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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 189198" data-attributes="member: 22">KNOTS LANDING: 29 Oct 92 - 13 May 93: Season 14FALCON CREST drowned Maggie, DYNASTY put Krystle in an irreversible coma and DALLAS mowed April down in a hail of French bullets. KNOTS likewise marks its final season with the death of a major blonde by blowing up Val in a fiery car crash. We don’t see her face, but Gary’s convinced the dead woman in the car must be Val because she was wearing Val’s wedding ring, just as Jeff Colby was certain the woman who died in the plane crash at the start of DYNASTY’s fifth season must have been Fallon because she was wearing Fallon’s engagement ring — until Fallon turned up alive and confused at the end of the season.Each of these blondes leaves behind a husband in mourning and a sombre atmosphere which permeates the rest of the season. Meanwhile, reduced budgets result in a smaller main cast, less location filming and more emphasis on close-ups, with a resultant feeling of claustrophobia — all of which contribute to that dark “final season” mood.A sense of powerlessness seems to grip the main Soap Land characters in their final seasons, as if grief, the prospect of cancellation and plain old soap fatigue have conspired to weaken them to the point where they no longer have the energy to do battle as they once did. The Channings and Cumsons watched helplessly as a slew of twisted and irreverent newcomers trampled over FALCON CREST, Barbara Eden ran rings around JR on DALLAS while Bobby was terrorised by a tiny woman with big hair in Paris, and now Mack and Karen Mackenzie — who in the past have vanquished drug cartels, stolen baby rings and ruthless shadowy organisations — are finally brought to their knees by an ex-con grandma and her stupid brother.Once heroic leading men start to behave erratically, even violently. The combination of Krystle’s illness and the dark family secrets he was determined to keep hidden meant that Blake Carrington was more volatile and morally compromised during DYNASTY’s final season than at any time since its first. Bobby Ewing, meanwhile, channelled his grief over April’s death into a vengeful quest to track down her kidnappers. Gary Ewing doesn’t seem as concerned about finding his wife’s kidnappers (in fact, KNOTS doesn’t linger on his grief very much at all) so instead it’s Mack Mackenzie who crosses over to the dark side, in a desperate attempt to get Mary Robeson to leave his family alone. He starts by cooking up a scheme with Claudia Whittaker to embezzle a million dollars from the Sumner Group and ends up destroying evidence in a murder investigation.While the first eight episodes of KNOTS’ final season are very watchable, it’s not until Mary is bumped off and Tom Ryan returns to investigate that things really start clicking into place. The episode following Mack’s arrest for Mary’s murder is particularly striking. We’ve seen the Knots Landing Police Station plenty of times throughout the years, but never like this — overcrowded, chaotic, anonymous. This is no longer the cosy community cop shop where Sid was taken after he was accused of rape in Season 2 and the police all knew him by his first name. Twelve years later, no-one knows or cares who Karen is as she tries to find out what’s happening to her husband. They don’t even recognise her from OPEN MIKE. Small wonder she’s bewildered. When she turns up at court for Mack’s arraignment, she’s not even sure if she’s in the right building. The bailiff she speaks to is impatient and cold. No-one asks for her autograph. The Mackenzies are no longer TV super sleuths, Soap Land’s equivalent of HART TO HART, but small, frightened, middle-aged nobodies. Mack’s absence from the episode (another consequence of budget cuts) makes Karen’s isolation all the more effective and adds to the sense that he has been somehow swallowed up by the system. (Mary’s real killer turns to be her bro Joe who meets his end in the same way that Jordan Lee did in DALLAS’s final season: shot dead in a phone box by an anonymous hitman.)Save for DALLAS, each of the soaps makes a slightly odd excursion into the so-called real world during their last year. Following Krystle’s encounters with the homeless and Lauren Daniels slumming it as a waitress in a sleazy neighbourhood, KNOTS takes on the aftermath of the LA race riots. The riots are never referenced directly and, almost thirty years after the event, the point of the storyline feels kind of vague. Two ex-baseball stars, one black, one white, persuade the Sumner Group to fund an urban renewal project. With Greg, Paige, Gary and Kate all involved, it plays like a less eventful version of the Tidal Energy storyline from a year earlier. The white baseball guy, Bill, briefly becomes Paige’s boyfriend. (He’s likeable enough, but is perhaps one love interest too many for Paige.) Just like Joseph the oceanographer did with Tidal Energy, Bill abruptly bails on the project he helped initiate when he receives a more lucrative job offer elsewhere. (As with Joseph's, the offer has been discreetly engineered by Greg.) Unlike Tidal Energy, this storyline ends not with a bang but a whimper as Greg, much like the show itself, realises he’s bitten off more than he ever possibly chew, and retires defeated to the sidelines.Greg marries Anne believing her to be pregnant. To begin with, she thought she was too, and by the time she realises she isn’t and never was, it’s too late. A fall from a horse resulting in the loss of a baby is a soap trope that goes back as far as Pam Ewing’s second miscarriage in 1979. Over the years, there have been variations on this scenario: Alexis firing a gun to deliberately cause Krystle’s horse to throw her, Kirby intentionally falling from a horse in an attempt to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and now Anne using a horse-riding accident to explain away a pregnancy that never existed in the first place. So far so zany, but once she comes clean to Greg about her deception, the storyline becomes richly poignant. He immediately pulls down the emotional shutters. “This is a marriage of convenience — my convenience,” he tells her. Asked if he’ll ever make love to her again, he replies matter-of-factly, “The heart wants what the heart wants and at the moment it doesn’t want you.” It’s a bit like watching JR and Sue Ellen’s marriage during DALLAS’s early years, if JR and Sue Ellen had been fifteen years older than they were then. JR used to threaten that Sue Ellen would wind up “in the gutter, with nothing but the clothes on your back and a little tin cup in your hand” — a fate Anne had already experienced when she married Greg. In response to his neglect, she hurls a perfume bottle at her reflection, contemplates a facelift, spends drunken afternoons in Nick Schillace’s restaurant and even kidnaps a horse, before deciding she’d be better off away from Greg, even without a prenup.If Anne is the season’s most fascinating, least predictable character, Vanessa Hunt comes a close second. Last year, soap life was simply a gas for Vanessa. The most troubling question on her mind was finding the next outrageous place for her and Alex Barth to have intercourse while the rest of the cast were waiting anxiously for news of Paige following her shooting by Pierce Lawton. This season, her situation is far more serious and so she turns into a combination of Genele Ericson and Sydney St James from FALCON CREST’s final season — a sexually insatiable opportunist on one hand and the terrified plaything of a madman on the other. Ironically, she ends up saving Paige’s life (and Greg’s) by tipping Tom Ryan off about the bomb Treadwell has placed in the Sumner Group’s private jet. Tom’s brief spell in the bomb squad (established back in Season 12 during Anne and Nick’s identical-attache-cases caper) comes in handy as he instructs Paige and Greg on how to diffuse a bomb in midair during Soap Land’s tensest flight since the FALCON CREST Season 3 finale.Just as Val showed up unexpectedly in “Conundrum”, the series finale of DALLAS, last year, she also makes a surprise return in “Just Like Old Times”, the series finale of KNOTS. The first thing she does is make herself over in a motel room mirror, but instead of a sunny waitress called Verna, she transforms herself into an intellectual looking bespectacled redhead (kind of a cross between Woody Allen and Gloria Steinem). Thus disguised, she is as invisible as JR was in “Conundrum” and likewise able to observe a world in which she no longer exists, first taking a cab out to the cul-de-sac and then watching the twins outside their school. Eventually, she makes herself known to Gary, enabling him to reprise his “Holy shit — it’s Ciji!” face. (Strangely, the full emotional impact of Val’s death isn't felt until her return.)Just as Sydney St James eventually stabbed her husband to death on FALCON CREST so Vanessa Hunt finally kills her English weirdo on KNOTS, just as he is about to shoot Nick. His death enables Val to come out of hiding and stop dyeing her hair. The sweet scene where she is reunited with Bobby and Betsy echoes her first reunion with them after they were kidnapped as babies. And it’s all thanks to Vanessa!It’s a really great series finale, crammed full with exciting twists and turns, whilst allowing nearly everyone to achieve some kind of open-ended closure. (Of all the characters' farewell scenes, the most moving is, surprisingly, between Anne and Paige.) Plus, Abby’s back!</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?