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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 245210" data-attributes="member: 22">24 Feb 14: DALLAS: The Return v. 20 Apr 16: EMPIRE: Time Shall Unfold v. 02 Nov 18: DYNASTY: Snowflakes in HellNew DALLAS’s third season opens with Bobby in the Southfork graveyard talking to his mama’s headstone (Eleanor Southworth Ewing Farlow 1915 - 2001). Similarly on EMPIRE, Lucious “introduces” Andre to his mother via her headstone (Leah Mary Walker 15 March 1947 - 11 January 1979). “So, I’m the caretaker now, huh, Mama?” Bobby says, looking around at the various family graves. “I’m the only one left. Well, I’ll try not to disappoint you.” “Hi, Grandma,” says Andre. “I’m your oldest grandson. I wish I could’ve met you. Medical science has made things more hopeful for people like us.” Lucious tells his son he’s proud of him. “Whenever you say that, you have an agenda,” Andre replies. “There’s a lot of things I’m trying to accomplish right now that I could use your help with,” Lucious admits. “What do you say, man — we good?” Andre doesn’t respond.To fill us in on the events that led to Alexis and Anders’ one-night stand and Steven’s subsequent conception, New DYNASTY employs the old KNOTSian trick of cross-cutting between three different conversations (Blake and Sam, Anders and Steven, Alexis and Fallon). As it did in the original series, Adam’s abduction proves a useful device to explain the characters’ past actions. “I was the one watching Baby Adam when he was taken and in the sombre weeks that followed, I was drowning in the guilt of having failed my duties,” Anders confesses. “I was also drowning in scotch.” “It was a dark time,” adds Alexis. So far, so evocative. Alas, the characters’ actions in the present are less dramatically interesting. Instead of shooting Anders in the face or at least sacking him for his betrayal, Blake just gets all sulky and petulant. “Bo took a dump and I stepped in it. Make sure you clean all the little grooves,” he huffs, pressing his soiled shoe against Anders’ shirt. By the end of the ep, he and Anders are friends again and all is forgiven. “Names aren’t what make a family, people do,” Blake concludes. Steven, meanwhile, deals with his paternal bombshell by moving to Paraguay to build houses for the needy. Commendable perhaps, but it’s a bit like Ray Krebbs responding to the discovery that he’s Jock’s son by immediately leaving Texas to become a missionary.Much to Steven’s bemusement, the rest of the Carringtons follow him to Paraguay where they attempt to show their solidarity by slumming it on a campsite. Much culture-clash comedy ensues. (Unsurprisingly, Alexis is not as amenable to sleeping in a tent as she was when she was Paige Matheson on an archaeological dig in Santa Tecla, even if her outfit — black vest, white pants — is the same as she wore then.) Shockingly, this means there is no Party of the Week on DYNASTY. Conversely on DALLAS, where there hasn’t been a party since the Ewing barbecue in Season 1 (unless you count JR’s memorial service almost a year ago), Sue Ellen has decided to celebrate John Ross and Pamela’s elopement by throwing them a big wedding at the ranch. This leads to a very old-fashioned scene on the Southfork patio where the Ewing ladies — Sue Ellen, Pamela and Ann — ooh and aah over engagement rings and bridal magazines. “I didn’t think I’d find happiness again,” says Pamela shyly, as if the clock has been reset and she is once again Rebecca Sutter, the wholesome bride-to-be we met when New DALLAS first began. Sue Ellen’s reply, “Happiness found you and that’s the best kind of happiness,” sounds like one of Miss Ellie’s pearls of wisdom from the 1980s.If Pamela is Southfork’s new good girl, Emma Ryland is its naughty one. Wearing the same sly smile that Lucy used to when skipping school to make out with Ray in the barn, she makes a point of befriending Pamela — even offering to help with the wedding — while continuing to sleep with her husband right under her nose. “I can see why John Ross loves you so much. It’s good to know you’re both right across the hall.” Indeed they are — I cannot think of another instance where a Soap Land husband or wife conducted an affair with someone just two bedrooms away from their own. (While Emma plays the sexy minx, her trouble-making DYNASTY equivalent, Kirby, is more of a prankster — running up debts on Steven’s credit card and pinning the blame on Alexis, then calling her up to gloat about it.)While it’s customary for snippets of dialogue from ‘80s DYNASTY to pop up in the reboot, the same thing rarely happens on DALLAS. This week, however, Pam and Bobby’s dialogue from when she woke up and found him in the shower is repeated by Sue Ellen and John Ross as she sees him coming out of Emma’s bedroom. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” John Ross asks his mama. “For a moment I thought I had,” she replies. While I’m hearing Bobby and Pam, Sue Ellen’s visualising JR, making the whole thing doubly spooky. When John Ross comes up with an excuse for being in Emma’s room, Sue Ellen acts like she believes it and changes the subject — which is pretty much how she used to react to JR’s infidelities when the original series began.“It’s about time we started living like the rich folk that we are!” declares John Ross, having decided, as the new half-owner of Southfork, to remodel the house. If this were New DYNASTY (or maybe even EMPIRE), this would be the set-up for a comedy plot involving gaudy colour schemes and furniture dipped in gold, but while John Ross has fun teasing Bobby with the idea of “a three-storey atrium,” most of his ideas — a billiards room, an indoor pool — don’t seem that outrageous. They certainly don’t warrant Bobby’s accusation that he is trying to “turn Southfork into a monument to you and your father’s self-indulgence.” In a lovely deleted scene, Sue Ellen points out to Bobby what the audience has known for more than thirty years, but no-one has ever acknowledged on screen before: “This house was too small even when I lived here.” However, Bobby is as resistant to change as an old-time DALLAS fan. “This house and its history is what grounds us as a family,” he tells John Ross. “It’s our roots. It’s about time you learnt to respect the past, boy.” “The past is what holds us back, Uncle Bobby,” John Ross replies, sounding as dismissive of his heritage as Fallon Carrington does of hers as the sale of her family’s hundred-year-old company is finally completed. “Good-bye CA, hello new dynasty,” she quips breezily.In the same deleted scene, Sue Ellen gently suggests to Bobby that “your gut response to John Ross is always to react to him as if he were JR, but he’s not.” “Miss Ellie was a smart woman,” Ann adds. “There’s a reason she gave John Ross half of Southfork.” “Yeah … guilt,” Bobby responds drily, but Sue Ellen disagrees. “Maybe it was balance,” she says. “Maybe she wanted you to be the father figure to John Ross because she knew it would never happen with JR. We’re getting older, Bobby. Maybe Miss Ellie understood that a young man’s point of view might help keep an older man’s point of view fresh.” She also has a word in John Ross’s ear: “As I counselled Bobby to be reasonable with you, I’m also counselling you to be reasonable with Bobby … Don’t underestimate your uncle. He’s a steel hand in a velvet glove.” Over on EMPIRE, Cookie also finds herself playing peacemaker to two men of different generations, but in a much more public context — the first annual meeting of the Empire shareholders since Hakeem took over as CEO. (This being EMPIRE, even a shareholders meeting takes place in a concert environment, complete with musical numbers.) During the meeting, Lucious does such a convincing job of discrediting Hakeem’s management skills that the crowd start chanting for his (Lucious’s) return. Cookie takes to the stage to cool things down. “What we have is two great men fighting over Empire,” she says. “They both love this company so much that they would kill for it!” At this point, she turns to Hakeem and Lucious. “So why don’t you come up here and show these shareholders that you will not fight with one another, but instead you will fight together to make this company great like … we all deserve? Empire was built on family!” Father and son reluctantly shake hands and the crowd love it. Over on DYNASTY, Fallon likewise views herself as the family arbitrator, having strong-armed the rest of the Carringtons into coming to Paraguay. “I’m the one trying to keep the peace among these jackals,” she complains self-righteously. Steven can’t believe his ears. “You’re the peacekeeper?” he asks indignantly. “You’re here for YOU, Fallon!” Eventually, she realises she’s being selfish for not letting her brother do his own thing, and that she has to let him go. They even sing a song together, Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’ (which Carly Simon covered on her Torch album, the one that has the original Steven Carrington on the sleeve) and I must admit it’s quite sweet.Back on EMPIRE, Rhonda is now staying at Anika’s place. Andre visits her there and admits he’s stopped going to church. “Why do I find that weirdly comforting?” she wonders. “I miss us,” he says. “We were a team, us against the world …” “We haven’t been that for a long time,” she replies. He asks her when she was happiest. “When we were excited about the future … and wanted to rule the world and take over Empire,” she says. They are interrupted by the sound of Anika throwing up in the bathroom. There’s only one reason someone throws up in Soap Land and Anika admits that, yes, she is pregnant and Hakeem’s the father.EMPIRE’s Anika and DALLAS’s Elena are two very different characters but have a surprising amount in common. Both started as a quasi-member of their respective show’s main family, both have had relationships with two members of that family (John Ross and Christopher; Lucious and Hakeem), both have now been effectively ex-communicated from that family. “I know that a lot of terrible things happened to this family because of my brother and I am so sorry,” Elena tells the Ewings on DALLAS. “I’m sorry for the part that I played in that and for all the lies and the hurt that followed.” “I know that things haven’t been pleasant among us all and I fully recognise the role that I played in that,” Anika tells the Lyons on EMPIRE. “I am taking full responsibility for my actions. I’m sorry. I’m trying to make amends.”Both apologies sound impressively sincere but aren’t the whole story. Earlier in the same ep, Elena visited Cliff in jail where she railed angrily against the Ewings (“They kicked me out of a company I helped start. They took away my oil leases. They accused me of helping my brother when they would have done the same to help their own!”) before agreeing to help bring them down. Meanwhile, Anika’s expression of regret omits the fact that she deliberately caused Rhonda’s miscarriage. She does, however, come clean about her own pregnancy. While Cookie is almost as sceptical as Alexis was about Melissa Daniels’ pregnancy on DYNASTY (“Are you that thirsty, you trick ass ho?”), Lucious asks Anika what she is after. “I want something very valuable, something almost priceless,” she replies. “I want my child to have a family.” Elena wants something too — a job at Ewing Energies, or Ewing Global as it has been renamed since the family acquired two-thirds of Cliff’s empire.While Elena and Anika’s apology scenes are great, the scenes that follow — between Elena and Christopher, and Anika and Lucious — are even better. When Christopher tells Elena he wants to reconcile with her, she is caught off guard. “You said you never wanted to see me again. You threw me out of that hotel room,” she reminds him. He says he’s sorry and reaches out to touch her face. She backs away. Even though she still has feelings for him, she has started down a dark and soapy path of revenge and can’t turn back. “I think we’re both still broken,” she tells him gently. I think we need to take some time to fix what’s broken in us before we can know if this is right.” Christopher accepts this but asks her not to move away from Southfork: “You’ve lived here since you were nine years old. We’ve always been friends … Stay on the ranch. It’s your home too.” Lucious is similarly solicitous towards Anika when she finds him waiting in her apartment. “I want you to take your prenatal, get good rest, bring the baby to term,” he tells her — before dropping the other shoe. “Then when you have it, give it to Hakeem and I’m-a give you ten million dollars.” When she turns this offer down, he gets angry. “If you wanted a family, why did you betray me? … You slept with my baby boy, my son!” he yells. It’s been over a year since Lucious first saw Anika and Hakeem together, but this is the first time he has confronted her about it. “You cheated on me first. You slept with Cookie,” she reminds him. “You broke my heart. You made me behave like some kind of lunatic.” “… Take my offer. Please don’t make me get ugly,” he warns her. These last two lines are very interesting: Anika acknowledging her lunacy isn’t typical psycho bitch behaviour. Could this mean she has come to her senses? Meanwhile, Lucious’s threat (“Please don’t make me get ugly”) is a reminder that this is a man who shot his best friend in the face. But then the dynamic between them shifts again. “My baby, he is making me believe in myself again, Lucious,” Anika continues, “and if that is something you cannot understand then I will have to do what I need to do too — just like you.” He asks what she means. “When the FBI was coming for you, I never dimed on you,” she says. “What could you possibly know about me that would be of any interest to the FBI?” he scoffs. “Five years of being with you, Lucious, living under your roof, working for you — I know more than you think,” she replies, suddenly sounding more like Julie Grey than Katherine Wentworth. He advises her to be careful. “You know, a lot of women, they don’t survive childbirth.” Hmm, so which of them is the more dangerous — the baby killer or the murderer?Bobby calls a board meeting to announce that he’s made a deal to sell Ewing Global’s consumer division (which originally belonged to Barnes Global) to finance some aquatic thing that, according to John Ross, is going to make the company “bigger than Exxon and BP combined!” Backs are slapped and champagne is called for, but then they are interrupted by one of those brilliant surprise-boardroom-entrances, which also doubles as the debut appearance of a character we know is important because we’ve already seen him in the opening credits. (Oh yes — DALLAS’s classic three-way split-screen title sequence is back!!) “My name is Nicolas Treviño and I’m here on behalf of Cliff Barnes,” the newcomer announces smoothly, oozing charisma. Reminding the Ewings that “Cliff still owns one-third of this company”, Nicolas invokes something called a supermajority clause which means that “no sector of Barnes Global will ever be sold. Cliff Barnes would rather destroy this company than see the Ewings profit from it.” “That’s insane!” gasps Bobby. (It’s also pretty much what JR said in 1980, "I'm gonna bring Bobby down if I have to destroy Ewing Oil to do it!”) Elena is present for Nicolas’s announcement and seems as shocked by it as everyone else is — but then we discover Nicolas is really Elena and Drew’s childhood friend Joaquin, a homeless child her family raised as one of their own in Mexico, who is now an unspeakably rich businessman. (Joaquin follows in the path of Ray Krebbs and Frank Ashkani, two other poor kids who were taken in off the streets and semi-adopted by Jock and Cliff.)Just as Anika threatens to expose Lucious’s past crimes on EMPIRE, Nicolas warns the Ewings that Cliff is determined to prove that they framed him for JR’s murder. “If Cliff can prove anything against us, it’ll land us behind bars!” panics Christopher. “And if Pamela or Sue Ellen find out —“ “Christopher, there are no loose ends,” Bobby replies firmly. “Carlos Del Sol and Bum and I made sure.”While Sue Ellen’s line about “this house [being] too small even when I lived here” finally acknowledges the unspoken paradox at the heart of DALLAS — that the incredibly rich Ewings choose to live on top of each other for no logical reason — EMPIRE and DYNASTY each have a different kind of self-aware moment. In response to the idea that Anika’s unborn baby will automatically replace Rhonda’s as the heir to the Empire fortune, Jamal remarks that “this family uses the term ‘heir’ like we’re in a Shakespearean play.” Sam, meanwhile, lowers the cultural bar to describe Alexis’s fling with Anders as “Downton Abbey After Dark.”The question Lucious asked Andre at his mother’s graveside, “What do you say, man — we good?” remains unanswered until the shareholders meeting where it emerges that Empire’s new streaming service app has been sabotaged, thereby severely damaging Hakeem’s credibility. Rhonda turns to Andre and whispers, “Did you do what I think you did?” He smiles and replies, “That’s how we get back to us!” This is when we realise Andre and Rhonda have, for the sake of their marriage, calmly decided to turn bad again. An even bigger shock comes in the very last scene of the ep where it is revealed that Lucious’s dead mama ain’t so dead after all ...And the Top  3 are …1 (2) EMPIRE2 (1) DALLAS3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?