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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 246379" data-attributes="member: 22">The Deadly Game (DALLAS, 17 Jan 86) v Dear Hearts and Gentle People (DALLAS, 23 Feb 90)The Deadly Game is from that strange part of the Dream Season where almost everything has started to feel a bit drab. Sue Ellen is stuck behind a desk organising fund-raising dinners for Graison Research, Donna is learning sign language and Miss Ellie finds herself in a weirdly nonsensical plot where’s she keeps buying up Clayton’s failing businesses behind his back. Four years later in Dear Hearts and Gentle People, she and Clayton are involved in another storyline that’s as dumb as a box of hair as the beneficiaries of Atticus Ward’s will start dying like flies, but at least that one’s kind of fun.The one remaining bit of glamour and mystery in The Deadly Game is provided by Angelica Nero and Grace. JR, smelling a rat in their convoluted Jack Ewing/Dimitri Marinos doppelgänger scheme, lays his half of the Marinos deal off on the cartel. It's exactly what he did with South-East Asian oil leases six years earlier, and the fact that they're falling for the same trick all over again makes them seem like real dum-dums.As a glamorous businesswoman with a foreign accent, Stephanie Rodgers feels like a direct descendant of Angelica Nero. Her feud with JR in Dear Hearts, over his belief that she should be at home cooking dinner for her husband rather than conducting meetings in a wide-brimmed hat, feels pretty basic (no doppelgängers in this storyline), but they spark off each other really well.Both episodes contain a not-very-promising plot about a business venture that has nothing to do with oil. In The Deadly Game, Pam is all excited about an emerald mine in Colombia, but it’s really because she’s still hung up on Bobby. In Dear Hearts, April is not as excited as she should be about her and Michelle’s nightclub venture because she too is still hung up on Bobby. While Pam’s decision to visit the mine in person is met with anger by Mark Graison (supplying the episode’s one moment of genuine conflict), April’s decision to abandon the nightclub deal and visit her mama in Springdale is met with frustration by her sister and partner, the lovely Michelle.There’s a strange atmosphere at Southfork in The Deadly Game: everyone is wearing rictus smiles and being really nice to each other like they've quietly been replaced by the Stepford Ewings — everyone, that is, except Jenna, who just squirms and looks uncomfortable, and who can blame her? Conversely in Dear Hearts, things are so acrimonious at the ranch that JR can't even bear to be under the same roof as Cally. He moves into a hotel where he and Serena the hooker exchange double entendres about putting his key in her ignition.Both episodes end with JR taking steps to rid himself of a pesky female, one in the office, one at home. In ’86, we discover that the whole emerald mine shebang is a plot of JR’s to get Pam out of Ewing Oil. In ’90, he takes a sharpie to Cally’s portrait of him that hangs in his office and scribbles over the word “Ewing” in her signature. Symbolic or what?And the winner is ... Dear Hearts and Gentle PeopleBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]g_WzAcH8Xpg[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

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