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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: 216018" data-attributes="member: 22"><p><u>28 Jan 13: DALLAS: Battle Lines v. 18 Mar 15: EMPIRE: Die But Once v. 24 Jan 18: DYNASTY: I Answer to No Man </u></p><p></p><p>“Twenty-two years ago, I had a daughter,” Ann Ewing informs Bobby on DALLAS. “Before Steven and Fallon were born, Alexis and I had a son,” Blake Carrington tells Cristal on DYNASTY. “When Emma was eighteen months old,” Ann continues, “I was at the State Fair. I turned away for a moment and when I turned back, she was gone. Someone had taken her.” “When he was six months old,” Blake explains, “someone broke into the house and took him.” “Everyone searched, but Emma was never found.” “We did what the police told us [but] … I never saw Adam again.” Whereas Ann’s bombshell acts as a prelude to an even bigger one — that her ex-husband Harris claims to have found Emma and is willing, for a price, to tell Ann her whereabouts — Blake’s revelation, which comes towards the end of this week’s DYNASTY, serves to explain his behaviour during the preceding screen hour, an unusually focused episode of DYNASTY that concentrates entirely on Fallon’s abduction by Iris and Alejandro. </p><p></p><p>“You don’t negotiate with a terrorist!” Bobby exclaims after Ann admits she has already given Harris what he wants (the tape she made of him admitting to extortion). His sentiment shared by Blake who refuses to meet Alejandro’s demand of $15,000,000 for Fallon’s return. “Giving in to their demands this early would only leave us more vulnerable down the road,” he tells his family. “Fallon is my daughter. We’re doing it my way.” Unusually for New DYNASTY, it feels like there’s something genuinely at stake here and, for the first time, Blake comes across like a real Soap Land patriarch. </p><p></p><p>“I didn’t want you to come. I was hoping I’d never see you again,” Ann’s daughter Emma tells her when they finally come face to face. A mother rejected by the daughter she had given up for dead — it’s the soapiest of scenarios, yet played with total conviction. As a result, Ann spends most of the episode careening between joy and anguish.</p><p></p><p>An unspecified amount of time has elapsed between the end of last season’s DALLAS and the beginning of this one, but in the interim, the empty office space we left John Ross and JR standing in has been transformed into the swanky new headquarters of Ewing Enterprises. Accordingly, after spending most of the first season in jeans and work shirts, the Ewing men are now slickly decked out in business suits while the women are doing the C21st equivalent of power dressing. Conversely, EMPIRE’s resident workaholic, Andre, is no longer comfortable in the corporate world: “I feel like nothing fits anymore. You know, this suit and tie, these shoes — nothing fits.” He tries to explain the change to his father: “There was always something missing, Dad, a void I filled with darkness, but now I’m getting to know my God and he is filling that void with a higher purpose.” “God? … What do you know about God?” scoffs Lucious. “There’s no higher purpose than being a maker of music. <em>That’s</em> the voice of God.”</p><p></p><p>Andre isn’t the only character to have undergone a transformation. As she explains to Bobby and Christopher in the <em>Batman</em>-esque surroundings of Barnes Global, Fake Rebecca is now New Pamela: “I’m Afton’s daughter … Cliff Barnes is my father.” “I don’t have to play weak anymore,” she later tells John Ross. To illustrate the difference, she’s wearing darker eye makeup than when she was Christopher’s sweet wife. There are echoes of her Aunt Katherine in this metamorphosis from Goody Two Shoes to Ruthless Go-Getter, but whereas Katherine spent three seasons indicating to the audience that her niceness was a sham, New Pamela spent the first year of New DALLAS lying the way people do in real life, i.e., with a straight face, which means the audience was as much in the dark about her true nature as the characters on screen. Come to think of it, we still are. How much of her quest for revenge has to do with her daddy’s vendetta against the Ewings and how much is because of her own broken heart has yet to be determined. It’s the kind of ambiguity that didn’t exist in Katherine’s day, but which New DALLAS specialises in.</p><p></p><p>Cliff’s instructions to his daughter are to “make sure Christopher Ewing does not get an annulment and that you get a piece of Ewing Energies in the divorce.” Between seasons, however, Christopher has tracked down the real Rebecca Sutter. As the chief witness to Fake Rebecca/New Pamela’s identity theft, she now replaces Southfork as the DALLAS asset everyone wants a piece of. She begins the episode as the ace up Christopher’s sleeve and ends it as John Ross’s bargaining chip. “What would you possibly have to offer that would make me wanna get in bed with you?” New Pamela asks him when he proposes that they join forces. With perfect Soap Land timing, the doors of her penthouse elevator slide open. “You remember the real Rebecca Sutter,” says John Ross by way of introduction. “She’s Christopher’s secret weapon. But if you’re in, she’ll be ours.” </p><p></p><p>There are two Soap Land celebrity cameos this week, racing driver veteran Ricky Rudd on DALLAS and rap icon Snoop Dogg on EMPIRE. Rudd is marginally worse than Snoop at playing himself. Happily, both are given the opportunity to show what they do best. For Ricky, that means driving around a track really fast in Christopher’s new methane-powered car; for Snoop, it means performing his groovy Funkadelic-sampling single ‘Peaches N Cream’. As DYNASTY is pretty much an immediate-cast-only affair this week, there is no room for cameos, but a reference to the real-life kidnapping of John Paul Getty Jr adds some verisimilitude to the Carringtons' debate on how best to deal with Alejandro’s ransom demands. “Getty strung out his son’s kidnappers for months,” says Anders. “Kid lost an ear. He was never the same,” Steven points out. “They didn’t <em>kill</em> him,” counters Blake. Having referenced a genuine tragedy (Getty Jr, who never recovered from his ordeal, subsequently developed a drug problem that led to a stroke, permanent paralysis and premature death), DYNASTY then satirises it. While on the phone to Blake, Alejandro pulls out a knife, and Blake can hear his daughter’s screams over the line — but instead of her ear, Alejandro has cut off some of her hair. “How am I supposed to live like this? Bangs?! … You should have shot me!” she sobs. </p><p></p><p>There’s another notable cultural allusion on DALLAS. Appealing for leniency on behalf of her brother Tommy (whom she believes is merely missing rather than dead), Rebecca Sutter tells Christopher that she’s “seen enough LAW AND ORDER to know it’s you he wronged and it’s you who can press charges.” This means that not only is LAW AND ORDER, in all its forms, a fictional series within the Ewingverse, but so is THE WIRE, THE X-FILES, HOMICIDE LIFE ON THE STREET and every other show that HOMICIDE’s Detective John Munch made a cross-over appearance in. (Also, thanks to that copy of the National Enquirer Sammy Jo bought in 1983, all of these shows are now fictions within a fiction within a fiction.) </p><p></p><p>JR drops by the new Ewing offices “to deliver some muffins to the pretty little secretaries,” he tells Bobby. “Who could’ve guessed so many would turn out to be men? I mean, where’s the fun in that?” While the office staff at Ewing Enterprises are somewhat anonymous thus far, Lucious and Cookie’s assistants, Becky and Porsha, remain consistently good value on EMPIRE. They’re like funnier, more characterful versions of Sly and Phyllis, the old Ewing Oil secretaries on DALLAS. “You use your <em>inside</em> voice when you talk to Becky,” scolds Becky when Lucious yells at her. Porsha, meanwhile, frantically backtracks after realising she’s said too much to Lucious regarding Cookie’s assignation with Malcolm: “I don’t know where she at. I don’t know nothing. I ain’t know nothing since Y2K!” In other underling news, there’s an unexpectedly sweet scene towards the end of DYNASTY where the normally cold Anders consoles Sam on the loss of both his parents — the kidnapping ordeal having ended with Iris (Sam’s mother) shooting dead Alejandro (his father) before going on the run. “You’ll always have family here,” Anders assures him, even going so far as to offer an awkward embrace.</p><p></p><p>“We’re not so different, you and me,” Hap Briggs told Billy LeFever in the final episode of BLOOD AND OIL. “We’re not so different, you and I,” John Ross tells New Pamela in the final scene of this week’s DALLAS. “Is this the part where you say we’re not so different after all?” Michael asks Jeff on DYNASTY just after they’ve exchanged punches over Fallon. Jeff refuses to follow this trend, however. “You and I are nothing alike,” he replies. “You fight like a guy that has something to prove. I’ve already proven it.”</p><p></p><p>On the most recent episodes of DALLAS and EMPIRE, John Ross and Lucious proposed to Elena and Cookie and were rejected. This week, their hearts have hardened. “Love is for pussies,” John Ross declares during the pre-credit sequence that opens DALLAS’s new season. At the end of the episode, he makes New Pamela a proposition. “We want the exact same thing — to destroy Christopher and Elena and make them hurt like they hurt us … Let’s help each other. And when we’re done, we take Ewing Energies.” Lucious becomes equally vengeful after learning about Cookie’s fling with Malcolm. He revokes her security clearance at the Empire offices and has her barred from the building. “You think you own me? You are sick!” she yells at him. “Are you gonna leave on your own or do I have to escort you?” he replies coolly. It feels a bit like JR throwing Sue Ellen off Southfork. As her lover, Malcolm has been playing Dex to Cookie’s Alexis, tolerating her preoccupation with her ex-husband and their family even as he’s seducing her in front of an open fire. However, when he asks her to move away to Washington with him, she declines to play Billy to his Cody. “Malcolm, you are a beautiful man but I can’t. I can’t leave all of this. I worked too hard,” she tells him sadly.</p><p></p><p>With EMPIRE’s first season finale coming next week, you can feel the show is hurtling towards some kind of explosive climax. As well as Lucious and Cookie’s blow up, Hakeem is furious at his father for sending Naomi Campbell away and vents his anger by dissing him during an onstage rap. Lucious responds by knocking him to the floor with one punch. Next thing we know, Hakeem has announced his intention to leave the family record label — which in EMPIRE terms, is as serious as Bobby and Pam moving out of the family home at the end of the original DALLAS’s second season. Worse follows when Lucious discovers Hakeem literally in bed with the enemy — his own former fiancee Anika. Both of them lock eyes with Lucious then just keep doing what they’re doing.</p><p></p><p>Trend of the week: women in business. While New Pamela is after a slice of Ewing Energies (“I would like 30% of your ownership,” she informs Christopher), Elena already owns 10% but is hungry for more: “I wanna earn a bigger stake in this company. I wanna be a partner.” Meanwhile, Cookie is shocked to discover that, contrary to what she was told, she was never on Empire’s board of directors and what’s more, her firstborn son was in on the deception. “Andre knew the day he made that deal with you that a convicted felon can never serve on the board of a publicly-traded company,” Lucious tells her. At the end of DYNASTY, a newly free but fringeless Fallon (“They might have stolen my hair but they’ll never steal my hustle”) informs Jeff that she wishes to end their partnership, both professionally and personally. “I know I was only tied up for a day,” she explains, “but it made me realise I have been tied to someone my entire life. I need to see this through on my own.” It’d be nice to be able to root for her here but, as with most of Fallon’s decisions, it feels kind of arbitrary.</p><p></p><p>Running out of family members he hasn’t alienated, Lucious turns to gay black sheep Jamal to help him out of a writer’s block and they conjure up a song together in front of our eyes. The creative process is notoriously hard to dramatise, especially in a Soap Land setting, which is one of the reasons the fashion-based soaps didn’t really work — a designer getting an idea is far harder to manifest on screen than, say, an oil well erupting. However, EMPIRE pulls it off here by utilising the richness and history of the characters’ relationship. Hoping to inspire Lucious, Jamal takes him back to the small house they used to live in — the house where Lucious dumped Jamal in a trash can as a little kid when he found him wearing his mother’s shoes. And it doesn’t hurt that the actors are so musically adept. (Turns out Lucious plays a mean Spanish guitar.) With Hakeem turning away from his father and Andre turning to God, Jamal is now first in line to assume control of Empire — but first, he has to prove he has what it takes. “Do you want Empire or don’t you? Cos if you want it, you gotta be willing to take it!” Lucious tells him, sounding not unlike Jock Ewing during his “Real power is something you take” speech. Nice boy Jamal heeds his father’s words and ends up holding the family nemesis Beretti over the ledge of a building and threatening to let him drop unless he signs over “the rights to Lucious Lyon’s masters in perpetuity, do you understand me?!”</p><p></p><p>When New DALLAS and EMPIRE began, Bobby Ewing and Lucious Lyon were told they were dying. Eleven episodes later, Bobby’s medical tribulations appear to be behind him, and now it turns out that Lucious, like Jason Colby before him, has been misdiagnosed. Instead of dying of ALS, he’s suffering from a serious, but far less terminal illness called myasthenia gravis or MG. This should feel like a massive cop-out, but as with Jason and Bobby, the dramatic pay off is worth it. (Ironically, the one character who genuinely is dying — JR — is playing it so close to his chest that no-one, including the viewer, knows anything about it.) </p><p></p><p>The news of his reprieve seems to imbue in Lucious a sense of omnipotence. “Let’s see who’s more powerful — your God or your daddy!” he tells Andre. Realising that Andre’s religious awakening has as much to do with his gorgeous music therapist Michelle (played by Jennifer Hudson) as it does the Lord, Lucious offers her the chance to make a gospel record at Empire. Thrilled, she accepts. As far as Andre is concerned, this means she is now contaminated. “My father is the Devil and you just spread your legs for him,” he says. </p><p></p><p>Like ‘80s Blake Carrington when his sight returned, Lucious elects to keep the news of his “recovery” a secret. However, the medication he’s on for his newly diagnosed condition causes him to hallucinate — he sees Bunky sitting at the bottom of his bed — and to ramble. Oh, how he rambles. “You can’t be here, man, I killed your ass just like Shine’s boys,” he tells Bunky’s ghost. “I’m not dying … I’m about to come back like a phoenix from the ashes. I’m-a rise up from the dead like Jesus. I’m your messiah!” And who should be present to hear this revelation but Cookie? ”Bunky was my cousin, you son of a bitch,” she murmurs before placing a pillow over Lucious’s face. “It’s over.”</p><p></p><p>And this week’s Top 3 are …</p><p></p><p>1 (2) EMPIRE</p><p>2 (1) DALLAS</p><p>3 (4) DYNASTY</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James from London, post: 216018, member: 22"] [U]28 Jan 13: DALLAS: Battle Lines v. 18 Mar 15: EMPIRE: Die But Once v. 24 Jan 18: DYNASTY: I Answer to No Man [/U] “Twenty-two years ago, I had a daughter,” Ann Ewing informs Bobby on DALLAS. “Before Steven and Fallon were born, Alexis and I had a son,” Blake Carrington tells Cristal on DYNASTY. “When Emma was eighteen months old,” Ann continues, “I was at the State Fair. I turned away for a moment and when I turned back, she was gone. Someone had taken her.” “When he was six months old,” Blake explains, “someone broke into the house and took him.” “Everyone searched, but Emma was never found.” “We did what the police told us [but] … I never saw Adam again.” Whereas Ann’s bombshell acts as a prelude to an even bigger one — that her ex-husband Harris claims to have found Emma and is willing, for a price, to tell Ann her whereabouts — Blake’s revelation, which comes towards the end of this week’s DYNASTY, serves to explain his behaviour during the preceding screen hour, an unusually focused episode of DYNASTY that concentrates entirely on Fallon’s abduction by Iris and Alejandro. “You don’t negotiate with a terrorist!” Bobby exclaims after Ann admits she has already given Harris what he wants (the tape she made of him admitting to extortion). His sentiment shared by Blake who refuses to meet Alejandro’s demand of $15,000,000 for Fallon’s return. “Giving in to their demands this early would only leave us more vulnerable down the road,” he tells his family. “Fallon is my daughter. We’re doing it my way.” Unusually for New DYNASTY, it feels like there’s something genuinely at stake here and, for the first time, Blake comes across like a real Soap Land patriarch. “I didn’t want you to come. I was hoping I’d never see you again,” Ann’s daughter Emma tells her when they finally come face to face. A mother rejected by the daughter she had given up for dead — it’s the soapiest of scenarios, yet played with total conviction. As a result, Ann spends most of the episode careening between joy and anguish. An unspecified amount of time has elapsed between the end of last season’s DALLAS and the beginning of this one, but in the interim, the empty office space we left John Ross and JR standing in has been transformed into the swanky new headquarters of Ewing Enterprises. Accordingly, after spending most of the first season in jeans and work shirts, the Ewing men are now slickly decked out in business suits while the women are doing the C21st equivalent of power dressing. Conversely, EMPIRE’s resident workaholic, Andre, is no longer comfortable in the corporate world: “I feel like nothing fits anymore. You know, this suit and tie, these shoes — nothing fits.” He tries to explain the change to his father: “There was always something missing, Dad, a void I filled with darkness, but now I’m getting to know my God and he is filling that void with a higher purpose.” “God? … What do you know about God?” scoffs Lucious. “There’s no higher purpose than being a maker of music. [I]That’s[/I] the voice of God.” Andre isn’t the only character to have undergone a transformation. As she explains to Bobby and Christopher in the [i]Batman[/i]-esque surroundings of Barnes Global, Fake Rebecca is now New Pamela: “I’m Afton’s daughter … Cliff Barnes is my father.” “I don’t have to play weak anymore,” she later tells John Ross. To illustrate the difference, she’s wearing darker eye makeup than when she was Christopher’s sweet wife. There are echoes of her Aunt Katherine in this metamorphosis from Goody Two Shoes to Ruthless Go-Getter, but whereas Katherine spent three seasons indicating to the audience that her niceness was a sham, New Pamela spent the first year of New DALLAS lying the way people do in real life, i.e., with a straight face, which means the audience was as much in the dark about her true nature as the characters on screen. Come to think of it, we still are. How much of her quest for revenge has to do with her daddy’s vendetta against the Ewings and how much is because of her own broken heart has yet to be determined. It’s the kind of ambiguity that didn’t exist in Katherine’s day, but which New DALLAS specialises in. Cliff’s instructions to his daughter are to “make sure Christopher Ewing does not get an annulment and that you get a piece of Ewing Energies in the divorce.” Between seasons, however, Christopher has tracked down the real Rebecca Sutter. As the chief witness to Fake Rebecca/New Pamela’s identity theft, she now replaces Southfork as the DALLAS asset everyone wants a piece of. She begins the episode as the ace up Christopher’s sleeve and ends it as John Ross’s bargaining chip. “What would you possibly have to offer that would make me wanna get in bed with you?” New Pamela asks him when he proposes that they join forces. With perfect Soap Land timing, the doors of her penthouse elevator slide open. “You remember the real Rebecca Sutter,” says John Ross by way of introduction. “She’s Christopher’s secret weapon. But if you’re in, she’ll be ours.” There are two Soap Land celebrity cameos this week, racing driver veteran Ricky Rudd on DALLAS and rap icon Snoop Dogg on EMPIRE. Rudd is marginally worse than Snoop at playing himself. Happily, both are given the opportunity to show what they do best. For Ricky, that means driving around a track really fast in Christopher’s new methane-powered car; for Snoop, it means performing his groovy Funkadelic-sampling single ‘Peaches N Cream’. As DYNASTY is pretty much an immediate-cast-only affair this week, there is no room for cameos, but a reference to the real-life kidnapping of John Paul Getty Jr adds some verisimilitude to the Carringtons' debate on how best to deal with Alejandro’s ransom demands. “Getty strung out his son’s kidnappers for months,” says Anders. “Kid lost an ear. He was never the same,” Steven points out. “They didn’t [I]kill[/I] him,” counters Blake. Having referenced a genuine tragedy (Getty Jr, who never recovered from his ordeal, subsequently developed a drug problem that led to a stroke, permanent paralysis and premature death), DYNASTY then satirises it. While on the phone to Blake, Alejandro pulls out a knife, and Blake can hear his daughter’s screams over the line — but instead of her ear, Alejandro has cut off some of her hair. “How am I supposed to live like this? Bangs?! … You should have shot me!” she sobs. There’s another notable cultural allusion on DALLAS. Appealing for leniency on behalf of her brother Tommy (whom she believes is merely missing rather than dead), Rebecca Sutter tells Christopher that she’s “seen enough LAW AND ORDER to know it’s you he wronged and it’s you who can press charges.” This means that not only is LAW AND ORDER, in all its forms, a fictional series within the Ewingverse, but so is THE WIRE, THE X-FILES, HOMICIDE LIFE ON THE STREET and every other show that HOMICIDE’s Detective John Munch made a cross-over appearance in. (Also, thanks to that copy of the National Enquirer Sammy Jo bought in 1983, all of these shows are now fictions within a fiction within a fiction.) JR drops by the new Ewing offices “to deliver some muffins to the pretty little secretaries,” he tells Bobby. “Who could’ve guessed so many would turn out to be men? I mean, where’s the fun in that?” While the office staff at Ewing Enterprises are somewhat anonymous thus far, Lucious and Cookie’s assistants, Becky and Porsha, remain consistently good value on EMPIRE. They’re like funnier, more characterful versions of Sly and Phyllis, the old Ewing Oil secretaries on DALLAS. “You use your [I]inside[/I] voice when you talk to Becky,” scolds Becky when Lucious yells at her. Porsha, meanwhile, frantically backtracks after realising she’s said too much to Lucious regarding Cookie’s assignation with Malcolm: “I don’t know where she at. I don’t know nothing. I ain’t know nothing since Y2K!” In other underling news, there’s an unexpectedly sweet scene towards the end of DYNASTY where the normally cold Anders consoles Sam on the loss of both his parents — the kidnapping ordeal having ended with Iris (Sam’s mother) shooting dead Alejandro (his father) before going on the run. “You’ll always have family here,” Anders assures him, even going so far as to offer an awkward embrace. “We’re not so different, you and me,” Hap Briggs told Billy LeFever in the final episode of BLOOD AND OIL. “We’re not so different, you and I,” John Ross tells New Pamela in the final scene of this week’s DALLAS. “Is this the part where you say we’re not so different after all?” Michael asks Jeff on DYNASTY just after they’ve exchanged punches over Fallon. Jeff refuses to follow this trend, however. “You and I are nothing alike,” he replies. “You fight like a guy that has something to prove. I’ve already proven it.” On the most recent episodes of DALLAS and EMPIRE, John Ross and Lucious proposed to Elena and Cookie and were rejected. This week, their hearts have hardened. “Love is for pussies,” John Ross declares during the pre-credit sequence that opens DALLAS’s new season. At the end of the episode, he makes New Pamela a proposition. “We want the exact same thing — to destroy Christopher and Elena and make them hurt like they hurt us … Let’s help each other. And when we’re done, we take Ewing Energies.” Lucious becomes equally vengeful after learning about Cookie’s fling with Malcolm. He revokes her security clearance at the Empire offices and has her barred from the building. “You think you own me? You are sick!” she yells at him. “Are you gonna leave on your own or do I have to escort you?” he replies coolly. It feels a bit like JR throwing Sue Ellen off Southfork. As her lover, Malcolm has been playing Dex to Cookie’s Alexis, tolerating her preoccupation with her ex-husband and their family even as he’s seducing her in front of an open fire. However, when he asks her to move away to Washington with him, she declines to play Billy to his Cody. “Malcolm, you are a beautiful man but I can’t. I can’t leave all of this. I worked too hard,” she tells him sadly. With EMPIRE’s first season finale coming next week, you can feel the show is hurtling towards some kind of explosive climax. As well as Lucious and Cookie’s blow up, Hakeem is furious at his father for sending Naomi Campbell away and vents his anger by dissing him during an onstage rap. Lucious responds by knocking him to the floor with one punch. Next thing we know, Hakeem has announced his intention to leave the family record label — which in EMPIRE terms, is as serious as Bobby and Pam moving out of the family home at the end of the original DALLAS’s second season. Worse follows when Lucious discovers Hakeem literally in bed with the enemy — his own former fiancee Anika. Both of them lock eyes with Lucious then just keep doing what they’re doing. Trend of the week: women in business. While New Pamela is after a slice of Ewing Energies (“I would like 30% of your ownership,” she informs Christopher), Elena already owns 10% but is hungry for more: “I wanna earn a bigger stake in this company. I wanna be a partner.” Meanwhile, Cookie is shocked to discover that, contrary to what she was told, she was never on Empire’s board of directors and what’s more, her firstborn son was in on the deception. “Andre knew the day he made that deal with you that a convicted felon can never serve on the board of a publicly-traded company,” Lucious tells her. At the end of DYNASTY, a newly free but fringeless Fallon (“They might have stolen my hair but they’ll never steal my hustle”) informs Jeff that she wishes to end their partnership, both professionally and personally. “I know I was only tied up for a day,” she explains, “but it made me realise I have been tied to someone my entire life. I need to see this through on my own.” It’d be nice to be able to root for her here but, as with most of Fallon’s decisions, it feels kind of arbitrary. Running out of family members he hasn’t alienated, Lucious turns to gay black sheep Jamal to help him out of a writer’s block and they conjure up a song together in front of our eyes. The creative process is notoriously hard to dramatise, especially in a Soap Land setting, which is one of the reasons the fashion-based soaps didn’t really work — a designer getting an idea is far harder to manifest on screen than, say, an oil well erupting. However, EMPIRE pulls it off here by utilising the richness and history of the characters’ relationship. Hoping to inspire Lucious, Jamal takes him back to the small house they used to live in — the house where Lucious dumped Jamal in a trash can as a little kid when he found him wearing his mother’s shoes. And it doesn’t hurt that the actors are so musically adept. (Turns out Lucious plays a mean Spanish guitar.) With Hakeem turning away from his father and Andre turning to God, Jamal is now first in line to assume control of Empire — but first, he has to prove he has what it takes. “Do you want Empire or don’t you? Cos if you want it, you gotta be willing to take it!” Lucious tells him, sounding not unlike Jock Ewing during his “Real power is something you take” speech. Nice boy Jamal heeds his father’s words and ends up holding the family nemesis Beretti over the ledge of a building and threatening to let him drop unless he signs over “the rights to Lucious Lyon’s masters in perpetuity, do you understand me?!” When New DALLAS and EMPIRE began, Bobby Ewing and Lucious Lyon were told they were dying. Eleven episodes later, Bobby’s medical tribulations appear to be behind him, and now it turns out that Lucious, like Jason Colby before him, has been misdiagnosed. Instead of dying of ALS, he’s suffering from a serious, but far less terminal illness called myasthenia gravis or MG. This should feel like a massive cop-out, but as with Jason and Bobby, the dramatic pay off is worth it. (Ironically, the one character who genuinely is dying — JR — is playing it so close to his chest that no-one, including the viewer, knows anything about it.) The news of his reprieve seems to imbue in Lucious a sense of omnipotence. “Let’s see who’s more powerful — your God or your daddy!” he tells Andre. Realising that Andre’s religious awakening has as much to do with his gorgeous music therapist Michelle (played by Jennifer Hudson) as it does the Lord, Lucious offers her the chance to make a gospel record at Empire. Thrilled, she accepts. As far as Andre is concerned, this means she is now contaminated. “My father is the Devil and you just spread your legs for him,” he says. Like ‘80s Blake Carrington when his sight returned, Lucious elects to keep the news of his “recovery” a secret. However, the medication he’s on for his newly diagnosed condition causes him to hallucinate — he sees Bunky sitting at the bottom of his bed — and to ramble. Oh, how he rambles. “You can’t be here, man, I killed your ass just like Shine’s boys,” he tells Bunky’s ghost. “I’m not dying … I’m about to come back like a phoenix from the ashes. I’m-a rise up from the dead like Jesus. I’m your messiah!” And who should be present to hear this revelation but Cookie? ”Bunky was my cousin, you son of a bitch,” she murmurs before placing a pillow over Lucious’s face. “It’s over.” And this week’s Top 3 are … 1 (2) EMPIRE 2 (1) DALLAS 3 (4) DYNASTY [/QUOTE]
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