New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 265158" data-attributes="member: 22">Ewing-Gate (DALLAS, 01 May 81) v Ewing Inferno (DALLAS, 06 May 8)It’s a season finale double bill!Miss Ellie only appears in one scene of each finale. In Ewing-Gate, she calls JR from Paris where the writers have despatched her and Jock because of Jim Davis’s illness. In Ewing Inferno, her role is again reduced because of ill health, this time BBG’s own, as Clayton insists on taking her away from all the sturm and drang at Southfork. With the exception of Ray and Donna’s scenes, everything in Ewing-Gate revolves around the senate investigation into Ewing Oil’s involvement in the counterrevolution in South East Asia. Ellie tells JR she will try to keep the news of the investigation away from Jock; two years later, Clayton will be in the same position, trying to keep the news of the Southfork fire away from her.With Mama and Daddy away, JR’s running the show at Southfork and there’s an undercurrent of instability running through Ewing-Gate. It has that insanely exciting end-of-season vibe where it feels like the entire series is somehow teetering on the edge of a cliff. Two years later in Ewing Inferno, it feels as if the show has already fallen off that cliff. In other words, the worst has already happened: “My wife is incapable of anything … Mama’s so broken up I can’t even face her … If you and Pam ever get back together, it’ll be a miracle.” Even Aunt Lil believes her paralysed and comatose son Mickey “would be better off dead.”  Yet the season somehow manages to end on yet another cliffhanging catastrophe. This arises out of the seemingly irrelevant question of “Who was driving the car that hit Sue Ellen and Mickey?”, which initially appears to exist just to give Ray something to obsess over, but which ultimately results in a fight to the death between him and JR, which in turn leads to Southfork going up in flames.Leslie Stewart is JR’s female opponent in Season 3; in Season 5, it’s Holly Harwood. By Ewing Inferno, JR and Holly have already inflicted all the damage they can on one another. In Ewing-Gate, Leslie has one last betrayal left up her sleeve as she and Jeremy Wendell put their snowy white heads together and join forces against JR. In the Post-Pam’s Dream era, Jeremy is shown to have a deep-seated grudge against the Ewings (“That family has been a thorn in my side for longer than I care to remember”), but when he first appears in Season 3, he and JR are portrayed as friendly business associates. When Leslie asks him in this episode, “Why are you so determined to get JR?”, his answer is interestingly pragmatic: “If JR is prosecuted and found guilty, Ewing Oil will be stripped of its state charter. The biggest independent oil company in the south west will simply cease to exist. It’s less competition for West Star — and the satisfaction of JR’s knowing I helped put him away.” It will take another six seasons, but Jeremy will eventually achieve his aim, only then he will be driven by revenge rather than pragmatism — even though the origin of that revenge will remain unclear.While JR is in Houston bribing politicians prior to the hearing, Sue Ellen arranges to snatch John Ross from Southfork. She’s moments from escaping her miserable life as a Ewing and making a new one with her son and the man she loves when JR returns home unexpectedly, grabs the kid and has his security guards throw her off the ranch. “I’m gonna to have him!” she screams as she is dragged away from her son. “I’ll kill you first!” he snarls in reply. A year earlier, it was JR’s life that was being threatened by all and sundry, now he gets to return the favour.Both finales include a great Pam/JR clash where she condemns him for his treatment of Sue Ellen (“Give her her child, she loves him!" she yells in '81. "She should have him just for putting up with you all these years!”; “Sue Ellen wasn’t enough for you so you fell in bed with the first available woman!” she snaps in ’83), only for JR to retaliate by going for the jugular (“No wonder you care so much for Sue Ellen. She’s just like your mother – another drunken slut who ran away!”; “Climb down off your soapbox, honey — what were you doing with Mark Graison in the South of France, holding hands? … Or did you try a few Frenchmen just cos you were there?”) “Stay out of my way, Pamela, or I’ll destroy you!” he warns her in Ewing-Gate. “Damn, I hate that woman,” he mutters after she slaps him in Ewing Inferno.He also threatens Kristin when she shows up at Ewing Oil, as sexy and greedy as ever but maybe a little more unhinged, and demanding even more money. “I picked up some very expensive habits in California,” she explains. On her way out of JR's office, she slyly asks him to “give my love to Sue Ellen.” Ten years later in The Decline and Fall of the Ewing Empire, Dusty will deliver almost the same line on his way out of JR’s office: “Give my regards to Sue Ellen. Oh that’s right, I forgot — she dumped you.”The senate hearing in Ewing-Gate sums DALLAS up in a nutshell: it’s simultaneously really dumb and really clever. Most of the witness testimony is pretty flimsy while JR’s defence is smart and witty. Just as he does when defending his cut-rate gas stations on TV in The Ewing Blues, he poses as a progressive on the witness stand, claiming the money he paid to the deposed Asian government was for philanthropic reasons, “to dispel the image of the ugly American”. Cliff, meanwhile, reverts to the same role he had in Digger’s Daughter, that of committee counsel interrogating Ewing Oil associates during a televised court proceeding. Back then, he was merely trying to prove that the Ewings paid for hookers, now the stakes are a lot higher.Both sides of Cliff and Bobby’s volatile relationship are on display in this ep. After the senate committee rules in JR’s favour, Cliff is angry enough to threaten to file charges against Bobby of showing his brother the evidence the state had on him, yet is still willing to meet him out at Southfork to discuss the matter first — which is how he ends up in the pool holding a mystery dead woman.So who’s dead in the pool? The prime suspects are, of course, Sue Ellen, Pam and Kristin. But four decades after the fact, another (remote) possibility occurs to me: JR’s secretary Louella, whom he abruptly fires after the hearing for failing to get the prosecution’s chief witness out of the country. She could easily have found her way to the ranch looking for a little payback and ended up taking a fatal dip.And the winner is ... Ewing InfernoBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]zcua9XzKVas[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?