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Dallas the TV series
Dallas - The Original Series
DALLAS versus KNOTS LANDING versus the rest of them week by week
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<blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 211908" data-attributes="member: 22"><p><u>01 Aug 12: DALLAS: Family Business v. 04 Mar 15: EMPIRE: Unto the Breach v. 06 Dec 15: BLOOD AND OIL: The Art of the Deal v. 13 Dec 17: DYNASTY: Rotten Things </u></p><p></p><p>DALLAS and BLOOD AND OIL began the season with the same conundrum: what do you do when you discover a huge untapped oil reserve under a piece of land that cannot be drilled (Southfork on DALLAS, the Black Elk Indian reservation on B&O)? Nine episodes later, both shows come up with the same answer: you slant-drill it from an adjacent property. “We can drill from the Henderson rig, down and under the ranch,” Elena explains, showing Bobby a map of what she is proposing. “This is a way to get the oil without having to go against what you promised Miss Ellie,” adds John Ross. A similar map is produced on BLOOD AND OIL. “We siphon out their oil with our straw from our land,” Hap Briggs explains. “The land remains pristine and we all get rich,” adds Carla.</p><p></p><p>Bobby’s meeting with Elena and John Ross is interrupted when he suffers an aneurysm which may or may not be related to the treatment he’s been receiving for his cancer. The episode takes an unexpected interest in the impact this has on John Ross who didn’t know anything about his uncle’s illness before now. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks Elena. “Bobby asked me not to,” she admits. “He thought … you and JR would use it against him to get Southfork.” John Ross’s first response is to pin Bum against a wall and order him to find JR: “Tell him his brother’s dying.” </p><p></p><p>Slant-drilling might sound like the best solution for both the Ewings and the Briggs, but in each case, there is a complication. Christopher is angry when he learns that his cousin is still intent on getting his hands on Southfork oil, but agrees not to oppose the operation on one condition: that John Ross persuades JR to sign the deed to the ranch back to Bobby. “It’s about giving my father some peace of mind,“ he explains. “You keep saying you wanna fix the damage you’ve done. I know you love your father, but your whole life, my father was there for you when JR wasn’t. The John Ross that I used to know loved my father and if any of that person is still inside of you, you’ll do whatever it takes to get Southfork back for him.” This brief speech conjures up several conflicting elements of the DALLAS saga: the richly complicated relationship which exists between the cousins in the present, the more innocent Omri Katz and Joshua Harris versions who grew up together in the original series, and a slightly reconfigured (and more poignant) backstory in which JR was an absentee father to John Ross. It’s a heady mix. </p><p></p><p>Meanwhile, the complicating factor on BLOOD AND OIL is that Hap is not the only one who owns a parcel of land adjacent to the Indian reservation — his ex-wife Annie and Billy LeFever do too, which means they are also in a position to slant-drill for the oil. So the race is on to get the rights from the Indians. “All we have to do is persuade the chief …” begins Carla in one scene; “… that we are the only partners that can drill that oil,” continues Annie in another.</p><p></p><p>Having learned of Bobby’s illness, JR returns home, but refuses to consider the idea of “signing Southfork over to anybody … This land is finally mine like it should have been all along!” he barks at John Ross. </p><p></p><p>“I’ve spent my entire life missing him, wanting to be with him, wanting to <em>be</em> him … I always thought if I was more like him that he’d be proud of me, that would be enough. But it isn’t. I love my father but he’s so lost in his own anger and bitterness there’s no room for anybody else.” John Ross’s movingly delivered account of growing up with and without JR is mirrored by both Andre’s despair as he talks to his brothers about their dad on EMPIRE (“He’ll never see me, man, not like he sees you. No matter what I do, he’ll never see me — God!”) and Sam’s description of his upbringing on DYNASTY (“I grew up feeling completely worthless, thinking why should anybody care about me if my dad didn’t?”).</p><p></p><p>There was a very touching moment in the opening episode of New DALLAS where Bobby, visiting JR in the nursing home, gently kissed him on the forehead and told him he loved him. This wasn’t exactly news — we’ve known since early on in DALLAS’s original run that, despite all their differences, Bobby cares about his brother deep down. However, I’m not sure I’d truly <em>felt</em> it until that scene. And I've never felt it more strongly than in this episode when Bobby, weary and in pain, says to his brother, matter-of-factly, without sentiment, “JR, I love you. No matter what.” It’s as moving as anything in DALLAS history, including <em>Swan Song</em>.</p><p></p><p>John Ross’s describing JR as “lost in his own anger and bitterness” and Sue Ellen reminding him that “the depression that put you into that nursing home happened because all you really cared about was you being on top, and when it all fell apart, you realised you had nothing” recall the suicidal JR at the end of the original series, but in richer, more interesting terms than he appeared at the time. “Well, I’m back, honey, and I’m gonna be bigger than ever!” JR insists, turning on the old bravado. “And you still have nothing,” replies Sue Ellen sadly. Somehow it’s all so poignant, so moving. The actors — Hagman, Henderson, Gray and especially Duffy — are as good, if not better, in this episode than they ever have been. They imbue their characters with more than what’s in the script: a sense of history, an awareness of their own mortality, a humanity. As wonderfully soapy as Bobby, JR, John Ross and Sue Ellen have always been, for the first time they truly feel like real people. </p><p></p><p>This shift is neatly symbolised by the framed photo that catches JR’s attention as he sits behind the desk in the Southfork study for the first time. It’s a picture of himself and Bobby in younger days — or to be more accurate, it’s a snap of Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy on what appears to be a real-life fishing trip. They look happy and relaxed together in a way we’ve never really seen on screen before: Duffy displays his catch with one hand and gives a thumbs up with the other while Hagman has an arm around his shoulder. They look less like stylised soap characters and more like regular human beings. There’s an equivalent moment in <em>Burden of Proof</em>, the Season 4 episode of KNOTS LANDING where Richard Avery leaves the cul-de-sac for good. At one point, the camera lingers on a framed picture of him holding a baby. It’s meant to be his screen son Jason, but it can’t be — the child is younger than Jason was when KNOTS started. Presumably, it’s the actor with his own son. This KNOTSian blurring of the real and the fictional is very potent. In the same way, when Bobby says to JR, “Nobody lives forever”, one is reminded of Larry Hagman’s real-life health issues as much as Bobby’s fictional ones. </p><p></p><p>The opening scene of EMPIRE is great and recalls some familiar scenarios from Soap Land’s past. Lucious and Anika meet with their wedding planner to discuss their outrageously lavish big day (“More doves, more champagne, more everything!”), even though we know that Anika is secretly planning some kind of revenge on Lucious for cheating on her with Cookie. (Shades of Abby Ewing going ahead with her wedding to Charles Scott even after learning of his scheme to defraud her.) Then in barges Cookie, accompanied by faithful lieutenant Porsha, who informs Lucious that Anika has joined forces with his arch-nemesis: “She working with Beretti … Yeah, while you up here planning weddings, this bitch planning how to steal everything you got!” She and Porsha then march upstairs and proceed to toss Anika’s clothes over the balcony. Cookie’s “Get these damn ugly ass debutante clothes outta here!” is her version of Alexis Colby’s “Take this junk and your blonde tramp and get out of my home!” Following on from all this fun soapy stuff is a really good, emotional argument between Anika and Lucious. “This is not even me!” Anika yells tearfully as if insisting she is not by nature a two-dimensional Soap Land schemer. “I am not a treacherous person, Lucious, but you — you — you have twisted my love and made it some awful thing!”</p><p></p><p>Another cheated on mistress strikes back on BLOOD AND OIL as Jules makes a super quick recovery from her overdose to fill Hap in on his son’s duplicity (“Wick knows about us … which is why he asked me to bug you for the Feds”) before cutting her ties with both Briggs men: “The two of you can take your manipulative arses and … go to hell.” This puts Anika and Wick in similar positions. Both have secretly plotted revenge against the man who betrayed them (her fiancee, his father) and both are found out this week. For their part, Lucious and Hap each behave as if they were the injured party. “Are you playing me?” a wounded sounding Lucious asks Anika. “What kind of son did I raise that betrays his father?” an indignant Hap asks Wick. “<em>You</em> are accusing <em>me</em> of betrayal, after all those women, all those lies and now <em>her?!</em>” replies Anika, pointing towards Cookie. “You were sleeping with my girlfriend!” shouts Wick at Hap. “I wanted to make you pay for all the times you made me feel like crap. I wanted to see you rot in jail.”</p><p></p><p>Wick’s warning to his father (“You are an old man, Hap … At some point you’re gonna look back on your life and the only thing you’re gonna see is oil, the only thing you love and maybe the only thing that loves you back”) mirrors Sue Ellen’s words to JR: “All you really cared about was you being on top and when it all fell apart, you realised you had nothing … You still have nothing.” </p><p></p><p>While this week’s DALLAS, EMPIRE and BLOOD AND OIL mostly consist of in-fighting amongst their existing characters, DYNASTY adds no less than four long-lost relatives to the mix: Cristal’s sister Iris (a grumpy gold digger), Blake’s father Tom (a fun bigot), Jeff and Monica’s father Cecil (a prison inmate) and Sam’s father Alejandro (who, despite being stabbed to death by Cristal in a flashback, shows up alive and well and calling himself Diego Calastana at the end of the ep: “Blake Carrington, what a pleasure it is to meet you — I’ve been looking forward to this for quite some time.”)</p><p></p><p>In the opening episodes of New DALLAS and New DYNASTY, Christopher Ewing and Blake Carrington married Rebecca Sutter and Cristal Jennings respectively, neither realising that his new bride was lying about her identity. Since then, both women have come clean — up to a point. There’s still more to tell and Rebecca’s phony brother Tommy and Cristal’s scheming sister Iris are threatening to spill the rest of the beans to their respective husbands. “The plans to Christopher’s rig or I put a bullet in your little fairytale,” snarls Tommy. “If I tell your husband what really happened, who do you think will be on a flight out of Atlanta?” threatens Iris.</p><p></p><p>There are three physical altercations between Soap Land siblings this week: brother versus brother versus brother on EMPIRE, sister versus sister on DYNASTY and brother versus sister on DALLAS. And there is a musical component to all three. </p><p></p><p>We’ve never seen the three Lyon brothers alone together until this week. Following Anika’s defection, the family and the company are in crisis mode (“We at war!”) with everyone focused on either signing new clients or keeping existing ones from jumping ship. Alas, eldest son Andre has chosen this very week to stop taking his bipolar medication and is acting more irrationally than ever. When Hakeem questions his manic behaviour, he starts teasing him. Then Jamal teases Andre in return, only for Andre takes it the wrong way and before you know it, all three brothers are slamming each other up against walls. Oh, and did I mention this entire fight scene takes place in an elevator? All of a sudden, they get stuck between floors. Whereas the equivalent scenario involving Bobby and JR on old DALLAS was just a random occurrence, this time the elevator breakdown is part of the bigger storyline. (“The elevator’s not a malfunction,” reports the security chief. “We’re being hacked from the eighteenth floor — elevators, phones, internet.”) During the DALLAS stuck-in-an-elevator episode, JR flashed back to a conversation with Bobby from the beginning of the series where he pointed out that as the eldest son, he’d borne the brunt of their father’s disciplinarian approach to parenthood (“While you were out there sowing your wild oats … I was here, busting my butt under our father. And let me tell you, he’s not an easy man to work for”). Here, Andre makes the same point to Jamal and Hakeem, but in a far less cool and collected way than JR did. “You got no idea!” he screams in their faces. “You weren’t even there when it was really hard … You were just babies … I made Empire — 8:00 to 10:00! 8:00 to 10:00! 8:00 to 10:00 every day! I’d go home and work!” Jamel tries to calm him down by reminding him of the song he (Andre) used to sing to his brothers when they were small and scared — ‘Lean on Me’ by Bill Withers. Tentatively, the brothers all start singing and end up in a three-way embrace. That probably sounds disgustingly cheesy, but it’s beautifully done.</p><p></p><p>By way of contrast, Fallon and Steven deliver a rendition of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ at the Carrington Christmas party so lacklustre that it prompts Sam to burst into an impromptu salsa routine in an attempt to liven things up. (And very good it is too — if he’d busted these kinds of moves on EMPIRE, he and Jamal might still be together.) Cristal joins in, which triggers Iris’s jealousy: “Now that you’re part of this family and have all this money, you think you can just push me out and take my son?” A sisterly catfight ensues, during which the enormous Carrington Christmas tree is overturned, just as the one in <em>Merry Christmas, Charley</em> (FALCON CREST Season 9) was during Ian St James and Frank Agretti’s fight to the death twenty-three years earlier. </p><p></p><p>Speaking of fights to the death, the final and most violent Battle of the Siblings takes place in the closing minutes of DALLAS between fake brother and sister Tommy and Rebecca Sutter. Rebecca’s refusal to steal Christopher’s top-secret plans for him means that Tommy has lost a deal worth a fortune. So when he shows up at her apartment, he is angry enough to strike her across the face as soon as she opens the door. “I was fine living off the little cons I was pulling,” he rants. “Then you show up, wiggle your ass, tell me I’m going to make millions off this Texas oil kid … I did everything you asked me to.” He grabs her by the neck and pushes her onto the bed, one hand over her throat and the other pulling at her jeans. It’s not clear if he’s gonna rape her or kill her or both. (This makes Rebecca, following Cody on B&O, the second pregnant woman to be violently attacked so far this season.) She whacks him with an alarm clock, rushes to her purse and pulls out a gun. He grabs for it and they struggle — just as Krystle and Claudia, Sean Rowan and Dex, and JR and Nick Pearce have before them. Inevitably, the gun goes off and then just as inevitably, the camera cuts away before we can see which of them was hit. In place of a shocked or screaming bystander, we cut to a shot of the two identical chimps Rebecca and Christopher bought earlier in the ep, and which are now splattered with blood. (This cuddly toy/gunshot juxtaposition recalls another moment from <em>Merry Christmas, Charley</em> when Emma unzipped a stuffed rabbit and pulled out the weapon she then shot her husband with.) Rather than Sammy Joe’s salsa or Bill Withers’ 'Lovely Day’, the musical element in this scene is Johnny Cash singing ‘The Man Comes Around’ on the soundtrack. Using preexisting pop music in an extra-diegetic way was never part of the original DALLAS aesthetic, of course, but suddenly Cash and DALLAS feel like a perfect fit — lean and brooding, western and mythic. (And let us not forget that a Ewing mother-in-law, Lilimae Clements, once claimed to have sung on stage with Cash’s mother-in-law, Maybelle Carter.)</p><p></p><p>“Can you imagine what Ewing Oil would have been today if our fathers had been allies instead of enemies?” John Ross asks his cousin towards the end of this week’s DALLAS. “It didn’t have to be this way. Jock — he set them against each other.” “And we carried on the family tradition,” replies Christopher. He then suggests they break the cycle and go into business together: “Ewing Energies has a nice ring to it. Don’t you think?” The way they sell the idea to Bobby (“We thought it was time for a little peace in this family”) makes it sounds like a can’t lose proposition. Even JR finally comes around and signs the deed to Southfork back to his brother. There’s further family bonding on EMPIRE as the Lyons come out ahead of Beretti and Anika, and celebrate with another singalong. But the harmony of both families is shattered by a medical crisis. Bobby suffers a second attack at Southfork while Andre has a complete meltdown in the Empire boardroom. “You are my son and I love you,” Lucious tells him. “You love me too?!” Andre sneers. “He loves me too! You choosing me to take over Empire since you love me?” “You know I haven’t decided which one of my sons —“ Lucious begins. “Piece of business advice from that Wharton education you paid so handsomely for,” Andre whispers, pressing his forehead against his father’s. “You pick the one who knows you’re a murderer.” It’s a brilliantly chilling moment and recalls John Ross’s earlier observation about what his grandfather did to JR and Bobby: “It didn’t have to be this way. Jock — he set them against each other.” Bobby and Andre are each taken away by ambulance. </p><p></p><p>The separation of BLOOD AND OIL’s super couple, Billy and Cody, continues to follow the blueprint laid down by similar estrangements in ‘80s Soap Land — the introduction of potential love interests leading to further complications and misunderstandings. While visiting Jules in the hospital, Cody is mistaken for a nurse by a handsome doctor who reprimands her for not being at her post. It’s the cutesiest of meet-cutes. When they later run into each other in a bar, Billy sees them together and jumps to the wrong conclusion. Annoyed, Cody deliberately flirts with Dr Meet Cute to make Billy jealous. So Billy gets drunk and kisses Emma the sexy geologist, and Cody ends up seeing <em>them</em> together. So far so enjoyably hackneyed — but there's a twist! At the end of the ep, the two companies competing to slant-drill under the Indian reservation (Hap, Carla, Lacey and AJ on one team, Annie, Billy, Emma and Wick on the other) sit down with the leader, Chief Elaine Whitecloud, and make their respective sales pitches. “The only deal I’ll make is in the interest of my people,” the chief declares. “I’ve asked my son to join us. He’s my best adviser and especially good at cutting through the bull.” And in walks Dr Meet Cute!</p><p></p><p>And this week's Top 4 are ...</p><p>1 (1) DALLAS </p><p>2 (2) EMPIRE </p><p>3 (3) BLOOD AND OIL</p><p>4 (4) DYNASTY</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James from London, post: 211908, member: 22"] [U]01 Aug 12: DALLAS: Family Business v. 04 Mar 15: EMPIRE: Unto the Breach v. 06 Dec 15: BLOOD AND OIL: The Art of the Deal v. 13 Dec 17: DYNASTY: Rotten Things [/U] DALLAS and BLOOD AND OIL began the season with the same conundrum: what do you do when you discover a huge untapped oil reserve under a piece of land that cannot be drilled (Southfork on DALLAS, the Black Elk Indian reservation on B&O)? Nine episodes later, both shows come up with the same answer: you slant-drill it from an adjacent property. “We can drill from the Henderson rig, down and under the ranch,” Elena explains, showing Bobby a map of what she is proposing. “This is a way to get the oil without having to go against what you promised Miss Ellie,” adds John Ross. A similar map is produced on BLOOD AND OIL. “We siphon out their oil with our straw from our land,” Hap Briggs explains. “The land remains pristine and we all get rich,” adds Carla. Bobby’s meeting with Elena and John Ross is interrupted when he suffers an aneurysm which may or may not be related to the treatment he’s been receiving for his cancer. The episode takes an unexpected interest in the impact this has on John Ross who didn’t know anything about his uncle’s illness before now. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks Elena. “Bobby asked me not to,” she admits. “He thought … you and JR would use it against him to get Southfork.” John Ross’s first response is to pin Bum against a wall and order him to find JR: “Tell him his brother’s dying.” Slant-drilling might sound like the best solution for both the Ewings and the Briggs, but in each case, there is a complication. Christopher is angry when he learns that his cousin is still intent on getting his hands on Southfork oil, but agrees not to oppose the operation on one condition: that John Ross persuades JR to sign the deed to the ranch back to Bobby. “It’s about giving my father some peace of mind,“ he explains. “You keep saying you wanna fix the damage you’ve done. I know you love your father, but your whole life, my father was there for you when JR wasn’t. The John Ross that I used to know loved my father and if any of that person is still inside of you, you’ll do whatever it takes to get Southfork back for him.” This brief speech conjures up several conflicting elements of the DALLAS saga: the richly complicated relationship which exists between the cousins in the present, the more innocent Omri Katz and Joshua Harris versions who grew up together in the original series, and a slightly reconfigured (and more poignant) backstory in which JR was an absentee father to John Ross. It’s a heady mix. Meanwhile, the complicating factor on BLOOD AND OIL is that Hap is not the only one who owns a parcel of land adjacent to the Indian reservation — his ex-wife Annie and Billy LeFever do too, which means they are also in a position to slant-drill for the oil. So the race is on to get the rights from the Indians. “All we have to do is persuade the chief …” begins Carla in one scene; “… that we are the only partners that can drill that oil,” continues Annie in another. Having learned of Bobby’s illness, JR returns home, but refuses to consider the idea of “signing Southfork over to anybody … This land is finally mine like it should have been all along!” he barks at John Ross. “I’ve spent my entire life missing him, wanting to be with him, wanting to [I]be[/I] him … I always thought if I was more like him that he’d be proud of me, that would be enough. But it isn’t. I love my father but he’s so lost in his own anger and bitterness there’s no room for anybody else.” John Ross’s movingly delivered account of growing up with and without JR is mirrored by both Andre’s despair as he talks to his brothers about their dad on EMPIRE (“He’ll never see me, man, not like he sees you. No matter what I do, he’ll never see me — God!”) and Sam’s description of his upbringing on DYNASTY (“I grew up feeling completely worthless, thinking why should anybody care about me if my dad didn’t?”). There was a very touching moment in the opening episode of New DALLAS where Bobby, visiting JR in the nursing home, gently kissed him on the forehead and told him he loved him. This wasn’t exactly news — we’ve known since early on in DALLAS’s original run that, despite all their differences, Bobby cares about his brother deep down. However, I’m not sure I’d truly [I]felt[/I] it until that scene. And I've never felt it more strongly than in this episode when Bobby, weary and in pain, says to his brother, matter-of-factly, without sentiment, “JR, I love you. No matter what.” It’s as moving as anything in DALLAS history, including [i]Swan Song[/i]. John Ross’s describing JR as “lost in his own anger and bitterness” and Sue Ellen reminding him that “the depression that put you into that nursing home happened because all you really cared about was you being on top, and when it all fell apart, you realised you had nothing” recall the suicidal JR at the end of the original series, but in richer, more interesting terms than he appeared at the time. “Well, I’m back, honey, and I’m gonna be bigger than ever!” JR insists, turning on the old bravado. “And you still have nothing,” replies Sue Ellen sadly. Somehow it’s all so poignant, so moving. The actors — Hagman, Henderson, Gray and especially Duffy — are as good, if not better, in this episode than they ever have been. They imbue their characters with more than what’s in the script: a sense of history, an awareness of their own mortality, a humanity. As wonderfully soapy as Bobby, JR, John Ross and Sue Ellen have always been, for the first time they truly feel like real people. This shift is neatly symbolised by the framed photo that catches JR’s attention as he sits behind the desk in the Southfork study for the first time. It’s a picture of himself and Bobby in younger days — or to be more accurate, it’s a snap of Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy on what appears to be a real-life fishing trip. They look happy and relaxed together in a way we’ve never really seen on screen before: Duffy displays his catch with one hand and gives a thumbs up with the other while Hagman has an arm around his shoulder. They look less like stylised soap characters and more like regular human beings. There’s an equivalent moment in [i]Burden of Proof[/i], the Season 4 episode of KNOTS LANDING where Richard Avery leaves the cul-de-sac for good. At one point, the camera lingers on a framed picture of him holding a baby. It’s meant to be his screen son Jason, but it can’t be — the child is younger than Jason was when KNOTS started. Presumably, it’s the actor with his own son. This KNOTSian blurring of the real and the fictional is very potent. In the same way, when Bobby says to JR, “Nobody lives forever”, one is reminded of Larry Hagman’s real-life health issues as much as Bobby’s fictional ones. The opening scene of EMPIRE is great and recalls some familiar scenarios from Soap Land’s past. Lucious and Anika meet with their wedding planner to discuss their outrageously lavish big day (“More doves, more champagne, more everything!”), even though we know that Anika is secretly planning some kind of revenge on Lucious for cheating on her with Cookie. (Shades of Abby Ewing going ahead with her wedding to Charles Scott even after learning of his scheme to defraud her.) Then in barges Cookie, accompanied by faithful lieutenant Porsha, who informs Lucious that Anika has joined forces with his arch-nemesis: “She working with Beretti … Yeah, while you up here planning weddings, this bitch planning how to steal everything you got!” She and Porsha then march upstairs and proceed to toss Anika’s clothes over the balcony. Cookie’s “Get these damn ugly ass debutante clothes outta here!” is her version of Alexis Colby’s “Take this junk and your blonde tramp and get out of my home!” Following on from all this fun soapy stuff is a really good, emotional argument between Anika and Lucious. “This is not even me!” Anika yells tearfully as if insisting she is not by nature a two-dimensional Soap Land schemer. “I am not a treacherous person, Lucious, but you — you — you have twisted my love and made it some awful thing!” Another cheated on mistress strikes back on BLOOD AND OIL as Jules makes a super quick recovery from her overdose to fill Hap in on his son’s duplicity (“Wick knows about us … which is why he asked me to bug you for the Feds”) before cutting her ties with both Briggs men: “The two of you can take your manipulative arses and … go to hell.” This puts Anika and Wick in similar positions. Both have secretly plotted revenge against the man who betrayed them (her fiancee, his father) and both are found out this week. For their part, Lucious and Hap each behave as if they were the injured party. “Are you playing me?” a wounded sounding Lucious asks Anika. “What kind of son did I raise that betrays his father?” an indignant Hap asks Wick. “[I]You[/I] are accusing [I]me[/I] of betrayal, after all those women, all those lies and now [I]her?![/I]” replies Anika, pointing towards Cookie. “You were sleeping with my girlfriend!” shouts Wick at Hap. “I wanted to make you pay for all the times you made me feel like crap. I wanted to see you rot in jail.” Wick’s warning to his father (“You are an old man, Hap … At some point you’re gonna look back on your life and the only thing you’re gonna see is oil, the only thing you love and maybe the only thing that loves you back”) mirrors Sue Ellen’s words to JR: “All you really cared about was you being on top and when it all fell apart, you realised you had nothing … You still have nothing.” While this week’s DALLAS, EMPIRE and BLOOD AND OIL mostly consist of in-fighting amongst their existing characters, DYNASTY adds no less than four long-lost relatives to the mix: Cristal’s sister Iris (a grumpy gold digger), Blake’s father Tom (a fun bigot), Jeff and Monica’s father Cecil (a prison inmate) and Sam’s father Alejandro (who, despite being stabbed to death by Cristal in a flashback, shows up alive and well and calling himself Diego Calastana at the end of the ep: “Blake Carrington, what a pleasure it is to meet you — I’ve been looking forward to this for quite some time.”) In the opening episodes of New DALLAS and New DYNASTY, Christopher Ewing and Blake Carrington married Rebecca Sutter and Cristal Jennings respectively, neither realising that his new bride was lying about her identity. Since then, both women have come clean — up to a point. There’s still more to tell and Rebecca’s phony brother Tommy and Cristal’s scheming sister Iris are threatening to spill the rest of the beans to their respective husbands. “The plans to Christopher’s rig or I put a bullet in your little fairytale,” snarls Tommy. “If I tell your husband what really happened, who do you think will be on a flight out of Atlanta?” threatens Iris. There are three physical altercations between Soap Land siblings this week: brother versus brother versus brother on EMPIRE, sister versus sister on DYNASTY and brother versus sister on DALLAS. And there is a musical component to all three. We’ve never seen the three Lyon brothers alone together until this week. Following Anika’s defection, the family and the company are in crisis mode (“We at war!”) with everyone focused on either signing new clients or keeping existing ones from jumping ship. Alas, eldest son Andre has chosen this very week to stop taking his bipolar medication and is acting more irrationally than ever. When Hakeem questions his manic behaviour, he starts teasing him. Then Jamal teases Andre in return, only for Andre takes it the wrong way and before you know it, all three brothers are slamming each other up against walls. Oh, and did I mention this entire fight scene takes place in an elevator? All of a sudden, they get stuck between floors. Whereas the equivalent scenario involving Bobby and JR on old DALLAS was just a random occurrence, this time the elevator breakdown is part of the bigger storyline. (“The elevator’s not a malfunction,” reports the security chief. “We’re being hacked from the eighteenth floor — elevators, phones, internet.”) During the DALLAS stuck-in-an-elevator episode, JR flashed back to a conversation with Bobby from the beginning of the series where he pointed out that as the eldest son, he’d borne the brunt of their father’s disciplinarian approach to parenthood (“While you were out there sowing your wild oats … I was here, busting my butt under our father. And let me tell you, he’s not an easy man to work for”). Here, Andre makes the same point to Jamal and Hakeem, but in a far less cool and collected way than JR did. “You got no idea!” he screams in their faces. “You weren’t even there when it was really hard … You were just babies … I made Empire — 8:00 to 10:00! 8:00 to 10:00! 8:00 to 10:00 every day! I’d go home and work!” Jamel tries to calm him down by reminding him of the song he (Andre) used to sing to his brothers when they were small and scared — ‘Lean on Me’ by Bill Withers. Tentatively, the brothers all start singing and end up in a three-way embrace. That probably sounds disgustingly cheesy, but it’s beautifully done. By way of contrast, Fallon and Steven deliver a rendition of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ at the Carrington Christmas party so lacklustre that it prompts Sam to burst into an impromptu salsa routine in an attempt to liven things up. (And very good it is too — if he’d busted these kinds of moves on EMPIRE, he and Jamal might still be together.) Cristal joins in, which triggers Iris’s jealousy: “Now that you’re part of this family and have all this money, you think you can just push me out and take my son?” A sisterly catfight ensues, during which the enormous Carrington Christmas tree is overturned, just as the one in [i]Merry Christmas, Charley[/i] (FALCON CREST Season 9) was during Ian St James and Frank Agretti’s fight to the death twenty-three years earlier. Speaking of fights to the death, the final and most violent Battle of the Siblings takes place in the closing minutes of DALLAS between fake brother and sister Tommy and Rebecca Sutter. Rebecca’s refusal to steal Christopher’s top-secret plans for him means that Tommy has lost a deal worth a fortune. So when he shows up at her apartment, he is angry enough to strike her across the face as soon as she opens the door. “I was fine living off the little cons I was pulling,” he rants. “Then you show up, wiggle your ass, tell me I’m going to make millions off this Texas oil kid … I did everything you asked me to.” He grabs her by the neck and pushes her onto the bed, one hand over her throat and the other pulling at her jeans. It’s not clear if he’s gonna rape her or kill her or both. (This makes Rebecca, following Cody on B&O, the second pregnant woman to be violently attacked so far this season.) She whacks him with an alarm clock, rushes to her purse and pulls out a gun. He grabs for it and they struggle — just as Krystle and Claudia, Sean Rowan and Dex, and JR and Nick Pearce have before them. Inevitably, the gun goes off and then just as inevitably, the camera cuts away before we can see which of them was hit. In place of a shocked or screaming bystander, we cut to a shot of the two identical chimps Rebecca and Christopher bought earlier in the ep, and which are now splattered with blood. (This cuddly toy/gunshot juxtaposition recalls another moment from [i]Merry Christmas, Charley[/i] when Emma unzipped a stuffed rabbit and pulled out the weapon she then shot her husband with.) Rather than Sammy Joe’s salsa or Bill Withers’ 'Lovely Day’, the musical element in this scene is Johnny Cash singing ‘The Man Comes Around’ on the soundtrack. Using preexisting pop music in an extra-diegetic way was never part of the original DALLAS aesthetic, of course, but suddenly Cash and DALLAS feel like a perfect fit — lean and brooding, western and mythic. (And let us not forget that a Ewing mother-in-law, Lilimae Clements, once claimed to have sung on stage with Cash’s mother-in-law, Maybelle Carter.) “Can you imagine what Ewing Oil would have been today if our fathers had been allies instead of enemies?” John Ross asks his cousin towards the end of this week’s DALLAS. “It didn’t have to be this way. Jock — he set them against each other.” “And we carried on the family tradition,” replies Christopher. He then suggests they break the cycle and go into business together: “Ewing Energies has a nice ring to it. Don’t you think?” The way they sell the idea to Bobby (“We thought it was time for a little peace in this family”) makes it sounds like a can’t lose proposition. Even JR finally comes around and signs the deed to Southfork back to his brother. There’s further family bonding on EMPIRE as the Lyons come out ahead of Beretti and Anika, and celebrate with another singalong. But the harmony of both families is shattered by a medical crisis. Bobby suffers a second attack at Southfork while Andre has a complete meltdown in the Empire boardroom. “You are my son and I love you,” Lucious tells him. “You love me too?!” Andre sneers. “He loves me too! You choosing me to take over Empire since you love me?” “You know I haven’t decided which one of my sons —“ Lucious begins. “Piece of business advice from that Wharton education you paid so handsomely for,” Andre whispers, pressing his forehead against his father’s. “You pick the one who knows you’re a murderer.” It’s a brilliantly chilling moment and recalls John Ross’s earlier observation about what his grandfather did to JR and Bobby: “It didn’t have to be this way. Jock — he set them against each other.” Bobby and Andre are each taken away by ambulance. The separation of BLOOD AND OIL’s super couple, Billy and Cody, continues to follow the blueprint laid down by similar estrangements in ‘80s Soap Land — the introduction of potential love interests leading to further complications and misunderstandings. While visiting Jules in the hospital, Cody is mistaken for a nurse by a handsome doctor who reprimands her for not being at her post. It’s the cutesiest of meet-cutes. When they later run into each other in a bar, Billy sees them together and jumps to the wrong conclusion. Annoyed, Cody deliberately flirts with Dr Meet Cute to make Billy jealous. So Billy gets drunk and kisses Emma the sexy geologist, and Cody ends up seeing [I]them[/I] together. So far so enjoyably hackneyed — but there's a twist! At the end of the ep, the two companies competing to slant-drill under the Indian reservation (Hap, Carla, Lacey and AJ on one team, Annie, Billy, Emma and Wick on the other) sit down with the leader, Chief Elaine Whitecloud, and make their respective sales pitches. “The only deal I’ll make is in the interest of my people,” the chief declares. “I’ve asked my son to join us. He’s my best adviser and especially good at cutting through the bull.” And in walks Dr Meet Cute! And this week's Top 4 are ... 1 (1) DALLAS 2 (2) EMPIRE 3 (3) BLOOD AND OIL 4 (4) DYNASTY [/QUOTE]
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