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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 177825" data-attributes="member: 22">20 Dec 90: KNOTS LANDING: A Merry Little Christmas v. 21 Dec 90: DALLAS: The Odessa FileMack Mackenzie and Bobby Ewing both set out to right wrongs this week. Mack stakes out Jason Lochner’s house, hears a fight start inside and alerts the authorities. Bobby drives to Odessa, Michelle riding shotgun, to confront the woman who kidnapped his wife. Along the way, he and Michelle compete as to which of them is the most vengeful. “If you don’t have the guts to take her down, I do!” Michelle snarls. “I’m gonna see how she likes it when the thing she loves most is destroyed!” Bobby vows.Neither man gets the results he was hoping for. Instead of thanking Mack for rescuing him from his abusive father, Jason spits in his face and then disappears into The System until he is eventually released back into his father’s custody. Meanwhile, the Sheila Foley Bobby finds in a psychiatric hospital turns out not be the Sheila Foley he encountered in Paris.“If this is the real Sheila Foley, why did the one in Paris use her name?” Michelle asks, but nobody knows the answer. However, we do know why Anne Matheson used Paige’s name when she married Nick last week: to get her hands on Paige’s inheritance.There’s an end of an era vibe hanging over this week’s DALLAS. Not only is Bobby determined to get rid of Ewing Oil, and fast, but Carter McKay also wants out of the oil business (“My life has been one battle after another, Rosie, and I’m fed up. If I can make the right deal, I’m going to retire”). There’s something momentous about Cally telling JR, “Don’t ruin it with Vanessa because I truly believe she’s your last chance to ever be happy.” And there’s a really good argument between JR and Harve Smithfield who, save the secretaries, is now the series’ last remaining recurring character. “Dammit, what side are you on anyhow?” JR barks after Harve refuses to delay implementing Bobby’s instructions regarding the sale of Ewing Oil. “Do I have to play you the Battle Hymn of the Republic? This company was Daddy’s, you were his attorney. Where’s your loyalty …?” “JR, my job has always been to follow the orders of the man in charge of Ewing Oil … That’s the way it has to be,” Harve replies solemnly.During the best scene on this week’s KNOTS, a handful of Sumner Group employees are summoned to Greg’s hospital room and subjected to an angry dressing down from the man himself regarding a substandard report on a proposed merger. To Mort’s satisfaction, most of Greg’s ire is directed at his new fiancee, Paige. “Did you read this?” he barks at her, brandishing the report. “I wrote it,” she replies. “If you’re interested in fiction, write a novel!” he yells. “I guess we know who’ll be handling the family cheque book!” There’s some intriguing ambiguity here (or possibly just a lack of understanding on my part): it’s not clear if Paige really is guilty of taking her eye off the ball at work or if she has been set up to take a fall by Linda Fairgate, the pretender to her throne. Either way, Paige is not happy at being bawled out like any other employee. “How can you have done that to me?” she asks Greg. “It wasn’t personal,” he insists. “You had an important job to do and you dropped the ball. Anyone who would have done that I would have pounded on.” “You should have taken my feelings into account,” she insists. Here is yet another interesting contradiction about Paige: she is fiercely independent while still expecting preferential treatment.Although business interferes with Greg and Paige’s relationship, it isn’t a problem for JR and Vanessa’s. In fact, Vanessa makes it clear that she supports JR in his fight to hold onto Ewing Oil: “It should be your company, something for you to hand down to James and John Ross.” While Greg wins Paige around by having Carlos deliver a fancy necklace to her door (“Now this you should take personally!” reads the accompanying note), JR does the hiring-out-an-entire-restaurant-and-orchestra thing in order to formally propose to Vanessa. “As soon as my divorce is final, I want you to be my bride,” he tells her. “Oh JR, I don’t know what to do, I’m so happy!” she gasps.But their romantic evening together interrupted by a call from Sly informing JR that Bobby is in the process of signing Ewing Oil over to LeeAnn De La Vega, a “mystery woman” from Venezuela. With a name and description like that, one might have expected an exotic, enigmatic figure like Angelica Nero. Instead, we get Barbara Eden from I DREAM OF JEANNIE, who is just as blonde and perky as can be. JR arrives at Ewing Oil mere seconds after Bobby has signed the papers and headed off to Paris, following another lead on Sheila Foley. JR and LeeAnn pass each other briefly and there’s a frisson of recognition between them. Is it from the ‘60s sitcom they co-starred in or somewhere else?Humour has always been an essential component of Soap Land. There is a streak of absurdity running through the genre which means that events on screen can often seem thrillingly exciting and laughably ridiculous at the same time. Sometimes, the acting feeds into this. The performances of Larry Hagman and Joan Collins, for example, are infused with an innate sense of comedic “knowingness” that skilfully manages to stay just the right side of self-parody. There’s also the humour that is part of a scene — the characters who say sharp, witty things simply because they are sharp, witty people. This is especially common on KNOTS, which has occasionally spun entire episodes out of a deliciously light comedic sensibility.But there is another type of comedy that is probably my least favourite aspect of Soap Land. It’s when a scene or a storyline is played for laughs at the expense of the drama and is often underscored by jaunty or whimsical music that announces upfront that “This is a funny scene”, instead of allowing the audience the chance to find the humour for themselves. This heavy-handed approach invariably kills whatever laughs exist stone dead — and because any genuine drama has already been jettisoned in favour of humour, all that’s left is an unfunny “funny" scene. Of the main four soaps, FALCON CREST was the most guilty of this approach and DYNASTY the least. (That series, however nuts it got, played pretty much everything as serious melodrama.) For my money, latter-day DALLAS isn’t anywhere near as big a culprit as its reputation suggests. The story of JR’s Haleyville/chain-gang ordeal, for example, might be silly and farfetched, but it is nevertheless told with a straight face.Having teetered on the edge for the past few episodes, this week’s KNOTS finally crosses over into dreaded “playing for laughs” territory. In the offending scene, Anne and Nick are celebrating their fake wedding when Claudia arrives at the door. She has heard rumours of a marriage involving Paige and has shown up on a little fishing expedition. Anne, meanwhile, has no idea that Paige has just gotten engaged to Greg. The stage is therefore set for some enjoyable cross-purpose talk about Paige and marriage, potentially leading to some inadvertent revelations. However, any such straightforward intrigue is discarded in favour of the “thought bubble” gimmick, whereby each line Anne and Claudia deliver to each other is accompanied by another in voice-over, which is meant to convey to us what the character is really thinking. Sadly, none of these thoughts is particularly revelatory (“She doesn’t know anything! She’s fishing!”) and at one point, Anne even recycles her “And I’m the Queen of England!” quip from two years ago (which was funny when she said it to Paige, but lame when she “thinks” it to us). Because the motivation behind every line is spelt out, there’s no tension or subtext to the scene and all remains are some unfunny "funny" lines.Such ham-fisted attempts at humour — whether it’s thought bubbles on KNOTS or outdated mental patient stereotypes on DALLAS or Melissa’s slapstick hysteria on FALCON CREST — betray a fundamental lack of confidence on the part of the series, both in the viewers’ capacity to decide for ourselves what is or isn’t funny, and in its own ability to sustain an ongoing narrative without resorting to cheap laughs and gimmicks. Perhaps the underlying anxiety is that being a plain old ‘80s supersoap that tells its over-the-top stories in a straight-faced linear fashion just isn’t enough anymore. And, given that this is no longer the ‘80s and the supersoap genre is nearing extinction, perhaps one can understand KNOTS’ sudden crisis of confidence.In the event, Anne learns from a lawyer that Paige’s inheritance was poorly invested and is now nonexistent. This means all of her scheming — the faux blackmail, the identical attache cases, the fake marriage — was for nought. Adding insult to injury, the lawyer then charges her for his services.  This feels more like an ending to a sitcom rather than the conclusion of a soap opera storyline. There’s even a closing punchline: “We’ve been robbed!” Anne exclaims.Then ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ by Michele Lee kicks in and for the length of the accompanying montage at least, all is forgiven as the episode’s disparate storylines and characters are gathered together in a way that complements them all. In particular, Gary's and Anne’s eyes meeting in church feels like a potentially game-changing moment. The emotional pinnacle of the song, “Hang the shining star upon the highest bough” recurs three times and each time is matched by an equally emotional moment onscreen — Frank arriving home with a tree after previously telling Julie there was no point in celebrating Christmas without Pat; Mack picking up Meg after learning “they just returned Jason to his father” and, finally, Jason walking down his Tim Burton-esque suburban street, now transformed from Edward Scissorhands into an idealised winter wonderland, just as Mack appears in front of his house in a full Santa outfit, his hand outstretched. “You don’t have to go in there,” he tells Jason. What should be a hideously mawkish collision of sentiment and social issue somehow — in the seasonal no man’s land of this montage — works.And this week’s Top 2 are …1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) KNOTS LANDING</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?