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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 247290" data-attributes="member: 22">10 Mar 14: DALLAS: Playing Chicken v. 04 May 16: EMPIRE: The Lyon Who Cried Wolf v. 16 Nov 18: DYNASTY: That WitchSoap Land’s two current love triangles are between Pamela, John Ross and Emma on New DALLAS and Culhane, Fallon and Liam on New DYNASTY. Emma and Liam are both pretty shameless in their respective pursuits of John Ross and Fallon. While Emma opens her robe to give John Ross a flash of her skimpy bikini right under his wife’s nose (Pamela may not notice but Sue Ellen certainly does), Liam issues Fallon with a challenge. “Try and go the whole weekend without thinking about me or that kiss,” he tells her, referring to their divorce party snog. “When you can’t stop replaying it, then you’ll know you should be with me and not Culhane.”  “See? I knew you couldn’t stop thinking about me!” he says when Fallon later encounters him in her subconscious during a godawful 'Wizard of Oz'-themed fantasy sequence. “I wasn’t thinking about you,” she insists. “You forced your way into this crazy dream.” Emma likewise forces her way into John Ross’s head, by the most devious of means. During a girly shopping trip, she encourages Pamela to buy herself some sexy underwear as a treat for her new hubby. A few hours later, Emma surprises John Ross in his office by unzipping her dress to reveal an emerald corset of her own. “What do you think — is green my colour?” she asks. He nods appreciatively and starts to peel it off her. “Keep it on,” she insists. “I want you to remember me wearing it.” The following night, he returns home to be greeted by Pamela wearing the exact same thing. As they kiss, he can’t help but flash back to Emma, like something from a weird erotic nightmare. He mumbles some excuse and heads for the door, leaving Pamela behind, semi-naked and humiliated, just as Sue Ellen was when her attempts to seduce JR with a sexy negligee in the original mini-series similarly backfired. The scenario also echoes what Sue Ellen told Mandy when she was the Valentine Girl: “JR likes trashy lingerie, but not on the women he cares about.” Fallon’s 'Wizard of Oz' parody-dream-thing occurs after a milk jug flies through the air, cartoon-style, hitting her on the head and knocking her unconscious. There is a similarly minor, though less stupid, mishap on EMPIRE where Rhonda is accidentally pushed by a workman, triggering a flashback to the night of her miscarriage. “I was at the top of my stairs and felt hands on my back,” she recalls. Up until now, she had assumed her fall to have been accidental. “Are you saying that you think somebody pushed you?” asks Anika, full of concern. In a later scene, a glimpse of Anika’s distinctive red-soled shoes has a similar effect on Rhonda as the sight of Pamela’s emerald corset had on John Ross: she again flashes back to her fall, this time seeing someone wearing the very same shoes walking away as she lies helpless at the bottom of the stairs. If one were so inclined, one could draw connections between both Emma’s emerald corset and Anika’s red shoes, and Fallon’s 'Wizard of Oz' dream (Emerald City; Dorothy’s ruby slippers), but why bother? DYNASTY’s 'Oz' parody is as uninspired and unoriginal as DALLAS’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ homage during the final episode of its original run, but whereas it took DALLAS thirteen seasons to reach its creative nadir, DYNASTY has got there in little over a year. And while 'Conundrum' was merely lame and boring, 'Fallon Goes to Oz' is horribly smug and self-satisfied. This is perfectly illustrated by Fallon (who to all intents and purposes is New Dynasty) coming face to face with another version of herself (who knows or cares why) and kissing herself passionately.“My uncle is the past and I’m looking into the future,” insists John Ross as he and Bobby feud over his decision to frack for oil on Southfork. “I’m tired of singing songs from the past, this is new stuff,” says Jamal, arguing with his father over whose material they should perform at the ASA Awards.  Now that Cookie and Lucious are jointly running the Empire and Jamal in direct competition with his father for an ASA, there is plenty of familial infighting over who gets to sing what during the award ceremony. But despite the ASAs being “the biggest stage in the world” and Cookie urging the Lyon men to “put your big girl drawers on ‘cos we gonna come together and do this as a family,” it’s hard for us to care how many minutes of stage time the Lyons will be granted or whose song will be featured most prominently. I mean, the Oil Baron’s Ball was always fun on ‘80s DALLAS, but we were never expected to worry about who got to present the Oil Man of the Year Award, or even who won it. But then, just as the drama’s starting to feel too predictable and insignificant, into the rehearsal room walks Andre, accompanied by a surprise guest. “It’s OK, Grandma,” he says quietly before introducing her as “Leah Walker, Lucious’s mother.” While the rest of the family are simply bewildered, Lucious is in shock. “What — you got nothing to say?” Andre asks him. “You wanna tell them how you sent her away to a home for twenty-one years and never looked back?” As Lucious’s mama reaches out to touch her son’s face, he backs away, terrified. “You have no idea what you’ve done,” he says to Andre. In due course, Lucious fills Cookie in on the missing pieces of the puzzle. “I didn’t lie about anything,” he tells her. “My mother did try and drown me. She did put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger … Just turns out there was no bullets in the gun … My mother died the day that they locked her up.” The next bit of back story is particularly interesting as it incorporates some real-life political history from Soap Land’s heyday, the 1980s. “Remember how, under Reagan, the government took all the mentally ill patients and dumped them out on the street?” Lucious asks. “Well, one day in front of 30th Street Station, I damn near tripped over her. You and me were on welfare with two and a half kids. We couldn’t have taken care of her if we wanted to … I needed her to stay dead … None of y’all understand how dangerous she really is.” There are echoes of previous Soap Land characters in Leah: Amanda Ewing (another mentally ill woman locked away and forgotten about), Rebecca Wentworth (another mother unwilling or incapable of raising her children) and even, in a lovely scene where Lucious finds his mother singing at the piano and gently harmonises along with her, Lilimae Clements (another songbird who never got the chance to truly realise her potential).Trend of the week: soap tropes given a fresh spin. First, two women wearing identical outfits — it’s happened a few times in Soap Land over the years (Alexis and Krystle, April and Michelle, Anne Matheson and Paula Vertosick), but Emma’s naughty little scheme takes it to a different level. Then there’s furious anger erupting into unbridled passion — how many times have we seen that happen? But never between two men and never ever between two black men. “Dude, this the ASAs … If you wanna be on it, I wouldn’t be throwing some hissy fit,” the show’s super-cool musical director Major-D snarls at Jamal. The next thing you know, mouths are being kissed and bodies slammed against walls. While EMPIRE gives us a genuinely raunchy scene between two men, New DYNASTY gives us Sam camping it up as the Cowardly Lion in Fallon’s dream. “I’m loving the outfit you chose for me and I’m thrilled to help you with this triangle,” he gushes to Fallon (dressed as Dorothy), Culhane (the Tin Man) and Liam (the … oh, just kill me now).EMPIRE cuts back and forth between Jamal and Major-D getting it on and Hakeem and Tiana recording a sultry little duet together. There’s some similarly sexy cross-cutting at the end of DALLAS. While Nicolas Treviño is making gorgeously photographed love to Elena in his apartment (“I never wanted a woman more than I want you”), Christopher is in Mexico meeting Nicolas's wife and kids. A married man having an affair is probably the soapiest trope of them all, but DALLAS somehow manages to make the revelation feel urgent enough to end the episode on. Inspired by the piece of music his mother plays on the piano, Lucious comes up with an arrangement for the ASA Awards that the rest of the family agree on. Hakeem, urged by his father to rap from the heart (“You gotta be a hundred per cent honest [about] the way we really are with each other”), improvises a rhyme that sums up the whole Lyon family dynamic: “Blood is supposed to be thicker than water/Nowadays we can’t even stomach the thought of it/It’s like we can’t even get along/Who right and who in the wrong?/Too busy pointing fingers like it’s politics … Too much dysfunction … Ain’t nobody here to mediate it/And you would think we wasn’t even related/Why are we even throwing blows in the first place?/We fight at cookouts, picnics and birthdays … It’s time for Plan B/If Bloods and Crips can reconcile/Why can’t we?” Jamal chips in with some “ooh oohs” and “yeah yeahs”, the family wipe away tears and slap each other on the back, and suddenly everything’s all happiness and rainbows. It’s well done … but lets all the tension out of the drama. (Talking of unexpected displays of affection, Anders telling Sam, “I love you, mate,” on DYNASTY made my toes curl slightly — but that might be because I still associate Anders with his emotionally repressed ‘80s predecessor.) When the Ewings got similarly loved-up towards the end of the Dream Season, it was the characters on the outskirts of the show — Angelica Nero, Mark Graison — to whom one looked to continue the drama and intrigue, and so it proves on EMPIRE. As well as Rhonda finally figuring out the truth about Anika, there’s also Harper Scott, the reporter who let the cat out of the bag about Lucious’s mother in the first place. We see her being driven by Thirsty, supposedly to Lucious’s house for an interview, before he abruptly pulls over in a side street. “What are you gonna do — kill me and leave me by the side of the road?” she asks him casually. “I resent that,” he replies. “I’m a gentleman. I wouldn’t touch a hair on your head.” Annoyed, she gets out of the car. Out of nowhere, two men grab her and carry her away screaming while Thirsty drives off. Such is the unpredictable nature of EMPIRE that this incident could be the start of a whole new storyline or might never be referred to again. EMPIRE concludes with a truly strange scene where Lucious is woken by his mother in the early hours of the morning and finds she has been baking cakes throughout the night. Brandishing a knife, she insists that he sit down and eat. She switches back and forth between maternal and cruel ( “Do you love me?” she asks him tearfully. He nods. “Liar!” she replies before cutting him another slice of cake. “I’m sorry,” she says, “sorry I was too weak to kill you when I had the chance”), yet ultimately is old and powerless. She cannot be the EMPIRE equivalent of either Judith Ryland or Miss Ellie — she’s simply too ill — and so it feels kind of truthful that the scene doesn’t really go anywhere. Needless to say, EMPIRE’s sensitive depiction of mental illness is not matched by DYNASTY's. This week’s episode opens with Anders referring to Claudia Blaisdel as “a lunatic woman with a gun” and ends with Alexis finding a baby on her doorstep with a note attached saying, “Please look after me … My mom is Claudia and she is crazy.”And the Top 3 are …1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) EMPIRE3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =