New posts

A little forum update...We're planning an upgrade.

Find out more about what's planned and how you can help support the forum
Click here for the details

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 154429" data-attributes="member: 22">05 Oct 89: KNOTS LANDING: Poetic Justice v. 06 Oct 89: DALLAS: Ka-Booooom! v. 06 Oct 89: FALCON CREST:  CharleyBack in the day, to be English in Soap Land was mostly to be an elegant, to-the-manor-born female with a nice line in crisp one-liners. These days, you’re more likely to be an arty, non-traditional (by Soap Land standards) male. DALLAS’s limey du jour — replacing filmmaker Don Lockwood (who was laidback to the point of nondescript) is gallery owner, and Cally’s would-be Svengali, Alex Barton (quietly spoken and a bit creepy). He is now joined by FALCON CREST’s Charley St James, who combines Alex’s accent and mullet with a flamboyant personality and a terrible taste in clothes — even by late ‘80s standards. A yellow string vest is one hideous highlight.Charley first appears when he steps into the Falcon Crest driveway, blocking the path of the limousine transporting Maggie’s family to her funeral. Emma gets out of the car to greet him and we realise this is the violent lover she told Maggie about last week. Like Emma, DALLAS’s Carter McKay is surprised by the return of an old flame this week, when the nameless woman in heavy makeup and tight skirts whom he kept barking at during the range war shows up at his office. We learn that her name is Rose and she’s recently opened “a little beauty shop in Follett.” Mack is pleased to see her and invites her to stay at his ranch. Over on KNOTS, Val is rapidly falling head over heels in love with Danny the computer guy. Reality bites when the twins walk in on them kissing. “You don’t love us anymore,” Bobby accuses her. “I don’t want him over here anymore,” Betsy adds. “They’re very protective, possessive,” Val explains to Danny. “They don’t want someone to come between them and their mommy.” Swap the gender of the parent and the same could be said of Tommy McKay. “In Tommy’s new role of father protector,” warns his rehab counsellor, “he could be capable of almost anything.” So it proves. “What’s a cheap little trick like you doing, latching onto my father?” he snarls at Rose, grabbing her and smearing her lipstick all over her face. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll cut your little vacation short and clear outta here!” While a frightened Rose scurries back to her Follett beauty parlour, Danny comes up with an unexpected way to combat the twins’ resistance to him. “Marry me,” he tells Val. Back on FALCON CREST, the situation between Charley and Emma’s family grows increasingly bizarre. First, he invites himself along to Maggie’s funeral as if it were the opening of a new nightclub. Plonking himself in the back of the funeral car next to Emma, Angela and Frank, he indulges in a spot of man-spreading before sparking up a fag. Maggie’s kids end up coughing instead of weeping for their mom. It’s cruelly funny. The family are dismayed by Charley’s behaviour, but seemingly too shocked to stand up to him. A terse “Would you mind putting out the cigarette?” is all macho Lance can manage.In a Soap Land first, Maggie lies in an open casket at her funeral. The only other major Soap Land character I can recall seeing in a coffin (aside from a drunken Mack in “Noises Everywhere” and FC’s Meredith Braxton when she burst out of a casket firing a machine gun) was Chip Roberts on KNOTS. That scene provided Lilimae with an opportunity to deliver a powerful goodbye speech. Here, however, the dramatic function of showing Maggie’s body isn’t to allow the characters to emote around her, but so that Charley can reach into the box and yank the ring off her finger — the very same ring that Richard bought for her and that led to her death last week. Charley isn’t the only one at the funeral with no sense of occasion. When Richard arrives at the church in handcuffs accompanied by a prison guard, he finds Michael Sharpe waiting for him. Without a word of sympathy, Michael orders him not to testify against him: “It’s a big waste of time. Back off.” So it is that these two interlopers, Charley and Michael, have by their monstrous insensitivity, deprived both the characters and the audience of their chance to mourn Maggie — even though the show has gone to the trouble of bringing the actress back for her own funeral scene! It’s so perverse.We are granted one emotional moment when Angela, who hasn’t spoken to her son since before Maggie died, approaches him after the funeral. “It’s amazing how death can shake even the firmest resolve,” she says. Broken, Richard falls into her arms. “What am I going to do?” he whispers. “You’re going to survive,” she replies.Charley subsequently adds insult to injury by re-gifting Maggie’s ring to Emma. Later on, when she and Richard are visiting Maggie’s grave (which is situated next to the old Alexis v Krystle lily pond), Emma shows him the ring. We wait for Richard to recognise it and explode, but he doesn’t. Instead, he remarks, “It looks like the ring I gave Maggie … The first time I saw it on her finger was at the funeral.” Once again, Charley has prevailed and the audience is denied its cathartic moment. The injustice of it all!There’s more jewellery stealing on DALLAS. About a third of the way through this week’s ep, Tommy sneaks into Ewing Oil to plant a bomb in Bobby’s attache case and spots a pendant Bobby has bought for April. “A going away gift for me — how nice!” he says before pocketing it. The bomb has been rigged to go off as soon as someone opens the case and the remainder of the episode is spent teasing the audience (in a cartoonish but nonetheless suspenseful way that’s quite unusual for DALLAS) with moments where Bobby, or Christopher on his behalf, is about to open the case, only to be distracted at the last second. “By tomorrow night, they’ll be scraping Mr Bobby Ewing off the ceiling!” predicts Tommy. Instead, the case eventually topples over April’s balcony, and she and Bobby watch in amazement as it goes boom on the street below. Angela is no happier when Emma invites Charley to stay at Falcon Crest than Tommy was when Mack asked Rose to stay at the ranch. Instead of smearing Charley’s lipstick, Angela leaves a plane ticket and an envelope full of cash on his bed, hoping he’ll take the hint. When that doesn’t work, Pilar tries a more direct approach: she hires a couple of thugs to beat him up. Charley’s reactions to these various attempts to get rid of him are fascinating. First, he comes uninvited into Angela’s room while she is asleep and sits on the edge of the bed. “Nice nightie — silk?” he asks when she wakes up and stares at him open-mouthed. “You don’t like me very much, do you?” he continues. “But I like you, and the smell of this place, and of Emma’s body, but most of all, I love the smell of those grapes.” Then he leans forward and kisses her on the lips. Later, a steamy bed scene between Pilar and Lance is rudely interrupted when they pull back the sheets to find they’ve got company, GODFATHER-style: the thugs Pilar sent to beat up Charley are at the bottom of the bed, bound and gagged.Bobby had bought April the pendant to celebrate “the four-month anniversary of the Great Waltz in Vienna.” Time seems to be moving a lot faster on DALLAS than on KNOTS this season. Abby and Sue Ellen departed Soap Land in the same week, but while it’s already time for John Ross to visit his mother in England, Paige hasn’t had a chance to change out of the jeans she’s been wearing since Abby caught that flight to Japan. Either way, Sue Ellen and Abby are both thousands of miles away now, but each continues to further the plot on the shows they left behind. In another neat little KNOTS twist I’d forgotten all about, Paige learns that Abby was responsible for the ransacking of her apartment at the end of last season. “My wife stole your key,” Greg explains — and then he stole it from her. Meanwhile on DALLAS, Cally’s concern that she is “still a girl and JR’s used to women — sophisticated, powerful, rich women like Sue Ellen” is what drives her to succeed as a painter so she will become “someone JR can be proud of.” As for the Ewing-verse’s rival Mystery Key storylines, Paige wins the race to solve hers when Miss Ellie, who had victory in her grasp, slows down at the final hurdle. Instead of flying to Pride, Texas to “unlock something from Jock’s past”, she suggests to Clayton that they turn it into a road trip: “I haven’t seen that part of Texas in years. It’d be fun.” By contrast, Paige, Greg and Ted spent this week’s KNOTS outwitting and chasing each other all over the town of Spring Lake. The ep does a really good job of sustaining the tension throughout. Even though Paige is the one who succeeds in unlocking Rick Hawkins’ safety deposit box, she has to lock herself in a gas station bathroom before she can examine its contents. Her haul includes evidence that Ted killed Nagata and that Abby owned Murakame all along. “She knew there was oil at Lotus Point before she bought it!” Paige murmurs. So maybe it’s still not too late, to paraphrase the judge at Richard Channing’s trial, for Abby to end up in a REAL prison where she’ll do REAL time like the REAL criminal she is. In the meantime, Ted is breaking down the bathroom door, Paige is clambering through a window — and the chase is back on. By the end of the ep, Paige and Greg believe that Ted has been killed after his getaway truck goes out of control, even though his body has yet to be found. KNOTS knows that we hardened viewers won’t fall for that one and so makes no secret (to us) that Ted is alive and hitching his way back to civilisation. Conversely, the open coffin on FALCON CREST proves that Maggie is definitely dead. It doesn’t prevent her from showing up later in Richard’s bedroom, but this turns out a dream version of Maggie — sadly no more real than Jeff Wainwright’s fantasy version four years ago.You’d swear some of Charley’s scenes on FALCON CREST were ripped off from TWIN PEAKS — if Charley’s arrival didn’t predate the pilot episode of TWIN PEAKS by six months. In one scene, he’s playing the piano in a club (possibly the Del Oro Spa) while crooning the old Dean Martin number ‘Everybody Loves Somebody’ like a slightly rubbish lounge singer, before suddenly speeding the song up and turning it into a frenetic, out-of-control Jerry Lee Lewis style boogaloo. It’s nuts but, just like one of those nutty musical numbers on TWIN PEAKS, it’s made all the nuttier by the fact that no-one else in the scene reacts as if it were nuts. Instead, they all just go along with it as if it were normal. Charley subverts the rules of Soap Land at every turn, behaving as if he neither knows nor cares who the real stars of this show he’s just sauntered into are. During dinner at Falcon Crest, he sits at the head of the table opposite Angela, happily conversing with Chao Li in Chinese while the family look on appalled, yet strangely helpless. Is Charley “the evil in the air” heralded by the dead falcon at the start of last week’s episode? He must be — otherwise why else do they all seem so powerless against him? Maybe it’s because he’s not evil in the way that one has come to recognise evil in Soap Land. If he were a powerful oil or shipping magnate played by some old Hollywood star or an enigmatic European woman with a big hat and a vendetta, then Lance and Angela would be better equipped to deal with him. But instead, Charley is funny, vulgar and just doesn’t give a shit — which makes him all the more nightmarish.Michael Sharpe takes a more conventional Soap Land route to strike back at Richard, blackmailing a judge over an indiscretion with a teenage cheerleader into having Richard’s kids taken into care. Just like the folks up at Falcon Crest, all Richard can do is stand impotently by and watch. Suddenly, he looks much older.There’s more male helplessness on KNOTS where Gary is essentially playing Jimmy Stewart in a telephone version of REAR WINDOW. Of all the characters on KNOTS, and maybe all of Soap Land, Gary is the best choice to ground this crazy plot in some kind of reality. He’s not a super sleuth like his buddy Mack or a natural hero like his brother Bobby, and instead becomes, in spite of his chequered past and famous last name, a frustrated, reluctant Everyman with whom we can identify in this scenario.For the second week in a row, the final scene of FALCON CREST is both extraordinary and extraordinarily bleak, shot through with a grotesque weirdness that again is pure TWIN PEAKS. It’s late at night. Angela is in bed reading. The phone rings, she answers, but there’s no-one there. The lights flicker on and off. There’s someone lurking downstairs, but it’s too dark to make out who. Angela takes a gun from her bedside drawer. Someone is creeping up the stairs — we see that it’s Charley, a demonic look on his face. Angela waits in bed, watching the door knob slowly turn. He enters. She points the gun at him and tells him to get out. “I can’t leave you alone in this great big dark empty house,” he replies. “Can’t you see how I’m attracted to you?” “You’re a sick man!” she shouts. “Don’t shoot, Mother!” he replies mockingly. She pulls the trigger, but there are just clicks. She keeps firing, but the barrel’s empty. He pretends he’s been shot anyway, collapsing to the floor dramatically like a kid playing Cowboys & Indians. Then he takes the bullets from his pocket, shaking them as if they were dice before tossing them onto the bed: “Gimme a lucky seven for Uncle Charley … It’s a winner!” She throws the gun at him and picks up the phone, but the line is dead. Meanwhile, Charley calmly picks up a pillow, takes the phone out of her hand and places the pillow over her face. She struggles for a while … and then stops. The suffocation of an elderly woman, the sound of another woman being attacked and possibly killed over the phone, yet another woman trapped in a bathroom as a dangerous man batters down the door with a metal bar, an attache case rigged to explode upon opening … all in all, it’s been a pretty violent week in Soap Land. And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (3) KNOTS LANDING2 (1) FALCON CREST3 (2) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?