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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 137965" data-attributes="member: 22">19 Jan 89: KNOTS LANDING: Merger Made in Heaven v. 20 Jan 89: DALLAS: The Sting v. 20 Jan 89: FALCON CREST: There Goes the BrideIn spite of the traumatic circumstances surrounding it, Krystle and Blake’s wedding went off without a hitch on last week’s DYNASTY. Not only was their nemesis, Alexis, absent from the ceremony, she didn’t even appear in the episode. The same cannot be said of the primary obstacle to Greg and Abby’s big day on this week’s KNOTS. The ep opens in the Mackenzie kitchen with Mack, Karen and Michael all making light of Abby’s impending nuptials (“I wonder if she’s gonna keep her own name?” “Well, she has a choice — Fairgate, Cunningham, Ewing, Sumner.” “Sounds like a law firm!”), but the scene’s focus is firmly on Paige. Her expression is detached and she barely speaks. If one didn’t know better, one might mistake her demeanour for indifference. However, we do know better. This one of those interesting situations where only the viewer at home knows what a character on screen is really going through and so a complicity is forged between her and us. In fact, the aspect of this story that really wins us over to Paige’s side is the way she pridefully conceals her heartache from her family. She doesn’t look for sympathy or succumb to emotional indulgence the way another character might. No-one’s about to pop a bottle of pills down her throat and call her “Poor Paige”.She does, however, engage in some classic Soap Land manipulation to keep Greg off balance. First, she shows up with Ted Melcher to the club where he and Abby are in attendance and makes sure he sees Ted nuzzling her neck on the dance floor. The next morning, she arrives for work wearing the previous night’s dress. This is hardly subtle stuff, and Greg’s smart enough to see what she’s doing, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t as rattled by it as any regular soap sap would be. “Don’t start these stunts with me,” he snarls at her. “You come in here dressed like Carmen Miranda. What’s that supposed to signal me — that you’ve been spending the night with Mr Congeniality? … You call that dancing you were doing last night? Looked to me like you were grinding coffee!” (Over on FALCON CREST, Angela makes a similar observation about Lance and Cookie Nash: “The other night at dinner … you were pressed so close together, you could have eaten off the same plate.” The big difference here is that Angela is speaking approvingly.) Paige persists in her campaign by sending the engaged couple a croquet set as an anonymous wedding gift. “Is this what passes for wit in your generation?” responds Greg, all but hurling the mallets back at her. “What did you think was gonna happen when I opened this eight-grade gift — you think a light was gonna pop on in my head and I was gonna decide all of a sudden that I shouldn’t marry Blonde #2, I should marry Blonde #1?” This is the kind of common sense question soap characters in Greg’s position don’t normally think to ask.Despite his protests to the contrary, Paige’s behaviour starts to affect Greg’s thinking. “This republic’s in a sorry state when a guy as confused as I am gets to run for elective office,” he broods to manservant Carlos, who is fast becoming a confidante equivalent to Richard Channing’s Man Friday Garth on FALCON CREST. When Carlos asks if he still plans to go through with the wedding, Greg doesn’t reply. His ambivalence is mirrored by FC’s groom-to-be, RD Young. After calling off his wedding to Emma at the end of last week’s episode, he changes his mind this week, only to get cold feet yet again on the day of the ceremony.No-one’s getting married on DALLAS this week. Quite the opposite, in fact. “Lucy and I are engaged to be married,” insists Casey Denault. “We’re what?! … You’re nothing but a conman. You always were, you always will be!” Lucy snaps back. This brush-off seems almost gentle compared to Sue Ellen’s response to Jeremy Wendell’s proposal: “I would hope that one day in the future you would consider becoming my wife.” “Let me make my position perfectly clear, Jeremy,” she begins, before launching into Soap Land’s most brutal romantic rejection since Michael Tyrone destroyed Lute Mae Sanders on FLAMINGO ROAD. “I don’t like you. You make my skin crawl when you touch me. I would rather sleep with JR than sleep with you and I’d rather sleep with a carnival geek than sleep with JR. Does that give you any idea as to where you rank in my affections? … As bad as my life is right now, it can only improve with you out of it.” Such is the harshness of this speech that it has the effect of making Wendell, one of the genre’s coldest and creepiest characters, appear fleetingly sympathetic.At the beginning of this season’s KNOTS, Harold Dyer shot dead his Uncle Manny in order to save the life of Mack Mackenzie. On last week’s DALLAS, Carter McKay did the same thing to foreman Fred Hughes to save Bobby Ewing. Both men’s actions clearly indicated a desire to renounce his criminal past and start over. But then things went sideways — Harold was arrested on a drugs charge and McKay went back on his word almost immediately when he publicly informed the Ewings of his plan to continue harassing them until they sold him Section 40 of Southfork. Both situations are finally resolved this week, but it takes some credulity-stretching behaviour by our regular characters (not dissimilar to Bobby’s Jack Bauer-style heroics last week) to get us there.First off, KNOTS LANDING’s Olivia Cunningham is transformed from teen airhead into Soap Land’s least likely amateur sleuth, quizzing both a Lotus Point security guard and her cousin Michael before deducing that her mother must have framed Harold (something about Abby seeing his arrest record before the cops did). The pay off for this contrivance comes in a cracking scene that marks a sea change in both Olivia’s relationship with her mother and her own evolution as a character. A self-satisfied Abby is soaking in the bubbliest bubble bath you’ve ever seen when Olivia confronts her with her discovery. Instead of the sulky petulance and strident yelling we’re used to, Olivia remains calm and reasonable, even as she blackmails her mom: “We’re gonna go ahead and get engaged … We expect your blessing and if we don’t get it, I’m gonna tell the whole world that you planted the cocaine in Harold’s locker … That would bump your wedding off the front page, wouldn’t it?” Conversely, the ordinarily cool and collected Abby is now so furious that she can barely bring herself to even look at Olivia. “You see? I am your daughter,” Olivia concludes. “I just don’t want the things that you want.” Meanwhile, DALLAS goes a bit SCOOBY DOO as we learn that McKay and the Ewings have secretly joined forces to outwit Jeremy Wendell. In his final ever scene, DALLAS’s shrewdest villain is ultimately outwitted by those meddling pensioners, Miss Ellie and Clayton, who goad him into bragging about how far he was willing to go to destroy them (“I told Hughes to kill anyone who stood in my way”). Next thing we know, Jeremy is being dragged away by the police, Angelica Nero-style. “We’ve got enough on tape to arrest you on a dozen charges!” they crow.As Wendell is arrested on DALLAS, the drug charges are dropped against Harold on KNOTS. He attends Abby and Greg’s wedding as Olivia’s guest, unaware that the bride was the one who framed him in the first place. McKay, meanwhile, is invited to dinner at Southfork. (The newfound bonhomie between him and the family means that, confusingly, there are now two characters in the Ewingverse who answer to the nickname of Mack.) While Abby is icily polite to Harold at the wedding, Mack receives a more openly hostile greeting from Bobby’s dinner date, his own daughter Tracey. “Leave me alone!” she yells at him.Meanwhile, at Emma’s wedding on FALCON CREST, Nick Agretti and Cookie Nash are no happier to see Pilar on Lance’s arm than Abby is to see Olivia on Harold’s. Whereas Nick, who has quietly fallen for Pilar, does his best to mask his disappointment, Cookie, who has been sleeping with Lance on the sly, makes a point of blanking her — before pretending to struggle to pronounce her last name (another example of the casual racism running through the Tuscany Valley this season).Mack Mackenzie and Bobby Ewing each tries to repay the man who saved his life by putting in a good word on his behalf. Whereas Mack’s appeal to Abby (“Let’s give Harold a little credit for wanting to change his life … He’s a good guy”) ultimately has little effect, Bobby has more success in persuading Tracey to give her father a second chance. (“He’s an honourable man, Tracey. He helped us put away Jeremy Wendell and that counts a lot in my book.”)Like Abby and Olivia, Emma and Angela share a mother/daughter scene prior to the former’s wedding, but theirs is closer in spirit to the affectionate heart-to-heart between Krystle and Fallon on last week’s DYNASTY. Where Fallon acknowledged how much her step-mother has done for the family, Angela admits to her daughter that “I haven’t always done what was right in my time, but I did what I thought was best.” “I think I realise that — finally,” Emma replies. As Abby did with Karen and Krystle did with Krystina, they then observe the “something old” tradition as Angela presents Emma with the string of pearls her own mother gave to her when she married Douglas. “They’re very lucky,” she tells her. So when the necklace subsequently breaks and the pearls fall to the floor, it can only be a bad omen. Sure enough, the groom-to-be then appears in the doorway of Emma’s bedroom with a grim expression on his face. “You’re not supposed to see me before the wedding,” she says nervously.We aren’t privy to the conversation that follows, but we do get to witness an equivalent scene on KNOTS where Paige steals into Greg’s room just as he is preparing to walk down the aisle and tearfully begs him not to. Once again, her pleas fall on stony ground. “What I want is for you to get out of my face and marry some nice white bread guy who will ask you to be a better person than you already are,” he tells her. But it’s what he says next that really hits home: “Look, if we spent any time together, the way you feel right now is the way you would always feel. I don’t think that you want that.”KNOTS ends ambiguously, with Greg and Abby meeting at the altar while Paige hovers in the background between them. It recalls the freeze frame from DALLAS where Cliff suddenly stood up in the middle of JR and Sue Ellen’s wedding. Back on FALCON CREST, Emma and Daniel both fail to appear for their wedding. Instead, they leave behind a note explaining that they have eloped. Just as Krystle’s wedding doubled as her departure from DYNASTY so Emma’s does from FALCON CREST. “We’re going to go away for a while,” she writes. “I feel it’s better to start off our future together away from so many reminders of the past.”Back on DALLAS, Ray Krebbs is also reminded of the past as he too prepares to leave. “Ray, it’s just not the same here anymore,” Bobby laments. “You going off to Europe, Gary out in California, Daddy’s gone, Sue Ellen, Pam — it’s altogether different.” Add Krystle and Emma to that list and he could be talking about Soap Land as a whole. “Maybe I’m leaving here at the right time — it’ll always be the same in my memory,” Ray replies, perhaps speaking for Soap Land's departing viewers.It’s not over quite yet, however. We’ll see Krystle and Ray again in their respective series’ reunions and Emma will be back next year. More immediately, this week’s DALLAS and FALCON CREST both conclude with a long-lost relative arriving unannounced at the front door — JR’s shotgun bride Cally and Ben Agretti’s presumed-dead mother Anna. Whereas Anna, in her chic hat and fur stole, is the embodiment of ’80s soap glamour, Cally is so simply dressed it’s as if the 1960s, let alone the 1980s, completely passed her by. While Anna exudes European inscrutability, Cally is all wide-eyed country girl innocence. As the naive hayseed blonde who shows up claiming to be Mrs JR Ewing, it feels like the joke should be on her (and if this scenario were playing out on FALCON CREST a year ago, you could be sure it would be), but instead, it’s JR’s discomfort that we find ourselves enjoying. There’s something fundamentally joyous about watching Larry Hagman stutter and squirm as Miss Ellie asks him, “JR, did you marry this girl? … Then you own up to it and do the right thing!” “Mama, look at her. You think she’s gonna fit in in Dallas?” he protests. When Cally exasperatedly demands to know “what’s so all-fired wonderful about Dallas?!” she (unintentionally) hits the same irreverent funny bone that Krystle did when she tickled Adam at her wedding last week.For all that the town of Haleyville and its inhabitants were stuck in a 1950s time-warp, Cally’s arrival at Southfork seems to herald a new era for the Ewings. Her last line before the freeze frame, “I think I’m gonna like it here”, serves as a declaration of intent in the same way JR’s did at the end of “Digger’s Daughter” (“I underestimated the new Mrs Ewing — I surely won’t do that again”). Bobby was more correct than he realised when he said, “it’s just not the same anymore … it’s altogether different.” And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (3) DALLAS3 (4) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?