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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 224122" data-attributes="member: 22">11 Feb 13: DALLAS: False Confessions v. 30 Sep 15: EMPIRE: Without a Country v. 09 Mar 18: DYNASTY: The Gospel According to Blake Carrington  At the start of both this week’s DYNASTY and DALLAS, we see a woman going about her business — an unnamed florist making a delivery, Judith Ryland returning home and throwing off her shoes — before being stopped in her tracks by the sight of a man’s prone body — Ted Dinard on the ground after jumping out of an apartment window, Harris Ryland on the living room floor after being shot. “Oh my God!” gasps the florist. “NO! NO!” howls Judith.We then cut to Sam peering round the corner of the apartment block and Ann arriving back at Southfork. They are quickly joined by Steven and Bobby who want to know what has happened. “He ripped my earring out and took it with him when he jumped. I think he was trying to frame me for his murder,” postulates Sam (a very Jill Bennett theory). “I couldn’t let Harris get away with it. I shot him, Bobby,” Ann tells her husband. While Steven’s first reaction is to call 911, the Dallas sheriff is already knocking on the Ewings’ front door. Ann is all for coming clean: “I shot him. Let them take me.” However, Sam’s and Bobby’s instincts are much soapier — why tell the simple truth when you can cover it up with a complicated story that will almost inevitably come back to bite you in the arse? Admittedly, each has a compelling reason for lying. “I can’t talk to the police,” Sam explains. “I’m not here legally, Steven. My papers are not valid anymore.” Meanwhile, Bobby is thinking about Emma. “She can’t think that you tried to kill her father. She’d never forgive you and you’d lose her again,” he tells Ann. From this point on, Steven and Bobby each take control of their respective situation. “Ted was by the window and I turned my back. I don’t know if he lost his balance or jumped,” Steven tells the DYNASTY cops. “I’m the one you wanna talk to. I shot Harris Ryland,” Bobby tells the DALLAS ones. Matters are complicated yet further when it transpires that both men are still alive (“He’s not dead?!” exclaims Ann in dismay; “This man still has a pulse!” declares a DYNASTY paramedic) and stand a good chance of regaining consciousness by the end of their episode.Both plots are kinda nuts but are tonally very different. DALLAS takes its situation completely seriously, with watery eyes and anxious frowns on the faces of all concerned. Even JR is worried. “No baby brother of mine is gonna spend his twilight years in jail!” he insists. John Ross, however, is more pragmatic when he hears of Bobby’s arrest. “You think that’ll help us get him out of Ewing Energies?” he asks his father. JR’s stern reaction — “You still got a lot to learn, boy. When the family’s in trouble, we don’t take advantage” — mirrors perfectly what he told a five-year-old John Ross when Bobby was shot and blinded by Katherine Wentworth in ’84: “It wouldn’t be right to take advantage of Bobby while he’s in the hospital … With family, you play fair.” Meanwhile, DYNASTY goes down the flippant, farcical route. The strongest emotion Steven can muster towards his suicidal former lover is irritation that Ted hasn’t “simply stuck to his plan and died.” To conceal Sam’s involvement, Steven plans to wipe his blood off the incriminating earring and pass it off as his own. This involves him piercing his own ear with a syringe and pretending to the press that he and Ted are still an item while Blake plays the homophobia card so that Steven can gain access to Ted’s hospital room (in a similar if less sophisticated way that Cookie played the racism card to try and get her hands on Empire last week). “What is this, 1952?” he barks at a confused nurse. “My son can’t comfort a dying man, the love of his life because of his sexual orientation? This is inexcusable, not to mention disrespectful to all the gays, the whole LTBZ community!”As Ted and Harris lie unconscious, their respective parents, Gerry Dinard and Judith Ryland, keep a vigil at their bedsides. Both are angry as well as upset. “You … drove him away from me, away from the church,” says Gerry to Steven. “Why you brought Ann into our lives I will never understand … She took you from me,” seethes Judith to her unconscious son. Each vows to bring the person they believe (wrongly) to be responsible for their son’s condition to justice. “God already knows your sins and as for me, I will do everything I can to expose them,” Gerry promises Steven. “I will make sure Bobby goes to jail,” Judith vows.While Judith’s maternal intensity is a fascinating thing to behold, Gerry Dinard is the only person in the DYNASTY storyline who exhibits any genuine feeling. As such, he is an object of ridicule. His grief, his faith, even his name — Gerard Dinard — all exist for Steven, and by extension the programme, to roll their eyes at and make fun of. When Steven pretends to be choked up and asks Gerry to pray with him, Gerry falls into his embrace and we’re all supposed to be amused at how stupidly gullible this church-going nobody is. I guess when people accuse the “Hollywood elite” of looking down their noses at Middle Americans (Gerry’s from Indiana), this is the kind of thing they’re talking about.It’s another busy week at the Soap Land Correctional Facility. As Cecil Colby is released on bail after eight and a half years, Bobby Ewing climbs into his old orange jumpsuit and has his feet shackled together for added verisimilitude. Being white, however, he is granted bail almost immediately, to the tune of one million dollars. Being black, Lucious Lyon can’t get the medication he needs for his ongoing condition, much less bail. Interestingly, those Lucious comes into immediate conflict with are also black — the ambitious prosecutor who wants him to turn state's evidence and a prison warden called McKnight who is as megalomaniacal as the one who presided over JR’s stay in the Haleyville Penal Camp twenty-eight years earlier. “This is your only world and I am your only God!” bellowed JR’s captor then. “You forget whose house this is — mine! That’s my table, my newspaper, that’s my basketball goal, my everything!” barks Lucious’s jailer now. Lucious even gets thrown in “the hole”, a place as dark and uncomfortable as “the box” JR was locked in in Haleyville. One soap along, Fallon Carrington sympathises about the miseries of prison life: “I can only imagine what years of tiny televisions, toilet wine and baloney sandwiches can do to the human spirit.” After hearing that Harris Ryland has regained consciousness, Ann is certain that he will identify her as his would-be assassin and so decides to come clean. No sooner has she confessed all than we hear him tell the police it was Bobby who shot him — and I thought Abby and Olivia covering for each other over Peter Hollister’s murder was complicated. Back on DYNASTY, Ted wakes up murmuring Sam’s name. When Steven learns that Ted may be brain damaged, and thereby unable to place Sam at the scene of his suicide attempt, he permits himself a smile of smug satisfaction. (By this point, I’m starting to hate Steven.) Family betrayals, particularly of fathers by their sons, loom large this week. Frank Ashkani gets the ball rolling by digging up Tommy Sutter’s corpse. From the way he violently wretches, one assumes Tommy’s body hasn’t been miraculously preserved the way Roger Grimes’s was. Once he has sufficiently recovered, Frank calls JR to remind him of their arrangement: “You said if I told you the location of Tommy Sutter’s body, you’d get rid of Pamela Barnes and it won’t come back to me. Well, you have a deal.”When JR tells him of his plan “to take Pamela out of the picture,” John Ross calls his mama: “I need you to put me in touch with Cliff Barnes.” This leads to a fascinating scene where Sue Ellen warns her son of the dangers of getting between JR and Cliff: “Being caught in the middle of that war nearly destroyed me,” she tells him. “I paid for it for years.” Later, during a conversation with Ann, Sue Ellen refers to the past again, recalling John Ross as “a child who hated my guts … I have a scar from when he threw a toy truck at my head.” “I paid for it for years … a child who hated my guts” — these descriptions don’t quite match up with what we saw on screen back in the ‘80s. Instead, they sound like what should have happened, and what would have happened if the Ewings had been real people whose actions have truly lasting consequences rather than characters in a fast-moving soap opera. “Being JR’s son is no easy task,” Sue Ellen tells John Ross during their scene together. “Even when you hated him the most, you were obsessed with being just like him … Sometimes I think you forget that half of you is me. You’re your own man, John Ross.” She reaches out to touch his face. This gesture, and the sentiment that goes with it, is mirrored by Cookie during a conversation with Jamal: “I know you. See, Lucious is trying to make you like him but you ain’t him.” Where Sue Ellen tenderly strokes her son’s cheek, Cookie playfully squeezes hers by the chin. After Frank betrays Cliff to JR, it’s John Ross’s turn to betray JR to Cliff: “Your guy Frank, he’s got a deal with JR … Figured if there’s anyone that could stop them, it would be you.” Cliff regards John Ross with coldness and suspicion. “Are you telling me that you’re willing to betray your own father?” he asks him warily. “His performance as a father hasn’t exactly gained my undying loyalty,” John Ross replies. Cliff isn’t convinced: “I took this meeting out of respect for your mother. You’ve wasted enough of my time today.” The really big betrayals on EMPIRE took last week during Cookie and co’s botched attempt to take over the family business. The stakes aren’t quite as high this week. After Jamal boots his mother and brothers out of the company, they decide to start their own record label and spend most of the ep trying to think of what to call it. Eventually, Cookie has a brain wave: “Dynasty. Hmm, that’s a dope name.”Back at the Soap Land Penitentiary, Lucious tells Jamal that “Hakeem belongs at Empire … Make that happen.” So Jamal tries to tempt back his baby bro by promising to “release your album, give it a huge push, the whole thing.” Hakeem is tempted, but then, with one click of his laptop, leaks the album online, even though it legally belongs to Empire. “I don’t care if they sue us, I don’t care if I lose money from it, all I care about is that my music is out to the world and that it gonna be legendary,” he declares. Such recklessness is too much for uptight Andre who immediately quits the new label. Cookie pleads with him to change his mind. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he replies. “It’s not you, it’s not even Hakeem. This isn’t me … It’s not what I’ve been working for all these years … I need you to let me go.” In theory, this shouldn’t be that big of a deal — back in the ‘80s, it seemed like either Steven or Adam were quitting Colby Co every other week — but somehow the actors make it feel as sad and momentous as when Bobby and Pam moved off Southfork in 1980.  When Jamal learns of Hakeem’s online betrayal, he does his quietly-spoken-but-enraged thing: “So that’s how we gonna roll, Hakeem? You’ll never see a penny. We’ll sue the drawers off your black ass.” “Jamal, you think you on top now. Our little Dynasty’s gonna crush your Empire,” Hakeem assures him, bringing new meaning to the idea of EMPIRE v DYNASTY.The best scenes on both DALLAS and EMPIRE this week involve a prison visit between a contrite son and an unyielding father. John Ross’s tip-off enables Cliff to circumvent Pamela’s arrest for Tommy’s murder when his body is discovered and it’s Frank who ends up in an orange jump-suit instead. “You did this to me,” Frank realises when Cliff comes to visit him. “You kept the gun after the shooting, you planted my fingerprints on it and you dropped it by the burial site. You set me up.” Cliff doesn’t bother to deny it. “I know about your plan with JR. I wanna know why,” he tells him. “Ever since you left Pamela in charge, she treated me like a dog,” Frank complains. “If you were unhappy with Pamela you should have come to me. We could have worked it out. That’s what families do. You were just a young boy in the streets of Islamabad when I found you and I treated you as my own … How could you betray me like this? You broke my heart,” says Cliff, but despite his words, there is no emotion in his voice. As in the scene with John Ross, he is distant and cold. By contrast, Frank’s heart is breaking. “Father, I love you,” he says movingly in Urdu. Cliff dismisses this with a simple shake of his head. “Your family will be taken care of,” he tells him matter-of-factly. “They will be fed and provided for, but you brought this on yourself. You should do the honourable thing and you should do it for me.” He embraces Frank, telling him, “I love you, son,” but there is a strangely remote expression on his face. Ken Kercheval has shown us many, many sides to Cliff over the years, but we’ve never seen him as chillingly detached as he is here. In the vacuum created by his lack of emotion, echoes of Cliff’s past and future flood in. I’m reminded of possibly my least favourite scene in all of Soap Land where Cliff jokes with Jordan Lee about Texans being forced to wear turbans instead of Stetsons and eat goat rather than turkey at Thanksgiving because of the “damn foreigners” that are taking over the oil industry. Yet these words came from the same man who took pity on a child on the streets of Islamabad and raised him as his own. This contradiction is distilled to its essence when Cliff essentially tells Frank, “I love you, kill yourself.” One also recalls Cliff’s own suicide attempt and then thinks forward to the prison cell and orange jump-suit he too will end his days in.Across the Soap Land Penitentiary visitors room, Andre is begging Lucious’s forgiveness. “I never should have been a part of that hostile takeover. I messed up big time, Pop, and I know it.” “Hurt me to my core to watch you take sides against me, son,” Lucious replies. “Empire’s in my blood. When I bleed, I bleed Empire,” Andre insists, sounding not unlike John Ross on last season’s DALLAS: “I’m a Ewing, deep in my DNA. Everything I am, everything I’d die for has the name Ewing on it.” “I’m praying that you’ll forgive me, Pop,” he concludes. “Then you pray to God that He forgives you because I don’t,” Lucious replies, sounding as cold and implacable as Cliff did towards Frank. He starts to walk away, but Andre’s words bring him to a halt: “For years, you rejected Jamal because of who he is and now he’s running the company. Hakeem, he slept with your fiancee. Apparently, you want him back at Empire. Here I stand, contrite, remorseful, humble. And yet you look at me like I’m some kind of mutant. Why do you hate me?!” Instead of replying, Lucious flashes back to a woman singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ to a little boy. I assumed this to be Young Cookie and Young Andre until she called the child Dwight and I remembered that Young Cookie is usually played by Cookie With A Wig On rather than Kelly Actual Rowland as is the case here. Halfway through the song, Kelly Actual Rowland stops singing and just stares into space. “I don’t hate you,” Lucious tells Andre in the present before turning his back on him again. There is an equivalent father/son scene on DYNASTY — only now that Cecil is out on bail and under house arrest, his surroundings are a lot grander than Frank and Lucious’s. “This beats the hell out of my last prison,” he says, looking around Jeff’s palatial dwelling. “This is paradise … It’s a proud day when your son outstrips your wildest dreams.” That pride soon fades, however, as Cecil finds Jeff’s engagement to his enemy’s daughter hard to stomach. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” he warns him. “I faced Blake and lost.” “I’ve been facing him for years and winning,” Jeff replies smugly. “I know when you left, I was just some confused naive kid, but this is my house. You play your part in it and everything will be just fine.” John Ross attempts to assert his authority over his father in a similar way: “You must be getting senile in your old age, Daddy, because I’m the one calling the shots here, remember?”  This week’s DALLAS and EMPIRE both end with an outrageous courtroom scene. At his arraignment, not only does Frank confess to Pamela’s crime of killing Tommy, but he also admits to murdering Becky Sutter for good measure. “I have disgraced my family. I only hope they will see the honour in my confession and one day be able to forgive me,” he says, turning to Pamela who looks back at him with a mixture of gratitude and remorse. Also in the courtroom is Christopher who, upon seeing his last chance to get Pamela convicted go up in smoke, starts shouting in protest. As the judge is admonishing him, the scene goes into slow motion. Unobserved, Frank hastily swallows something, falls to the floor, goes into convulsions and dies. Forget soap, this is pure opera. Over on EMPIRE, Lucious finally gets a bail hearing (Soap Land’s second in two weeks, following Cecil Colby’s on DYNASTY). His new lawyer, played by Bubbles from THE WIRE, arrives proffering “new evidence” which he hands straight to the judge. It’s an envelope of photos that show the judge wearing S&M gear including one of those little red balls strapped in his mouth. As a result, Lucious gets his parole — for the same price as Bobby Ewing: a million dollars. (I guess that qualifies as racial equality in Soap Land.) Admittedly, the kinky judge photos are kind of silly, but whereas DYNASTY wouldn’t have been able to resist over-egging the pudding with a smart ass quip, EMPIRE plays it straight. And it’s curious, given that this the same week that EMPIRE pays homage to DYNASTY by naming its new record label in its honour, that John Forsythe’s most well-known on-screen role pre-Blake was as a kinky judge in the 1979 film … And Justice For All whose career is destroyed when S&M photos of him are produced in court.While this week’s DALLAS is all about false confessions - Bobby taking the rap for shooting Harris, Frank for killing Tommy - DYNASTY is all about fake romances. While Steven pretends to be in love with Ted, Fallon explains she has accepted Jeff’s proposal “to make him believe that I was into him, not on to him. The closer I stay, the better chance I have of figuring out what the hell’s going on.” Michael likewise continues to see Monica to keep tabs on her (“I thought maybe keeping her around for a while could be helpful”).In a scene deleted from this week’s episode, DALLAS makes a rare reference to real-life events when Drew Ramos jokes that he “used to tell the troops in Afghanistan, ‘You want real action, spend a tour at Southfork.’” The military talk continues on both EMPIRE (“Stayed in Iraq too long … We didn’t have no business over there in the first place. The infrastructure wasn’t there,” opines Lucious’s new prison pal Wade) and DYNASTY (“I’ve been through war. Much tougher men have tried to lie to me,” Ted’s father warns Steven).Michael/Sam is officially back with Jamal on EMPIRE and with Steven on DYNASTY. Whereas Jamal shows Michael off on a TV talk show (“He’s a little shy, but trust me, ladies, he is adorable,” gushes the host), Steven has no choice but to put Sam back in the closet (“After everything I said about Ted, I can’t suddenly turn 180 and be with you now. I’m in the spotlight now and the more you’re seen with me, the bigger the chance someone will uncover your undocumented status”). I suppose I should feel sorry for them, but if they don’t care about Gerard Dinard’s pain, why should I care about theirs?The first two-thirds of this week’s DYNASTY is mostly inconsequential silliness, but twelve minutes before the end of the ep, during a polite dinner party to welcome his daughter-in-law-to-be to the family, Cecil Colby suddenly smashes his dessert bowl on the floor and shouts, “I can’t watch this anymore! You all make me sick!” This has the effect of cutting through the crap and shifting the tone of the episode dramatically. He angrily informs Fallon of the truth behind his prison term: “I wasn’t a drug addict … Your father framed me … right after he screwed my wife. And when I threatened to kill him for taking her away, he took everything else away from me ... He planted blow in my car and had his dirty cop friend arrest me, had his dirty judge lock me away … I will not stand by and watch my only son marry that bastard’s dirty daughter!” For once, Fallon is completely taken aback. (Alas, the moment is somewhat diminished by a mournful ballad playing obtrusively on the soundtrack — instead of allowing us to have a personal response to Fallon’s shock, the song instructs us on what our response should be.) This is followed by a succession of juicily dramatic confrontations, between Fallon and Blake (“This whole time you made me think that Mom was the whore that destroyed your marriage when you were the monster who pushed her away”), Cristal and Blake (“I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, you whored your son out to the press, why not do the same to your wife?”) and Cecil and Jeff (“I was wrong to get you twisted up in this war, my war. Now the only way to end it is for me to end it myself … I’m taking over. Daddy’s home.”) Credit where it’s due: New DYNASTY is very good at delivering end-of-episode sequences that are exciting enough to make you want to overlook whatever shortcomings preceded them and tune in again next week. And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (2) DALLAS2 (1) EMPIRE 3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?