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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 258787" data-attributes="member: 22">D.T.R. (DALLAS, 24 Mar 14) v Election (DALLAS, 05 Nov 78)As cowgirl Heather explains to Christopher, DTR stands for “Define the Relationship” — but it also works as an acronym for the Daughters of the Texas Revolution, the group Governor McConaughey is on his way to address when he is doorstepped by Sue Ellen. From his description of the DTR — “three hundred daughters with three hundred guns in their purses; that’s a group of ladies you don’t keep waiting” — they sound like a larger and more militant version of the DOA (aka  Daughters of the Alamo), the charity organisation Sue Ellen was a member of in the early years of ’80s DALLAS.During Election, Sue Ellen hosts a DOA event where both the Ewing-endorsed senatorial candidate, Martin Cole, and his rival, Cliff Barnes, are guest speakers. She and Cliff take the opportunity to do some illicit flirting. “I didn’t realise you were interested in politics,” he says. “I’m not,” she replies, “but certain politicians interest me a lot.” By 2014, of course, she has not only acquired an interest in politics, but has even run for office, only for her campaign to be scuppered at the last moment when some illegal activity in her past is exposed — which is precisely what happens to Cliff in 1978.In Election, JR is looking for dirt to use against Cliff; in DTR, Sue Ellen is looking for dirt to use against McConaughey — hence the bottle of JR Ewing bourbon she presents him with that just happens to have a bug in its cork. JR has no need of such high-tech wizardry, not when he has Cliff’s own sister sitting across the dinner table ready to blurt out inconvenient truths.We learnt about Pam’s secret past in Double Wedding and Jock’s in The Dove Hunt, and in Election, it’s Cliff’s turn. In lieu of an ex-spouse, he has a dead fiancee, Penny. Just as Amanda Ewing’s mental breakdown and Pam’s elopement with Ed Haynes were placed in a real world historical context — the early, dangerous days of wildcatting and the Vietnam draft respectively — Penny’s death was the result of a botched abortion that took place only a few years before such procedures were legalised. Like Vietnam, abortion was also a component of Ginger Ward’s back story in Constant Companion (KNOTS Season 1). Back when these episodes were first broadcast, a woman’s right to choose was a controversial topic. (Still is, come to that.) While KNOTS sidestepped the issue by making it clear that Ginger was forced into an abortion by her mother, DALLAS’s treatment of the subject matter can be read in two different ways. One interpretation is that the show punishes Penny for deciding to end her pregnancy by killing her on the operating table. The other is that her death is depicted as a tragedy that could have been avoided had abortion been legally available just a few years earlier.“Barnes just broke the cardinal rule of politics: Never get caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman,” JR declares in 1978*. If he were still around in 2014, he might have added, “Never get caught with a hooker in a dog costume or accepting bribes from the railroad commissioner or running your own brothel or profiteering from illegal black ops” — all of which are grist for the blackmail mill in DTR. Bobby and Sue Ellen’s discovery that Governor McConaughey has been in receipt of illegal campaign contributions — the same kind of contributions Cliff indignantly refuses in the opening scene of Election — gives them sufficient leverage to get John Ross’s permit to frack for oil on Southfork rescinded.Penny’s abortion in 1968 and the explosion that killed Cliff's unborn grandchildren in 2013 are in no way comparable, save for that fact that the abortion is the reason Cliff loses the election in Election while in New DALLAS, he thinks that the explosion is the reason Pamela helped the Ewings frame him for JR’s murder — until he speaks to her in DTR and realises that she genuinely believes he killed JR. He then instructs Elena and Nicolas to find a way to drive a wedge between Pamela and the Ewings in order to get her back on his side. This sets in motion a thrilling chain of dramatic events. (To be fair, pretty much everything that happens in New DALLAS sets in motion a thrilling chain of dramatic events.)Cliff starts off Election assured and confident and ends it feeling bitter and betrayed by his own family. The same thing happens to John Ross in DTR. He returns from his honeymoon with Pamela ready to claim what’s his: namely, the oil under Southfork. He has no idea what Bobby and Sue Ellen are up to and, throughout the episode, he regards his uncle smugly from a distance. Early on, he spies Bobby on horseback watching him as he inspects the Southfork drill site, and gives him a self-satisfied wave. Later, he’s flirting with his new secretary at Ewing Global when he sees Bobby across the reception area and smiles at him cockily. Later on, however, the smirk is wiped from his face when he sees Bobby announced on TV as the new Texas Railroad Commissioner. Realising he’s been betrayed and outmanoeuvred by those closest to him, John Ross explodes. In Election, Cliff likewise receives a nasty shock from the media when a TV news crew shove a microphone in his face as they inform him that he “has just been implicated in the abortion death of a young woman who was his fiancee.” It takes him a little longer than John Ross to figure out it was his nearest and dearest who let the cat out of the bag, but then he too goes nuts. Both men end up accusing the women closest to them of betrayal. “You live with vipers, you become a viper!” yells Cliff at his sister. “You wanna betray me? Do it to my face!” John Ross shouts at his mother down the phone.Sue Ellen has great fun in both episodes: she daringly consorts with Cliff in a hall full of prim matrons in Election and outwits her old adversary McConaughey in DTR. “The family that blackmails together stays together,” she quips to Bobby, sounding more like JR than she ever has before or will again. But by the end of each ep, the consequences of her game-playing have caught up with her. In ’78, she watches unhappily as Cliff suffers a bitter defeat at the hands of her husband. “I was just thinkin’ how nice it would have been if JR didn’t get what he wanted for once,” she tells Pam tipsily. Thirty-six years later, she likewise uses alcohol to cushion the blow, reaching for her hip flask after hearing her son’s threatening phone message: “Now I know I got another enemy I gotta look out for — I ain’t gonna forget this!”During arguments with Pam in ’78 and John Ross in ’14, Bobby gives each of them a lesson in family history. To his wife, he talks about the Ewings (“My daddy built an empire because he was smarter than the next guy and he worked harder and he was luckier, but anybody with the same qualifications can do the same thing”); to his nephew, he talks about the Southworths (“Southfork is my trust from Aaron Southworth, a man who understood the value of preserving this family’s heritage, of protecting it, that was passed down to me by Mama and, I’ll be honest, sometimes I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse”). It’s interesting to compare the certainty of the younger man (“anybody with the same qualifications can do the same thing”) with the ambivalence of his older self (“sometimes I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse”).While Bobby’s confrontation with John Ross is the end-of-episode climax of DTR, he is also instrumental in healing the rift between Cliff and Pam in the final scene of Election. The see-sawing nature of Bobby and Cliff’s relationship, which began in Double Wedding, escalates here. At one point, he knocks Cliff’s feet off his desk in anger, but they end the scene smiling at each other and shaking hands.In Digger’s Daughter, Jock warned JR of the dangers of turning competitors into enemies and enemies into fanatics. The final moments of both of these episodes provide examples of this. “If I know my brother, it’s just beginning,” predicts Pam in Election. Cut to Cliff on the phone agreeing to sell his soul to the big corporations he was so disdainful of in the opening scene. “I’ve just become a realist,” he says drily. At the end of DTR, after Christopher tells John Ross he’s even more selfish than his father ever was, John Ross informs Bobby that his and Sue Ellen’s plan to stop him won’t succeed: “If you wanna build a roadblock between me and drilling Southfork, fine — go ahead. If I’m as bad as my father ever was, I’ll blow right past it.”(*although that saying wouldn’t officially exist in the real world for another five years: <a href="http://www.tellytalk.net/threads/barnes-just-broke-the-cardinal-rule-of-politics-never-get-caught-in-bed-with-a-live-man-or-a-dead-woman.10019/" target="_blank">http://www.tellytalk.net/threads/barnes-just-broke-the-cardinal-rule-of-politics-never-get-caught-in-bed-with-a-live-man-or-a-dead-woman.10019/</a>)And the winner is ... by a whisker, ElectionBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]OFKI986u3k0[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

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