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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 249332" data-attributes="member: 22">Denial, Anger, Acceptance  (DALLAS, 18 Aug 14) v Denials (KNOTS, 15 Dec 83)Or: The One After the 2nd Southfork Fire and Pamela’s Sexy Overdose Versus The One After Chip Impales Himself on a Pitchfork. Phew, this is a very strong round.There’s a glorious pileup of storylines at Ewing-verse Memorial Hospital in 2014 as John Ross rushes his comatose wife into the emergency room to find half his family already there suffering from smoke inhalation. The storytelling is as taut as the metaphorical noose tightening around Drew Ramos’s neck, with everything impacting on everything else. I’m not sure, but this may well be the very first episode of DALLAS with no mention of JR, yet in the scene where Bobby lectures his remorseful nephew as they stand in the ruins of Southfork, he could just as easily be talking to his big brother: “You justify and then you ignore all the destruction you leave in your wake … Words are cheap. You are what you do. You want to be a better man? Be one.”DALLAS ends with the devastatingly brutal execution of Drew Ramos. Although his childhood friend Nicolas doesn’t actually pull the trigger, he nonetheless sanctions his death to save his own skin, but with customary New DALLAS ambivalence, does so with tears in his eyes. “With what I've done I'm going to Hell,” Drew tells him. “I’ll save you a seat.”Thirty-one years earlier on KNOTS, the characters must deal with the passing of another young man — only it’s not <s>Chip Roberts</s> Tony Fenice's bizarre death they are trying to make sense of, but his bizarre life. Like Greg did his father in The Deluge, Lilimae visits <s>Chip</s> Tony at the crematorium and, while she doesn't prise a ring off the deceased's finger as Greg did, neither does she pull her punches: “That smile of yours hides the hardest heart I’ve ever known," she tells <s>Chip </s>Tony. "You were hard and cold — but were you? Did you ever have a moment, a private moment when nobody could see, when you felt sorry for what you’d done, when you realised the hurt you’d caused and felt something?” The preacher at <s>Chip's</s> Tony’s funeral evidently never met him, but nevertheless makes a valiant attempt to explain who and why and how he was: “He chose a name for himself — Chip — a small piece of something cut away from the whole — which is all Chip wanted, to be something special and apart, yet part of the whole. He cherished his individuality yet he wanted to belong.”As both episode titles suggest, several characters are in denial: While Pamela denies her overdose was a suicide attempt (“I did what I did so that every time you think about screwing that piece of trash, all you'll be able to see is me on the floor with my eyes rolled back in my head — sexy, huh?” she snarls at John Ross), Diana refuses to believe Chip was the cold-hearted monster everyone else, including his own sister, knew him to be ("Chip and I had a love that nobody will ever understand!"). Then there's Sue Ellen and Karen, who spend most of their respective episodes wandering around in dressing gowns insisting they don’t have a dependency issue. When the doctor at Ewingverse Memorial Hospital tries to broach the subject of her drinking, Sue Ellen coldly denies she has a problem, while Karen is affronted when she overhears Val, Mack and Eric discussing her pill habit.These are two brilliant, but very different episodes, yet Diana Fairgate and Judith Ryland deliver remarkably similar speeches. Judith is consoling Emma who has been dumped by John Ross. “I know you think I’m weak and stupid to care for John Ross, but I can’t help it. It hurts being cast aside,” Emma tells her grandmother. "On the contrary, my dear," Judith replies. "The ability to feel pain is a gift. Feel that hurt. Nurture that hurt. Feed that hurt till it’s powerful enough to take vengeance on those that have wronged you.”Meanwhile, Abby tries to comfort Diana following the death of her husband. “I promise you there’ll come a day when it won’t hurt as much as it does now,” she tells her niece. “I want it to hurt," Diana insists. "I don’t want it to stop hurting, ever … because if it stops hurting I might forget and forgive and I don’t wanna forget and I hope I never forgive. As long as I hurt, I won’t be lonely because the pain will keep Chip with me and as long as I’m in pain I won’t forgive anybody who did anything to let this happen. I don’t wanna forgive. I wanna hurt and hate and keep him with me … I cherish the pain. It’s the only thing I have left of Chip and I’m not ever, ever going to let it go.”And the winner is ... impossible to decide. There's just too much pain to cherish in both episodes.BONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]b8drKcZln3c:46[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

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