I can rationalize the Season 2 and Season 9 versions easily enough, even throwing in the Season 5 "reconciliation" before Blake throws Alexis out a second time -- had that second reconciliation not gone on for "months" and having happened, supposedly, as early as 1963.
I don't mind retcons so much as long as an umbrella explanation can canopy them all, or even a character's "mistake" can be cited in the script to explain the discrepancies or contradictions, even humorously (e.g., "Why does mother say you were only married for 7 years?" to which someone, like Blake, can respond, "Because she doesn't count the last three" or even "Alexis has always lied about her age.")
Alexis' -- to say nothing of Joan's -- selective memory is the go-to central point with which to explain all continuity errors.
DALLAS, even in its best years, had those back story continuity issues -- actually, quite a lot of them (e.g., were Ellie and Jock married in 1930 or 1936 or 1938? Were Pam and Bobby born in late 1952, or Patrick's true birthyear of 1949 and Victoria's of 1997? Were JR and Sue Ellen married in 1971 or 1970? Was Sue Ellen Miss Texas in 1967 or 1968? Were Punk and Mavis Anderson married 10 years or 25? and perhaps, after a brief estrangement, they renewed their vows after 15 years "and started the count all over again", etc ...)
This kind of boo-boo is inevitable in a long-running show, even the best-produced among them. But there were far too many discrepancies in DYNASTY, oft-stated ones.
The above point is a good one: why couldn't Alexis have left Denver pregnant without a "reconciliation" required in the dialogue?
This is how I've long-aligned the Dynastic history:
*Alexis married Blake at age 17 (as women often did in the 1950s) just after her birthday in 1954. It follows a whirlwind romance that seems to involve Moldavia and Cecil Colby. And probably her predatorily opportunistic mother, Minx.
*Adam is born around March 1955, kidnapped off the street six months later, in September 1955; he returns to Denver in 1982 at 27 years old.
*There is a housefire in the summer of 1955, which leads Blake to purchase the mansion and move into it -- but how can he afford it, if Denver-Carrington wasn't founded until 1958? (I've always thought 1953 made more sense -- but perhaps he'd had a false start with a start-up company which was re-christened as "Denver-Carrington" in 1958). And was the Summer 1955 fire the one that killed Ellen Carrington, when that was, according to Season 6,
before Blake and Alexis were married? But then, perhaps housefires were a recurrent issue for the Carringtons... And it can be stated that Blake's assertion that his mother died when he was only "four" was a benign fib to protect his babies from the horror of the truth about the fire(s) just as he kept from Fallon & Steven any knowledge that they'd once had a big brother who'd went away suddenly.
*How could Blake's mother have left a huge crater to her son if his parents were impoverished? And how could Adam assert that he belongs to one of the oldest and most respected families in Colorado when Blake has only been rich and famous for a mere 30 years? Simple, Blake's mother, Ellen Lucy Fallon was a member of the (Catholic?) Fallon family dynasty of Colorado Spring (or Boulder or Aspen) who disowned and disinherited sweet Ellen when she dared marry a Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia, Tom Carrington... Tom cheated on and abused his bride, insodoing eventually fracturing his relationship with his eldest son, Blake, who, after WW2, set out for his mama's home state to become an oil wildcatter in the same industry the Fallon dynasty had made their millions... Tom had wound up running a small high seas shipping liner business and, even more oddly, came to own the company after the war, attempting to make amends with his son by offering Blake enough early funding to help with the necessary infrastructure to start up Denver-Carrington; Blake, suspicious immediately and not one to be bought, gives his father a small percentage of the company and its future profits, initially unaware of the shame of the true story behind Tom's new-found wealth (which would see a many-fold increase once Denver-Carrington exploded into success as the '50s progressed). Pleased that her son is doing so well, the Fallon family reabsorbs Ellen into their clan, reincluding her in the will just shortly before her own tragic death in that fire.
*Fallon was born around January 1956.
*Steven was born in late May 1957.
*(I won't go into my Alexis-had-Joseph's-baby-named-Kirby-in-1961-and-then-presents-the-infant-to-Alycia-in-the-hospital-which-drives-Mrs.Aynders-irreparably-insane scenario, although I love the theory, because it's just too weird for some fans).
*With jealous and vengeful Caress' whispers into his ears, Blake catches Alexis in bed with Roger Grimes -- in the master bedroom, no less! -- in June 1964, just three days after Steven's seventh birthday.
*Six weeks later,
if we need a reconciliation between Blake and Alexis, it can fall apart over a single weekend (not months, as Season 5 proffered, and not in 1963) and then, desperate and rejected yet again, she goes to find Roger Grimes, fresh out of the hospital from the beating he received at the hands of Blake the previous month.
*Perhaps the divorce -- quickie but nonetheless complicated -- was finalized in January 1965, vaguely supporting the "sixteen formative years" history laid out in the script from 1981 (although I always thought "17 years" would have given Blake, or Andrew Laird, an opportunity to snipe about "locust plague" cycles --- did Lucius ever say that about Cookie?? -- once Alexis returned to testify).
*The discrepancy about when Roger Grimes died (1964 in the cottage and tossed into the bottom of that lake, or 1981 "two months ago" in prison) can be explained with a shrug, Alexis claiming that the assistant D.A. had likely had no idea when Roger died and simply lied to her about it in order to manipulate her into returning to Denver to testify against her ex)... I'm assuming Roger's Dad was still in prison for kidnapping or dead himself by Season 9. And one supposes Nick Toscanni's contracting of the elder Grimes to steal Little Blake wasn't relevant to later storylines, but a mention might have been cozy.
But the ~15 year "mysterious" era between the mid-1960s and the beginning of the '80s seems implicitly fundamental to DYNASTY's identity, imperfect and suffocated and misguided as the show and its execution often was. Those "shadows" feel somehow real, at least whenever they tapped into that, whether deliberately or not. DYNASTY as a series was both out-of-control but yet over-controlled, and the imbalance didn't always work, the Carrington saga, with its rich potential so desperate to be mined, a bit less than the sum of its parts.
One could maybe find a way to apply that same ~1965 to 1980 era thing to the other shows as well, the cultural meltdown that began in the middle of the '60s, the murky, nightmarish phantasmagoria of the climaxing Cold War that existed when JFK was assassinated, followed by the counterculture psychedelic desolation of the late-'60s, then the melancholy refractory period of the 1970s, and the reunion of all these soapy people in the acquisitive, revisionism of the 1980s.
Say, DALLAS... the record-setting rating for the Whodunnit? episode wrap-up to the "Who Shot JR?" global cliffhanger, an unprecedented TV event, occurring on 21 November 1980, some seventeen years to almost the day after an infamous
real-life Dallas shooting -- one which would become arguably the greatest murder mystery in human history, the assassination of President Kennedy... That works for me in a weird way: many see JFK's death as the end of America as a democracy, such as it was, a literal coup d'état and a total capitulation to the military contractors and a federal government the corporations view as their business agents. And certainly the country has been moving consistently to the political right ever since (rhetorical leftist pretenses to the contrary), the decimation of the working class given its
coup de grâce under the auspices of President Reagan in the '80s, a man who ravaged the unions and anti-trust laws while eliminating the progressive tax structure (where the more you make the more you pay). Making it impossible for most Americans to recapture the opportunities or the "cultural values" of the 1950s which Ronald Reagan so extolled and nostalgized.
And that led us to where we are now in the States: a warlike late-stage capitalist country with the #1 economy in the world yet is #37 in quality of life. And that's about money. Money endlessly re-routed from the working class (and the former middle class) to the point that the corporate-crony government is 100% corrupt and does nothing for its people (and is constantly scheming to do even less) unless those people are of the billionaire donor class.
So the factual shooting of JFK and the fictional shooting of JR, both in Dallas and both occurring or wrapping up on 21/22 November, separated by seventeen years, seems meaningful. At least in terms of drama. At least inside my head.
I'm sure Jacqueline Perrault was up to nightmarish no good circa 1964... I postulate elsewhere that her Cuban casinos were nationalized by Castro in 1959, so she funded the CIA/anti-Castro rebels in their attempts to assassinate the premier, eventually turning the conspiracy back onto "uncooperative Stateside politicians," and in her hydra-headed efforts, facilitating gain-of-function development of super-viruses to kill him, her wildly-powerful linear particle generator located under a New Orleans children's hospital utilized in the related lab experiments, the resulting Simian mutations somehow seeping into the general population (as devastatingly happened in the '50s with the earliest polio vaccine) and coming to pandemic fruition in the '80s. (i.e., Lana Turner killed Kennedy and released AIDS into the world, the glamorous toxic bitch).
But where were all these people from 1965 until at least the end of the 1970s?? Dropping acid with Timothy Leary?, profiting obscenely from the Vietnam war (the one they call "the American war" in Vietnam)?, engaging in hippie orgies along the walkways of Haight-Ashbury city parks?, protesting something at Berkley?, opening a Carnaby Street boutique?, or, inevitably doing something -- or anything -- somewhere in Paris? Burning out and winding up in a cocaine and THC-laden disco haze, multiple rehabs in their recent pasts, before all agreeing to re-invent and re-identify themselves by returning to Denver (or to Southfork, or Knots Landing, or to that most-shadowy corner of Napa known as Tuscany Valley) at the onset of the decade of the 1980s -- to regroup, to make some money, or just to be seen.
Especially now that Angela Channing's ex-husband was in the White House.
I still say Roger Grimes was an Oswald-ian low-level intelligence grunt who hired on to the Carrington estate reconstruction project in 1963 to locate that crystal skull der Fuhrer's recently-widowed spouse was so determined to reclaim as her own, with a little help from her buds at the CIA.
