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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 203154" data-attributes="member: 22">Barbecue (DALLAS, 30 Apr 78) v Barbecue Five (DALLAS, 07 Dec 84)What leaps out immediately from Barbecue is Bobby and Pam’s youth and optimism. Newlyweds with a baby on the way, they’re certain love can heal all wounds — even the Barnes/Ewing feud. Of course, they’ll know better by the end of the hour. Their young love is mirrored by Miss Ellie and Digger’s stroll down memory lane to when they too were sweethearts.Barbecue’s a unique episode in that it’s the only time the action is seen through the eyes of two neutral observers, caterers Tilly and Sam. They’re not especially cynical, but neither are they overly concerned. They’re just not hugely surprised when it all starts to go wrong.It’s interesting to see the news of Pam’s pregnancy spread through the party. First to know are some nameless extras, then Tilly and Sam, and then Lucy who delights in breaking the news to Ray and Sue Ellen, neither of whom are pleased, but for different reasons. After putting on a brave face to congratulate Pam (who’ll return the favour when Sue Ellen’s pregnancy is announced in Act of Love), Sue Ellen lets rip at JR and then has her first drunk scene.While Tilly and Sam are DALLAS's first black characters, Lucy makes the show’s first gay reference. “You don’t like boys, do you … you know, in that way?” she asks Pam’s cousin Jimmy. Six years later, she brings Eddie Cronin to the barbecue. “As long as he’s not a Barnes, that’s all I care about,” says JR.The closing ten minutes of Barbecue is especially great: Sue Ellen drunk on a horse, JR badmouthing Pam, Bobby knocking him to the ground, then JR crawling up behind Pam in the hayloft, slurring his words with a split lip — all set against an open Texas backdrop. It feels cinematic, novelistic, saga-like, in a way the series rarely would once it settled into its televisual groove.“I don’t wanna lose another son,” Jock tells Pam after her miscarriage, while outside in the dark, Sue Ellen asks JR if he’s sorry that she lost the baby. He doesn’t reply. “Are you comin’ in?” she asks him hopefully. By this point, the Ewings feel more like a weird collection of screwed-up individuals than they do a family. The mini-series ends on two opposing notes. One is hopeful — after Jock admits “we’ve had things our way so long that maybe it got in the way of us being just people”, there’s the implication that Pam’s continued presence at Southfork might be the thing that will humanise the Ewings. The other note is a lot darker — the suggestion that Sue Ellen wants to use the loss of Pam’s baby to her and JR's dysfunctional advantage. But it’s all left unspoken, hanging in the air.By Barbecue Five, Bobby and Pam are almost unrecognisable as those fresh-faced lovers. Now divorced, both seem possessive, even obsessive, of their subsequent love interests. Pam launches a salvage operation and consults a psychic in the hopes of raising her fiancee from the dead, while Bobby stalks his current girlfriend when she goes to meet her ex-husband for dinner.Whereas the original Ewing barbecue took up nearly its entire episode, the party in Barbecue Five is allotted twelve minutes of screen time at the end of the ep, with scarcely any reference to it beforehand. At the first barbecue, JR drank a toast with Digger over their shared dismay at Bobby and Pam’s marriage. At this barbecue, he celebrates the fact “this is the first time in years a member of the Barnes family's not here.” Instead of Digger entertaining the extras with a drunken rendition of ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’, there’s Jamie and Marilee Stone having a punch up in the pool. In place of Bobby threatening to take Pam and leave Southfork, there’s JR ordering Jamie to pack her bags and get out. And in lieu of Jock and Digger arguing about who stole what from whom fifty years before, Jamie produces a legal document that appears to prove Jock stole Ewing Oil from Jason and Digger. And rather than the open-ended exchange between JR and Sue Ellen at the end of Barbecue, we get Clayton spelling out exactly what we can expect from the rest of the season: “JR and Bobby may just have a real fight on their hands for control of Ewing Oil!”And the winner is ... Barbecue.BONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]8tCeHOWbBPc[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?