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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 175639" data-attributes="member: 22">15 Nov 90: KNOTS LANDING: The Best Laid Plans v. 16 Nov 90: DALLAS: One Last Kiss Much of the Ewingverse’s action this week focuses on its two sets of unlikely roommates: Anne and Nick on KNOTS, and Bobby and Sheila on DALLAS. The former spend most of their time fighting their mutual attraction while sharing the same bed, kind of like a weird ‘90s version of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, before finally succumbing to it. Anne also uses her feminine wiles to convince Nick to let her face her supposed blackmailer alone — with an attache case containing $1,000,000. However, at the last moment, Nick surreptitiously switches the case for a duplicate rigged with an explosive. The episode ends with Anne leaving her apartment hugging the case to her chest, in the mistaken belief that she is carrying her newly acquired fortune rather than a Tommy McKay-style bomb.Over in Paris, Bobby likewise deceives Sheila. While appearing to follow her orders, he secretly enlists the aid of Mark Harris, a teenage cyclist (played by Patrick Duffy’s real son and named after his character in THE MAN FROM ATLANTIS), to find out where April is being held. And then while Sheila is getting her beauty sleep, he sneaks out of their hotel, heads to a less salubrious part of the city (in fact, the scuzziest surroundings we’ve seen Bobby in since his own kidnapping in Season 1) where he scales a building and busts a window or two in order to rescue his bride. He and April share but a few moments together before they are discovered. April is spirited away and Bobby is rendered unconscious. On paper, this sounds like the usual kind of generic action sequence Soap Land gives us whenever its characters become embroiled in an “international intrigue” storyline (such as the Dimitri Marinos doppelgänger plot in DALLAS Season 8), but it really pulls this one off with panache. The genuine foreign locations and stylish camera work help enormously. Also, Sheila Foley makes a terrific villain. Bobby regains consciousness to find her standing over him, furious. She’s shot from below, making her seem even more twisted and evil than she already does. “No more long leash,” she snarls at him. “From now on, it’s my rules all the way!”Back on KNOTS, the Danny Waleska case is closed after Julie admits that she inadvertently broke his fingers in a sliding door while trying to escape his clutches, and then watched him drown. There are echoes here of the last time a teenage girl solved a whodunnit on KNOTS — Diana's statement to the police about Chip killing Ciji. (Mack is present in both cases, watching quietly from the sidelines.) Just as Diana remained unrepentant about her role in the affair even after Chip’s death (“I cherish the pain!”), Julie likewise shocks her father by telling him she doesn’t regret her actions. “I don’t feel bad,” she insists. “He killed Mom, and I let him drown because I didn’t want him to kill anyone else … I’d do it again.” But whereas Diana’s actions had ongoing ramifications for the rest of the show's characters, Julie’s confession creates nary a ripple beyond the Williams’ front door. Even Val appears to have forgotten all about Danny since moving on to her latest storyline.Just as Bobby and April’s honeymoon hasn’t quite gone according to plan, Val and Gary’s impending nuptials also go somewhat awry. When Gary sees her in her wedding dress a few days before the ceremony, Val turns into Bridezilla. First, she turns up for their rehearsal dinner a day early and blames it all on Gary and then, when the zipper breaks on her party frock, she calls the whole thing off. “I don’t wanna marry you,” she informs him. “You’re gonna cancel a wedding because of a stupid dress??” he asks her incredulously.With Nick and Anne doing the light-hearted screwball romcom thing and Val getting wackier by the scene, gravitas and complexity are in short supply on KNOTS. By far the highlight of the episode is a little gem of a scene where Paige, after Greg has asked her to move in with him, comes to Mack’s office looking for relationship advice and ends up receiving an impassioned lecture from her father. “You know, Paige, I’m just sorry I wasn’t around when you were growing up so that I could make you understand how special you are,” he tells her. “Yeah well, don’t worry about not being there — I had Mother,” she replies flippantly. “That’s the wonderful thing about being young,” he reflects, “the confidence with which to judge other people and damn them … You know — there are big, fat, gigantic, humungous chunks of life that you’ve never experienced and never can imagine, and you can sit around and feel sorry for yourself because your mother dragged you across Europe, but did you ever stop and think about how tough it was on her, bringing up a kid by herself? How much easier it might have been if she’d just shipped you off to her parents? … Every choice that your mother made, she made for you! And you can sit around and think about, ‘Boy, they were bad choices’ but Paige, everyone is brilliant in hindsight.”Back on DALLAS, the captive April receives a visit from Sheila and realises for the first time that the lonely widow lady she and Bobby befriended at the airport is also the person behind her kidnapping. “Just tell me why you’re doing this!” April demands. Just like Mack did Paige, Sheila tells April she’s too naive to comprehend the bigger picture: “You don’t know anything about pain or tragedy … Look at you — a foolish little rich girl off on a great romance while the rest of us are going through hell!” Whereas Mack’s words get through to Paige — it’s not often we see her tear up but she does here — April rewards Sheila with a sarcastic round of applause for “a wonderful, sincere performance — now why don’t I believe any of it?” Both scenes end on an ominous note. “Can you really imagine yourself years from now looking back on your life with that man?” asks Mack, referring to Greg. “All I have to do is nod my head and you’ll be dead before you hit the ground,” Sheila warns April.Both soaps have felt unusually fragmented of late, and KNOTS takes steps to rectify this by having Greg’s sister Claudia move into Abby’s old house on the cul-de-sac. On DALLAS, meanwhile, the Ewings could not be more scattered — as Sly discovers when she tries to track down at least one member of the family to help rescue JR from the sanatarium where he is currently being pumped full of Thorazine. “They can’t just have dropped off the face of the earth!” she exclaims. “Nobody knows at Southfork?” asks Jackie. “Nobody’s at Southfork,” she replies. “What am I gonna do?” (Remember when all it took was someone not turning up for dinner on time for Jock to complain that the family was falling apart?) Sly finally resorts to taking out a full-page newspaper appealing to Cally to make contact. This leads to a great scene where Cally visits a doped up JR and agrees to get him released, but only under certain conditions: “I want the divorce … and I want you out of my life forever … but once I’m gone, I want you to remember me as the woman who, for a while at least, brought out the best in you, and not some pathetic plaything you got tired of.”We’re willing JR to comply because we want him out of that boring dressing gown and pyjamas and back at the centre of the action where he belongs. If the sanatarium storyline was DALLAS’s answer to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (just as the chain gang story from Season 11 contained echoes of Cool Hand Luke), it unexpectedly veers into It’s a Wonderful Life territory this week as it transpires that all the inmates, even nympho Anita, are better people for having known JR. To my surprise, I found the bizarrely sentimental scene where JR distributes parting gifts to all of his dayroom buddies quite sweet, even as a different part of my brain was yelling “Make it stop! Make it stop!”Inevitably, JR’s first port of call upon being released is Ewing Oil where Sly is waiting with a welcome-back hug. He tells her he’s eager to get back to work, gives her a few preliminary instructions and then casually tells her to “write yourself a letter of recommendation. After that letter-switching fiasco, you are fired.” This small but deliciously unthinkable moment gives off the same all-bets-are-off, anything-could-happen signal that FALCON CREST’s final season did a year ago.And this week’s Top 2 are …1 (2) DALLAS2 (1) KNOTS LANDING</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?