James from London
International Treasure
14 Apr 14: DALLAS: Where There's Smoke v. 05 Oct 16: EMPIRE: What Remains is Bestial v. 25 Jan 19: DYNASTY: The Sight of You
During the series finale of FALCON CREST, Richard Channing rented three Cary Grant movies. In a 1990 episode of DALLAS, April described Cary Grant as “the greatest-looking man that ever lived.” Greg Sumner once said on KNOTS LANDING that Charles Scott “makes Pee Wee Herman look like Cary Grant.” And now, in the mid-season finale of New DALLAS's third season, Soap Land’s most referenced cultural figure finally appears onscreen. Alone at Southfork and intent on drinking herself into oblivion, Sue Ellen ignores the movie playing on TV, Hitchcock’s 'North by Northwest' starring Grant and Eva Marie Saint (the same film Danny Waleska once cited as an inspiration while attempting to drive Gary Ewing off a cliff).
From Cary to Carey. EMPIRE has been chockfull of pop culture references since it began: phone calls to Barack Obama, framed snapshots of Lucious with the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Tina Turner, cameo appearances by everyone from Al Sharpton to Snoop Dogg. Portraits of black music legends like Jimi Hendrix, Sammy Davis Jr and Mariah Carey adorn Empire’s office walls. This week, one of those legends — Mariah herself — steps off the wall and into the recording studio to sing a duet with Jamal. Confusingly, she does not appear as her pop diva self, but as another pop diva named Kitty. Kitty is super-talented, super-glamorous and super-nice in much the same way as the pop diva played by Alicia Keys was last season. Given that Carey’s own persona is so much more dazzling than Kitty’s, she seems kind of wasted in such a generic role.
While Carys Grant and Mariah are cultural references made Soap Land flesh and blood, Jerry Jones, real-life owner of the Dallas Cowboys football team, travels in the opposite direction. Having already cameoed as himself in ‘War of the Ewings’ and a couple of episodes of New DALLAS (he even attended JR’s memorial service), he receives a passing namecheck on this week's DYNASTY where Blake is in the process of putting together his own football team. “Jerry Jones paid $150,000,000 for the Cowboys — they’re worth $5 billion now,” he says. “Are you comparing yourself to Jerry Jones?” Culhane asks him.
The strange but irresistible paradox at the heart of DALLAS has always been that it’s about a multi-generational family of billionaires living all together in a house that’s too small for them. Just as he did at the start of this season, John Ross challenges this incongruity when, as a surprise for Pamela, he invites a pair of architects to the ranch to discuss expanding their living quarters. Bobby’s objection is pure soap opera: “Exactly what part of ‘I will not let you destroy Southfork’ did you not understand?!” he snarls at his nephew, who responds with real-world common sense: “I just wanna build a proper master suite for my new bride cos, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re sleeping in JR’s bedroom.”
Pamela, meanwhile, awakens from her night’s slumber to find a note from her lovin’ husband, inviting her to follow the trail of rose petals that lead from their bedroom to the outside of the house where “your morning surprise” awaits. She complies and is just feet away from John Ross — close enough to hear him talking about their idyllic new love nest with the architects — when disaster strikes, as it inevitably must in Soap Land whenever a character flies too close to the sun. Casually glancing down at her phone, she sees the “Now go home and kiss your wife” video of Emma and John Ross Nicolas sent her at the end of last week’s episode. Cue the opening credits.
After John Ross has left for the day none the wiser, Sue Ellen notices a puddle of water coming from under Pamela’s bathroom door. While the suicidal implication of this turns out to be a red herring — Pamela is found sitting in a daze next to an overflowing bathtub — it nonetheless foreshadows what will happen later in the episode. After talking to Sue Ellen and Ann, Pamela realises they’ve known about John Ross and Emma’s affair all along and is furious that they’ve kept it a secret. She’s not the only one. “We’re supposed to be partners, Annie!” Bobby yells at his wife. “What is it that’s so hardwired in you that you keep the most important events in your life secret from your husband? … I want Emma out of my house!”
Since it began at the end of last season, John Ross and Emma’s affair has impacted almost all the show’s major characters — Harris and Judith, Elena and Nicolas, Sue Ellen, and now, as we speed towards the mid-season finale, even Bobby and Ann’s marriage. Shaken by Bobby's anger, Ann turns to her ex-husband for support and, in true soap opera fashion, they end up kissing as if they were Maggie and Richard in the final moments of FALCON CREST Season 4 — only instead of a bomb going off, they are spied on by an incandescent Judith, which is possibly even more dangerous.
Judith also finds time for a sizzling whorehouse confrontation with John Ross. “We have a problem, Harris,” she informs her son after John Ross has gone. “One of the Dalmatians get loose?” Harris quips. I’m not sure if this is a reference to hookers in dog costumes or Cruella de Ville, but Cruella is an apt reference point for Judith’s striking appearance this week. In keeping with the ep's overall vibe of upside-down, nightmarish sexuality, her deathly white face is decorated with a gash of blood-red lipstick and framed by sexily tousled blonde hair. She looks glamorously grotesque. Or maybe grotesquely glamorous. One of the two.
Despite Sue Ellen and Ann’s assurances that their affair is over, Pamela tracks John Ross and Emma to a hotel and walks in to find them kissing on the bed. A familiar enough Soap Land scenario, but instead of being devastated and tearful as, say, Sue Ellen was when she found JR and Holly Harwood together, she remains eerily calm. Instead, it’s Emma and John Ross who are shocked to see her. After John Ross springs to his feet, Pamela’s hand reaches into her pocket. “Don’t do anything you’re gonna regret,” he says nervously. Then she looks at Emma, clocks her emerald corset — the same one they both wore earlier in the season — and smiles. “Love what you’re wearing,” she tells her. Then she turns back at John Ross and removes her coat to reveal an identical corset. “May I join you?” she asks them both. John Ross looks confused — as well he might.
This is the inverse of the scenario JR was confronted by in 1983 when, after he raped Holly in his office, she lured him to her bedroom with the promise of more sex. When he touched her, she pulled a gun on him. In both scenes, the viewer’s expectations, and those of the male character involved, are toyed with and then overturned. When JR found Holly reclining provocatively on a bed in her negligee, champagne chilling in an ice bucket, he anticipated a seduction — instead, he got a gun in his face. When Pamela reaches into her coat, John Ross fears she’s going to produce a gun — instead, she offers him something very different. In each instance, the woman plays the man at his own game, using his appetites and instincts to blindside him.
While John Ross remains rooted to the spot, Pamela kneels on the bed and beckons Emma to join her. They start kissing and Emma gets into it. John Ross doesn’t know what to do — it’s like a dream and a nightmare coming true at the same time: the woman he cherishes lowering herself to the level of a sex object, a fantasy. His wife and mistress both turn to look at him and it's like a challenge — how can he back out now? He hesitates and then, finally, takes off his shirt and joins them on the bed as the music starts: ‘Break on Through (To the Other Side)' by the Doors. Musical montages are pretty much a weekly occurrence in C21st Soap Land, but I think you’d have to travel back as far as Danny Waleska running Pat Williams down to the strains of ’You Are So Beautiful’ by Joe Cocker to find one as effective as this. After Jim Morrison starts to sing and John Ross kisses Pamela and Emma in turn, we cut to another bedroom scene where Nicolas is about to break on through the other side of Elena’s contraceptive device, having pricked some holes in it in an earlier scene. “We chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there,” croons Jim as Bo McCabe (whom we’ve already been warned is “coming for everyone at Southfork”) lights up a joint as he drives towards the ranch house where Sue Ellen is staggering from room to room in search of more booze (“She get high! She get high!” screams Jim). Bo pulls up, Sue Ellen passes out and a curtain goes up in flames. Meanwhile, Emma and Pamela smother John Ross’s torso in kisses, the three of them unconsciously mimicking the snapshot Harris took of John Ross with two underage two hookers on the morning of his wedding — only instead of fending them off, John Ross is lost in bacchanalian pleasure. Then Pamela gasps, but not in pleasure. She’s having some sort of seizure. John Ross and Emma look on in panic. Again, there’s a parallel between the situation we’re seeing and the song we’re hearing — or more specifically, the man singing it — Jim Morrison, the impossibly beautiful symbol of everything sensual and Dionysian about the ‘60s till the turn of the decade when he suddenly ended up fat, bloated and dead of an overdose in a Parisian bathtub. “Oh yeah!” he cries orgasmically, tauntingly, mockingly, on the soundtrack as Southfork blazes out of control.
According to Oscar Wilde, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” In C21st Soap Land, that goes double for oral sex: Fallon showing us who’s boss by having Culhane go down on her in the very first scene of New DYNASTY, Emma doing the same by ordering John Ross to “go home and kiss your wife” on New DALLAS, and this week, two scenes between the recent EMPIRE newlyweds. First, Anika knocks on the door of Lucious’s study asking if they can talk. He invites her in and she finds him sitting behind his desk, absorbed by computer screens monitoring the rate of subscriptions to his streaming service. “The board has determined that if I don’t get to 10,000,000 subscribers by Thursday, they’re gonna pull the plug which means I lose $50,000,000,” he informs her, but she has concerns of her own. “I’m like a prisoner in this house with nothing to look forward to,” she complains, before hinting that she’d like her old A&R job back at Empire. He turns her down flat: “You know that is never gonna happen, so you need to just —“ He breaks off abruptly and winces, as if in pain. “Oh my God, you need me to call a doctor?” she asks anxiously. Then a girl emerges from under the desk, mumbling something about a lost earring, and Anika realises what’s being going on the whole time they’ve been talking. “Pia, you remember your old boss Anika?” asks Lucious, then laughs. It’s his “go home and kiss your wife” moment.
“What are you doing in my office?” he asks later in the ep when he walks in and finds Anika sitting behind his desk. She is the one now fixated by the computer display which shows that XStream is only a couple of dozen away from its target number of ten million subscribers. “Almost — a little higher,” she urges. As it reaches 10,000,000, she lets out an orgasmic-sized, “Yes, yes, yes!” “… You sound more excited than me,” Lucious observes. “I am, Lucious. Oh, I am,” she assures him — and then up pops the head of a previously seen delivery boy. “He was just looking for my earring,” she explains. Lucious casually pulls out a gun. The boy flees and it’s Anika’s turn to laugh. “I only wanted to remind you that when you push me, I push back harder,” she says — which is kind of what Pamela was doing when she overdosed in bed with John Ross and Emma: reminding them that actions have consequences. “Then I’ll remind you that you are my wife in my house,” Lucious replies, “and the only men that are gonna be touching you in here is gonna be the coroner when he carries your dead ass body away after my crazy ass mama kills you.” “No … that’s not how this is gonna go, Lucious,” Anika replies. From here on in, they continue to argue over which of them has the upper hand. “See, I married you to save YOUR ass … I am not the one who needs this marriage,” she insists. “You married me because you always wanted to be Mrs Lucious Lyon,” he tells her. “Not anymore,” she replies. “I am here in this Haunted House of Horrors because I knew that if I did cooperate with Tariq, my baby would grow up without a mother.” “… And now you’re cornered.” “And so are you.” “… I’m gonna do what I want when I want or we both go down in flames. I like to call it mutually assured destruction.” Going down in flames … mutually assured destruction … These words chime with the twin cliffhangers at the end of DALLAS.
For DALLAS’s Drew Ramos and EMPIRE’s Freda Gatz, atonement for their crimes (blowing up the Ewing babies and shooting Jamal respectively) remain tantalisingly, frustratingly and poignantly just out of reach. Hoping to come to terms with what happened to him, Jamal finally visits Freda at the Soap Land Penitentiary, but just as Drew’s return to Dallas triggered traumatic flashbacks for Christopher last week so the same thing happens here. When Freda puts out her (chained) hands to him in a gesture of welcome, Jamal flashes back to her raising the gun to shoot him and backs away nervously. Unlike Christopher, however, he wants to make peace. “I hate seeing you like this,” he says. But when she tells him she’s surprised he’s stopped making music — “The Jamal Lyon I know is a beast in the studio” — his anger resurfaces: “The Jamal Lyon that you know went missing when you shot him.” “Jamal, I didn’t mean to hurt you.” “Yeah, but you did … I’m ruined and that’s your fault — you’re the one that did it!” He calls for the guards and they drag her away.
Back on DALLAS, Nicolas finds the missing Drew hiding in the back of his car. “All the bad decisions I’ve made are a result of what JR did to my father,” Drew tells him. By this point, we know for sure that Nicolas cannot be trusted, yet the advice he gives in this scene is in Drew’s best interests — but, tragically, Drew is too far gone to hear him. “Listen to me,” Nicolas pleads. “Elena and I have put in place an intricate plan that will take everything from the Ewings. Be patient. Go back to Mexico … and let us set you and your family free.” “The Ewings killed my father, our father,” Drew insists, “as surely as if they’d put a gun in his hand and pulled the trigger … Come with me to avenge our father. Avenge the man who raised you, Joaquin.” “No,” Nicolas replies. “You’re being irrational, Drew, like you’ve always been irrational since Enrique died.” If Nicolas won’t help him, then Drew “will do it alone.” He bolts out of the car and runs; Nicolas tries to follow him but is momentarily trapped by his seat belt (a great little moment) and loses him. Reluctantly, he calls Luis, the Mendez-Ochoa boss man and spells out the situation: “Drew Ramos is out for blood against the Ewings. If he reaches them and tells them anything, our plan will be ruined … It is the Ewing deal that puts the cartel much closer to overthrowing the Mexican government … Put every man you have in Dallas out finding Drew Ramos now!”
Following Andre’s assault and arrest by the police at the end of last week’s EMPIRE, his storyline continually flips between the real world and soap, and between the (black) hood and the (white) justice system. He leaves the police station after being released on bail to find a crowd of reporters and fans waiting for him. “Don’t go all Black Lives Matter on me here, okay?” urges his (white) lawyer, but the goading of reporters (“Your mother and father have a chequered history with law enforcement — are you just following in their criminal footsteps?”) prompts him to respond politically: “What’s happening to me is what’s happening all across America, right now.” “And what’s that?” shouts a voice in the crowd. He looks over and sees Rhonda’s ghost. “None of this would have happened if I was still here,” she tells him. Later, he tells his parents that he blames himself for how he handled the situation that led to his arrest. “Nothing you could have done different — you were born black,” Lucious replies, assuring him that he will set Thirsty on the cops who assaulted him. “With the FBI watching our every move, the last thing we need is Thirsty taking care of anything … I just wanna do this the right way,” Andre insists. Cookie is incredulous: “You do realise you’re a black man, Andre? And this was a dirty cop that did that to your face? … We’re gonna fight fire with fire!” “Enough!” Andre shouts. “I’m a Wharton graduate, Mama. I’m a CFO of a publicly-traded corporation. I’m not gonna fight fire with fire!” In the event, despite his brothers showing up in court to lend moral support and his lawyer’s assurances that the whole thing will be dismissed, he is charged with criminal trespassing, aggravated assault and assault against a police officer, and a trial date is set.
This leads to a brilliantly fascinating sequence where Lucious pulls up outside the courthouse in a large black van with the most incredibly luxurious interior — it’s like a private jet — to takes his sons on a trip through “our old neighbourhood. This is where we grew up.” The view from their tinted windows is so bleak, Hakeem can’t believe it. “We ain’t never lived here,” he insists. “I did everything I could to shield y’all from this,” Lucious tells them. “After your mama went away, I got us up and outta here as fast as humanly possible. But I coddled y’all, let y’all breathe rarified air and live behind giant gates and drive in limos. Biggest mistake of my life cos it made y’all soft.” (This speech runs parallel to one Bobby delivers on this week’s DALLAS: “Southfork is my home. I was born in this house and I will protect it and every person in it with my life!”) “The whole time I thought the problem was that you were bipolar and you were gay and you were just spoiled,” Lucious continues, addressing each of his sons in turn, “but now I realise y’all don’t know you’re black.” An angry Andre demands to be let out of the van. “When you step outside this high wall of privilege that I’ve built around you,” Lucious warns him, “your name might as well be Trayvon or Philando or Freddie.” [Three real-life black men killed by the police in recent years to whom Lucious refers almost as casually as Blake Carrington does Jerry Jones.] “And the fault lies in me because I didn’t prepare you … You better get woke and quick, because you are one moment away from becoming a hashtag, and I don’t care how many white wives or white lawyers you get.” At this, Andre explodes: “OPEN THIS DOOR! OPEN IT! You DARE talk about my wife after what happened? I don’t know what it’s like to be a black man in America?! I know what it’s like to be a Lyon and I’d rather be in jail — hell, I’d rather be dead — than end up like you!”
While systemic racism is the underlying cause of what is happening to Andre, the cause underlying the underlying cause is far soapier: familial revenge. “You’re behind this — some twisted way of getting back at my father,” Andre realises when his Uncle Tariq approaches him in the final scene of the ep. “You think you can get me to inform on my father in exchange for dropping some charges? … That ain’t gonna happen.” “You are your father’s son after all,” Tariq observes. (So, after insisting he’d rather be dead than end up like his daddy, Andre is told by his uncle that he is his father’s son — it’s John Ross and JR all over again.) “We shall see,” Tariq continues. “It doesn’t take much to put the screws on a black man once he’s part of the system and you ain’t no ordinary black man. You’re a Lyon — prize game.”
A seam of ‘60s pop music runs through this week’s Soap Land. As well as the Doors on DALLAS and a portrait of Jimi Hendrix on Cookie’s wall, there’s a karaoke scene on DYNASTY where all the female characters — minus Alexis, but including Sam (who, as a gay man, apparently qualifies as an honorary woman) — get up and “spontaneously” perform ‘These Boots are Made for Walking’ for our apparent pleasure. As hatefully indulgent musical numbers go, it’s up there with Val and Karen’s ‘I’m Henry VIII I Am’ in 'Back to the Cul-de-sac', only there isn’t quite the same sense of betrayal in this case as one doesn’t expect any better from this group of narcissistic cunts.
The best moment of DYNASTY come near the end of the ep when Liam delivers a line from the original series — “There was a time when I thought I couldn't live without you; now I can't stand the sight of you” — to New Fallon with even more contempt than ‘80s Jeff did to Pamela Sue Martin back in the day.
And the Top 3 are ...
1 (1) DALLAS
2 (2) EMPIRE
3 (3) DYNASTY
During the series finale of FALCON CREST, Richard Channing rented three Cary Grant movies. In a 1990 episode of DALLAS, April described Cary Grant as “the greatest-looking man that ever lived.” Greg Sumner once said on KNOTS LANDING that Charles Scott “makes Pee Wee Herman look like Cary Grant.” And now, in the mid-season finale of New DALLAS's third season, Soap Land’s most referenced cultural figure finally appears onscreen. Alone at Southfork and intent on drinking herself into oblivion, Sue Ellen ignores the movie playing on TV, Hitchcock’s 'North by Northwest' starring Grant and Eva Marie Saint (the same film Danny Waleska once cited as an inspiration while attempting to drive Gary Ewing off a cliff).
From Cary to Carey. EMPIRE has been chockfull of pop culture references since it began: phone calls to Barack Obama, framed snapshots of Lucious with the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Tina Turner, cameo appearances by everyone from Al Sharpton to Snoop Dogg. Portraits of black music legends like Jimi Hendrix, Sammy Davis Jr and Mariah Carey adorn Empire’s office walls. This week, one of those legends — Mariah herself — steps off the wall and into the recording studio to sing a duet with Jamal. Confusingly, she does not appear as her pop diva self, but as another pop diva named Kitty. Kitty is super-talented, super-glamorous and super-nice in much the same way as the pop diva played by Alicia Keys was last season. Given that Carey’s own persona is so much more dazzling than Kitty’s, she seems kind of wasted in such a generic role.
While Carys Grant and Mariah are cultural references made Soap Land flesh and blood, Jerry Jones, real-life owner of the Dallas Cowboys football team, travels in the opposite direction. Having already cameoed as himself in ‘War of the Ewings’ and a couple of episodes of New DALLAS (he even attended JR’s memorial service), he receives a passing namecheck on this week's DYNASTY where Blake is in the process of putting together his own football team. “Jerry Jones paid $150,000,000 for the Cowboys — they’re worth $5 billion now,” he says. “Are you comparing yourself to Jerry Jones?” Culhane asks him.
The strange but irresistible paradox at the heart of DALLAS has always been that it’s about a multi-generational family of billionaires living all together in a house that’s too small for them. Just as he did at the start of this season, John Ross challenges this incongruity when, as a surprise for Pamela, he invites a pair of architects to the ranch to discuss expanding their living quarters. Bobby’s objection is pure soap opera: “Exactly what part of ‘I will not let you destroy Southfork’ did you not understand?!” he snarls at his nephew, who responds with real-world common sense: “I just wanna build a proper master suite for my new bride cos, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re sleeping in JR’s bedroom.”
Pamela, meanwhile, awakens from her night’s slumber to find a note from her lovin’ husband, inviting her to follow the trail of rose petals that lead from their bedroom to the outside of the house where “your morning surprise” awaits. She complies and is just feet away from John Ross — close enough to hear him talking about their idyllic new love nest with the architects — when disaster strikes, as it inevitably must in Soap Land whenever a character flies too close to the sun. Casually glancing down at her phone, she sees the “Now go home and kiss your wife” video of Emma and John Ross Nicolas sent her at the end of last week’s episode. Cue the opening credits.
After John Ross has left for the day none the wiser, Sue Ellen notices a puddle of water coming from under Pamela’s bathroom door. While the suicidal implication of this turns out to be a red herring — Pamela is found sitting in a daze next to an overflowing bathtub — it nonetheless foreshadows what will happen later in the episode. After talking to Sue Ellen and Ann, Pamela realises they’ve known about John Ross and Emma’s affair all along and is furious that they’ve kept it a secret. She’s not the only one. “We’re supposed to be partners, Annie!” Bobby yells at his wife. “What is it that’s so hardwired in you that you keep the most important events in your life secret from your husband? … I want Emma out of my house!”
Since it began at the end of last season, John Ross and Emma’s affair has impacted almost all the show’s major characters — Harris and Judith, Elena and Nicolas, Sue Ellen, and now, as we speed towards the mid-season finale, even Bobby and Ann’s marriage. Shaken by Bobby's anger, Ann turns to her ex-husband for support and, in true soap opera fashion, they end up kissing as if they were Maggie and Richard in the final moments of FALCON CREST Season 4 — only instead of a bomb going off, they are spied on by an incandescent Judith, which is possibly even more dangerous.
Judith also finds time for a sizzling whorehouse confrontation with John Ross. “We have a problem, Harris,” she informs her son after John Ross has gone. “One of the Dalmatians get loose?” Harris quips. I’m not sure if this is a reference to hookers in dog costumes or Cruella de Ville, but Cruella is an apt reference point for Judith’s striking appearance this week. In keeping with the ep's overall vibe of upside-down, nightmarish sexuality, her deathly white face is decorated with a gash of blood-red lipstick and framed by sexily tousled blonde hair. She looks glamorously grotesque. Or maybe grotesquely glamorous. One of the two.
Despite Sue Ellen and Ann’s assurances that their affair is over, Pamela tracks John Ross and Emma to a hotel and walks in to find them kissing on the bed. A familiar enough Soap Land scenario, but instead of being devastated and tearful as, say, Sue Ellen was when she found JR and Holly Harwood together, she remains eerily calm. Instead, it’s Emma and John Ross who are shocked to see her. After John Ross springs to his feet, Pamela’s hand reaches into her pocket. “Don’t do anything you’re gonna regret,” he says nervously. Then she looks at Emma, clocks her emerald corset — the same one they both wore earlier in the season — and smiles. “Love what you’re wearing,” she tells her. Then she turns back at John Ross and removes her coat to reveal an identical corset. “May I join you?” she asks them both. John Ross looks confused — as well he might.
This is the inverse of the scenario JR was confronted by in 1983 when, after he raped Holly in his office, she lured him to her bedroom with the promise of more sex. When he touched her, she pulled a gun on him. In both scenes, the viewer’s expectations, and those of the male character involved, are toyed with and then overturned. When JR found Holly reclining provocatively on a bed in her negligee, champagne chilling in an ice bucket, he anticipated a seduction — instead, he got a gun in his face. When Pamela reaches into her coat, John Ross fears she’s going to produce a gun — instead, she offers him something very different. In each instance, the woman plays the man at his own game, using his appetites and instincts to blindside him.
While John Ross remains rooted to the spot, Pamela kneels on the bed and beckons Emma to join her. They start kissing and Emma gets into it. John Ross doesn’t know what to do — it’s like a dream and a nightmare coming true at the same time: the woman he cherishes lowering herself to the level of a sex object, a fantasy. His wife and mistress both turn to look at him and it's like a challenge — how can he back out now? He hesitates and then, finally, takes off his shirt and joins them on the bed as the music starts: ‘Break on Through (To the Other Side)' by the Doors. Musical montages are pretty much a weekly occurrence in C21st Soap Land, but I think you’d have to travel back as far as Danny Waleska running Pat Williams down to the strains of ’You Are So Beautiful’ by Joe Cocker to find one as effective as this. After Jim Morrison starts to sing and John Ross kisses Pamela and Emma in turn, we cut to another bedroom scene where Nicolas is about to break on through the other side of Elena’s contraceptive device, having pricked some holes in it in an earlier scene. “We chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there,” croons Jim as Bo McCabe (whom we’ve already been warned is “coming for everyone at Southfork”) lights up a joint as he drives towards the ranch house where Sue Ellen is staggering from room to room in search of more booze (“She get high! She get high!” screams Jim). Bo pulls up, Sue Ellen passes out and a curtain goes up in flames. Meanwhile, Emma and Pamela smother John Ross’s torso in kisses, the three of them unconsciously mimicking the snapshot Harris took of John Ross with two underage two hookers on the morning of his wedding — only instead of fending them off, John Ross is lost in bacchanalian pleasure. Then Pamela gasps, but not in pleasure. She’s having some sort of seizure. John Ross and Emma look on in panic. Again, there’s a parallel between the situation we’re seeing and the song we’re hearing — or more specifically, the man singing it — Jim Morrison, the impossibly beautiful symbol of everything sensual and Dionysian about the ‘60s till the turn of the decade when he suddenly ended up fat, bloated and dead of an overdose in a Parisian bathtub. “Oh yeah!” he cries orgasmically, tauntingly, mockingly, on the soundtrack as Southfork blazes out of control.
According to Oscar Wilde, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” In C21st Soap Land, that goes double for oral sex: Fallon showing us who’s boss by having Culhane go down on her in the very first scene of New DYNASTY, Emma doing the same by ordering John Ross to “go home and kiss your wife” on New DALLAS, and this week, two scenes between the recent EMPIRE newlyweds. First, Anika knocks on the door of Lucious’s study asking if they can talk. He invites her in and she finds him sitting behind his desk, absorbed by computer screens monitoring the rate of subscriptions to his streaming service. “The board has determined that if I don’t get to 10,000,000 subscribers by Thursday, they’re gonna pull the plug which means I lose $50,000,000,” he informs her, but she has concerns of her own. “I’m like a prisoner in this house with nothing to look forward to,” she complains, before hinting that she’d like her old A&R job back at Empire. He turns her down flat: “You know that is never gonna happen, so you need to just —“ He breaks off abruptly and winces, as if in pain. “Oh my God, you need me to call a doctor?” she asks anxiously. Then a girl emerges from under the desk, mumbling something about a lost earring, and Anika realises what’s being going on the whole time they’ve been talking. “Pia, you remember your old boss Anika?” asks Lucious, then laughs. It’s his “go home and kiss your wife” moment.
“What are you doing in my office?” he asks later in the ep when he walks in and finds Anika sitting behind his desk. She is the one now fixated by the computer display which shows that XStream is only a couple of dozen away from its target number of ten million subscribers. “Almost — a little higher,” she urges. As it reaches 10,000,000, she lets out an orgasmic-sized, “Yes, yes, yes!” “… You sound more excited than me,” Lucious observes. “I am, Lucious. Oh, I am,” she assures him — and then up pops the head of a previously seen delivery boy. “He was just looking for my earring,” she explains. Lucious casually pulls out a gun. The boy flees and it’s Anika’s turn to laugh. “I only wanted to remind you that when you push me, I push back harder,” she says — which is kind of what Pamela was doing when she overdosed in bed with John Ross and Emma: reminding them that actions have consequences. “Then I’ll remind you that you are my wife in my house,” Lucious replies, “and the only men that are gonna be touching you in here is gonna be the coroner when he carries your dead ass body away after my crazy ass mama kills you.” “No … that’s not how this is gonna go, Lucious,” Anika replies. From here on in, they continue to argue over which of them has the upper hand. “See, I married you to save YOUR ass … I am not the one who needs this marriage,” she insists. “You married me because you always wanted to be Mrs Lucious Lyon,” he tells her. “Not anymore,” she replies. “I am here in this Haunted House of Horrors because I knew that if I did cooperate with Tariq, my baby would grow up without a mother.” “… And now you’re cornered.” “And so are you.” “… I’m gonna do what I want when I want or we both go down in flames. I like to call it mutually assured destruction.” Going down in flames … mutually assured destruction … These words chime with the twin cliffhangers at the end of DALLAS.
For DALLAS’s Drew Ramos and EMPIRE’s Freda Gatz, atonement for their crimes (blowing up the Ewing babies and shooting Jamal respectively) remain tantalisingly, frustratingly and poignantly just out of reach. Hoping to come to terms with what happened to him, Jamal finally visits Freda at the Soap Land Penitentiary, but just as Drew’s return to Dallas triggered traumatic flashbacks for Christopher last week so the same thing happens here. When Freda puts out her (chained) hands to him in a gesture of welcome, Jamal flashes back to her raising the gun to shoot him and backs away nervously. Unlike Christopher, however, he wants to make peace. “I hate seeing you like this,” he says. But when she tells him she’s surprised he’s stopped making music — “The Jamal Lyon I know is a beast in the studio” — his anger resurfaces: “The Jamal Lyon that you know went missing when you shot him.” “Jamal, I didn’t mean to hurt you.” “Yeah, but you did … I’m ruined and that’s your fault — you’re the one that did it!” He calls for the guards and they drag her away.
Back on DALLAS, Nicolas finds the missing Drew hiding in the back of his car. “All the bad decisions I’ve made are a result of what JR did to my father,” Drew tells him. By this point, we know for sure that Nicolas cannot be trusted, yet the advice he gives in this scene is in Drew’s best interests — but, tragically, Drew is too far gone to hear him. “Listen to me,” Nicolas pleads. “Elena and I have put in place an intricate plan that will take everything from the Ewings. Be patient. Go back to Mexico … and let us set you and your family free.” “The Ewings killed my father, our father,” Drew insists, “as surely as if they’d put a gun in his hand and pulled the trigger … Come with me to avenge our father. Avenge the man who raised you, Joaquin.” “No,” Nicolas replies. “You’re being irrational, Drew, like you’ve always been irrational since Enrique died.” If Nicolas won’t help him, then Drew “will do it alone.” He bolts out of the car and runs; Nicolas tries to follow him but is momentarily trapped by his seat belt (a great little moment) and loses him. Reluctantly, he calls Luis, the Mendez-Ochoa boss man and spells out the situation: “Drew Ramos is out for blood against the Ewings. If he reaches them and tells them anything, our plan will be ruined … It is the Ewing deal that puts the cartel much closer to overthrowing the Mexican government … Put every man you have in Dallas out finding Drew Ramos now!”
Following Andre’s assault and arrest by the police at the end of last week’s EMPIRE, his storyline continually flips between the real world and soap, and between the (black) hood and the (white) justice system. He leaves the police station after being released on bail to find a crowd of reporters and fans waiting for him. “Don’t go all Black Lives Matter on me here, okay?” urges his (white) lawyer, but the goading of reporters (“Your mother and father have a chequered history with law enforcement — are you just following in their criminal footsteps?”) prompts him to respond politically: “What’s happening to me is what’s happening all across America, right now.” “And what’s that?” shouts a voice in the crowd. He looks over and sees Rhonda’s ghost. “None of this would have happened if I was still here,” she tells him. Later, he tells his parents that he blames himself for how he handled the situation that led to his arrest. “Nothing you could have done different — you were born black,” Lucious replies, assuring him that he will set Thirsty on the cops who assaulted him. “With the FBI watching our every move, the last thing we need is Thirsty taking care of anything … I just wanna do this the right way,” Andre insists. Cookie is incredulous: “You do realise you’re a black man, Andre? And this was a dirty cop that did that to your face? … We’re gonna fight fire with fire!” “Enough!” Andre shouts. “I’m a Wharton graduate, Mama. I’m a CFO of a publicly-traded corporation. I’m not gonna fight fire with fire!” In the event, despite his brothers showing up in court to lend moral support and his lawyer’s assurances that the whole thing will be dismissed, he is charged with criminal trespassing, aggravated assault and assault against a police officer, and a trial date is set.
This leads to a brilliantly fascinating sequence where Lucious pulls up outside the courthouse in a large black van with the most incredibly luxurious interior — it’s like a private jet — to takes his sons on a trip through “our old neighbourhood. This is where we grew up.” The view from their tinted windows is so bleak, Hakeem can’t believe it. “We ain’t never lived here,” he insists. “I did everything I could to shield y’all from this,” Lucious tells them. “After your mama went away, I got us up and outta here as fast as humanly possible. But I coddled y’all, let y’all breathe rarified air and live behind giant gates and drive in limos. Biggest mistake of my life cos it made y’all soft.” (This speech runs parallel to one Bobby delivers on this week’s DALLAS: “Southfork is my home. I was born in this house and I will protect it and every person in it with my life!”) “The whole time I thought the problem was that you were bipolar and you were gay and you were just spoiled,” Lucious continues, addressing each of his sons in turn, “but now I realise y’all don’t know you’re black.” An angry Andre demands to be let out of the van. “When you step outside this high wall of privilege that I’ve built around you,” Lucious warns him, “your name might as well be Trayvon or Philando or Freddie.” [Three real-life black men killed by the police in recent years to whom Lucious refers almost as casually as Blake Carrington does Jerry Jones.] “And the fault lies in me because I didn’t prepare you … You better get woke and quick, because you are one moment away from becoming a hashtag, and I don’t care how many white wives or white lawyers you get.” At this, Andre explodes: “OPEN THIS DOOR! OPEN IT! You DARE talk about my wife after what happened? I don’t know what it’s like to be a black man in America?! I know what it’s like to be a Lyon and I’d rather be in jail — hell, I’d rather be dead — than end up like you!”
While systemic racism is the underlying cause of what is happening to Andre, the cause underlying the underlying cause is far soapier: familial revenge. “You’re behind this — some twisted way of getting back at my father,” Andre realises when his Uncle Tariq approaches him in the final scene of the ep. “You think you can get me to inform on my father in exchange for dropping some charges? … That ain’t gonna happen.” “You are your father’s son after all,” Tariq observes. (So, after insisting he’d rather be dead than end up like his daddy, Andre is told by his uncle that he is his father’s son — it’s John Ross and JR all over again.) “We shall see,” Tariq continues. “It doesn’t take much to put the screws on a black man once he’s part of the system and you ain’t no ordinary black man. You’re a Lyon — prize game.”
A seam of ‘60s pop music runs through this week’s Soap Land. As well as the Doors on DALLAS and a portrait of Jimi Hendrix on Cookie’s wall, there’s a karaoke scene on DYNASTY where all the female characters — minus Alexis, but including Sam (who, as a gay man, apparently qualifies as an honorary woman) — get up and “spontaneously” perform ‘These Boots are Made for Walking’ for our apparent pleasure. As hatefully indulgent musical numbers go, it’s up there with Val and Karen’s ‘I’m Henry VIII I Am’ in 'Back to the Cul-de-sac', only there isn’t quite the same sense of betrayal in this case as one doesn’t expect any better from this group of narcissistic cunts.
The best moment of DYNASTY come near the end of the ep when Liam delivers a line from the original series — “There was a time when I thought I couldn't live without you; now I can't stand the sight of you” — to New Fallon with even more contempt than ‘80s Jeff did to Pamela Sue Martin back in the day.
And the Top 3 are ...
1 (1) DALLAS
2 (2) EMPIRE
3 (3) DYNASTY
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