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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 214465" data-attributes="member: 22">(continued)DALLAS and DYNASTY each include a shock parent/child reunion. On DALLAS, the shock belongs to the viewer (well, to me anyway — I’m not sure how I didn’t twig who Rebecca’s father was beforehand, but the penny didn’t fully drop until the moment her eyes light up when Christopher shows up with a bag of Chinese takeout: “Like when we were dating. I got you spring rolls, wonton soup and your moo-shu.”) On DYNASTY, the shock belongs to Sam when the Spanish-speaking man who approaches him in the park (and whom Sam initially appears to think is trying to pick him up — a possibility he seems quite happy to explore) turns out to be his previously dead dad.“You’re just like your Aunt Pamela when it comes to the Ewings,” Cliff Barnes tells his daughter Rebecca as he emerges from his private plane. “I never could trust her and I can’t trust you.” “For years, I’ve imagined this moment,” Alejandro tells his son Sam in their native tongue, “what I’d do, what I’d say, but there are no words.” “I gave up two years of my life for you so you can finally settle things and be at peace,” Rebecca reminds her father. “For the longest time, I thought you’d abandoned us,” Sam tells his. Both scenes conclude with the father making plans for the future. “I’m giving you a second chance to make me proud,” says Cliff. “I want you to get me a piece of Ewing Energies so we can put that family down for good.” “Now that I’ve found you, I have a plan so we can be a family again,” says Alejandro,” but I need time and your trust.” “I won’t lose focus again,” promises Rebecca while a teary Sam nods in agreement.While Rebecca Barnes prepares to avenge the Ewings for wrongs done to her father, Jeff Colby plots to pay the Carringtons back for putting his father in prison. “I have Fallon Carrington in my pocket,” he assures Cecil over the phone. “Everything she owns, her assets, her stake in Carrington Atlantic, could all be mine — when I marry her.”This being the last episode of BLOOD AND OIL, things are moving fast, and somewhere along the line, exes Hap and Annie Briggs go from being adversaries to business associates. “There are huge advantages to pooling our resources,” Annie assures her startled partner Billy.The centrepiece of both EMPIRE and BLOOD AND OIL is a contract signing deemed so significant that it warrants a family party to mark the occasion. While the Lyons gather at Lucious’s house to sign the IPO transfer thingy, the partners in the Black Elk deal convene at Hap’s to sign their contract. In each instance, one character is conspicuous by their absence. Even though Andre is considered instrumental to the EMPIRE deal (“We wouldn’t even know what IPO was if it wasn’t for you,” Jamal tells his brother. “It’s all cos of you, Dre”), he is too hurt by his father’s refusal to visit him at the clinic to attend: “Dad doesn’t wanna see me like this? Well, this is who I am.” Instead, he gives wife Rhonda proxy to act on his behalf. This leads to some juicy friction between father and daughter-in-law. “I’m not signing over Andre’s stock to some little country club queen just because his feelings are hurt!” Lucious huffs. “I’ve been with your son for ten years and you don’t know a damn thing about me,” Rhonda snaps back. “I came from nothing and I worked my ass off … Nothing has ever been handed to me and I have never expected anything to be either.” In a parallel world once removed, one could almost imagine such an exchange occurring between Jock and Sue Ellen on DALLAS — he didn’t know a damn thing about her either.Over at the Briggs’ party, it’s Billy who’s the no-show — the contract signing clashes with the deadline Cody gave him to leave town and save their marriage. “If he doesn’t show up to sign, our alliance is over before it begins,” worries Annie. “If I know my boy Billy, he’ll be here,” Hap replies confidently. And so it proves. Billy signs on the dotted line, hoping Cody will understand. “It’s not just my dream, it’s our dream,” he reasons.The two gatherings turn out to be hugely eventful: each includes a gatecrasher with a gun, a fatal shooting, a climactic revelation and a character bribed into leaving and/or being exiled from Soap Land forever.First of all, the gatecrashers: At the EMPIRE party, Jamal’s baby mama Olivia arrives unannounced with boyfriend Reg in tow. Olivia is oddly subdued while Jamal notices a tattoo of a crow on Reg’s arm and connects it to the scary bird Lola described in her dreams. “Does he hurt her?” he asks Olivia. “Help me,” she whispers, a scared look on her face. As Jamal turns to confront him, Reg pulls out a gun and grabs Cookie. At the BLOOD AND OIL party, a Saudi Arabian baddy, glimpsed earlier in the episode, lurks outside the house. When Lacey Briggs comes out to retrieve a sweater, he pulls out a gun and grabs her.Thinking Reg is after money, Hakeem offers him his diamond-encrusted watch. (That’s how we know it’s worth $10,000 more than the Soap Land pawnbroker paid Steven Carrington for his.) However, it’s not money Reg wants, but revenge. Turns out he's crazily possessive over Olivia and wants to kill Jamal for getting her pregnant, even though it happened years before she and Reg got together. Evil Saudi Man’s motives are less convoluted. “Don’t move, just listen, I want the USGS report,” he hisses at Lacey.While Billy attempts to rescue Lacey only to be knocked unconscious, Lucious tries to save Cookie by making a terrible admission — that it was him and not his son who impregnated Olivia during her brief marriage to Jamal: “I put the baby in her, not him … Shoot me!” Both gunmen are then abruptly shot dead by a professional: the Saudi thug on B&O by Sheriff Tip; Reg on EMPIRE by Lucious’s security chief (and Cookie’s secret lover), Malcolm. (Gunshot fatalities #2 & 3.)It looks like Lucious is not the only Soap Land father to have impregnated his son’s woman. Jules is pregnant on BLOOD AND OIL and, unsure which Briggs man is the daddy, goes to Dr Meet Cute for a DNA test. Soap Land being what it is, it doesn’t take long for Carla to learn the results. “Does my husband know he’s gonna father another child?” she asks Jules. He doesn’t.This brings us to the two characters, both female, who are “bought off” during the EMPIRE and BLOOD AND OIL parties, in much the same way Val Ewing and Alexis Carrington allegedly were during in the 1960s and 70s. First, it’s the turn of Naomi Campbell on EMPIRE. Lucious, unhappy at how much influence she is exacting over Hakeem’s career (Cookie amusingly refers to her as Yoko), tells her to name her price, just as JR did Pam in the opening episode of DALLAS. “I need to know how much it will cost to make you … go as far away from my son as humanly possible,” he tells her. “There’s no amount of money, Lucious, that’s going to make me go away from Hakeem,” she replies confidently. “You are in debt up to your neck,” he points out, before instructing Malcolm to “put her on the first flight to London. One way.” Angrily, Naomi Campbell tears up the cheque he has just written her: “I don’t want your money and as soon as I hear that you’re dead, I will take the first flight back …” “He’ll forget you in a month,” Lucious assures her. ”And in six months you’ll be rotting in a wheelchair like a vegetable with a colostomy bag trailing behind you. You are a disgusting, despicable human being and I wish you a miserable death when you go to hell!” Naomi snarls as she is dragged off the show. Imagine Joan van Ark delivering that speech to Larry Hagman. Lucious then lies to Hakeem about his girlfriend the same way JR did to Lucy about her mama. “Did she take your money?” Hakeem asks. “What do you think?” Lucious replies before bragging to his family, “I saved him from a con artist!”Back on B&O, Carla makes Jules a similar offer to get out of town: “I will pay you fifty per cent over market value for the Tack Room and provide a generous allowance for you and your child for the rest of your lives. In exchange, you move away, you never speak to Hap again and you never tell him about your baby.” Jules starts to respond with the usual Soap Land spiel about how she’s not for sale, but then Carla points out that “you betrayed Hap and he hates you for it — and when he finds out about the baby, he’ll sue you for custody and he’ll win. Chances are you will never see your child again.” Over on DALLAS, Christopher vows to make this threat a reality for Rebecca: “I’m gonna send you to prison and then I’m gonna see to it that those babies you’re carrying never know what a lying piece of garbage you really are.”Jules agrees to the deal, but unlike Naomi Campbell, gets to have her cake and eat it. Not only does she take Carla’s money, but due to one of those crazy medical mix-ups that occasionally happen in Soap Land, it turns out Hap isn’t the father of her baby after all — Wick is, and he agrees to leave town with her. Over on DYNASTY, Steven’s leaving too. “I don’t know where yet, but you can always come and visit,” he tells Fallon. Rather than taking money to leave, he is the one bestowing gifts — a birthday present for Fallon of a cigarette lighter he found in the pawnshop. “It reminded me of the one Mom used to have,” he explains.Remember those chances of a fresh start that were proffered early on in this week’s DALLAS and BLOOD AND OIL? “Meet me tomorrow at the Ewing Energies space. It’ll be a new beginning for us,” John Ross urged Elena. “I’ll be at the Tack Room at midnight … If you’re not there, I’m leaving without you,” Cody told Billy. We wait to see if these appointments will be kept. It feels like there’s a lot at stake — as if the souls of John Ross and Billy are up for grabs. If Elena shows up to meet John Ross, it means she still believes in him and he can be saved. If Billy shows up to meet Cody, it means he has chosen love over money and he will be too. Alas for John Ross, Elena does not appear. Instead, she sends her mother Carmen to hand back the engagement ring. Over the top of this scene, we hear Sue Ellen delivering a speech to her political supporters. A shot of John Ross’s face as he realises he’s lost Elena is matched by his mother’s voice saying, “I have lived a life of mistakes and regret and truthfully, there were times I thought I was beyond saving.”Things work out better for Billy. Hap tells him how shocked Chief Whitecloud was to discover that her son, Dr Meet Cute, “was using the oil deal to try and break up your marriage” and has agreed “to give us the deal, no strings attached … You’ll be a part of it, no matter where you are.” This means Billy gets to live happily after with the love of his life and be unimaginably rich.Still brooding in his empty office space, John Ross receives a visit from his daddy. Rebecca Barnes and Jeff Colby might be obediently following their fathers’ orders, but John Ross is calling the shots with his. “You want in on Ewing Energies?” he asks JR. “You stop teaching me about the oil business and you start teaching me every dirty trick that you know. And when I take this company from Christopher and Elena, I’ll cut you in … If you screw me, I’ll make sure you don’t see a dime of that oil sitting underneath Southfork and I will put you back in that home for good [just like his big brother James once did]. Got it?” JR smiles approvingly as his son crosses back over to the dark side.Before riding off into the sunset with Jules, Wick Briggs is summoned by his father to a private room for the confrontation we’ve been waiting for all season. Hap now knows Wick was the masked intruder who held him at gunpoint in B&O's pilot episode — so what’s he gonna do about it? Well, first of all, he pulls a gun on him. (“How does that feel, Wick — to be looking down the barrel of a gun and somebody that you love is pointing it at your face?”), which is quite exciting, but then he something really unexpected. He starts to cry and then apologises for being a bad dad. “Forgive me, Wick,” he weeps, “so that I can forgive you and we can move forward.” Wick gets a bit weepy too and they embrace. All the while, you’re waiting for Hap to suddenly pull out a knife and stab his son in the back — or for his eyes to narrow so you know he’s at least thinking vengeful thoughts. But it doesn’t happen. They just ... hug.After Lola is reunited with her mother on EMPIRE, another endangered toddler is reunited with his father on B&O when Khalid, AJ’s kidnapped son, is found hiding in a closet following a police raid on a house occupied by the Bad Saudis. (Gunshot fatality #4: the woman AJ had been liaising with earlier in the season takes a bullet to the forehead.) Whereas the Lyons bid a fond farewell to Lola before Olivia takes her back home,  AJ tells Lacey that he and Khalid are staying put in Rock Springs: “We’re already home.” Khalid’s mother, AJ’s soon-to-be ex-wife, apparently has no objection to this (“She knows Khalid’s best life is here, and so is mine”), which is just as well considering BLOOD AND OIL has just thirteen minutes left to run at this point and there isn’t time to embark on a whole new custody battle storyline.In fact, everyone on B&O gets a nice, neat happy ending, which feels like a bit of a cheat. For FALCON CREST and the original DYNASTY reunion to reach similarly upbeat conclusions, both soaps required their chief antagonists, Angela Channing and Alexis Colby, to abruptly acquire an air of benevolence towards those they’d spent an entire series waging war against. Likewise, Hap and Carla Briggs, easily the most coldly ruthless couple in C21st Soap Land, are suddenly suffused with warmth and benevolence towards their fellow man. In the final scene of the series, in which they stand arm in arm, gazing serenely out over their property (“Look at all this. As far as the eye can see, it’s ours.” “ …This place isn’t for everybody, but it’s definitely for you and me”), they look and sound just like Bobby and Ann in their final scene of DALLAS’s first season as they gaze contentedly out over Southfork. (“Feels like home again.” “Yeah.”)This season finale of DALLAS was apparently filmed before a second season had been confirmed. Had this week’s ep turned out to be its last-ever instalment, it would, ironically, have served as a more satisfying conclusion to the series than B&O's finale, which was clearly constructed with cancellation in mind. Although aspects of the DALLAS saga remain unresolved, it still manages to come full circle with the next chapter of the Barnes/Ewing feud about to commence and JR agreeing to make John Ross over in his own image. The very last shot, where the camera pulls back and back from John Ross and JR standing at the window of the old/new Ewing offices until they are indistinguishable from the rest of nighttime Dallas skyline, mirrors the opening shot of the very first episode of DALLAS where Bobby’s car is just one among many driving along the Dallas highway. Whereas this episode of DALLAS leaves some loose ends to dangle tantalisingly in our imaginations, every plot thread on BLOOD AND OIL has been so neatly tied up that one need never think about it again.And the Top 4 are …1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) EMPIRE3 (3) BLOOD AND OIL4 (4) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?