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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 254004" data-attributes="member: 22">07 Apr 14: DALLAS: Like a Bad Penny v. 28 Sep 16: EMPIRE: Sin That Amends v. 18 Jan 19: DYNASTY: A Champagne MoodAfter a high-octane few episodes which have included a shock wedding, a premature birth, a long-lost brother, the shooting of one major character and the tragic death of another, this week’s EMPIRE understandably takes its foot off the gas a little. DALLAS isn’t quite as emotionally devastating as last week's was either.Less than a full episode after John Ross had her committed to a psychiatric unit, Sue Ellen is released into Bobby’s care — which means bringing her back to live at Southfork. The words ‘frying pan’ and ‘fire’ spring to mind. Nor is she the only Soap Land character to be receiving medical care in a home environment. Jeff Colby, who ended last week’s DYNASTY in a car crash after being shot, wakes up in a hospital bed surrounded by all the usual Soap Land Memorial paraphernalia — IVs, heart monitors, doctors with clipboards, anxious relatives — but when the screens around his bed are pulled back, we see that he is actually in a guest room at the Carrington Manor. Blake explains to Monica that it’s to conceal his involvement with Ada Stone from the authorities. “Believe me, there was no other choice,” he tells her. “You, Blake, should never start a sentence with ‘Believe me,'” she replies.Strange as these domestic arrangements might be, however, the award for Most Toxic Household of the Week belongs to Lucious Lyon. “Who in the hell are all these people in my house?” he demands to know when he arrives home to find Anika quizzing a group of potential nannies (not, thankfully, as part ‘Terrible Interviews’ comedy montage). After ordering them all to leave, he asks, “Who gave you the permission to hire a nanny?” “I need permission?” Anika replies indignantly. “In my house you do,” he tells her, before adding in a whisper, “I don’t need people I don’t know looking in my life, okay?” Then we hear the sound of a baby crying in another room. “Oh my God, Lucious,” Anika pleads, “I need help — I cannot do this by myself!” At this point, Lucious’s mother Leah, who has been silently observing all of this, offers to see to the child. “No! You keep your crazy hands off of my baby!” Anika yells. “You got one job in this house and that’s a mother,” Lucious snarls at his wife. "Get in there and do your damn job!” So we’ve got a paranoid despot, a spoilt princess and a bi-polar granny, each of whom has a history of homicidal violence, all living under the same roof with a newborn. Sounds nuts, but it’s played completely straight, which makes it fascinating.While Tariq kept tabs on the goings-on in Lucious’s house via a camera secreted in the nursery on last week's EMPIRE, Elena watched surveillance footage of John Ross and Emma having sex on DALLAS. This week, Elena shows Nicolas the sex video, but then tells him she’s changed her mind about sending it to Pamela. “It was one thing when we thought he was cheating with Candace,” she explains, “but if I had to watch video of someone I love betraying me with someone I thought was my friend, I couldn’t get over that. I’m not gonna do that to her.” Nicolas nods in agreement … but later texts the tape to Pamela anyway. The penultimate scene of the ep finds Pamela in bed with John Ross, too preoccupied to notice the buzzing of her phone — an indication that Nicolas’s message is incoming  — just inches away from her. Before anything so incriminating can happen on EMPIRE, Anika discovers the bug hidden in the teddy bear and Lucious destroys it.For the most part,  the tone of this week’s EMPIRE is comparatively light. Lucious’s primary concern is trying to woo Cookie back. Rather than the traditional romantic gestures of a Soap Land leading man — buying out a florist’s worth of flowers; hiring an entire restaurant for an intimate dinner — he showers her with an array of rather more idiosyncratic gifts including a statue of a lion, an espresso machine and a gold-plated gun with matching bullets. He also deploys one of the most potent weapons a Soap Land character has at their disposal: flashbacks!Back in the ‘80s, the majority of Soap Land flashbacks could be divided into two categories: the romantic flashback, whereby a character, often at a hospital bedside, would go into a reverie, causing the screen to go all wibbly-wobbly as he or she summoned up a sentimental montage of days gone by, and the revelation flashback, most commonly deployed during the resolution of a whodunit, where a character follows up an “It was you!” style accusation by flashing back to previously unseen events that led up to the crime in question. Of the flashbacks that did not fit into either category, arguably the most memorable were those that told the ongoing story of Mack and Anne’s youthful romance during KNOTS Season 8. EMPIRE now adopts the same approach to show us how Cookie and Lucious first got together back in the day. Just like rich Anne and poor Mack, it’s a case of opposites attract as good Catholic schoolgirl Loretha (as Cookie was known back then) sees young punk Lucious beatboxing on a street corner with his crew and shocks her friends by going over to dance with him. It’s quite touching to see these two hard-bitten characters back when they were young and relatively innocent. As much as present-day Cookie insists that Lucious “can’t keep hitting me over the head with this when-we-first-saw-each-other sentimental crap," it feels like it can only be a matter of time before she succumbs to his charms once again.In the same way that the story of Young Mack and Young Anne was expanded to include additional flashbacks from the perspective of Young Greg Sumner, here we also see Tariq flashing back to the same street corner when he was a little kid trying to join in with the beatboxers, only for his mother to drag him away. “How many times have I got to tell you — stay away from that boy!” she scolds, referring to Lucious. “But, Ma,” protests Young Tariq, “you said he’s my brother.” “Tariq, you listen to me,” she replies gravely, “you do not ever, ever say that out loud again, not to anybody, least of all to him … Him and his crazy ass mama are the worst things to ever happen to us!”The romantic style flashback of ‘80s Soap Land seems to have died out in C21st, replaced by what might be termed as PTSD-style flashbacks, where an event in the present will trigger a traumatic memory for a character — conveyed in a series of short, sharp cuts — causing him or her to lose control. An example of this occurs on DALLAS where the reappearance of Drew Ramos in a parking garage transports Christopher back to the loss of his babies. As he beats the crap of Drew, he flashes back to the explosion on the rig, then the flatlining of the twins' heart monitors in the hospital. While the beating takes place in slow motion, the flashbacks occur in rapid succession, making it seem as if what Christopher is remembering is more real to him than what is happening in the present. “Finish it," pleads Drew finally, as Christopher's fist hovers over his bloodied face. This is enough to snap Christopher out of the past. “If I have to live with this pain, so do you,” he tells Drew, before leaving him in a heap on the ground. Back on EMPIRE, Jamal has a similarly visceral reminder of a recent traumatic event. Lucious is giving a speech at a charity event when he spontaneously invites him to get up and perform. The yelling of the crowd and the flashing of the cameras is enough to transport him back to his shooting on the red carpet. He runs for the exit then collapses, hyperventilating, outside.Meanwhile, Drew's guilt turns to rage after he finds the documents showing how JR swindled his father out of his land. “I watched Papi die ... for nothing,” he realises. “He wasted his life on a dream that was already taken from him and I wasted mine hating myself for not being able to save him. Everything that’s happened is because of JR’s betrayal. Their greed took everything from our family.” Elsewhere in the ep, Nicolas is not pleased to learn that Drew is back in town. “Besides Carmen, he’s the only one who knew we grew up together … He could ruin all our plans,” he tells Elena anxiously.There’s one more, very C21st use of the flashback convention in this week’s DALLAS. In the final scene, Nicolas has a clandestine meeting with — surprise, surprise — Hunter McKay. “Sorry I’m late,” he says. “I had to deal with some family issues.” We then quickly flash back to John Ross’s introduction to Hunter in last week’s ep (“Hunter McKay — his granddaddy and my daddy fought their fair share of battles back in the day”). This doesn’t represent a character’s memory; it’s simply there to remind the audience of who Hunter is, like a “previously on Dallas” style recap in the middle of a scene. Maybe it shouldn’t work, but such is the increasingly non-linear nature of television drama that one doesn’t even question it.“When you offered me a chance to take down the Ewings, you didn’t say anything about midnight meetings with Mexican gangsters … with guns,” Hunter complains nervously. This is how we realise that not only are Nicholas and Hunter in cahoots, but they’re both working for the Mendez-Ochoa cartel — the same bad boys that Harris Ryland is secretly plotting against with the CIA. “When the company goes public, we’ll buy enough shares to give you controlling interest,” Nicolas is assuring boss man Luis, referring to Ewing Global. “By the time the Ewings and Cliff Barnes realise what happened, you’ll be in control of the company, free to launder billions of drug profits for years to come.” Luis warns Nicolas that his plan better work or there will be fatal consequences for his children. At the same time as widening the narrative to include the cartel and Hunter in the “Ewings go public” storyline, DALLAS also tightens it as Nicolas asks Luis for a favour: “I need your help finding Drew Ramos.”As well as flashbacks, a couple of characters experience otherworldly moments this week. Andre continues to receive visitations from dead wife Rhonda on EMPIRE, only now he just hears her disembodied voice rather than seeing her, which I guess is some sort of progress. Jeff Colby, meanwhile, has a kind of near-death experience in his hospital bed. Thankfully, rather than another horrible Wizard of Oz-style dream sequence, it takes the form of a short and stylish vision in which he sees the silhouette of a glamorous black woman in a turban singing into a microphone, evoking both Billie Holliday in Lady Sings the Blues and Dominique Devereaux in ‘80s DYNASTY. I don’t think it has yet been established that Jeff and Monica’s mother is the C21st version of Dominique, but viewers who remember the original series are clearly being invited to make that connection here.Twisty-turny schemes-within-a-scheme where things turn out to be other than as they originally appear, and then turn out to be different again, are part of what makes the Soap Land world go round. However, New DYNASTY has given this kind of story-telling a bad name with its various twists and turns becoming tediously convoluted with scant regard for character or even logic. This week's DALLAS and EMPIRE, however, each give us a reminder of how such an ever-shifting narrative, where different layers of a story are gradually peeled away, revealing different truths, can be both fascinating and fun.As part of his plan to seize control of Ewing Global once its IPO goes through, John Ross flies with Pamela to Vegas to renew a business acquaintance with an old friend of JR’s — Sheik Sharif Ali, no less: “We cut him in on the Arctic leases if he agrees to give us the necessary capital to purchase the controlling interest in the IPO.” The sheikh mostly communicates through his son, Prince Nasir. I don’t think we’ve encountered such regally titled characters in Soap Land since DYNASTY’s Moldavian era — although the protocol and etiquette required to deal with the sheikh is more reminiscent of the Sumner Group’s encounter with Murakame, the bogus Japanese company on KNOTS LANDING. John Ross immediately finds himself in the sheikh’s bad books for not approaching him with the Arctic deal when JR originally promised he would. “Your actions are callous and selfish and not only have you disrespected my father, but you have brought dishonour to your father’s name as well,” Prince Nasir informs him. To turn things around, John Ross embarks on a scheme-within-a-scheme which also serves as a metaphor for his complex feelings about his father.Using Pamela’s priceless earrings (previous owners include Catherine the Great and Katherine the Wentworth) to buy into a high-stakes poker game with the sheikh, John Ross also puts the watch he inherited from JR on the table. “If my father was king, this watch would be his crown, a symbol of everything he was,” he explains. He then deliberately loses the game and the watch. Humbled, he apologises to the sheikh for “disgracing myself, my father and you by not following through on his promise. And I can only hope one day to be worthy of the legacy he left me.” Later, Pamela asks him why he threw the game. “I kept seeing that damn watch as an albatross around my neck,” he replies. “Without it, maybe I’ll be free to be my own man instead of the man everybody else wants me to be.” But that’s not the only reason: “Sometimes the only way to win is to show the other person you’re not afraid to lose,” he smiles knowingly.After their return to Southfork, John Ross receives a surprise visit from Prince Nasir who hands him back JR’s watch. “My father has had a change of heart,” he explains. “When you gambled the watch, my father saw JR in you. You were humble enough to know you were wrong and brave enough to risk something you cared deeply about to prove it.” John Ross is moved. And there’s the conundrum at the heart of his character: he desperately wants to escape JR’s shadow but is just as desperate to be worthy of him. It’s an ambivalence JR himself never experienced —  you can’t imagine him gambling so recklessly with a sacred possession of Jock’s — his medallion, say, or his portrait.EMPIRE introduces the wonderfully named Angelo Dubois this week. He’s a slick black politician who heads the not so wonderfully named W.O.K.E.  (aka We Organise for Knowledge and Empowerment), a social work programme for young kids. He and Jamal get into a heated debate on a radio show after he refers to Jamal as a victim of gun violence. “If anyone’s a victim, it’s actually Freda Gatz,” Jamal argues. “Why don’t we all try to grow up where she grew up?” “See, it’s that line of thinking that does a tremendous disservice to black folk,” replies Angelo. “How are we meant to deal with these circumstances if we marginalise ourselves?” He then extends an on-air invitation to Jamal to attend one of W.O.K.E.’s anti-violence summits. Cornered, Jamal has no choice but to agree. Having witnessed this discussion, Cookie is unimpressed with Angelo: ”That bougie bitch — he wouldn’t know the streets if it shot him in the ass.” Nor does she think it wise for Jamal to continue their association. “We got a FBI agent up our ass,” she reminds him, “we don’t need a politician too.” Nonetheless, Jamal’s interest in Angelo’s organisation grows and Lucious, under the misapprehension that Cookie is equally enthusiastic, offers to host the summit himself and finance it and “stream the whole thing live on Empire XStream.”On the surface, this isn’t the soapiest of storylines, but dig a little deeper and it becomes apparent that everyone involved has an ulterior motive for doing what they’re doing. While Lucious’s generosity is really a (misjudged) attempt to impress Cookie, Lucious himself suggests that Jamal’s newly acquired social conscience is a smokescreen for him to hide behind: “This whole ‘I wanna end the cycle’ thing is some BS to cover the fact that that boy can’t sing no more.” Cookie, meanwhile, accuses Angelo of “exploiting my son’s situation for your political tricknology”  in front of Lucious and Jamal: ”I know you … with your little summits and town hall meetings … Those kids carry a pain that people like you can’t even begin to imagine. See, you ain’t never had to overcome nothing, have you?!”  “Well, damn, only person I ever seen her go off on like that is you!” Jamal tells Lucious as they watch her storm off. The implication here is that Cookie’s dislike of Angelo masks a strong sexual attraction towards him.Racial politics also raise their head on DYNASTY, albeit in a more superficial way. In return for helping to save his life, Blake asks Jeff for a favour: “I need a diverse investment partner to get this soccer team. All it’ll cost you is ten million for 20% ownership and a call to the Urban Outreach Programme pushing our bid.” When Jeff refuses, he resorts to blackmail, threatening to expose his involvement with Ada Stone unless he co-operates. Jeff comes up with a condition of his own: “You want your soccer team? I want Culhane to suffer.” This sounds juicy enough, but as both Blake’s desire for a football team and Jeff’s thirst for revenge against Culhane have come pretty much out of nowhere, they don’t mean very much.Like EMPIRE’s summit, DYNASTY’s Party of the Week is charity-based, a fundraiser in aid of the Steven Carrington Foundation. While things go badly for Jamal at the summit — his PSTD panic attack thingy when Lucious invites him to sing — they don’t go much better for Sam, who is obliged to act as host in Steven’s absence and is then rewarded for his efforts by receiving divorce papers in the mail with no explanation.Following a nice brotherly bonding session between Jamal, Andre and Hakeem where they all pledge to support each other during their current upheavals (PTSD, widowhood and fatherhood respectively), a newly optimistic Andre returns to the house he used to live in with  Rhonda to collect some belongings. As he loads his car, he is approached by a couple of cops who want to know what a black man is doing in such a nice neighbourhood: “Lot of break-ins in this neighbourhood. You know anything about that? … Got any ID on you, yo?” “My wallet’s in my car — yo,” mimics Andre, and that’s enough to get him arrested, slammed on the ground and handcuffed, with a gun pointed at him. It feels both ugly and plausible — a reminder that no matter how rich your family or how escapist your soap opera, a black man living in America is still a black man living in America.And this week's Top 3 are ...1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) EMPIRE3 (3) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?