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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 252183" data-attributes="member: 22">31 Mar 14: DALLAS: Like Father, Like Son v. 21 Sep 16: EMPIRE: Light in Darkness v. 21 Dec 18: DYNASTY: Crazy LadyEMPIRE’s Season 2 opener picks up the story a couple of minutes before the end of the previous season, this time focusing on events happening outside the hotel where <s>Hakeem and Laura’s</s> Lucious and Anika’s wedding has just taken place. Still upset at being jilted, Hakeem runs out of the building, ignoring Jamal and Lucious’s entreaties to come back inside. Instead, he jumps into the back of his wedding car, complete with a sign saying ‘Just Married’ on the trunk, and speeds off into the night. Lucious eyes the extras on the street suspiciously. “Look at all these damn people out here,” he says. “Any one of them could be Feds.” Then he tells Jamal to take his grandmother home and look after her. Suddenly, a body falls out of the sky, landing with a thud on top of a car, Marta Del Sol-style. It’s Rhonda. Not Anika. Rhonda. Well, I wasn’t expecting that. Spookily, New DYNASTY chooses this week to re-enact the scene from the original series where Claudia Blaisdel drops a baby off a roof (of a cheap motel, as opposed to the swanky hotel on EMPIRE). Whereas we’ve just been on ground level with the Lyons, we’re now up on the roof with the Carringtons, just as we were in ’83. The aerial view of the baby smashing onto the car below is still a surreally gruesome sight, even when you know it’s a doll.Seconds before Rhonda fell (unless she was pushed — we can’t be sure), Anika finally admitted to killing her baby. Likewise, just before the DYNASTY doll flies through the air, Claudia finally confesses to killing New Cristal at the end of Season 1 (“and I would do it again if it would bring Matthew back”). In both scenes, the drama doesn't end with the fall. As in the original DYNASTY, the Carringtons’ relief upon discovering that the child Claudia dropped wasn’t real is swiftly followed by another realisation — that the actual baby is still missing (“If Claudia doesn’t have the baby then —” “Who the hell does?”). Meanwhile on the EMPIRE balcony, Andre is still screaming the same “NOOO!!” he was at the end of last season. After seeing his dead wife down below, he turns back to Anika and starts choking the life out of her — “What did you do? What did you do? You killed my wife!” — only for her waters to break. In one smooth movement, he goes from strangling her to scooping her up in his arms and carrying her inside.And so for the second time in three episodes, the EMPIRE gang all wind up in Soap Land Memorial looking anxious but glamorous in their wedding outfits (everyone, that is, but Hakeem, the father of Anika’s baby, who has passed out drunk in another woman’s apartment, kind of like ‘80s Jeff Colby did when his first child was being born). As the doctors prepare for Anika to give birth six weeks prematurely, the cops show up to talk to her. “Those aren’t Feds,” Lucious realises before barging into the delivery room. “Sir, unless you’re the father, I’m gonna have to ask you —” a nurse begins. “That’s my wife,” he replies and no further explanation is required. While the medical staff are at one end of the bed delivering the kid, Lucious is at the other, saying appropriate words of encouragement to Anika (“You can do it … push, baby, that’s it …”), before whispering in her ear, “Speaking of push, you see the cops out the window right now? Nobody pushed Rhonda. She jumped, you tried to stop her, she overpowered you, tried to take you with her, grabbed you by the throat — which is what’s gonna happen if you don’t go with the story.” There’s a parallel moment following the rooftop incident on DYNASTY. The real baby has been found and Claudia is being handcuffed and led away by the cops. “You said you’d help me!” she protests to Blake. “Look, I am helping you,” he replies reasonably, before whispering in her ear in the same menacing way that Lucious does in Anika’s, “I’m helping you understand the pain you caused me and my family by taking away what you love. I know it’s cruel — he’s only a baby. Will it make things equal? I don’t know, but it’s a hell of a start.”Back on EMPIRE, one final push and Anika’s child is born. Lucious looks every bit the proud step-father/grandfather — until the doctor says “it’s a girl.” This is not what Anika had led him to believe. “You wanna cut the cord, Dad?” the doc asks him. “No,” he replies coldly before snarling at Anika: “You lied to me!” His disappointment, however, does not prevent him from having himself registered as the father on the birth certificate or from taking the baby away from Hakeem when he tries to hold her later in the episode. Over on DYNASTY, Blake may have taken Claudia’s baby away from her to raise as a Carrington, but then St Sam insists that he be given to Matthew’s parents to raise. So I guess Mother Blaisdel won out in the end.Tariq, Lucious’s recently acquired half-brother and the federal agent determined to bring him down, tells Cookie that he knows Lucious married Anika “just to keep her from testifying. If I can prove that marriage is fake, I could subpoena her.” Consequently, Lucious and Anika are obliged to reenact Fallon and Liam’s storyline in which they pretended their sham marriage was genuine, only this time playing it for soapy drama rather than farce. When Anika moves back into Lucious’s house with the baby, she receives a warm welcome from her new mother-in-law. “You about as trustworthy as a snake in a hamster cage,” Leah hisses at her while wielding a kitchen knife. “I got my eye on you — and don’t touch any of this food. I know you’re trying to poison me.”Meanwhile, a grieving Andre (“I’m done with God and his plans!”) receives a ghostly visit from Rhonda who berates him for not preventing her death. “Without me, you’re just one more Philly thug with mental problems,” she sneers at him. It’s too soon to say whether this visitation is the same kind of Soap Land daydream that allowed Bobby to keep “seeing” April after her death in DALLAS or a symptom of a deeper malaise, similar to that which caused Claudia to believe Matthew had returned from the dead on DYNASTY. Speaking of whom, when Claudia threatens to expose Alexis's involvement with Hank (i.e., the fact that she paid him to pretend to be her son), Alexis cleverly plays on Claudia’s mental history by convincing her that she has imagined the whole thing: “Who’s Hank, dear — another doll of yours? … Is he here with you now?”Thanks to the missing baby storyline, there’s a seam of seriousness running through this week's DYNASTY — not even this show can play a kidnapped baby plot entirely for laughs — which makes it a bit more watchable than it has been recently. Fallon and Blake’s dispute over whether to call in the FBI or handle the kidnapping privately is the same argument abductees’ families have been having in Soap Land since Bobby Ewing was snatched in 1979. Their opposing views are informed by their own previous kidnapping experiences, which means the conflict feels rooted in character rather than existing solely as a vehicle for Fallon’s latest collection of tiresome wisecracks.“I grew up in a family where if you don’t stab someone in the back before dinner, you don’t get dessert,” Fallon tells Culhane in this ep, echoing what Bobby told Christopher a couple of seasons ago: “I grew up in a family where stabbing everybody in the back was encouraged.”On this week’s DALLAS, it’s John Ross who feels that his family have stabbed him in the back. “You can justify your actions to kingdom come, Mama,” he tells Sue Ellen, referring to her and Bobby’s plot to prevent him fracking on Southfork, “but we both know the real reason you did this … I may be drunk on power but you — you’re just drunk. This wasn’t the tough love of a mother. These are irrational decisions of an alcoholic.” “Malign me all you want,” he tells his Uncle Bobby, “but if you get off your high horse, maybe you’d see that I was the only one offering you a real solution to get around Treviño. It wasn’t personal. But you and my mother, you stabbed me in the back so don’t talk to me about the importance of sticking together. That stunt you just pulled? That doesn’t make you a Ewing. Makes you a damn hypocrite.”In their ongoing efforts to bring down the Ewings, Nicolas and Elena adopt a two-pronged attack. They decide that the best way to alienate Pamela from the rest of the family is to provide her with proof that John Ross is cheating on her. To that end, Elena enlists the aid of Jasper, an extremely sexy female private eye, who sets up surveillance devices in both John Ross’s office and his apartment. Meanwhile, hoping to take advantage of the rift that has developed between John Ross and his mother and uncle, Nicolas invites him out for a drink — and guess who they run into!Back in 1989, Dennis Grimes, son of Roger Grimes, arrived on DYNASTY two decades after his father’s untimely demise. On this week’s DALLAS, we are introduced to Hunter McKay, son of Roger’s other self, Tommy McKay, twenty-five years after his father’s sudden death. But whereas Dennis was a long-haired extortionist just like his father, Hunter doesn’t appear to have much in common with his daddy. Tommy was a motorbikin’ rebel; Hunter is a computer geek. When he encounters John Ross (“my oldest friend”) in a bar, he is celebrating the success of taking his gaming company public. “One day I realised the video game I really wanted to play didn’t exist,” he explains, “so I just decided to create it myself … Who knew being a video game junkie would pay off?” A junkie trying to capitalise on his addiction? Maybe he and his dad do having something in common after all. It’s just that Tommy’s business plan — smuggling cocaine in clay pots from South America — didn’t really work. That scam of Tommy’s is also echoed on DYNASTY where Culhane discovers Ada Stone has tricked him into smuggling heroin inside supposedly valuable antiques (except that this then turns out to be part of one of those tricksy plot-within-a-plots I didn’t really follow).Inspired by Hunter’s story (“The best part about going public — I was able to buy up the controlling interest in the company!”), John Ross decides to do the same thing with Ewing Global. Knowing Bobby and Christopher will never agree, he sets about getting the other shareholders on his side. After convincing Pamela and Nicolas, he turns his attentions to his mother. “I want a vote to take Ewing Global public. It’ll get us the capital we need for the Arctic leases and it will dilute Cliff’s shares,” he explains — but all Sue Ellen wants to know is whether or not his affair with Emma is over. “Yes, yes it is,” he insists. “I wanna make this point very clear: I love my wife. The last thing I’d ever wanna do is hurt her.” She believes him, a bit like how she used to believe JR whenever he promised he’d turned over a new leaf — only John Ross sounds like he truly means it. “You have my support,” she tells him. Over on EMPIRE, Lucious also has a new business plan, which he pitches to real-life rapper Birdman (a rare example of a “playing himself” Soap Land cameo that genuinely works). “I’m relaunching Swiftstream under a brand new banner called Empire XStream and I wanna make an offer for exclusive rights to your music,” he tells him. Birdman proves a harder sell than Sue Ellen, however. “Empire’s fallen to the bottom of the ocean, man,” he sneers. Lucious retaliates with a potent cocktail of mixed metaphors: “I know you think y’all smelling blood in the water, but I think you better check your own damn panties cos I don’t lose. I always ride the wave because I am the King!”John Ross’s secretary Candace, under pressure from Harris Ryland to seduce him, slips into his office while he’s working late to ask if there’s anything he needs. To spell out what she means, she starts taking off her dress. Staying true to the promise he made his mama, he shows her the door (“I’m a married man … It ain’t ever gonna happen”) — but who should emerge from the elevator just in time to see Candace leaving John Ross’s office with her dress half off but Sue Ellen? “That son of yours is something else,” says Candace coolly as she walks past her. Sue Ellen is devastated, as devastated as she used to be when she’d find JR in bed with another woman after he’d sworn he’d changed — except this time, of course, John Ross is innocent.The following day, the Ewing shareholders gather to vote on taking the company public. As Christopher and Bobby argue with John Ross (“This company is our family’s legacy … You take it public, you’re putting it in play for anyone to buy for controlling interest!” “The only reason he’s doing this is to get the company for himself!”), an agonised Sue Ellen stands with her back to the rest of them — she and Bobby inadvertently paying homage to Abba in the process.[ATTACH=full]24458[/ATTACH]John Ross is confident of victory, especially after Pamela and Nicolas vote in his favour. Finally, Sue Ellen turns around to face her son. “I vote no,” she says.This leads to one of the most powerful scenes in the entire history of Soap Land as John Ross storms into his mother’s house and finds her in the kitchen, drinking. She doesn’t even bother to hide it. She’s really drunk and they’re both really angry. He accuses her of stabbing him in the back for a second time; she accuses him of lying to her face. “I didn’t lie to you!” he insists. “I told you the truth — it is over with Emma.” “How clever you are with your words — just like JR,” she replies bitterly. “I saw her coming out of your office. I saw her, John Ross!” He looks baffled for a second, then the penny drops: “Candace?” “Once a cheater always a cheater. I should have learned that lesson the first time around.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mama. Yeah, Candace was in my office and the crazy bitch was all over me — and I turned her down!” “BULLSHIT!” screams Miss Texas 1967. “I know what I saw!” “You don’t know, because you’re drunk! I am telling you the truth!” he insists. “Even drunk, I know the sound of a lie, and you are an expert at it, just like your father.” “I AM NOT MY FATHER!” he explodes. Suddenly, the scene isn’t about marital infidelity or corporate betrayal anymore, it’s about a son trying desperately to communicate with his alcoholic mother. ‘80s DALLAS always glossed over this aspect of John Ross and Sue Ellen’s relationship — understandably, as it wasn’t really equipped to convey the damage wrought by a drunken parent on a little boy — but now it’s made three-dimensionally real. “Are you so hell-bent on punishing JR for his sins that you’re willing to destroy the relationship with your only son?” he asks her, his voice choking with tears. “I’m your son. You remember that? Or are you too damn addled to remember who I am? Why are you doing this to yourself again, huh?” “Don’t you get it?” she sobs. “You did this to me — you and your father.” “No, Mama, you did this to yourself. You’re so busy seeing the ghost of JR in me that you cannot stop to take a hard look in the damn mirror. You want me to take responsibility for my actions? Then you take responsibility for yours.”He leaves the house, slamming the door behind him. Outside, he hesitates, considering his next move. Then he makes a call: “Hey, I need a favour.” We don’t know it yet, but having just vehemently denied that he is the same as his father, he is about to prove the exact opposite is true. The call was to Emma. He needs something from her father’s files. They meet at his apartment. “Gimme that file on the judge,” he tells her. “It’s always about you,” she replies, casually removing her dress, “your schedule, your needs — but I have needs, too.” Following her lead, he starts to undress as well. After all, he has no choice — she holds all the cards. “Oh, don’t bother,” she says. “Tonight, it’s about my needs.” She reclines on the sofa in her underwear, legs splayed, and beckons him with her finger. He hesitates. “I said come here — now,” she tells him. Reluctantly, he obeys. When Culhane went down on Fallon in the opening scene of New DYNASTY’s first episode, there was something liberating, even celebratory about it. When Emma pretty much blackmails John Ross into doing the same thing, it’s about power. “Now go home and kiss your wife!” she tells him when the task is completed. “John Ross degrades you,” Emma’s grandmother told her last week. Well, now the tables have been turned. Two episodes ago, John Ross watched with smug amusement as Stanley Babcock and his dog-suited companion did their thing on CCTV. Now, thanks to the surveillance installed by her private eye, Elena is the one watching John Ross and Emma doing their thing on her computer, a look of appalled fascination on her face.There’s more bedroom surveillance on EMPIRE. The final scene of this week’s ep shows Lucious cradling his brand new daughter/granddaughter/step-daughter/whatever she is in the nursery. “They are coming for us from all sides, Bella,” he whispers gently, “but we’re gonna show all these haters just what time it is.” We cut to a row of stuffed animals on a shelf, a big brown teddy bear in the middle. Then we see and hear Lucious and the baby through the bear’s eyes. Then we cut to Tariq seeing what the bear is seeing on his computer screen. New DYNASTY has already done the camera-inside-the-cuddly-toy thing (which is how everyone found out Steven was Anders’ son), but again that was played for cheap laughs, whereas this episode concludes with an ominous close-up of the bear’s face as Lucious says to the baby, “Wait until we show them how dark Hell can get.”Back on DALLAS, the sexual degradation continues as John Ross hands the file he obtained from Emma to an old friend of his daddy’s, Judge Robbins. “A gift from that whorehouse you like to frequent,” he explains. The pictures contained within are not as salacious as the CCTV footage of Stanley Babcock or, indeed, the S&M snaps of the judge who presided over Lucious’s bail hearing last season, but are nonetheless sufficiently compromising for the judge to sign a court order to have Sue Ellen taken into custody "for a mandatory psychiatric evaluation.” “You certainly are just like your father,” he tells John Ross. “You hear that enough, eventually, you start to believe it,” John Ross replies darkly. Kirby applies the same rationale to her behaviour on DYNASTY. “My dad keeps treating me like an immature bratty child,” she complains. “I’m tired of trying to prove him wrong … I should just embrace it. Screw it, right? If he doesn’t think I’m an adult, why act like one?”By the time the medics arrive to take her away, Sue Ellen is a befuddled, pathetic mess. The fact that they are so gentle with her as they help her into the ambulance somehow makes the situation even more poignant, and you start thinking that maybe John Ross is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Then, just as the doors slam shut, he appears, lit in hellish red by the ambulance lights. He doesn’t chuckle as Sue Ellen is taken away like JR did when he had her committed thirty-five years earlier. (“You boys take care of her now!” he said cheerfully back then). And she doesn't swear revenge on John Ross the same way she did on his father as she was being dragged off (“Somehow I’ll get back at you!”). Claudia does, though, as she is led away by the police on DYNASTY. “You’re gonna pay for this, you hear me? I’ll be back!” she yells at Blake.In a great deleted scene on DALLAS, Pamela instructs Candace to stop flirting with her husband at the office and tells her that her revealing outfit is inappropriate and "an insult to every woman who works here.” God knows what she’d have made of the skimpy dresses Paige Matheson used to wear to work at the Sumner Group back in the day.And this week's Top 3 are ...1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) EMPIRE3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?