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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 227893" data-attributes="member: 22">The Call of the Wild (DALLAS, 11 Nov 88) v A Call to Arms (DALLAS, 08 Apr 13)The Call of the Wild feels like back-to-basics DALLAS with JR trying to recreate The Dove Hunt, the Season 2 episode where he and his brothers went hunting with Jock, by taking Bobby, John Ross and Christopher to Haleyville to shoot some wildlife. Meanwhile, Sue Ellen suggests to Cliff that they resurrect their Season 4 storyline by sleeping together to anger JR. Given that that story ended with his suicide attempt, it’s perhaps not surprising that Cliff turns her down.The 1988 version of Cliff is lethargic and depressed — he’s lost interest in both the Barnes/Ewing feud and the oil business and makes a half-hearted attempt to sell Barnes Wentworth to Jordan Lee. Twenty-five years later, he’s an old man, but one re-energised by hatred. Far from selling up, he gleefully announces his intention to foreclose on Ewing Energies and assures his daughter Pamela that they are about to get back everything the Ewings stole from Digger.Back in Haleyville, Christopher is chomping at the bit to kill some animals while John Ross is less keen. Talk turns to how sensitive Uncle Gary was back in the day. “He was different from the rest of us,” JR remembers scornfully. “For one thing, he used to like to write poetry. Now can you imagine a real man who would rather write poetry than go hunting? Not me!” It looks like history might be about to repeat itself as John Ross exhibits some Gary-like squeamishness in the field, much to JR’s disappointment. However, this rich seam of father/son conflict is abandoned mid-scene — John Ross suddenly pulls himself together, kills a deer, wins his father’s approval and never looks back. Perhaps John Ross is consciously choosing to repress his true feelings in order to present himself as a Ewing to be proud of, but the show doesn’t investigate further (perhaps deciding that the inner conflicts of a twelve-year-old boy are too complex for a child actor and/or a primetime soap to convey).Jumping straight from The Call of the Wild to A Call to Arms, one is struck by the physical resemblance between prepubescent John Ross and the somewhat babyfaced version in his thirties. In 2013, John Ross is still in conflict, this time over whether or not to tell Pamela Barnes that her father is responsible for the deaths of her unborn babies. When he does tell her, she accuses him of lying to exploit her grief and turn her against her father. “For once in my damn life, I told the truth. And she thought it was a move. I guess I’m like the boy who cried wolf.” Or the boy who didn’t want to shoot a deer, but pretended he did.Both episodes include a scene of Bobby explaining one of the basic realities of life to his nephew. In Haleyville, the Ewing men are about to sit down to a dinner of the birds JR killed that day. Seeing how bemused John Ross is, Bobby tells him that “long before there were stores, men had to go out and hunt for their food, put it on the table. Otherwise, they’d starve to death.” Twenty-five years later, he finds John Ross sitting in his recently deceased father’s bedroom, brooding about Pamela while nursing a glass of JR Ewing Bourbon. This time Bobby’s words of wisdom are closer to home: “If anyone in this house knows how complicated a relationship with a Barnes woman can be, it’s me. Whenever there was a conflict between me and my Pamela, she would choose her family and I would choose mine. As much as I loved her, I had to understand that she was a Barnes first, a Ewing second.”Bobby’s Pamela’s unseen presence hovers over both eps. In Call of the Wild, Bobby and Cliff are both are recovering from her brief reappearance played by someone else while in A Call to Arms, Christopher is trying to have her declared dead so that he can inherit her shares of Barnes Global and prevent Cliff’s takeover. As John Ross did in Haleyville, he puts on a brave face, insisting that Pam’s been dead to him since she abandoned him as a kid, but Elena can see he’s covering up and calls him on it. (It’s the characters’ inner turmoil that makes New DALLAS such a consistently emotional watch.) In both episodes, Sue Ellen drops by for a girly chat with her best friend of the moment. In 1988, she shocks April when she casually mentions her plan to use then dump Cliff. “Nobody wins every time,” she shrugs bitterly. In 2013, her concern for Ann that her daughter Emma might be using drugs turns into brittle defensiveness when Ann asks if she herself is still drinking. (In fact, Emma and Sue Ellen are both using — an echo of the 1979 ep when Sue Ellen and Lucy were getting simultaneously shitfaced at Southfork).There’s a very exciting scene in A Call to Arms when Cliff unwittingly gives himself away in front of Pamela and she realises everything John Ross said about him is true. It’s Val realising the truth about Danny on KNOTS all over again — except that finding out your father killed your babies is arguably a fraction worse than discovering your latest husband’s a serial rapist. While watching JR sweet-talk Cally into bed in Haleyville is fun, the sight of John Ross scooping a devastated Pamela up in his arms during a rainstorm and then carrying her inside Southfork is just … well, I believe the technical term is swoonalicious.And the winner is … A Call to ArmsBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]VuiR4AtH1fc[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?