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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 239815" data-attributes="member: 22">Constant Companion (KNOTS, 13 Mar 80) v Conundrum (DALLAS, 03 May 91)Constant Companion might just be the weirdest ever episode of KNOTS, weirder even than The Three Sisters. Pretty much the whole episode revolves around Ginger, who at this point is KNOTS’ least clearly defined character. It seems like someone’s trying to drive her crazy — or it could be that the episode itself has gone a little crazy. With the exception of the kids she teaches, who are just off-the-scale cute, every character Ginger encounters feels like an escapee from either SCOOBY DOO (such as the strangely tall and ornery school janitor) or TWIN PEAKS (such as the singing dwarf who declares that “life is full of surprises”). Or maybe Ginger, who we don't really know, is the weird one.Eventually, it turns out that the person gaslighting her is her dead boyfriend’s mom Beatrice whom we know better as Rebecca Wentworth on DALLAS. Whereas there was always something a bit distant, a bit chilly about Rebecca as a mother, here she’s the opposite — poignantly clinging to memories of her son's youth even after his death. The similarities between Beatrice and DYNASTY’s Mother Blaisdel, who likewise tormented the woman she blamed for the deaths of her son and grandchild via anonymously sent bouquets and spooky beyond-the-grave phone calls, are so obvious I can’t believe I never made the connection before. By the end of the ep, it does feel like we know Ginger a lot better than we did at the start, and it’s interesting that she chooses not to tell husband Kenny about her teenage abortion.While Constant Companion is weird in a fascinating way, Conundrum — the final episode of DALLAS's original run, in which JR visits an alternate universe where he was never born — manages to be weird in an incredibly boring way, so boring, in fact, that the last time I sat through it, I promised that I would never make myself watch it again. So I haven’t.Val gets a sweet and funny little subplot in Constant Companion where she studies for her high school equivalency test. It’s our first glimpse of her neurotic perfectionism and her first step on the path that leads her to write a best-selling novel or three. In Conundrum, an Alternate Val meets an Alternate Gary for the first time. He's a generic TV lawyer and she’s a generic TV divorcee and the whole thing’s as unremarkably generic as Constant Companion is downright peculiar.And the winner is ... Constant CompanionBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]xCJlaJNuj14[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?