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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 126982" data-attributes="member: 22">28 Apr 88: KNOTS LANDING: Discovery v. 29 Apr 88: DALLAS: Pillow Talk v. 29 Apr 88: FALCON CREST: As Tears Go ByIf the archaeological students in Santa Tecla are KNOTS’ equivalent of Laurel Ellis and her artsy pals on DALLAS then Chava would appear to be the David Shulton of the group, i.e., the blackmailer — at least, that’s Paige’s assumption after he keeps silent about her planting the statue at the dig site. “How much do you want?” she asks. “You’re gonna make me pay sooner or later and I’d rather it be sooner.” Interestingly, Chava interprets this as a racial slur: “Oh, I see. You’re in Mexico so you take one look at me and you assume that I want a bribe.”While Miss Ellie and Clayton’s Laurel-induced crisis is officially resolved when Ellie unexpectedly hands over half of Southfork to her husband (“I’ve found a good man to help me run the ranch, a man that my daddy would have been proud of”), Mack and Karen’s more lighthearted squabbles over Manny Vasquez take a surprisingly dramatic turn after Karen chastises Mack for being unnecessarily rude to him over dinner. “Manny Vasquez is dirty eight ways from Sunday!” Mack suddenly yells. “He’s running drugs through Lotus Point!”Karen’s realisation that she, Abby and Gary are in business with a serious crime organisation puts them in a similar position to the one Richard Channing has been for the past few weeks on FALCON CREST. Now, they must fight back. For Richard, the line the Thirteen crossed was when they revealed their plan to unleash economic devastation across the United States. (However much of a despot Richard may be in his own backyard, he evidently feels a sense of obligation to America in general. “If I don’t stop the Thirteen, who will?” he asks.) Abby’s motivation for stopping Manny’s operation is more personal: “Olivia was hooked on drugs. Well, somebody made a profit on those drugs. Those are the ones I wanna get — the people who are responsible for what happened to her … I want the one at the top.”The Lotus Point crew turn to the authorities who advise them to sit tight and do nothing. (“Don’t let these people know you’re suspicious … We’ll do everything we can. You tip our hand, they’ll bolt.”) Meanwhile, Richard, Maggie and Angela have yet to convince the authorities that the Thirteen even exist. To this end, they hatch an elaborate scheme which involves Angela infiltrating the Thirteen as their newest member.Gary Ewing, unhappy at the prospect of “sitting on our thumbs”, recalls a similar storyline from seven years earlier: “When I got involved in the stolen auto parts ring, they told me to wait. I waited. Sid died.” Meanwhile on DALLAS, Ellie takes Clayton to visit the grave of her brother Garrison (after whom Gary was named, of course) and recounts almost the entire plot of “Home Again”, a stand-alone episode from Season 1, as a prelude to gifting him half the ranch. (One of the fascinating things about this season has been watching DALLAS digging into its onscreen history to illuminate the present: Bobby comparing Pam’s burns to his mama’s mastectomy, Sue Ellen basing her three Ds on Jock’s three Bs, the flashbacks to Jeff Faraday and Kristin during the Lisa Alden story, recalling Jock’s relationships with Digger and Julie Grey through Cliff’s with Dandy Dandridge and Clayton’s with Laurel Ellis.) FALCON CREST, meanwhile, delves even further back into the past via an old map and a key that Melissa believes will unlock an ancient secret regarding the Agretti/Gioberti feud. This treasure hunt leads to some disused tunnels which provide her with plenty of opportunities to squeal, screech, scream and, inevitably, fall down a hole — very, very loudly. No Paige Matheson she when it comes to roughing it.While Miss Ellie is telling the story about her brother, I’m struck by Clayton’s complete lack of reaction to the part where Garrison comes back from the dead — but maybe after you’ve experienced your own son’s resurrection, anyone else’s isn’t that big of a deal. There’s another such return over on FALCON CREST. “I thought you were dead,” says Maggie to the back of a man’s head. Who could she be speaking to (or rather, who are we being teased into thinking she’s speaking to)? It's John Remick, now minus a leg, thus making him Soap Land’s very first amputee. It looks as if he may be the only person who can prove the Thirteen's existence — but will he testify to what he knows in front of a Senate committee in order to get Richard off the hook? A year ago, it was Donna Krebbs’ decision as to whether or not Andrew Dowling interceded with a Senate enquiry to keep the Ewing brothers out of jail. Now it’s Maggie turn. “I wanna hear it from you,” Remick insists. “Tell me that getting your husband off the hook is really gonna help you.”Maggie’s daughter Vicky is also called to testify at the hearing and finds herself caught between her mother (“I am asking you not to hurt Richard, … You owe me. I am calling in that debt”) and her husband (“Now it’s time to get Channing”). In the end, she sides with her mom, denying that Richard had her falsely imprisoned in Geneva, and she and Maggie are reconciled. Likewise on DALLAS, Jenna calls Ray from Europe to tell him she and Charlie are “a mother-daughter team again.” Conversely on KNOTS, relations between Olivia and Abby at an all-time low. “Everything she does makes me feel bad … I hate her,” seethes Olivia.The Senate hearing on FALCON CREST is impressive. The atmosphere is both more imposing and less formal than the courtroom set-ups we’re used to seeing in Soap Land, there are microphones and TV cameras everywhere, and the wearily cynical reactions from the Senate committee as various characters recount some of the season’s more bizarre events under oath are great. I wouldn’t be surprised if these scenes were based on the Senate committee hearings in THE GODFATHER, PART II; they’ve got the same kind of vibe. There’s something missing from the storytelling itself, however. It seems sort of fuzzy and vague. I’m not sure if my own ignorance is to blame — I’m still not entirely certain what a Senate committee hearing is — or if the plotting itself is unnecessarily convoluted.The fight for West Star may be over on this week’s DALLAS, but two figures are left slugging it out on the battlefield — JR and Sue Ellen. Watch these two go at each other with no holds barred is Soap Land at its most primal. All the familiar yet thrilling beats are here: Sue Ellen packing her bags and making a triumphant exit from Southfork, later returning for her son only to find JR has outwitted her (“Where is my son?” “Safe from you — now get the hell out of here!”), JR throwing her belongings over the balcony as the sheriff waits to escort her off the ranch, Sue Ellen bursting into his office with a writ (“You’re being ordered to produce John Ross within three days”), him retaliating with a below-the-belt wisecrack about her sex life (“How’s your young stud, Sue Ellen? Is youth everything it’s cracked up to be?”) — all accompanied by close-ups of glowering, hate-filled faces and a deliriously insistent, escalating score that adds to the intoxicating sense that the show is about to drive itself off the edge of a cliff.As we move ever closer to that edge, two of year’s most enjoyable, if slightly ludicrous, supporting characters make contrasting departures this week. After John Remick testifies in Richard’s favour at the hearing, Maggie follows him into the hallway outside to thank him. “You remind me so much of Chase,” she says before being momentarily distracted by some reporters. When she turns back around, Remick has seemingly disappeared into thin air. Over on DALLAS, JR is on the warpath after losing West Star — evicting Sue Ellen, firing Casey Denault and telling Bobby, “I’m the only real Ewing my daddy ever had.” He is rendered speechless, however, by the sight of Kimberly Cryder standing naked in his office telling him he could have had it all if he hadn’t been so greedy. FALCON CREST has a vaguely equivalent scene where Richard’s henchman Garth is about to fit Angela with a recording device prior to her meeting with the Thirteen. “Where does this go — under my jacket?” she asks. “Well, actually,” he replies hesitantly, “it would be better — you know, it would be much safer for you if — um — under your blouse.” Angela takes this in her stride and starts to undress. “Oh, don’t look so terrified,” she tells him casually. “I’m not gonna bite you.” This is a rare example of a comedic scene in FALCON CREST that is actually funny: the humour is allowed to arise naturally from the characters’ behaviour without anyone feeling obliged to "sell" the joke.When JR dumps him, Casey pleads for another chance to prove himself. “Don’t beg, boy,” chides JR. “I wasn’t begging!” he insists. But he was. When I first watched this season, I wanted Casey to be as cunning and ruthless an operator as Alan Beam had been, but I now see that the whole point of his character is that he isn’t like that, as much as he wants to be. He’s too desperate, too needy and too naive to make it in Soap Land. After leaving JR’s office, he tries to interest April in investing in the land he inherited from his father, but she dismisses him as “just another hustler”. “Who do you think you are, talking to me like that?” he snaps. “I heard when you came to Dallas, you had about a nickel to your name … If I had a pretty face like yours and a nice fine-looking body, I might not be in the position I’m in right now.” (From someone who spent almost the entirety of EMERALD POINT NAS walking around without a shirt on, that’s kind of ironic.) April’s response is fantastically cold: “You know something, Mr Denault? You’re just all the other bitter little people on the outside — you’re just trying to figure out how to get what you don’t have. Well, you’re not gonna get it from me.”Two of this week’s soaps contain a scene where one character plays a cassette tape for the benefit of another, fully confident that it will back up their previous claim. On KNOTS, Val asks Gary to listen to the answerphone message Ben left her. On FALCON CREST, Richard has Garth play the recording of Angela’s meeting with the Thirteen for Senators Ryder and Horton. In each case, the tape turns out to be blank. “This doesn’t make sense,” Val exclaims. “His voice was right here on this tape … Maybe one of the kids erased it … I didn’t make it up, I didn’t imagine it.”  “I don’t understand,” mutters Garth. “The transmission was perfect … How could this be? Perhaps at the airport, the guard with the metal detector, if he had a demagnetiser …” “Either somebody erased it or it was never there in the first place,” Gary later speculates to Jill who, as we’ve already seen, stole Ben’s tape and then burnt it. “Obviously, somebody told the Thirteen about our plan. The question is who?” muses Richard.A revelation towards the end of their respective episodes pulls the rug out from under Karen, Abby and Gary on KNOTS, and Richard, Angela and Maggie on FALCON CREST and makes it clear that the situation they are caught up is even bigger than they thought, perhaps even exceeding the jurisdiction of Soap Land itself. “We’ve been asked to halt the investigation of Manny Vasquez,” the Lotus Point gang’s police contact tells them. “He’s an essential part of several covert operations outside our borders … Manny Vasquez is working for us.” Meanwhile, Senator Ryder admits to the FALCON CREST gang that he’s known about the Thirteen’s existence all along. “I’m just the fall guy in this little charade,” Richard realises. “The more it looked like the Thirteen didn’t exist, the safer they would feel …” “We were waiting for them to make their move and fall into our brilliant trap,” Ryder explains. Now that they’ve gone back underground, he wants to postpone the hearings. This puts the FC gang in the same “sit tight and do nothing” position as their KL counterparts. For once, Gary Ewing and Angela Channing are on the same page. “Look, if the government’s not gonna do something about it, I think we should,” says Gary. “Senator Ryder, if you don’t pursue this immediately, we will,” says Angela.KNOTS and DALLAS each end on a note of violence: “We’ve been subtle long enough. Just get rid of them. Make it look as if the Mexicans did it,” orders Manny Vasquez, referring to the archeological group which now includes not just Paige, but Karen’s son Michael. Meanwhile, Ray Krebbs wakes in the middle of the night to find Connie hovering over him, a carving knife poised in midair. Funnily enough, FALCON CREST starts almost exactly where DALLAS left off, with Richard waking up in his Washington hotel room next to the dead body of Madame Malec — the Thirteen’s equivalent of leaving a mint on the pillow, presumably.And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (2) DALLAS2 (1) KNOTS LANDING3 (3) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =