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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 10722" data-attributes="member: 22">02/Oct/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Pilot v. 03/Oct/83: EMERALD POINT NAS: Episode 3 v. 05/Oct/83 DYNASTY: The Bungalow v. 06/Oct/83: KNOTS LANDING: Fugitives v. 07/Oct/83: DALLAS: The Long Goodbye v. 07/Oct/83 FALCON CREST: Penumbra“I don’t wanna see no damn iron rocking horses on land God intended for cattle!” That's the line that made me realise I could love THE YELLOW ROSE, the latest addition to Soap Land’s weekly line-up. A saga set on a twenty-thousand-acre Texas ranch owned and run by the Champion family, the feel, unsurprisingly, is very much early DALLAS - dusty and earthy, full of Stetsons and cattle - but with more emphasis on ranch hands than businessmen. It may lack the glamour of the other soaps, (where the hair is getting bigger by the week, most notably on KNOTS LANDING) but it’s rich with atmosphere and a feeling of authenticity.In the opening ep, we learn that the Yellow Rose Ranch has fallen on hard times - but guess what? There’s oil underneath the land! But guess what else? The family patriarch’s dying wish was for the land to be preserved, no matter what! This leads to a lively argument between two of his sons over what their next step should be. Such scenes give me a warm glow of familiarity. There’s something mythic about the whole oil-versus-land theme when it's set against a Texas backdrop and I just can’t get enough of it. It’s part of what first drew me to DALLAS, both the original series and the Lee Raintree novelisation, and more recently to New DALLAS. (At one point in THE YELLOW ROSE pilot, someone actually says the line, “That land is my birthright!” I could have cheered.) The theme is present in this week's episode of DALLAS too: “You’re the only one who understands Miss Ellie's love of this land,” Clayton tells Bobby, "land that your great-grandfather staked out.”Acting on Miss Ellie’s behalf, Clayton appoints Bobby as Southfork’s “guardian, until she can take over”, which chimes neatly with how Bobby's responsibilities are depicted on New DALLAS, where he is more the custodian of the family’s legacy than its patriarch. During the same scene, Clayton mentions that Miss Ellie “feels that Gary’s out of her life forever”. It’s interesting that this comment should come so soon after Val’s acknowledgment on KNOTS of how far apart she and Lucy have grown. Put the statements together and it feels like a pretty conclusive parting of the ways for the two shows.Like Jock Ewing on DALLAS, the dead patriarch of THE YELLOW ROSE - a sort of cross between Jock and Aaron Southworth - casts a long shadow over his many children (I counted three sons and a daughter in the first ep, though there may be more) and his widow Colleen. Colleen is not, as one might have imagined, a homely Miss Ellie type, or even an Angela Channing style dowager. Instead, she's young and sexy and played by Cybill Shepherd. Naturally, the various familial relationships are tangled and complicated - so much so that Colleen manages to sleep with her own stepson without realising it.David Soul plays Roy Champion who, in the absence of his dead father, has become the de-facto head of the family. He’s the protector of the Yellow Rose in much the same way that Bobby is of Southfork. Roy is surrounded by faces from Soap Land’s future: Josh Harris from DYNASTY Season 7 is his son, Jeff Wainwright from FALCON CREST Season 5 is his brother and Nancy Scotfield from DALLAS Season 9 plays his ex-wife. All give very appealing performances. In fact, the whole cast is great. Over on EMERALD POINT NAS, given its producer credits for Richard and Esther Shapiro (from DYNASTY) and Michael Filerman (from everything else), it’s unsurprising to find traces of Soap Land’s past in its DNA. Most conspicuously, the Mallory house is the same as the Weldons’ on FLAMINGO ROAD.Larry “Big Close Ups” Elikann pulls off a Soap Land first by directing two different shows in the same week, EMERALD POINT and KNOTS LANDING. The EMERALD POINT instalment is ploddy and unremarkable, but this week’s KNOTS is slick, taut and gripping. Diana Fairgate and Chip Roberts play out a variation on a scenario we’ve seen a hundred times before - girl meets boy, girl takes cross country road trip with boy, girl sees boy’s picture on the TV news and realises he is wanted for murder, girl tries to raise the alarm without raising boy’s suspicions, boy becomes increasingly possessive of girl (“Now that we’re together, I’m never gonna let you go”). All of this is played out in a succession of nerve-wracking scenes set in motels, diners and gas stations, involving pay phones, traffic cops and frantic, shaky-handed fumblings for car keys. From being one-half of love’s young dream, Diana becomes as trapped as Lucy Ewing was in “Runaway”, that cack-handed ep from DALLAS’s first season where a demented trucker takes her hostage. In fact, this story is “Runaway” as if directed by Nicholas Ray.Soap Land’s other starry-eyed child-woman redhead, FALCON CREST's Vicky, gets almost as big a shock this week when she finds new husband Nick in bed with his ex-wife Sheila. The moment is similar to Sue Ellen's discovery of JR and Holly together, except that Vicky pauses long enough to toss her wedding ring on the bed before running off. Sheila then tries the ring for size, just for laughs. “I’ve got to get out of my marriage,” Vicky informs Cole - thus making the Hogans’ marriage Soap Land's shortest since Cecil Colby dropped dead on his wedding day.This week’s DYNASTY is pretty much by-the-numbers, with all the usual characters having all the usual confrontations, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless. Blake follows Chase Gioberti’s lead by taking the cabin fire investigation into his own hands and interrogating the likeliest suspects. Similarly, on KNOTS, Mack more or less wrests control of the search operation to find Chip and Diana from Janet Baines, pulling strings and calling in favours to get the story on the TV news and a wire tap on the Mackenzies’ home phone.The latter development leads to one of two key scenes in this week’s Soap Land that involves an aborted phone call. On KNOTS, a frightened Diana calls her mother from a pay phone only for Chip to intercept the call and cut it short - too short for the police to even begin to trace it. This causes Karen, already tightly wound, to lose control and knock the phone tapping equipment to the floor. It’s a very tense, dramatic scene. Not so that of the second aborted call, also from a pay phone, that takes place between Joseph and Blake on DYNASTY. Without making any sense at all, Joseph is required to both intimate his suicidal state of mind and provide sufficient clues to his whereabouts to enable Blake to get to his side just in time to have his old friend die in his arms. Suffice it to say, the whole sequence is as clunkily contrived as Soap Land gets."Diana honey, I'm sorry I wouldn't let you talk to your mother," Chip explains. "I was afraid of what she was going to say to you ... I can't afford to lose you." Diana nods meekly, but the most striking thing about this scene is its setting - a rain-lashed car at night, windshield wipers running, Chip at the wheel. The only light in the scene comes from within the car itself in order to conceal the fact that it’s being shot in a studio rather than on location, and that the car isn't really moving. It's the same way similar scenes in countless on-the-lam film noirs of the 40s and 50s would have had been filmed and evokes that same claustrophobic feeling (they're on the move, but they're not getting anywhere). DYNASTY pays homage to the same movie era when Blake, as part of his one-man investigation, visits private eye Morgan Hess at his down at heel office, and finds him sporting the same kind of injuries - a black eye, an arm in a sling - that Humphrey Bogart regularly sustained in his roles as Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe in those hard-boiled detective flicks. Hess’s explanation for his wounds - "I got worked over by a couple of unfriendly types I owed" - is typically Chandler-esque. As always, Hess gives good sleaze, offering to sell Blake information about his wife’s relationship with her ex-husband. "I'm not buying," Blake snaps, "I don't traffic with slime like you!" This archetype of the private detective as an unsavoury species is also perpetuated in this week's FALCON CREST when Phillip Erickson's "rather distasteful employment of two seedy private investigators" turns up some dirt he and Angela can use against Chase's doctor at Soap Land Memorial Hospital.For the first time since walking out on their respective husbands, Soap Land’s estranged wives, DYNASTY’s Krystle and DALLAS’s Pam, make brief returns to their marital homes this week. Fallon summons Krystle to the Carrington mansion to sit with Kirby after her fall and sympathises with the “mixed emotions” she must feel being there. Pam, meanwhile, pays a visit to Southfork in the aftermath of the fire, but declines to go inside the house for fear “it would be too painful to see what happened.” Bobby suggests she take Christopher over to the stables instead - the same stables where Christopher will have it off with pretty cowgirl Heather three decades later - which is kind of weird to think about when you’re looking at his little coochie face in this scene.On the subject of Soap Land’s kids, a week after John Ross’s recast in DALLAS, Melissa's son Joseph is suddenly walking, talking and giggling away on FALCON CREST. He’s a hell of a lot chirpier than either of the Ewing cousins - which is impressive when one considers the company he keeps (as Melissa lists them to Lance this week: “your crafty grandmother, your daffy Aunt Emma and your homicidal mother"). Conversely, there's an interesting little scene on this week's KNOTS where Gary apologises to Abby's children, Brian and Olivia, for what they've been subjected to during his alcoholic jailbird period.In the biggest bail-related plot twist since Sue Ellen’s unknown benefactor turned to be a not-so-dead Dusty Farlow in DALLAS Season 3, Blake pays Mark Jennings' $100,000 bail in this week’s DYNASTY, in an attempt to curry favour with Krystle. Bobby makes a similarly grand gesture towards Pam when he offers to give up Southfork and even Ewing Oil for her. “If I could have you back it wouldn’t mean anything,” he tells her during a dinner date almost romantic as the one between Val and Soap Land newcomer Ben Gibson on KNOTS. Alas, both Ewing wives are brought down to earth with a bump. First Val discovers Ben has kept his profession a secret from her ("He's a newsman, Mama!"), and then Pam receives an ultimatum from JR. "If you return to Bobby,” he tells her in the final scene of this week’s DALLAS, "all hell is going to break loose. I’ll call off this truce that exists between him and me. We’ll be in a dogfight that will make what went on before look like a love match." (Don’t tell Victoria Principal, but the rather fetching purple and blue kaftan she wears for this scene looks identical to one Donna Mills can be seen in during the current opening credits of KNOTS LANDING.) “I’ve despised you ever since Bobby first brought you to Southfork,” JR reminds Pam, slicing straight to the heart of the DALLAS saga. There is an equivalent moment in this week’s FALCON CREST when Maggie stands up to Angela. "I know how you feel about our being here," she tells her. "Right from the start, you've treated the Giobertis like they were carrying some kind of a plague." Both lines serve as a reminder of where all this drama originally sprang from.Just two episodes in and Ben Gibson is already a great character. He and DALLAS's Mark Graison display a similar combination of gee-shucks self-deprecation and cocky swagger as they talk about their pasts this week. Both actors play against the soapiness of their dialogue so that they're kind of laughing at themselves for saying such cheesy things. When Mark declares his feelings for Pam, (“"Until I met you, I was very sure of who I was and where I was going, but you've changed all of that - I’ve, er, fallen in love you”) he manages to sound sincere, embarrassed and ironic all at the same time. So does Ben when he talks to Val about putting down roots in Knots Landing. (“All through my twenties, I knocked around the world, searching for something, I guess - for adventure, for experience, for fun ... Right now I’m in what you would call a state of transition.") In each case, the effect is disarming.The highlight of this week’s DYNASTY is the sequence where an unknown someone steals into Alexis’s hospital room at night and tries to smother her with a pillow. Even though it is not presented as a dream, the camera work is strange and heightened and there are no witnesses to the attack. So did it really happen? Certainly, everyone but Alexis seems to think she imagined the incident. As a viewer, one is left with the same ambivalent feeling as after the Julia Cumson/Carlo Agretti flashbacks in last week’s FALCON CREST, where we’re not entirely sure we can trust what we’re seeing with our own eyes (which isn’t necessarily a criticism).There is a fair bit of relocating in Soap Land this week. Having had enough of Alexis, (first she disinherits him, then accuses him of starting the fire that nearly killed her) Adam packs his bags and moves out of her penthouse, leaving her alone and defenceless with an apparent attacker on the loose. Meanwhile, as part of their respective sober new starts, Gary tells Abby that they're moving out of the beach house and onto a ranch he’s just bought, and Sue Ellen informs JR that she’ll be moving into her own bedroom when they return to Southfork. Alexis, Abby and JR aren’t happy about these developments, but for once there’s nothing they can do to prevent them.Just as JR effectively forfeited his connubial rights by sleeping with Holly, (“Your sex life is your affair from now on, you just stay away from me,” Sue Ellen decrees this week) so the discovery at the end of last season's FALCON CREST that his mother murdered her father has put a dampener on Lance and Melissa’s conjugal relations. ("Just leave me alone," Melissa orders Lance.) But whereas Sue Ellen has “no desire to be with other men”, Melissa is spending her afternoons in swanky hotel rooms with Richard Channing.On DALLAS and FALCON CREST, Mickey and Chase both struggle to come to terms with their paralysis. Donna and Maggie insist on straight answers from Drs Blakely and Lantry respectively, neither of whom are very forthcoming. "You don't sound very optimistic," persists Donna. "I have no reason to be," Dr. Blakely admits. "In my clinical experience, patients with wounds such as those your husband has suffered don't often regain full use of their limbs," Dr. Lantry tells Maggie. "Then he'll never walk again?" she asks. Both doctors offer up the tiniest sliver of hope. "There's a possibility, but it's very slight," says Dr. L on FALCON CREST. "I don't want to say that it's absolutely impossible that something can change his condition," says Dr. B on DALLAS, "but I surely don't want you to get your hopes up." Speaking of hope, Mickey and Chase are both determined to look on the bright side. "I am gonna lick this," Mickey tells Lucy. "I'm gonna beat this thing, Maggie," vows Chase. Towards the end of this week’s DALLAS, however, tests confirm the permanence of Mickey's condition and he closes himself off from his loved ones. Meanwhile, Chase’s lowest point comes when Angela stops by Soap Land Memorial for a visit and accidentally-on-purpose lets slip about his mother’s death, news the rest of the Giobertis had been keeping from him for fear of jeopardising his recovery. Faced with Chase’s tortured reaction, Angela is unable to suppress a smirk. "I'd like to be alone," Mickey tells his family tearfully, "just let me be by myself." "Leave me alone," Chase tells Maggie angrily, "just leave me alone."Drugs prove a useful plot device this week. On FALCON CREST. Angela, Phillip and Lance all conspire in a plot to have Chase declared incompetent so that Angela can once again assume total control of Falcon Crest. To that end, they blackmail Chase’s doctor over his shady dealings in prescription drugs. What’s really striking is how much pleasure the three characters take in setting up both Chase and Dr. Lantry. “You can be quite vicious, can’t you?” Angela says to Phillip admiringly, which kind of says it all. Meanwhile on THE YELLOW ROSE, Roy Champion wrongly accuses mysterious newcomer, Chance McKenzie, of helping a group of bad guys smuggle drugs across his ranch (or something like that). The allegation provides Chance with an opportunity to show what a stand-up guy he is by bringing in the real culprit - a ranch hand played by the Indian chief from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, no less. This leads to a really good hillside brawl between Chance and the ranch hand. Both men are past their physical prime and neither really wants to fight the other. Both are quickly tired by their exertions but continue slugging it out even though their hearts aren’t in it. There may have been more dramatic punch-ups in Soap Land’s history (Nick Toscanni and Blake on Skycrest Mountain, JR and Ray at the end of last season's DALLAS) and certainly funnier ones (anything involving Alexis and Krystle or the Southfork pool) but this fight, alongside Lance and Cole’s set-to in the winery last season, ranks as the most realistic so far.DYNASTY and KNOTS each end on a confession - kind of. Joseph leaves a note for Blake before shooting himself, but we’re not yet privy to its contents. Meanwhile, Chip breaks down and admits to Diana that he killed Ciji - but even as he’s coming clean he can’t help but twist the facts. “I did it for you,” he tells her, "I killed Ciji so that we could be together.” And out of that comes a brilliant twist: by the time Chip’s finished his big emotional speech, Diana's fallen under his spell again. Anyone who doubts Claudia Lonow’s acting abilities should watch her performance in this episode, particularly her wordless transformation in this final scene from girl in peril to willing accomplice.While one Joseph dies, the life of another hangs in the balance. At the end of this week's FALCON CREST, cute little Joseph Agretti/Gioberti/Cumson (delete where necessary) is rushed to Soap Land Memorial, having mistaken one of Dr. Lantry's illegal prescriptions for sweeties.And this week’s Top 6 are …1 (2) KNOTS LANDING2 (1) DALLAS3 (4) FALCON CREST4 (-) THE YELLOW ROSE5 (3) DYNASTY6 (5) EMERALD POINT NAS</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?