It's been said before, including by me, that the forlorn cliffhangers of Spring 1985 seemed the precipice of the nighttime soap genre -- Bobby dies, Moldavia has its massacre, Val gets her babies back (the only time KNOTS ever hit #1 for the week), and there's that earthquake in Tuscany Valley that may have been delayed for another year but would have fit in nicely with this Spring 1985 funereal ambiance.
Perhaps these shows should indeed have ended right there (but I would have hated to have missed DALLAS' Season 10 -- per DVD count, DYNASTY's Season 9, or KNOTS for the rest of the decade).
During the 1985-'86 season, all the shows took on a tan, beige-y look to them visually, and became drably cluttered in cast size and story structure. (Even KNOTS, to a point, despite the presence of Paulsen). Then, towards the latter part of the season, FALCON CREST began flirting with that cheapy, film-edited-on-video post-production process which would ruin the Lorimar shows over the next three years after Telepictures took over. And DYNASTY, despite Aaron Spelling's refusal to adopt this new, down-market process because of the lousy visual result, nevertheless embraced
another post-production process which made the broadcast prints look so grainy and ruddy and washed-out, it looked just as bad or worse!
Spring of 1986 saw Bobby revived without explanation yet; Alexis took over the mansion and Blake's company, her crusade come full circle, and gets strangled on the landing; Napa finally had that earthquake that now felt passe; and I frankly forget what KNOTS did that May.
Ratings fell precipitously that year -- and not just because sitcoms made a comeback. The soaps felt tired, no longer focused, trying to "wing it" somehow which the viewers could sense. John Forsythe pointed out years later that "audiences can tell when there's something wrong with the scripts" and the stories (and the story flow) "and they lose interest in the project".
DALLAS and DYNASTY both had evil twins in 1986 (though Rita showed up a few months earlier) which seems a metaphor for something, these soaps revisiting their origins when Wes Parmalee and Alexis attempted to return to their "rightful" digs. (30 years later, one of the EMPIRE producers asserted that "once you go for the evil twin, you've lost your way;" one is tempted to reference the Nigerian brothers' scandal, and the lynching Trumpeter who never existed, but I won't).
I'd argue the Parmalee story worked better than the Rita Leslie plotline, but DALLAS' evil twin was connected to the series' entire backstory history, while DYNASTY's was mostly a way to fill time and force the golden heroine do things she wouldn't ordinarily allow.
But, well-executed or not, the evil twin trope might signal that a series has ripened, the fruit ready to drop from the tree. And how quickly the rot sets in just depends. After this point, the only good seasons these programs had was whenever David Paulsen wandered onto their sets and sprinkled his magical dust onto them (only KNOTS didn't really need him -- they had David Jacobs to preside over the proceedings).
