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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 233388" data-attributes="member: 22">11 Mar 13: DALLAS: J.R.'s Masterpiece v. 04 Nov 15: EMPIRE: A High Hope for a Low Heaven v. 06 Apr 18: DYNASTY: Don't Con a Con Artist "It can't end here, not in this stinkin' mud hole,” protested JR when he and his brothers gave up the search for Jock in a South American jungle back in 1981. That line resonates throughout this week’s DALLAS as the Ewings struggle to comprehend how JR's own life could end in some cheap Mexican hotel room, apparently the result of a small scale robbery that could have happened to anyone. “What would JR possibly be doing here? He would never stay in a place like this,” protests Sue Ellen. “I don’t believe he was killed here,” insists Bobby. “What the hell was JR doing in Mexico?” asks John Ross. Of course, the main similarity between the deaths of Jock and JR is that both were necessitated by the loss of the actors playing them. Whereas Jim Davis’s last screen appearance took place nine months before we learned of his character’s apparently fatal helicopter crash, Larry Hagman continued to appear on DALLAS until just a few seconds before JR’s demise. While Jock’s body was never found, leaving the possibility (explored five years later) that he might still be alive, the idea that JR might have faked his death is likewise mooted here, mostly by Bobby: “I’m not even sure he’s dead … There was no ID … Things with JR were almost never as they appeared to be.” However, neither viewers nor characters are left in any doubt when we see the family identify his body. This doesn’t take place in the hushed environment of a mortuary viewing room or even in the clinical surroundings of a hospital. Instead, the Ewings are shown into a dark, cramped room where corpses in blood-stained bodybags line the walls. As one of these bags is opened, Sue Ellen and John Ross immediately start to cry — she falls into Christopher’s arms while he turns to face the wall. Bobby, meanwhile, continues to stare down at his brother’s body, dry-eyed and grim-faced. “Throughout my life,” he’ll say later in the episode, “it’s pretty much been easy for me to do good because I could always count on JR to do bad.” Here in the morgue, it feels as if he has already begun absorbing JR’s dark side into his own character, if only as a way of keeping him around. Back in ’81, before the Ewing brothers left for South America to looks for Jock, Miss Ellie entrusted Bobby with the task of keeping them united. Here, he’s the first to break rank and point the finger: “All right, John Ross, what do you know about this?” he snarls. "You brought Vicente and his thugs into our lives. What the hell have you brought into our lives this time?” Later in Dallas, he’s brusque when Gary offers his sympathies (“Yeah it’s a sad day. I got a lot to do”) and downright cold when Ray does the same (“I just keep thinking he’s gonna show up again.” “Well, he’s not.”) In other words, he treats them pretty much how JR did after he (Bobby) died. “I had one brother. Now he’s dead,” JR told Ray and Gary back then. And Bobby has never treated any of the women in his life as harshly, even cruelly, as he does Ann throughout this episode.Before they can take JR’s body home to Dallas, the Ewings find themselves confronted by some decidedly KNOTSian red tape. “A physician authorised by the Secretary of Health must certify the death,” they are informed. “Then a Civil Registry judge will issue the death certificate … It could take several days.” It’s a relief, then, when Carlos Del Sol shows up. The father of the real Marta and an old friend of JR’s, he’s the C21st equivalent of Punk Anderson, the reassuringly familiar presence who welcomed Jock’s sons to the jungle base camp when they came looking for their daddy all those years ago. “You’re all going to go back to Dallas and leave everything in my hands,” he insists. “I give you my word, John Ross. My people will get to the bottom of this and I will personally escort your father home. I won’t leave his side until I deliver him home to you in Dallas.”Sue Ellen has never been more multi-faceted than she is in this episode. No sooner have the family returned to Southfork than she resumes her plan to get Ewing Energies back from Bobby and Christopher. “I’m gonna keep working on Gary to get that oil turned back on,” she tells her on. “I don’t see why I should stop doing business just because JR’s gone.” John Ross is angered by her pragmatism. “Are you kidding me? My father’s barely cold and you’re already talking about going to seduce his brother? Could you at least pretend to mourn him for five minutes FOR MY SAKE!?” Later, at JR’s memorial service, her former rival Mandy Winger graciously concedes defeat: “You were the lucky one, Sue Ellen, because you made your peace with JR. I always envied how you got over him. To be honest, I don’t think I ever really did.” Even as she accepts this victory, Sue Ellen enviously eyes the glasses of bourbon and branch Mandy and Cally are toasting with. Is this really what success looks like? Realising she’s in trouble, she turns to fellow alcoholic Gary for support (“I have never wanted a drink more than I do right now,” she admits) while simultaneously continuing to manipulate him (”I wanna be honest with you tonight, Gary,” she coos). Later, alone in JR’s bedroom, she finally does what John Ross asked of her: she mourns his father. However, there’s only one way Sue Ellen knows how to truly mourn JR: she pours herself a glass of JR Ewing Bourbon, salutes their wedding photo, and takes just one drink in his honour. But once she’s swallowed it, the invisible cord connecting her to her sobriety is instantly severed and she has no choice but to go on drinking.EMPIRE, meanwhile, picks up where last week’s episode left off with the Lyon family learning of Hakeem’s abduction. As Soap Land kidnappings go, it's a pretty conventional one (“a simple snatch-and-grab,” as Lucious puts it). His captors turn out to be the gang who have been harassing Cookie since her label set up shop on their block. An exchange is arranged — the thugs only ask for $40,000 — but Hakeem manages to give his abductors the slip on the way to the drop-off point. This is where the story really starts to get interesting. Instead of returning home, a beaten and bloodied Hakeem makes his way to Anika’s apartment. Having been rejected by the entire Lyon family, she is in a pretty dark place herself. (“I have nothing! I have no-one!” we hear her telling her mother on the phone.) She and Hakeem have urgent, traumatised sex almost right there on the doorstep. When he does eventually return to the bosom of his family, Hakeem is angry — less at the kidnappers than at his father. “What happened to you, son, is my worst nightmare,” Lucious tells him. “Tell yourself whatever you need so you can go to sleep but recognise: none of this would have gone down if I wasn’t your son. This is because of you and you,” he replies, pointing at both his parents. He refuses any offers of help or comfort. Throughout the ep, we see him screwing up in rehearsal, freezing on stage, smashing a mirror with his fist. He’s humiliated, emasculated, traumatised. Most Soap Land kidnap victims don’t exhibit such behaviour following their ordeal. Once they’ve been rescued or released, they’re pretty much OK. The exceptions are Lucy Ewing and Maggie Gioberti, both of whom eventually revealed they had been raped by their captor. Has something similar has happened to Hakeem or does his behaviour simply correspond with how anyone in the real world (as opposed to ‘80s Soap Land) might react to a kidnapping? “When the dudes pinned me up,” he finally admits, “I ain’t do nothing. I ain’t fight back. I wasn’t strong.” And that is reason enough for him to react the way he has.Both JR’s memorial service on DALLAS and Steven and Sam’s engagement dinner on DYNASTY are disrupted by an inebriated character making an exhibition of himself. Cliff Barnes gatecrashes the former, behaving more like the volatile loudmouth of the original series than the eerily contained villain of the new one. “I came to pay my disrespects … I wish I had killed your father, but somebody beat me to it … Look who’s dancing on who’s grave now!” (As he is ejected from the room, we catch a glimpse of his former lover Mandy’s dismayed reaction and I notice that she’s wearing a cross. Could it be that, like Andre on EMPIRE, the original Valentine Girl has accepted Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Saviour? For some reason, I quite like the idea.) Cliff’s outburst inspires some further badmouthing about the deceased. “JR was a selfish prick who died the way he deserved, in the armpit of the world!” declares a nameless drunk racist. John Ross is about to shut this guy up before Christopher steps in (“I got this, cousin”) and throws the first punch. A bunch of extras get involved and pretty soon it's a good old-fashioned DALLAS brawl. Meanwhile, DYNASTY takes a turn for the daft as Fallon decides the only way to get Alexis to come clean about her latest dastardly scheme (trying to frame Sam for shoplifting) is to spike her champagne flute with truth serum. Inevitably, the drinks get switched and it’s Sam who ends up losing his inhibitions and dancing on a table while singing ‘I Got Life’ from Hair. Melissa Agretti had a similar going-mad-and-climbing-on-a-table-during-a-formal-occasion incident on FALCON CREST which I hated because it was played for nonexistent laughs. This isn’t nearly so bad — the plot might be stupid, but the actors take it reasonably seriously and it’s actually quite funny, particularly when Sam loses his balance and falls over. Whereas the punch-up on DALLAS serves to bring the Ewing cousins closer together (“That was awesome!” John Ross tells Christopher after the fight, smiling for the first time this episode), Sam’s wig-out on DYNASTY drives the Carrington kids further apart as Steven blames Fallon for the whole thing. While he accuses her of turning his engagement party “into the battleground for a family war that I’ve been trying to end from the beginning,” Christopher promises John Ross “we’re gonna find out who killed your father and when we do, we’ll avenge his death as brothers. Ewings take care of Ewings — always.” For once, John Ross doesn’t reject his cousin’s attempt to reclassify them as siblings. Instead, he nods in agreement. There’s more brotherly support when Andre and Jamal reach out to Hakeem following his ordeal on EMPIRE. “The three of us, we can’t be broken, not by thugs or kidnappers or anything else that comes at us,” Andre declares emphatically. “You know why? … Because we already beat the odds by surviving as the children of Lucious and Cookie Lyon.”The term “junkyard dog” was heard in Soap Land for the first time two weeks ago. “You keep a junkyard dog like JR tied up long enough, he’s only gonna get meaner,” John Ross warned his uncle. It crops up thrice more this week. Like John Ross, Cliff uses it to refer to JR while talking to Bobby. “Since you lost your junkyard dog, there’s nothing keeping me from taking your family down!” he crows. Then, following Hakeem’s kidnapping on EMPIRE, Lucious warns Cookie that “there are two types of security in hip-hop. There’s the house dog and then there’s the junkyard dog and if you’re gonna make it in this game, you need both of them.” (I wasn't quite sure what he was talking about either.) Cookie later turns to Laz Delgado, ex-cop-turned-concert promoter, for security advice and he makes the unusual suggestion of putting Hakeem’s kidnappers on the payroll. “House dogs and junkyard dogs,” Cookie murmurs, recalling her earlier conversation with Lucious, before shooting the idea down: “I don’t want those wolves in my house.”Three new relationships kick off this week. The sexiest is between John Ross and Emma on DALLAS. Having scarcely exchanged a word, but bound together by a combination of grief, lust and prescription medication, they have it off in the back of a car on the Southfork driveway while the rest of the family are inside the house. (There’s a desperation about their coupling similar to Hakeem and Anika’s.) The sweetest is between Fallon and Liam on DYNASTY. After four episodes of marriage, they finally kiss. “I’ve been wanting to do that since the day I met you,” Liam admits. The most shocking is between Cookie and Laz on EMPIRE. Her turning up at his door and asking him to “make me forget about everything” isn’t the shocking bit, nor is it him then taking her in his arms and laying her down on the nearest flat surface. The shocking bit is when Laz’s top comes off and we see he has the same tattoo on his back as Hakeem’s kidnappers! For the past three weeks, each of the soaps has taken it in turn to stage a significant religious ceremony. Andre’s baptism on last week’s EMPIRE was preceded by Tom Carrington’s funeral on DYNASTY and is now followed by JR’s funeral on DALLAS. This time, rather than the inside of a church, the main event takes place in the family cemetery at Southfork. The cold, wintry environment is perfect. If the funeral is the highlight of a truly exceptional episode, then the highlight of the funeral itself is the eulogy Sue Ellen delivers at the gravesite. “When I was Miss Texas and I met JR,” she informs the various Ewings, Krebbs and Ramoses assembled, “I didn’t know what hit me. I fell in love — madly, passionately, hopelessly in love with the most infuriating, charming scoundrel I think I’ve ever known. It was enough to drive a girl to drink … I’m a bit drunk now.” This admission — which shows yet another side of Sue Ellen; she’s always hidden her drinking in the past — feels almost as devastating as JR’s death. The closest the other soaps get to the loss of a loved one this week is the sudden illness of Michael Culhane’s father on DYNASTY. As far back as one can remember, the corridors of Soap Land Memorial Hospital have rung with the sound of rich men demanding that the best specialist surgeon in whichever field be flown in immediately to deal with the latest medical catastrophe. The inequities of such demands have invariably passed without comment — until now. “Fair or not, and it’s not, the Carringtons have access to the best medical care: better doctors, better hospitals,” Cristal tells Michael and his mother. “I reached out to the head of the hospital. She was at a conference in New York, but I sent CA’s jet for her and she reviewed your father’s records on the way back. The one per cent is good for some things, at least one per cent of the time.” So it is that they learn that Culhane Senior is suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. With delicious Soap Land irony, it later transpires that the Carrington name is responsible not only for this speedy diagnosis but also for making Michael’s father sick in the first place. “CA faced a scandal in Northeastern Georgia a few years back,” Anders reminds Blake. “If Culhane realises the connection between his father’s disease and what CA covered up, it might not be so easy to handle this time.” It doesn’t take Cristal long to find evidence of this Empire Valley-style cover-up and, in her self-appointed role of resident Carrington truth-teller, she heads straight to Soap Land Memorial to show it to Michael’s family — only to find Blake has gotten there first. “Honey, thank you for being here,” he says with a steely look in his eye. I like this newly gutsy, principled Cristal very much.Back at JR’s gravesite, Sue Ellen reads from the letter she received from him in last week’s episode. “Old age has a way of humbling men,” it begins. He goes on to admit that he was never worthy of her and ends by asking, “When I get back to Dallas, will you have dinner with me?” “Yes, yes, JR. The answer is yes,” she sobs, crouching down to touch his casket. “You were the love my life,” she concludes. And with that, the never-ending, on-off, love-hate paradox that was JR and Sue Ellen’s relationship is finally resolved. However, another long-running, volatile Soap Land relationship is only just starting to be unpicked.“The truth is she’s a big part of your life,” Anders tells Blake. He’s referring, of course, to Alexis. “While you work out what that means, I have to protect you and this family from your feud.” “I don’t need protection, not from my ex-wife, and certainly not from a member of my staff,” Blake snaps. “I’ll handle this myself … You’re fired!” Cristal is alarmed by her husband’s behaviour. “It scares me that you can be so unfeeling towards people who have been a vital part of your life and family,” she says. “All those years, I thought Anders was by my side,” Blake explains. “It turns out his loyalty still lies with Alexis.” “So that’s what this is about — her. Are you still in love with her, Blake?” she asks. “How can you ask me that?” he replies angrily. He’s less defensive when he apologises to Anders towards the end of the ep: “The truth is I’ve been a hypocrite, blaming you for being swayed by her when … I am too … She still has a pull.”“I’m a bit drunk now,” Sue Ellen admits to her family on DALLAS. “I am a screwed-up person, Steven,” Alexis admits to her son on DYNASTY when he asks why she tried to frame his fiancé. “I was afraid Sam would take you away from me … and I don’t wanna lose another son. You’re not the firstborn Carrington, Steven.” She then tells him about his brother Adam and how she has spent all her money trying to find him. We can’t be sure if she’s as upset as she seems or just playing for sympathy, or some combination of the two. The scene ends with Steven promising to help her find Adam. There’s an even more unexpected revelation about a missing person in the penultimate scene of DALLAS. “For the last several months, [JR’s] been trying to find your mother,” Bum tells Christopher. He then hands him a file so he’ll “understand why it’s important for you to find your mama.” The race is on: who will be found first — Adam or Pam?Minor trend of the week: cooks in the limelight. Now that Alexis is living in her old studio again, she has the Carrington servants waiting on her like she is still the lady of the Carrington Manor. Annoyed, Blake repurposes the dressing down his ‘80s counterpart gave the staff for disrespecting Krystle when they were first married. Back then, he chose to make an example of Leon, his gardener of ten years, by firing him (only for Joseph to rehire him later on in the ep). This time around, it’s Mrs Gunnerson, aka “the head of the kitchen whose several family members eat well at my expense”, who gets the chop (only for Anders to rehire her later on in the ep). This Mrs G is somewhat more severe-looking than the motherly ‘80s version. In the extended version of “JR’s Masterpiece” on the DALLAS DVD, all but one of the Ewing and Ramos family members get a turn at speaking at JR’s funeral. This includes Carmen the cook, mother of Drew and Elena. She tearfully reveals that, like Mrs Gunnerson’s family, her children similarly ate well at JR’s expense: “When my husband died and I thought I was going to lose my house … JR told me, ‘Carmen, you make the best mole in the country and I don’t want you making it for anybody else but the Ewings … Just move your whole damn family in.’” Who knew? (The one person who doesn’t speak at the grave is John Ross. But even though he remains silent throughout the funeral, his angry yet tearful presence is the most compelling of all.)According to Sue Ellen, “JR always wanted everyone to get drunk at his funeral. He thought it would make everyone honest.” Larry Hagman, meanwhile, was once quoted as saying he wanted his remains “to be spread over a field and have marijuana and wheat planted, and harvest it in a couple of years and then have a big marijuana cake, enough for 200 to 300 people.” From a creative standpoint, Hagman’s passing has proven just as fertile as that field. Having already resulted in a deeply moving tribute to a legendary character, it now sets in motion a fantastically intriguing mystery story (variously known as “JR’s Masterpiece”, “Who Killed JR?” And “What the hell was JR doing in Mexico?”) that the writers have conjured out of nowhere (Hagman having died during the filming of the Vicente-at-Southfork episode that came just two weeks before this one) while making it seem as if it has been in the works for months. All we know so far is that it involves Pam, Cliff, Harris Ryland and a secret JR has posthumously passed on to Bobby via Bum. The final scene of the episode has Bobby entering JR’s room and knocking back a couple of shots of bourbon, just as Sue Ellen did earlier. Then he sees his brother’s Stetson hanging off a chair. “I knew you’d have at least one more left up your sleeve, JR, and it’s a good one,” he chuckles. The symbolism of the hat resonates back to 1981. Shortly after Jock’s final appearance and just before Jim Davis’s death, Miss Ellie called JR from Paris where she and Jock had gone on their second honeymoon. Jock's Stetson was positioned on a table as a reminder of the character’s presence. When the scene cut back to JR on the other end of the line, his own hat was positioned in the same way. "I love you, brother," says Bobby as he finally starts to cry.And the Top 3 are …1 (1) DALLAS2 (3) DYNASTY3 (2) EMPIRE</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?