/81: FLAMINGO ROAD: TrappedThis DYNASTY double bill is presented as one movie length episode, but is in fact two separate instalments welded together - sort of the TV scheduling equivalent of one of those cut-and-shut car jobs that occasionally kill people on EASTENDERS.Lucy Ewing's pill-popping pal Annie from DALLAS Season 1 resurfaces here as Lindsay Blaisdel's school friend Tonia - making her somehow four years younger than she was back then. (Blame the drugs.) Like Lucy in "John Ewing III", Lindsay attends a party at Annie/Tonia's house, but it's a far tamer affair this time round - strictly potato chips and ping pong, with no little white pills to make your eyes roll back in your head, your limbs go floppy or render you hysterical with mirth every time you say the word "milk". "Krystle's Lie" is all about discoveries - Lindsay learning that she was conceived out of wedlock, Matthew figuring out that Ed is the real saboteur in his crew, Claudia receiving confirmation of Matthew's affair with Krystle, and Blake finding Krystle's secret stash of birth control pills. This final discovery leads to a confrontation between husband and wife culminating in rape. There's none of the "he kissed her till she liked it" ambiguity of JR and Sue Ellen's more volatile bedroom scenes - this is clearly an act of violence predicated on physical strength (as opposed to threat and mental coercion, which would be JR's later approach with Holly Harwood and Laurel Ellis). Probably because both characters are familiar to us, the scene feels somehow even more brutal than the one between Laura and her attacker in "The Lie". Other than that, the actions are the same - man grabs woman, pins her down, rips her clothing and forces himself on her. In the early part of this week's second episode, "The Necklace", Blake apologises profusely to Krystle for the "something terrible" he did the previous night, (the word "rape" is never used) and after some initial coldness, she forgives him. This is the first time I have watched the two episodes as originally broadcast - i.e., as one - which means the rape and apology both occur within the same fifteen screen minutes. Given that the matter is never directly spoken of again, the criticism I have read of the storyline being too easily resolved now seems understandable. However, this is not a storyline about rape in isolation. Instead, it's part of the larger story of Blake and Krystle's relationship, and that is far from over.It's interesting that this first example of Blake's violent streak should come in the same episode that Ted Dinard's death is foreshadowed twice: first when he declares that he loves Steven more than his own life, and again during Fallon's brilliant speech informing him that "Steven comes from a world where culls and cripples and homosexuals are taken behind the barn and slaughtered before they can be given a chance to breed." More foreshadowing: a couple of references to Steven and Fallon's mother, and her unexplained absence from their lives since they were children. This is the first time she's been referred to since the pilot episode. (I wonder if viewers of New DALLAS unfamiliar with the original series felt the same sense of Pam's ghostly presence hanging over the first season of that show as we do of Alexis's here?) In "The Necklace", Claudia crimps her hair and treads a similar path to the one taken by Laura in "The Lie". She pays a visit to a singles bar, not unlike the one Laura frequented, only with brighter lighting and a dance floor playing the sort of sucky disco music Bobby and Pam boogied to in "Lessons". Her equivalent of Laura's pick-up is smoother and less arty (and ultimately less dangerous). Following a La Mirage style drinks-and-dancing montage, they end up driving back to his place. In the parking lot, Claudia has second thoughts, he turns mean, they struggle and she manages to get away. There are some long overdue showdowns in Soap Land this week. Matthew faces Blake down in his office at Denver Carrington, and we learn what their business feud is really all about - Krystle. And a week after Laura finally stood up to Abby about her affair with Richard, albeit in a roundabout way, ("You are such a slut") Claudia screws her courage to the sticking-place and confronts Krystle point blank: "I think you and my husband slept together while I was in the hospital." Ironically, given DALLAS's reputation as the grittier of the two oil-based soaps (the one with dirty fingernails, if you will), DYNASTY is the show more interested in depicting the day-to-day struggles of life on an oil rig, and this week provides Soap Land with its first on screen oil strike. (In fact, I'm struggling to think of many more that occur before the opening scene of New DALLAS.) It's an impressive sight - and I love the bit in the celebration bar scene that follows where Walter silences a bunch of beer-swilling, cigar-chomping roughnecks with a reprise of his Mozart in C Major piano piece from last week's episode. It's a very sweet and funny moment. When Matthew returns home from celebrating with the guys, he finds a heartbroken Lindsay sitting at the kitchen table. "Am I a bastard?" she asks tearfully. No sooner does he deal with that zinger than she comes up with an even harder question, regarding her mother: "Do you love her more than anything?" He can't answer. "This could be the happiest night of my life," he proclaims in an earlier scene, and it almost is, but these pesky secrets from his and Claudia's past keep coming back to haunt them and their daughter in the present, conspiring to prevent them from all being happy at the same time. As DYNASTY's first season progresses, it increasingly feels like there's nowhere for its characters to hide - yet even as their secrets are laid bare, new ones are created to take their place: Claudia and Fallon both become adulterers this week, and Fallon is Soap Land's second newlywed in as many months to cheat on their spouse with an old flame. It took Field Carlyle three episodes of wedded bliss to get back in the sack with Lane Ballou. Fallon manages to hold out for a week longer before "slumming" it with Michael the chauffeur while Jeff is away on unspecified business in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Claudia winds up in bed with Steven. "You have a beautiful gentleness about you," she tells him as they lie in each other's arms at the end of the double episode, "a tenderness that transcends gender." While that might not be the verdict most men are hoping to hear after their first time, it's probably as much as Steven can realistically expect.There's a potency in the title of this week's FLAMINGO ROAD. "Trapped" could apply to any number of soap characters (including a whole bunch of Blaisdels and Carringtons). Here, it chiefly pertains to Skipper Weldon. Skipper, like Steven Carrington, is the blond firstborn son of a rich family who rebels against everything his father stands for - but although Skipper and Steven's principles prevent them from working for their family businesses, they each continue to reap the rewards of the lifestyles they were born into. Poor Steven is so sensitive that, according to Fallon, his biorhythms have screwed up the workings of his digital watch, and so he must seek refuge from this material world … at his family's luxury cabin on Manchester Lake. Meanwhile, Skipper shows his man-of-the-people credentials by hanging out with the working class of Truro at Lute-Mae's ... but when he's stopped for drunk driving, he fully expects the sheriff to overlook it because of his family name. The crucial difference between the two characters is while Steven is complex and well acted, Skipper is just a bit wet and whiny - plus he looks and acts like a THUNDERBIRDS puppet.In "Trapped", Skipper makes a bid for freedom by accepting a job as newspaper copy boy in New Orleans. As with Jock and Miss Ellie, the idea of one of their children moving away is almost unthinkable for Claude and Eudora Weldon. But while the scene in "A House Divided" where Bobby tells his parents he's leaving Southfork somehow strikes right at the heart of the Ewing mythology, here Eudora's amusingly hysterical reaction lacks any kind of gravitas. As a result, she appears less the stately matriarch than a complete flake.Just as Bobby was summoned home after JR's shooting, so Skipper's plans are also thwarted by a family medical emergency. In this case, it's one inadvertently caused by Skipper himself. After an argument with Claude, Skipper prangs his truck, causing a load of boxes to fall on top of his father. (Yeah, it's as lame as it sounds). Full of remorse, Skipper meekly agrees to remain at home and run the mill while Claude recuperates from his injuries."I almost got away," he sighs in the episode's final, and most interesting, scene where he and brother-in-law Field, still "living the life my father wanted me to live", ruefully discuss the similarities of their situations: familial burdens, legacies laid down for them by their fathers - all that good soapy stuff that still fuels DALLAS even today.Interestingly, this week's DYNASTY and FLAMINGO ROAD each make reference to the American Dream:Matthew: "The day of the old tycoon, the oil baron, is over. And like them, you don't have any values anymore. You don't give a damn about anybody or anything."Blake: "Oh come on Matthew. You're talking about America, the American Dream - laissez faire, mother, apple pie, petroleum."Juan Lopez: "My men are proud. They do not take money for nothing."Titus: "Why not? It's the American Dream."The sheer cynicism on display here reminds me of this observation from Julie Burchill's introduction to the UK reissue of "Valley of the Dolls", the kitsch-classic 60's novel by Jacqueline Susann: Like many mainstream entertainments, "Valley of the Dolls" is far more critical of the American Dream than many avowedly "subversive" projects. As DALLAS showed American big business to be corrupt and filthy through and through, so DOLLS protractedly and minutely picks apart the "magic" of show business.(And on the subject of '60s potboilers, Betty Anderson's mother Julie from the early days of PEYTON PLACE shows up in FLAMINGO ROAD in the teeny tiny role of a nurse.)And the winner is … DYNASTY.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?