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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 13008" data-attributes="member: 22">21/Nov/83: EMERALD POINT N.A.S: Episode 9 v. 23/Nov/83: DYNASTY: Dex v. 24/Nov/83: KNOTS LANDING: Money Talks v. 25/Nov/83: DALLAS: Morning After v. 25/Nov/83: FALCON CREST: Chameleon Charades v. 26/Nov/83: THE YELLOW ROSE: Trail's End“It’s not so unusual for a young man to be attracted to an older woman,” says Sue Ellen in this week’s DALLAS, and she’s right. There have been occasional such couplings, or near-couplings, throughout Soap Land’s history: David Crane and Karen Fairgate in “Let Me Count the Ways", Bess Riker and Chip Roberts in last season’s KNOTS, Lute-Mae and Tony in FLAMINGO ROAD, Steven and Claudia on DYNASTY … one might even count - if one remembers Abby’s wisecrack to Mack last season, “Then it’s true, older women really are more attractive” - the Mackenzies themselves. More recently, there has been a delicate May/December romance burgeoning on THE YELLOW ROSE, ever since nineteen-year-old Whit Champion laid his cowboy hat at the trailer door of Grace, the ranch cook, in the first episode of the series. Like Lute-Mae, Grace is a single woman of a certain age with a chequered past - but where Stella Stevens floundered on FLAMINGO ROAD, Susan Anspach gives a really lovely performance as Grace - earthy, soulful and fragile. Alas, Grace abruptly exits THE YELLOW ROSE midway through this week’s episode with little explanation.Meanwhile, this week’s DALLAS and DYNASTY each end with a close up of “an older woman" looking somewhat taken aback after being kissed on the mouth by a younger man. While Dex Dexter - all big teeth and hands-on-hips macho swagger - grabs Alexis and plants a decisive smacker on her lips, Peter Richards - all sensitive yearning and exposed midriff - kisses Sue Ellen tentatively, maybe even a little sadly, as he opens her car door for her. The age difference is addressed on DALLAS, but not on DYNASTY. (Given that the show has thus far carefully avoided any direct reference to Alexis’s status as a grandmother, this is unsurprising.) Dex’s comparative youth, however, is a factor in his interaction with Blake earlier in the episode when they disagree over a business matter. “I know my company, young man,” Blake tells him. “My name is Dex!” he snaps in reply. "There may be age between us, not experience or knowledge.” Peter Richards is no happier when he hears himself described by JR as "a schoolboy with a crush on my wife.”Age aside, there is an interesting parallel between Alexis’s encounter with Dex on DYNASTY and the relationship developing between Greg and Abby on KNOTS LANDING. Both men show up uninvited at the respective woman’s office. “Don’t bother to announce me - we’re old friends and we both love surprises,” Dex tells Alexis’s secretary (male) before walking right in. Greg marches straight into Abby’s office too. “Hold all of Mrs. Ewing’s calls - no exceptions,” he instructs Abby’s secretary (female) as he ushers her out. “What are you doing here?” Alexis asks Dex, whom she met for the first time earlier the same day, at the Denver Carrington board meeting. “Unfinished business,” he replies, immediately pulling her towards him and kissing her. She responds in kind then coolly inquires, “Is that the start or the finish of your business?” While business and passion are interconnected on DYNASTY, Abby and Greg argue about the connection between business and politics on KNOTS. “If you’re gonna hang around, you’re gonna have to understand politics,” Greg tells Abby. “I understand money,” she counters. “They’re not the same thing,” he insists. “Since when?” she retorts. Then it’s Greg’s turn to grab Abby and kiss her - and so begins their affair. (Suddenly Holly Harwood turning down JR’s little pass aboard her yacht seems to belong to a much less complicated time.)Following these outbursts of ardour, Dex and Abby both get down to business, each making similar pitches to Alexis and Greg. Both start by talking about how compatible they are. “I think we’re pretty evenly matched,” Dex tells Alexis. "Now that we know we have something in common, we can do business together.” “You’re a politician on the rise,” Abby tells Greg, "I’m a businesswoman on the rise. You’re heading for national politics, I’m heading for national business.” Each then reveals the scope of their ambition. "You spoke of an empire,” says Dex to Alexis. "I'm forming one … Tar Sands, Canada ... There's believed to be more oil locked under those sands than there is under all of Saudi Arabia … Together we’ll reap a profit beyond your imagination.” "If things go according to plan,” Abby tells Greg, "you’ll be in the White House in eight years, which is exactly where we both want you - you for the thrill of it, me for the profits.” Whereas Alexis declines Dex’s offer, (“You overestimate your appeal”) Greg gives Abby what she’s been after for the whole episode - help with a building variance (now there’s a word we haven’t heard since last season’s DALLAS) from the coastal commission. Business concluded, for the time being, it’s time for the bottom line. "You’re a fantastic woman to kiss,” Dex informs Alexis before making his exit, while Abby assures Greg that, "if I ever have to make a choice between love and money - money’s gonna win every time.” KNOTS ends on a shot of Abby smiling away, while DYNASTY freezes on Alexis looking quizzical and intrigued.As Dex spins tales of Canadian fortunes and Abby dreams of power in the White House, New York remains the place that looms largest in the minds of Soap Land’s characters. In last week’s KNOTS, in-between waking from his coma and getting re-arrested for Ciji’s murder, Chip resumed his fantasy of starting a new life there with Diana. In this week’s DALLAS, Donna reminds Ray that New York was where they were headed a year earlier before the news of Amos Krebbs’s death took their lives in a different direction. Now she insists they take the trip they had planned then as a way of recapturing their former optimism. Over on DYNASTY, we learn that newcomer Tracy Kendall has recently come from New York (as has FALCON CREST’s new girl Terry), but doesn’t share Chip and Donna's positive view of the city: “Kind of a hassle, and the competition - talk about a jungle” - whereas people in Denver, she assures Krystle, “are so down to earth, just nice!"Tracy’s demeanour towards Krystle mirrors Katherine Wentworth’s towards Pam on DALLAS - she’s as nice as pie to her face, then glowers in her direction whenever her back is turned. Thus far, however, Tracy is more a disgruntled employee than a fiendish mastermind. Katherine, meanwhile, is currently less concerned with Pam than with the fact that Jenna Wade has found her way back into Bobby’s life. This leads Katherine to drop her guard for the very first time. “Bobby, don’t you realise I’m in love with you?” she asks. "I’ve been in love with you from the first time I ever saw you.” Bobby rejects her as kindly as he can. “Your Pam’s sister,” he replies. "I could never think of you in any other way."This is just one of several declarations from the heart in this week’s Soap Land. As well as Peter confessing to Sue Ellen that “I have these feelings every time I’m around you” (“It really can’t be,” she tells him gently), Jeff lays it on the line to Fallon on DYNASTY. "No matter how hard we fight it, tell me we don't belong together,” he implores. Her response is no more encouraging than Bobby’s. "I can't belong,” she replies. "I need somebody who doesn't need me.” Even Paul Morgan, the lawyer who defended Ray Krebbs in his DALLAS murder trial, declares his intentions to Donna, albeit in a roundabout way. “One of these days, you’re gonna wake up and leave that guy,” he predicts, "and I’m gonna be there when you do.” Donna, less tactful than Bobby, Fallon or Sue Ellen, briskly informs him of the healthy state of her marriage. In fact, the only Soap Land suitor not to be rejected this week is KNOTS LANDING’s Ben. “This world traveller is falling in love,” he announces to Val, who responds with a kiss.Don’t ask me why, but there’s something great about seeing Val do things with Ben that she never did Gary, even if it’s just sitting barefoot on the floor of his beach house to eat dinner, or emerge shyly from his bedroom the next morning wearing just a sheet. This may not count as "taking the world by storm” the way Jeff Munson encouraged her to last season, but it’s nonetheless pleasing to see her emerge from her domestic cocoon in such a way. (Conversely, the last time Pam Ewing sat on a floor it just seemed a bit weird.)On the business front, Pam and Krystle both begin their PR duties this week, at Denver Carrington and Barnes Wentworth respectively. For Krystle, this involves attending meetings and drawing up press releases. For Pam, it means dinner with Cliff and Ben Kesey, a man whose service company Cliff wants to buy before JR does, while “wearing the sexiest thing you got”. Cliff deliberately shows up late to the restaurant, leaving Kesey to stare at Pam’s décolletage for an hour. Yes, it’s Cliff's version of “the old Ewing one two” that JR tried to pull off with Sue Ellen and Gil Thurman exactly a year earlier - only this time it works. While DYNASTY’s might be the slightly more realistic depiction of what someone in public relations actually does, Pam's entrée in the oil business is a lot more entertaining. With her playing the exasperated-but-sexy straight woman to Cliff’s incorrigible schemer, (Mindy to his Mork, if you will) they're really fun to watch - as good a double act as Greg and Abby are on this week’s KNOTS.Krystle has dinner with her boss this week too, but business is strictly off the menu. Instead, she and Blake reminisce about their very first date which took place in the very same restaurant. ("I fell in love with Blake Carrington that night,” she sighs.) Following the Oil Barons’ Ball on DALLAS, Bobby and Jenna step even further back in time to a high school dance where Bobby got into a fight with another boy over Jenna. It’s slightly disconcerting to think that more time has passed - about ten years more - between Bobby and Tracey MacKay’s pool hustling encounter in DALLAS Season 11 and their recollection of it in New DALLAS Season 3 than between Bobby and Jenna’s teenage misadventures and their account of them in this ep. (We also meet Jenna Wade’s twelve-year-old daughter Charlie this week, as well as Greg Sumner's slightly older offspring Mary Frances on KNOTS.)Seeing Cliff first revelling in his success as he is crowned Oil Baron of the Year and then watching him moulder in his Mexican jail cell on New DALLAS makes for quite a contrast. And it feels like there is a direct line between his acceptance speech on the podium, which in effect resurrects the Barnes/Ewing feud, ("My daddy is the one that found the oil the Ewings have been sucking out of the ground for all these years!”) and the one his daughter Pamela makes thirty-one years later when she visits him in jail to hand over the deed to that same oil Digger found and lost all those years before. "It’s over now,” she tells him. "You avenged the wrongs done to your father, and I’ve avenged the wrongs done to me by mine.”More father/daughter parallels: Just like Pamela on New DALLAS, Mandy Winger struggles to come to terms with the knowledge that her father was behind the explosion that put her in hospital on THE YELLOW ROSE. And now that she is romantically involved with Roy Champion, she finds herself caught between her father and the family he despises - just like Cole’s new bride Linda on FALCON CREST. While there is scant explanation for Mr. Caproni’s resentment towards the Giobertis, Jeb Hollister has a great speech where he attempts to justify his actions to his daughter: “The Yellow Rose is our birthright. In my time, a man fought for what belonged to him … I’m living the only way I know how. You call it war, I call it life.” Both fathers end up accusing their daughters of betrayal. "You were all I had,” Mr. Caproni tells Linda. "You turned your back on me.” "You were the one I was doing it all for,” Jeb tells Mandy. "You made your choice.”Following Cliff's speech at the Ball, a punch up ensues as the Ewing brothers unite against him, with Mark Graison, Peter Richards and a few extras drafted in to make up the numbers. In the same way that the lily pond catfight between Alexis and Krystle at the end of last season’s DYNASTY was a sequel to their studio contretemps of the year before, so this brawl serves as a follow-up to the duel in the pool at JR and Sue Ellen’s wedding. As with the lily-pond, half the fun comes from seeing a good old fashioned scrap take place in such elegant surroundings. Pam is almost, but not quite, as primly disapproving of Mark trading punches with Bobby as Blake was of Krystle and Alexis doing the same thing. (Where she compares Mark and Bobby to children, he compared his two wives to female mud wrestlers.)Punches are thrown elsewhere in this week’s Soap Land. Lance gets into a barroom brawl over Terry on FALCON CREST, and pretty soon finds himself outnumbered by bit players in Stetsons. Instead of tending to his injuries like the ladies of DALLAS do their men's after the Ball, Terry waltzes off into the night with Michael Ranson.There’s fighting too on THE YELLOW ROSE, but here every blow carries an emotional wallop as well as a physical one: Chance blindsiding his brother to save him from himself; good guy Roy being driven to hit a frail but vicious old man as his daughter watches on. The climax is a fist-fight between Roy and Chance: “You wanna be top dog! You want it all!” “I want nothin' but a piece of you right now!” It’s been a long time coming and the rest of the family gather solemnly to watch, but no one was expecting the two men to come to blows inside a cattle pen or to end up rolling around in the mud amongst the livestock.This week’s KNOTS is really exceptional (especially the scenes between Greg and Abby which are just so smart and unpredictable) while DALLAS is first class - but I tell ya, THE YELLOW ROSE has them both beat. Visually, aside from that cattle pen fight, there’s Mandy Winger zipping around the countryside in a helicopter (and not just faking it like they do on DALLAS - she’s really in that thing while it's flying), the surreal sight of a herd of cattle being led across an airstrip, and a whole bunch of other great stuff. Plus there’s Jackson Mobley, Lilimae’s loveable conman from KNOTS Season 3, who shows up as a loveable rancher and lets slip about the woman who came between Jeb Hollister and Wade Champion years before, thus igniting the feud between the two families. Jeb’s sister who mysteriously ran away to have Wade’s illegitimate baby and then abandoned that child too, she sounds like a cross between Ellie Southworth, Margaret Hunter and Rebecca Barnes. I feel like I’m repeating myself but this show combines the sweep of a classic Western, the epic scale of a family saga, lots of deliciously familiar soap tropes and characters that are compelling and organic and deeply touching. I cried twice without fully understanding why.And this week’s Top 6 are …1 (1) THE YELLOW ROSE2 (2) KNOTS LANDING3 (3) DALLAS4 (4) FALCON CREST5 (5) DYNASTY6 (6) EMERALD POINT N.A.S.</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =