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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 175313" data-attributes="member: 22">08 Nov 90: KNOTS LANDING: Do Not Attempt to Remove v. 09 Nov 90: DALLAS: Charade When one thinks of soaps, one tends to think of lots of interwoven characters entangled in each other’s lives. That’s not the case in this week’s Ewingverse. On DALLAS, JR and Bobby are thousands of miles apart, undergoing entirely separate ordeals, neither having any inkling of the other’s situation. Both are trapped and helpless: JR by the-powers-that-be in a Texas mental hospital; Bobby by a bizarre little woman in Paris who is threatening to kill his wife unless he does her bidding. In each situation, the Ewing name counts for nothing. JR’s experienced that before of course — during his stint in Haleyville a couple of seasons ago — but it’s a first for Bobby. For the purposes of his current plot, nobody in France has ever heard of the Ewing family.KNOTS is similarly segregated. Not only are the characters involved in separate plots, but these plots take place in different genres. While Anne and Nick are immersed in their own screwball comedy/crime caper storyline, the unravelling of Paige and Tom’s relationship is explored in as emotionally truthful a way as Soap Land gets. Yet KNOTS finds interesting ways for these two contrasting storylines to intersect and impact on each other. During a low-key domestic scene with some really good, subtle acting, Paige and Tom quietly discuss her refusal to quit her job at the Sumner Group, even though he hates the idea of her working for her ex. At the same time, Anne is in her apartment, hatching her farfetched blackmail scam. While Nick is in the shower, she quickly calls Paige, who is in the middle of her discussion with Tom, asks her to call her straight back and then immediately hangs up. “Who was that?” Tom asks. “My mother,” Paige replies. “Are you sure it wasn’t Greg Sumner?” “What — are you calling me a liar?” “Why’d you hang up like that?” Anne then phones again and this time Tom picks up. She repeats her request for one of them to call her back right away, but instead of doing so, he and Paige continue to bicker, the argument now beginning to escalate. “It’s tragic how jealous you are!” Paige scoffs. “Why don’t you just admit to me you’re still interested in the old man?” Tom persists. Anne phones yet again. Paige doesn’t even wait for her to speak before telling her she’s busy and hanging up. The argument continues and Paige finally storms out: “Call me when you grow up!” No sooner has she left than Anne calls one more time. A quietly fuming Tom tells her Paige isn’t there and then hangs up. Anne looks panicked, but then her phone finally does ring — it’s Paige calling from a payphone to say she’s on her way over. Anne immediately cuts her off but continues to talk down the phone, making Nick — who has just emerged from his shower — believe that the blackmailer is on the line.Paige and Tom don’t officially break up until the following day in Paige’s office. Their final argument is laugh out loud funny and really sad at the same time. “Don’t wax psychological with me, you haven’t got it in you,” she tells him. “What a bitch,” he sighs wearily. On his way out of the building, Tom shares a silent elevator ride with Greg. We see him simmering and simmering until, just as the elevator reaches his floor, he finally boils over and punches Greg hard in the stomach. Then he walks off, leaving Greg doubled up in pain (as if he wasn’t in enough already). It’s a striking moment of character-based violence.Anne’s screwball scheme having impacted Paige’s love life, the same then happens in reverse. Paige arrives at her old apartment, now occupied by Anne and Nick, needing a place to crash. In order to maintain the cover story that they are lovers, Anne and Nick are obliged to share not merely the same bedroom, but the same bed. “What if she comes in in the middle of the night and finds me sleeping on the floor?” Nick reasons. “The less your daughter knows the safer she’ll be.”Bobby Ewing and Sheila Foley keep up a similar facade in Paris. Bobby’s task is to pretend to everyone he comes into contact with that Sheila is April, i.e., his new bride with whom he is madly in love. Within the privacy of their hotel suite, however, he elects to sleep on the sofa, even though Sheila has another suggestion: “It would look more convincing to the maid if we both used the bed … You know the French. They take their romance very seriously.” About as seriously as the Italians, if KNOTS’ Nick’s equivalent rationalisation is anything to go by.It is there (with the Arc De Triomphe looming handsomely in the background) that Sheila makes her move on Bobby. “It’s a long time since I’ve been with a man. I think we could both use some comfort … It would make us both forget for a few hours,” she suggests. “Why not?” he shrugs, unbuttoning his shirt. She goes on to make a favourable comparison between Bobby and her late husband. “You’re nothing like my wife,” Bobby replies. “She’s beautiful, loving, kind and generous, and if it’ll bring her back to me one minute sooner, I’ll push past my disgust and give you whatever you want.” “You bastard!” Sheila exclaims, slapping him across the face. And in Soap Land terms, her outrage is justified — this is a world where displaying sexual repulsion towards a glamorous woman feels more transgressive than kidnapping a bride on her honeymoon. At least JR has the common decency to lay down (again) with crazy Anita this week, however boss-eyed bonkers she might be.The most striking aspect of Bobby’s new storyline is how immeasurably more interesting he is now than he was as a corny joke-cracking honeymooner just a week ago. Suddenly, he’s dark, brooding and full of repressed anger. He really relishes twisting the knife into Sheila. I don’t think we’ve ever seen him quite this vindictive before and it really suits him. For her part, Sheila claims that she is simply carrying out orders (“We have a very important agenda”) and that she, like April, is expendable. Yet she is clearly enjoying playing the evil bitch to the hilt. As a result, there’s a real soapy zing between her and Bobby. Combine this with the Parisian backdrop (of all of DALLAS’s overseas excursions, this is the most dramatically effective) and it’s as if Bobby has woken up to find himself in one of those international, jet-setting ‘80s mini-series.Having convinced Nick that the blackmailer has made contact, Anne makes a big show of wanting to involve the police. “I’m scared … They have people to take care of this kind of thing,” she argues. “No police,” Nick insists. Back in Paris, Bobby also wants to alert the authorities — “unless you think you can stop me,” he tells Sheila. To his surprise, she raises no objection. Alas, the shoulder-shrugging Gallic cops find Bobby’s wife-swapping story too outlandish to take seriously, suggesting that he has been the victim of either a practical joke or “too much vin extraordinaire on your honeymoon night.” To Bobby’s frustration, there is no-one to back up his claim that April has been kidnapped, as everyone in the hotel thinks Sheila is April. The clincher comes when Sheila produces a fake passport identifying her as such. (Adding to the enjoyably soapy nuttiness of it all, Sheila-as-April’s passport photo is ridiculously glamorous.) But Bobby is not ready to admit defeat. Instead, he turns to Jordan Lee who introduces him to a Captain de Rougement, the head of the local anti-terrorist unit, who takes his story more seriously and promises to help. But then at the end of the episode, this Captain de Rougement turns out to be a fake. “What is going on?” Bobby murmurs.Meanwhile, Anne tells Nick that the blackmailer has demanded his payoff take place in a department store called Stanley’s. Nick comes up with a plan to outwit the blackmailer — a plan that Anne then succeeds in circumventing. This scheme-within-a-scheme scenario — involving duplicate attache cases, changing rooms, multiple price tags and emergency exits — is far too complicated to describe, but somehow makes perfect sense while you’re watching it. Curiously, there’s a very similar fitting room switcheroo in Quentin Tarantino’s 1995 movie Jackie Brown, starring Pam Grier — who’s already cropped up on this season’s KNOTS as one the cops investigating Danny Waleska’s death — in the title role.[MEDIA=youtube]TzatMfqIf3A[/MEDIA]Recurring theme of the week #1: Playing cards. While holed up in her apartment with Nick at the beginning of KNOTS, we see Anne playing patience — a possible metaphor for the plot she is secretly hatching. On DALLAS, bully boy Morrissey adopts the role of fortune teller to read JR’s destiny in the cards. “All I see in your future is bad, bad luck,” he snarls. Meanwhile James, in an effort to prove himself superior to his father, takes JR’s place in a poker game and ends up losing everything. Just as Paige turned up at Anne’s door looking for somewhere to lay her head, he likewise shows up at Cally’s, only to be turned away. As an indication of how low he has sunk, James then copies Lance Cumson in last season’s FALCON CREST and gets a tattoo. (As with Lorenzo Lamas, I’m pretty sure it’s a case of “actor’s own”.)Recurring theme of the week #2: Scams and charades taking place in public (or relatively public) places. There’s Anne and Nick’s escapade in the shopping mall, Bobby and Sheila pretending to be loved-up honeymooners at various Parisian cocktail parties, and a late-night confrontation in the sanatarium dayroom where JR goads Morrissey into admitting that he faked his insanity to avoid prosecution on a murder charge, unaware that he is being recorded by a surveillance camera.At the end of last week’s KNOTS, it sounded as if Val was in almost as much peril as April. This week, we learn that she has merely suffered a bump on the head, with no apparent after-effects … until Gary finds her frantically rearranging his bookshelves in the middle of the night. Then later, she becomes convinced she can smell smoke and refuses to believe the twins when they tell her they haven’t been playing with matches. “I can’t trust them anymore,” she says sadly. “I can’t trust my own children.” Crucially, we observe these changes of behaviour through the eyes of her increasingly perplexed fiancee. In his own way, Gary is as helpless this week as his DALLAS brothers are.And this week’s Top 2 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (2) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?