New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 237031" data-attributes="member: 22">The Children's Hour (KNOTS, 12 Nov 92) v China Dolls (KNOTS, 29 Apr 82)The highlight of The Children's Hour is a speech Gary delivers in the Mackenzie kitchen after returning from a fruitless search for Val in Florida. Coming from almost anyone else it could easily seem gloopy and sentimental, but Ted Shackelford, who couldn’t fake an emotion if he wanted to, makes it sound like something a real person might say. “You two are what Val and I always wanted,” he tells Karen and Mack. “We always held your marriage up as a kind of ideal. I mean, ‘Mack and Karen’ - it was never any question, right? Val and I never had that. The way we hurt each other year after year, it was a miracle that it lasted, but it was our miracle.”China Dolls, of course, contains a perfect example of “the way we hurt each other” — Gary and Abby’s affair. Val can’t or won’t face the truth, but pretty much everyone else knows what's going on. “Gamblers always lose — because they want to,” a not so subtle Joe Cooper tells Gary. “I can’t imagine my life without you,” Gary tells Val as the guilt starts to kick in. But when he tries to quit the affair cold turkey, being trapped inside the same house with her becomes a kind of torture. In The Children’s Hour, he doesn’t have to imagine being without her because she’s already gone.Gary becomes consumed by jealousy over Abby. Hearing laughter coming from her house at night, he storms across the cul-de-sac, in full of view of Val, and demands to be let in. It turns out the laughter’s coming from Abby’s kids. He drops by the same house ten years later to find Kate Whittaker dealing with another unwelcome ex-lover, Alex Barth, whom she has just discovered has been “fornicating with her best friend on a continual basis.”China Dolls is all about character. Purely in terms of plot, you could skip it completely and not miss anything — the episode ends as it begins, with Gary and Abby in each other’s arms, and Val no more certain about their relationship than she was at the start. “I’m not saying we’re having an affair and I’m not saying we’re not,” taunts Abby when she finally plucks up the courage to ask her about it. Meanwhile, Laura’s struggle about whether or not she should return to Richard is completely internal.Both episodes contain a great face slap — the one everyone remembers where Val whacks Abby in China Dolls, and one in The Children’s Hour where Paige finds a down on his luck Alex drunk in Greg’s office. He makes a few personal remarks about her and Greg then tries to interest her in some soapy sex on a desk. She smacks him in the face then fires him.I’ve always found Nicholas, the LSD and/or Vietnam casualty whom Karen meets when she visits Richard at the sanatarium in China Dolls, an interesting character. (She’s brought along a picnic breakfast, payback for the breakfast Richard surprised her with at the hospital at the start of the season perhaps). Nicholas tells her he “was at Monterey with Hendrix” — the famous 1967  festival where Anne Matheson sang with Mamas and the Papas — and is haunted by visions of three little girls (just as Val was a few months earlier) whom he describes as china dolls. “We’re all just china dolls,” he concludes.In The Children’s Hour, Anne is engaged to and pregnant by Greg and seems genuinely happy for the first time. (She even selflessly encourages him to come out of retirement and join the post-LA riots task force.) In the Ewingverse, happy also means vulnerable — or breakable like a china doll. So when Nick Schillace turns up in Anne's life without warning for the third time, it feels more important than it has previously — now she has something to lose. Sure enough, at the end of the episode, she finds out she was never pregnant in the first place.And the winner is ... China DollsBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]yB8oQguaCOc[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?