Tearing down Ray and Donna spoils the 1986-87 season for me

[Spooky Owl!]

Season 10 only gets a pass because it was a final hurrah to the iconic cast of 1979 to 1987 and we got some decent storylines but the dream reveal is a stain that cannot be erased.

Season 10 is like a Shakespearean seance for DALLAS -- the year that typified everything that DALLAS had been all about.

But it had already been killed. Killed by recasting the Emmy-winning matriarch of the biggest TV on earth, and then by explaining away an entire season as a dream in a single two-minute scene. (Two shockingly bizarre decisions, even at the time).

DALLAS was now a corpse, briefly reanimated in ectoplasmic form, Hamlet's ghost on the planes of Texas, the program revisiting its routes one final time before shutting down for good following Pam careening underneath that propane/butane tanker as a metaphor.

I didn't have to happen that way. But it did. And, oh, it really did!

Nothing mattered anymore. And yet everything did.


"Did you build it, Ray, or did you buy it?? I just can't keep up...!"

 

[Jock Ewing Fan]

Ray/Donna in season 9 just didn't work IMHO

Granted, I thought the entire season was substandard, didn't even look like Dallas,

and the characters seemed inconsistent with their earlier selves.

Interesting that the show didn't follow through with a JR/Pam partnership, which was the possible direction

earlier in the series. It just didn't work, and the show seemed to lack direction.

Ray/Donna's difficulties in season 10 were inevitable, perhaps, but when Susan Howard departed,

it really impaired the show's dynamics.

I always thought that Ray/Donna were the underrated stabilizing element of the show,

and when that ended, the show kept going downhill

 

[Mustard]

Speaking of Ray and Donna's house, there was a continuity error. Remember that their house was flooded in the dream season, and they moved into the main Southfork house briefly, before moving to a new house? Well, in Season 10 DVD they weren't back in their original house

 

[Piggyrella Sanderson]

Speaking of Ray and Donna's house, there was a continuity error. Remember that their house was flooded in the dream season, and they moved into the main Southfork house briefly, before moving to a new house? Well, in Season 10 DVD they weren't back in their original house

Actually there wasn´t such an error. Remember that Donna separated from Ray and was living at Southfork. We didn´t see Ray at (any kind of) home in "Return to Camelot" so he might have been living at the house he made.

 

[Jock Ewing Fan]

I keep forgetting that Donna was with Cliff for a time.

Very few, if any, Ray & Cliff scenes. The Oil Barons Ball and JR/Sue Ellen second wedding, and there were other characters there in both