New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 15108" data-attributes="member: 22">18/May/84: DALLAS: End Game v. 18/May/84: FALCON CREST: Ashes to AshesTwo contrasting episodes to end the season. While the DALLAS finale is giddy, giggly fun, much of FALCON CREST plays like a sombre epilogue to the tragic events of last week’s instalment.This week’s DALLAS begins in the same way as that episode of FALCON CREST did, with the family on red alert following the abduction of one of their own. But whereas the consequences of Julia snatching Joseph formed the basis of the entire ep, Jessica’s kidnapping of Miss Ellie is dealt with and resolved in roughly twelve screen minutes. It's urgent and exciting, but unlike Julia’s story, not particularly moving. Ultimately Lady Jessica is a guest-starring villain whose story-line can be tidily concluded over an info-dumping lunch between Ellie and Clayton, while Julia has been an integral character from the outset whose loss cuts deep. “I failed her,” Lance admits tearfully this week. “We all failed her,” Angela replies.Back in the eighties, BBC radio presenter Terry Wogan was given to affectionately mocking DALLAS’s more eccentric moments on his popular daily breakfast show. This episode will have provided him with rich pickings: the discovery of Miss Ellie trussed up in the trunk of Jessica’s car, her “beautiful” wedding dress which is essentially the same outfit she wears every week adorned with a string of pearls, the fact that the wedding itself (which the show has been building up to for five months) takes place off screen, Pam’s monologue about her sad life delivered to an uncomprehending but transfixed Christopher, the turban Sue Ellen slips into for an afternoon at the movies, and some deliciously ripe dialogue, particularly in the scene where Bobby tells Katherine of his plans to marry Jenna. “You can’t — not that slut with the child from that awful Italian!” she shouts. “I make my own decisions — especially regarding my love life!” he shouts back.It’s all wonderfully silly but not in a self-parodic or smirky way. Absurd as it might be, this is still full-on, red-blooded soap opera played with the utmost conviction.Dramatically, the strongest scenes are the ones involving Cliff Barnes (and even those are often laugh-out-loud funny, thanks to Ken Kercheval's remarkable ability to wring comedy from the unlikeliest of lines and situations). The best of these is the office confrontation where Vaughn Leland spells out to Cliff the bleakness of his circumstances: “If you don’t strike oil by midnight tomorrow night, the bank is foreclosing and all the assets of Barnes Wentworth will belong to the bank.” Cliff slumps in his chair, defeated. This is his equivalent of the moment in last week’s DYNASTY where Blake realises he’s lost Denver Carrington. Both men then receive a surprise visitor — but whereas Dominique Devereaux chose not to reveal her big secret to Blake, JR can’t wait to tell Cliff that he has been behind the offshore deal “from the very beginning ... The only way I could get through that thick skull of yours was to have you bankrupt your mother’s company while I just sat back and watched ... Tomorrow morning the janitor’s gonna come in here and sweep you out with the rest of the trash, unless of course you do the honourable thing — get in the elevator, go up to the roof and jump off, huh?”As it turns out, of course, JR’s gloating is somewhat premature. Cliff will end up striking oil before both his deadline and the end of the season. “It’s the biggest tract in the Gulf!” hollers his foreman in the Gulf. It’s a great moment: a perpetual loser like Cliff striking it rich is as big a twist as the high and mighty Blake Carrington losing everything.“I always thought you cared for the family, JR,” says Bobby after he learns that his big brother was working with Jessica to stop Miss Ellie’s wedding. “That’s what kept our relationship going despite everything else ... but if it’s true and you only care for yourself and the hell with the rest of us, then it's over and we’re through as brothers.” Bobby’s words seem to hit home — just before his mama’s wedding, JR raises a glass to Clayton, acknowledging him as "one of the few men I've never been able to beat. I truly admire that.”Family reconciliation is a prevalent theme on FALCON CREST as well. "This isn't much of a family," declares Angela in the aftermath of Julia’s death. "The first thing I have to do is pull us all together again.” Like Mark Graison in DALLAS, Julia has left a letter to be opened after her death. If Mark’s last words to Pam (read aloud last week by Cliff) were moving, then Julia’s final message to Lance (read aloud this week by Angela) are downright heartrending. "If this day ends the way I think it will, I will never see you again. Please don't allow them to bury me anywhere near Falcon Crest. I want my ashes to be scattered across the hills of Tuscany in Italy ... Pray for me.” And so it is that Angela spends the remainder of the episode persuading the rest of the cast to travel with her to Italy for the funeral: Richard donates his plane, Chase offers to fly it, Maggie agrees to read the eulogy, etc. It’s all quite contrived, but enjoyably and touchingly so.The dramatic device of first breaking a family apart and then having them movingly find their way back to each other feels very New DALLAS. On that show, the dramatic focus was often on the emotionally conflicted male heir, John Ross. Similarly in this episode of FALCON CREST, the character who goes through the biggest personal journey is Lance. First he turns away from his family, then ends up in jail after getting into a bar fight (“I own this valley!”), then breaks down over his mother’s letter. By the end of the episode he’s inherited her shares in the New Globe and started to regain his cock of the walk swagger. Lorenzo Lamas navigates all of Lance’s emotional twists and turns (which also includes a surprisingly tender break-up scene with wife Melissa) very well.JR on DALLAS and Melissa on FALCON CREST go to extreme and devious lengths to get their exes back into bed this week. Having already framed Peter Richards on a drugs charge, JR agrees to keep him out of prison on the condition that Sue Ellen start sleeping with him again. “I want you where I want you, when I want you,” he tells her. Meanwhile, Melissa pays a Falcon Crest worker $5,000 to lure Cole off Richard’s plane before it takes flight. Having separated him from his wife, she takes him to dinner and then kisses him on the Falcon Crest porch. He responds, then pulls away. Melissa goes inside the house leaving the door ajar. Cole hesitates … Meanwhile at Southfork, Teresa the maid informs Lucy that Sue Ellen was moving her belongings back into JR’s bedroom when “suddenly she dropped everything that she was carrying, grabbed something from a drawer and left.” What will Cole and Sue Ellen do next? Tune in next season to find out.Two years earlier, the FLAMINGO ROAD season finale blatantly referenced the “Who Shot JR?” mystery by having several of its characters line up to threaten Michael Tyrone’s life. It then cleverly subverted audience expectations of a whodunnit by having Tyrone fake his own death. The final third of this week’s DALLAS pulls a similar trick. First it establishes a handful of characters as having a motive to kill JR. Then in the final scene, an unknown assailant enters the Ewing offices just as they did once before, only this time they shoot ... Bobby. Given that he is hit from behind while sitting at JR’s desk, it would seem that he is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time — like Karen Mackenzie was when she took the bullet intended for Gary on the KNOTS season finale seven weeks ago.Just as the events of the KNOTS cliffhanger were orchestrated by a shadowy criminal organisation (the Wolfbridge Group) so a similarly sinister conglomerate (the cartel) is responsible for the plummeting plane at the end of this season’s FALCON CREST. "We've been sabotaged," realises Chase at the controls. "Aw hell, Denver, we're going down!” (With Denver as their destination, it’s tempting to imagine the FALCON CREST cast crashing through the roof of the Carrington mansion halfway through Jeff and Fallon’s aborted wedding celebrations.)No doubt the FALCON CREST plane crash would be filmed on a much grander scale today, but with little more than a few shaky camera moves and some stock footage of a plane engine, a sense of impending doom is nonetheless palpably evoked.And this week’s Top 2 are …1 (1) FALCON CREST2 (2) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?