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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 136745" data-attributes="member: 22">11 Jan 89: DYNASTY: The Wedding v. 12 Jan 89: KNOTS LANDING: Cabin Fever v. 13 Jan 89: DALLAS: Counter Attack v. 13 Jan 89: FALCON CREST: Suspicion  It’s Krystle Carrington’s last week in Soap Land and, like Laura Avery and Pam Ewing before her, her departure takes the form of a self-imposed exile, “to keep me from becoming a burden to the people I love.” As Pam did Bobby, she presents Blake with divorce papers: “If I come out of this operation and I can’t hear or speak or recognise you … my divorce from you will become automatic and you’ll place me in an institution where I’ll have no contact with the family.” Unless he sign the necessary documentation, she tells him she won’t have the operation needed to save her life. The ensuing argument between them is the equivalent of Laura and Greg’s “I just don’t want you to watch me” scene on KNOTS when she tells him she has chosen to die alone. Ultimately, like both Bobby and Greg, Blake has no choice but to comply with his wife’s wishes. “This is the hardest thing that I’ve ever been asked to do,” he tells her. “All my life in business, I’ve managed to keep out of corners. I’ve always given myself lots of options. I’ve never allowed myself to be pinned down, but now you’re forcing my hand … I have no choice. I’ll sign the divorce papers.”Blake is not the only powerful Soap Land magnate obliged to face his own helplessness and/or frailties this week. On KNOTS, Paige finally confronts Greg over his decision to marry Abby. “Why are you doing this?” she asks him. “What are you afraid of — are you afraid I’m gonna leave you? Are you afraid I’m gonna die or that you’re gonna die? What are you so scared of?” It’s fascinating: even though Paige is the one in tears, helplessly pleading with Greg to change his mind, it’s actually Greg — calm, quietly spoken, implacable Greg (“I don’t wanna fight about this. I made a decision. I’m gonna go ahead”) — who ultimately emerges as the more broken and damaged of the two. Over on DALLAS, it’s a surprise to find JR seeking help from a psychiatrist after being plagued by “Previously … on Haleyville” style dreams. Paige’s question to Greg, “What are you afraid of?” is echoed by the psychiatrist. “Are you afraid to tell me what you really feel?” he asks. After some prodding, JR starts to open up about how it felt to be held prisoner. “Of course it bothered me — I’m JR Ewing. I’ve got money and power. I could buy that whole state and nobody cared … For the first time, I felt I was mortal. I’d lost my invincibility. I wasn’t any better than anybody else.” Any hopes of him developing further insight into his own psyche are soon dashed, however. Just as Greg shut down Paige’s line of questioning with a measured response of “I don’t think it’s wise to continue this discussion”, JR decides that the solution to his problem is to double down on his previous ruthless behaviour: “I am gonna become so big, there won’t be a hick town in this country that won’t know my name. No sir — no more Mr Nice Guy!” Elsewhere in the same ep, Jeremy Wendell’s short-lived alliance with Sue Ellen comes to a bitter end. As with Greg and Paige, you assume the odds will be stacked in the man’s favour, but Jeremy’s familiar threats (“Just remember one thing … you’re either my friend or my enemy”) pale next to Sue Ellen’s more personal observations. “You’ve never had children, have you, Jeremy? … In a way, I feel very sorry for you,” she says coolly and we can see she’s got under his skin. The depiction of Sue Ellen we’ve been presented with so far this season is an intriguing one. The last time she and JR split, much was made of the fact that she was living as a single woman for the first time and the show followed her progress as a vulnerable divorcee closely. At least then she had her son with her. This time around, John Ross is living at Southfork and she is really is alone, yet the show views her from a comparative distance. We’re more likely to see her in her office than her home and her grief over Nicholas Pearce’s death has been pretty much unexplored. The glimpses we do get of her life are intriguing: she is clearly unhappy (“He loves me, but he doesn’t want me,” she reflects bitterly while looking at a picture of her son), but is more angry and defiant than tearful and dithery — witness the tellings off she gave Miss Ellie last week and Jeremy in this ep.Wedding arrangements feature in no less than three of this week’s soaps. When Blake and Krystle renew their vows on DYNASTY, the pomp and formality associated with previous Carrington weddings is stripped away, leaving the bride to make her journey down the aisle by candlelight while ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story plays quietly in the background. There isn’t even anyone to officiate the ceremony. “We don’t need a minister to marry us because what I want is for our vows to be blessed not only by God, but all the love I feel in this room,” Krystle explains. In contrast to such minimalism, KNOTS LANDING’s Abby wants her and Greg’s wedding “to be more than a wedding … It should be a media event.” Angela Channing feels similarly when it comes to organising Emma and RD Young’s big day. “That is going to be at Falcon Crest,” she decrees, “with just the family and a few of our close friends — and some of the friends from the valley …” This is all too much for the reclusive groom-to-be. Two of our prospective brides observe the “old, new, borrowed, blue” tradition, albeit for their own, other than traditional, reasons. On DYNASTY, Krystle indulges her daughter by letting her play at being the bride which, in turn, allows her to present her with something old — a locket containing a picture of Krystina herself as baby. “I was gonna give it to you when you’re older,” Krystle tells her. “Do you still have that bracelet of Mother’s that Sid gave you?” Abby asks Karen during a really fun phone conversation on KNOTS. “I was wondering if I could borrow it.” “Sure,” replies Karen. “You’re supposed to ask me why,” Abby persists. “I wanna borrow it because I need something borrowed.” Karen is uncharacteristically slow on the uptake, forcing Abby to spell it out to her: “Something borrowed, something blue, something old, something new?” “You’re getting married?” Karen realises. “Yes, and the bracelet can be something old and something borrowed,” she explains. When Abby tells her who she’s marrying, Karen sniggers — before realising it isn’t a joke. When it comes to their respective guest lists, Abby is easily persuaded by PR guy Ted to jettison close friends in favour of business contacts (“We have limited space at the church as it is and a lot of players who have to be there”), whereas there is only room for those most precious to Blake and Krystle at their ceremony. “Thank-you for including me,” says Jeanette the maid tearfully. Back on KNOTS, Greg’s manservant Carlos is included whether he likes it or not when it comes to keeping his master’s engagement a secret from Paige. Finally, he can hold his tongue no longer. “I think you should tell her,” he says to Greg. “I intend to tell her,” Greg shoots back. “I’ve always intended to tell her. Who are you — Jiminy Cricket? I’ve got a conscience of my own, thank you.” Over on FALCON CREST, RD Young’s housekeeper, the forbidding Mrs Anderson, also voices an unwanted opinion on her boss’s impending nuptials. “I foresee a disaster,” she declares. “When do you foresee anything else?” he replies.In the same way that the handwritten book of stories Krystle gives to Krystina echoes the dresses Laura Avery bought for Meg to wear as she gets older (“There’s something special for each of the birthdays you’re gonna have until you’re a very big girl … stories about me and how I felt at the age you’re going to be”), her and Blake’s wedding is DYNASTY’s equivalent of Laura’s wake in “Noises Everywhere”, i.e., a chance to put series conventions to one side and reveal a more spontaneous side to the characters. After walking down the aisle, Krystle breaks with protocol by tickling the best man. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited to do that,” she says to Adam. “Sometimes you’re such a stuffed shirt!” Later, Blake catches her counting aloud as they make their way down the Carrington staircase. “I always wondered how many steps there were. I just never got around to counting them,” she explains.The request she makes to her wedding guests — “What I really want tonight is that you share in the vows that Blake and I are going to take, that you promise to care for each other and be bound to each other for the rest of your lives” — is a Krystalised version of Bobby Ewing’s deathbed request nearly four years earlier: “Be a family.” Her final scene, where she and Blake are waved out of a fake driveway as they depart for a second honeymoon in Paris, recalls another DALLAS departure: Jock Ewing’s at the end of DALLAS Season 3. Our very last glimpse of Krystle feels unique to her situation, however. We watch her smiling and waving from the back of the limousine, blissfully unaware of what Jeff is telling Fallon and Sammy Jo: “There’s not going to be a honeymoon … The doctor just called. He wants them to fly directly to the clinic in Switzerland. The operation is scheduled for the day after tomorrow.” “Oh dear God, protect her!” exclaims Fallon as the episode ends on Krystle’s radiantly happy face, forever frozen in time. DYNASTY has cousin Virginia, DALLAS has Tracey Lawton, FALCON CREST has Pilar Ortega, and now KNOTS gets its own new girl — Paula the forest ranger, whom Mack encounters during his stay on Wild Horse Mountain. Whereas those other girls arrived in Soap Land with varying amounts of emotional baggage (Pilar’s angst over her secret daughter, Tracey’s problems with her father, Virginia’s admission to Krystle this week that she “slept under porches [and] ate out of trashcans” as a teenager), Paula insists that there’s no great mystery in her past. “You were the one who came up here to run away, not me,” she reminds Mack. Her job as a ranger means she can avoid another Soap Land convention — dressing up. “When I wake up in the morning, I don’t have to worry about what I’m gonna wear. Not only that, but I look great in greys and greens,” she grins. In this regard, she resembles the glamour-resistant Virginia whom Sable turns into her pet project this week, determined to make her over in time for Blake and Krystle’s big night (“Come along, Virginia — now I’m going to torture you with some eye shadow”). Paula also has something in common with DALLAS’s Tracey — an aversion to serious relationships. “I think families are great,” she says, “just not for me … I like my solitary life.” This does not, however, prevent her from giving Mack her room number — just as Joanna Sills did Dex on last week’s DYNASTY. To our surprise, it looks as if Mack will succumb to temptation the way Dex did — we see him enter a darkened bedroom and unbutton his shirt while smiling at someone off screen — but then the camera moves down to reveal Karen as the object of his desire. And so DYNASTY ends up not being the only show to celebrate its most enduring couple this week. While Krystina enters into the party spirit at her parents’ wedding — she manages to cajole one of her nephews into dancing with her (LB, I think, but he and Danny are pretty much interchangeable since their most recent recasts) — Abby’s children are decidedly nonplussed by their mom’s latest engagement. “You don’t love him,” Olivia insists. “This is really weird,” Brian decides. Another Soap Land kid, Christopher Ewing, proves a useful plot device when he is shot at during the range war (as an innocent caught up in a much bigger feud, this is a portent of his eventual fate on New DALLAS), thereby spurring Bobby to take matters into his own hands. “I’m gonna take care of this myself … McKay is mine!” he declares. Bobby’s played the hero before, of course — rescuing niece Lucy from various kidnappers, for example — but this storyline requires a whole new level of derring do: jumping out of helicopters, setting explosives, overpowering an entire squad of mercenaries almost singlehandedly. In other words, we’re in Dex-breaking-Caress-out-of-jail or Lance-scaling-walls-to-take-on-the-Cartel territory. Daft as such scenarios invariably are, DALLAS’s visuals give this one the edge, the exterior nighttime shots of Southfork and the McKay ranch covering a multitude of plot holes. Then there’s the quasi-Shakespearean moment where Bobby comes face to face with McKay — and realises he’s the father of his new girlfriend.“Can you imagine? My daughter is in love with the son of the family I’m at war with,” sighs McKay. Of course Bobby can imagine it. “That happened to me once before, with my first wife,” he replies. Just as this situation takes us right back to the beginning of DALLAS, so this week’s DYNASTY reminds us of its own beginning, with several references to the first time Krystle married Blake. “How angry I was at Daddy … for marrying you,” Fallon recalls. “I hated you! I thought you were just some opportunist trying to steal him away from me … I don’t think that anymore. I haven’t for years. In fact, you’ve brought us all so much closer as a family than we ever could have been without you.” (If one were looking for a moment of closure from this season of DYNASTY, that speech might just be it.) Virginia goes so far as to superimpose herself retroactively into the pilot episode. “I came to your wedding,” she tells Krystle. “I hitched all the way from Dayton, then I walked ten miles and stood in front of those huge gates. I looked inside and I said to myself, ‘I’m not going inside there. That place is a palace.’” She was lucky not to get mown down by Walter Lankershim.Towards the end of this week’s DALLAS and FALCON CREST, there are parallel walk-and-talk scenes where relatively new characters, Carter McKay and RD Young, explain to Bobby Ewing and Emma Channing the circumstances that led to their respective wives’ untimely deaths. Each has been previously implicated in said death, but now insists that the woman’s demise was a direct result of her own infidelity. “You know where she was going on the night she was killed?” McKay asks Bobby. “She was going to meet her lover … All the things she accused me of doing was what she was doing … She turned the kids against me pretty good.” “She took a lover,” echoes RD. “She drowned … She and her lover were on the boat alone. Nobody’s sure how it happened. Neither of their bodies was found.”While RD’s hard luck story appears chiefly to be a Maguffin to ensure that the perpetually unlucky-in-love Emma loses yet another chance at happiness (“Emma, I can’t marry you — I don’t think that I could stand to go through that again”), it’s hard to know what to make of McKay’s. In the space of an episode, he turns from villain to hero, when he saves Bobby’s life by shooting one of his own men, and then back into villain when he walks into Jeremy Wendell’s office and tells him to shut his face (“All of these years that you’ve been taking the bows and I’ve been the brains behind you”) before claiming to have “told Bobby Ewing one of the world’s greatest sob stories and he fell for it … I’m gonna get Section 40 for us if I have to kill everyone of the damn Ewings to do it!” Despite having watched this episode periodically over the past few decades, I’m still not entirely sure where the lies end and the truth begins.In the same week that Krystle celebrates her love for Blake, her FC counterpart Maggie celebrates the launch of her own newspaper. Whereas Krystle seems more of a rounded character than ever, Maggie is suddenly vapid — declaring everything to be either “fabulous” or “terrific” or both, and delivering lines like “Richard, you always make me feel beautiful, even when my hairdresser’s out to get me” without a trace of irony. Still, when one reflects on the nonstop traumas she’s endured over the past few years — from amnesia to abduction to alcoholism, with rape, widowhood and manslaughter thrown in for good measure — it’s hard to begrudge her a bit of brainless Fembot time. Besides, it looks as if she might be about to inherit Krystle’s mantle as Soap Land’s social conscience. Instead of championing the homeless, she listens sympathetically to Tommy Ortega’s gang battle problems.Along with Alexis Colby, Pam Ewing, most of the KNOTS gals and Sue Ellen on a good day, Krystle and Maggie have both helped promote and perpetuate the idea of the ‘80s woman who “has it all”. So it seems fitting, now that the decade is drawing to a close and particularly in the week that we say goodbye to Krystle, that this myth should be debunked by one of Soap Land’s newcomers. “You’re incredible — the hometown girl who feels just as comfortable in a boardroom as in a kitchen,” marvels Nick Agretti on FALCON CREST. “Superwoman — that’s how we’re all supposed to be these days, aren’t we?” Pilar Ortega replies. “But not everyone pulls it off,” he tells her. “I have news for you: nobody pulls it off,” she declares unequivocally. Pilar may not "have it all", but she certainly has a finger or two in more than her fair share of storylines at present: a burgeoning relationship with Nick, a love triangle with Lance and Cookie Nash, a complicity with Richard, a secret daughter, an intriguing flirtation with her predatory slob of a boss. None of these stories has quite caught fire yet, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens when they do.  And this week’s Top 4 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (2) DYNASTY 3 (3) DALLAS4 (4) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?