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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 263965" data-attributes="member: 22">The Ewing Blues (DALLAS, 07 Jan 83) v The Ewing Connection (DALLAS, 19 Apr 85)In The Ewing Connection, Donna, who is separated from Ray, tells Miss Ellie that their main problem is that he can’t deal with her being successful. “The reason that I dropped out of politics was because it made Ray uncomfortable,” she recalls. Rewind two years to The Ewing Blues, however, and Ray is actually talking her into staying in politics when, discouraged at her inability to persuade her fellow committee members to rescind JR’s oil variance, she considers quitting the TEC. “You stay there and you fight!” he urges her.Both episodes — indeed, both seasons — revolve around an ongoing battle for Ewing Oil. In Ewing Blues, Bobby and JR are fighting each other for control of it; in Ewing Connection, they’re fighting to prevent Cliff and Jamie from claiming two-thirds of it. In each ep, there’s a complicating factor. In ’85, it’s the arrival of Jamie’s long lost brother Jack, who claims to have hard evidence that “the Dallas Ewings own Ewing Oil” — but wants 10% of the company before he’ll tell them what it is. Even more controversial are Ellie's plans in '83 to have Jock declared incompetent  so she can break his will and sell 100% of the company. Pam’s support of her mother-in-law brings her into the orbit of one Mark Graison, who foresees stormy times ahead for her and Bobby. “I have a very strong marriage and we’ve survived lots of storms,” she tells him firmly.Two years later, over an intimate dinner with Bobby, from whom she is now divorced, Pam pinpoints the moment those storms turned fatal: “After JR was shot, nothing was ever the same, was it?” “You and I were on our way to California,” Bobby remembers. “Then the family found us and asked us to come back and I took over control of the company until JR got better.” “And after that, you never got the company out of your blood,” she says, before adding wistfully, “We could have gotten a house of our own … I think things would have worked out differently for us if we’d gotten away from the Ewing family.” Strange then that in Enigma (1986), as she and Bobby are about to remarry, Pam seems perfectly happy to move back to Southfork. “I have some good memories here — well, not all good memories!” she laughs.While Lucy is still at the insult stage of her pre-courtship with Mickey in ’83 (“Underneath all that cockiness, you’re basically pretty nasty”), she's at the polite conversation stage of her pre-reconciliation with Mitch in ’85. “How’s Afton and your mama doing?” she enquires. “Fine,” Mitch replies, neglecting to mention that Afton must be about to give birth to Julie Gonzalo around about now.Two years earlier, Afton tries to act cool and hard to get when Cliff invites her round to his new condo — but still ends up eating Chinese takeout while listening to him complain as he watches JR and Sue Ellen being interviewed by Roy Ralston on TV. Cliff makes much more of an effort to celebrate Jamie  moving in with him  in '85 — serving up cherries flambé, no less — but this time, she's the one preoccupied by a Ewing: Jack.“Some call him a saint, some call him a sinner,” says Roy Ralston in his talk show introduction to JR, a description reminiscent of the one bestowed on BD Calhoun (“a man one state department spokesman terms a rebel who should be hunted down; a man others have hailed as the spirit of America reborn”) in the PBS documentary JR watches in Enigma.In Ewing Blues, John Ross scampers round his daddy’s office and seems particularly taken with a model oil rig JR has on his desk. Is this the same model oil rig John Ross hurls across his apartment in anger during The Enemy of My Enemy twenty-nine years later and then later tries to glue back together? I’d sure like to think so.And the winner is ... The Ewing BluesBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]MctIMYxTfTk[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?