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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 156403" data-attributes="member: 22">02 Nov 89: KNOTS LANDING: When Push Comes to Shove v. 03 Nov 89: DALLAS: Fathers and Other Strangers v. 03 Nov 89: FALCON CREST: Soul SacrificeEcology is a hot topic in this week’s Ewing-verse. On KNOTS, Paula and Greg meet cute in the Sumner Group elevator and immediately start bickering about the ruination of California. Greg then goes on to debate fossil fuels with Karen in the more formal setting of OPEN MIKE, a TV talk show. “I suppose I’m in favour of hydro-carbons — I prefer driving to walking,” he ruminates beforehand. After the show, he runs into Paula again and she congratulates him on his performance: “For an opportunist and a huckster, you managed to side-step the issues pretty well.” There’s more moral indignation on DALLAS where “a West Star tanker has just had some sort of accident. It’s leaking oil all over the Gulf.” “This day is turning out better than I thought it would!” laughs JR, revelling in Carter McKay’s misfortune. “That’s not funny, JR,” admonishes Bobby. “You know what that’s gonna do to the Texas coastline, not to mention the pollution in the Gulf?” ”… This isn’t a comedy, it’s a tragedy!” adds Cliff. “What’s a few dead ducks?” JR shrugs, calling for champagne. Interestingly, the Ewing-verse’s younger generation, represented by Michael Fairgate and James Beaumont, seem to side with Greg and JR’s more conservative views. “He’s making a lot more sense than she is,” Michael observes while watching Greg debate his mother on TV. James, meanwhile, chuckles happily at JR’s jokes.Michael and James’s respective mothers are worried about the influence these two powerful men are having on their sons. As if Michael working at the Sumner Group wasn’t bad enough, he then splashes out $1,200 on a watch which just happens to be identical to Greg’s. “This is not extravagant spending, Mom — it’s investing,” he argues after Karen voices her disapproval. “Oh, is that what your new boss is telling you?” she asks. “I don’t need Mr Sumner to tell me how important appearances are,” he replies. “The problem with Michael is, he’s too young to realise what you represent,” Karen later tells Greg.Vanessa Beaumont, meanwhile, scolds James for “taking off for Dallas, not telling me.” “I don’t have to ask your permission every time I want a piece of candy,” he insists. “And this is quite a piece of candy, isn’t it?” she retorts. Her chief cause of concern is, of course, different to Karen’s. “You were worried I’d tell JR he’s my father,” says James. Notably, this game-changing bombshell is dropped not in the episode’s final scene, but a third of the way through, just as the discovery that Ray was Jock’s son was also revealed midway through an ep. “What if you decide to stay here permanently?” Vanessa worries. “What if you like being JR’s son? What if he likes being your father? I’ve already lost one man I love to this damn city, I don’t want to lose another one!”As for Greg and JR, they each seem uncharacteristically taken with the young man who has entered their respective orbit. Greg tells Karen that Michael is “a fine young man … he’s bright, he’s attractive and he’s got a great new watch.” JR, without realising that James is his son, describes him to Vanessa as “delightful … a man after my own heart.” While Michael’s situation brings out Karen’s self-righteous side (“Oh gosh, to think all my life I thought people were judging me on my actions and not on my watch!”), James suggests that Vanessa might have ulterior motives for showing up in Dallas: “Were you really looking for me or was I just an excuse for you to look up JR again?”In the same way that Karen takes a dim view of her son’s extravagance (“He may not be in college but thank goodness he has an impressive timepiece”), so FALCON CREST’s Walker Daniels disapproves of his brother-in-law Michael showing up with expensive gifts for the children in his care. “You really think an eight-year-old boy needs a Mercedes Benz?” he asks, referring to a replica toy car. “No, but then I don’t think a forty-year-old man should be driving a garbage pail on wheels either,” Michael snaps back, alluding to Walker’s beat up old van. Walker would be even less thrilled if he knew that his wife Lauren has been taking the kids to see their real father, Richard, behind his back. (By the way, how Richard’s son, also called Michael, qualifies as “an eight-year-old boy” when he was only born four seasons ago is unclear. Perhaps it’s something they’re putting in the Soap Land water — over on this week’s DALLAS, Bobby feels obliged to talk to his son Christopher about the birds and the bees, which seems a little premature given that Christopher was born in 1981 and so should only be eight years old — or even seven, if you subtract the year that turned out to be a dream.)Since returning to the Sumner Group, Paige has gone from being the pursuer to the pursued in her relationship with Greg. This has led to a workplace game of cat and mouse between them, which mostly entails Paige politely declining Greg’s invitations to dinner in favour of working late, usually with a tall, young and handsome client named R. Peter Christopher, Greg then observing their body language from the other side of his and Paige’s adjoining glass-walled offices, and later sabotaging her plans for the weekend with a last minute assignment that simply can’t wait. Nowadays, this would probably have #MeToo stamped all over it, but in 1989 it has the wit and sophistication of a Hepburn/Tracey movie.DALLAS has its own office flirtation storyline this week. The Ewing Oil set isn’t as an expansive as the Sumner Group's so it takes place on a more modest scale (DALLAS’s corporate offices are now smaller than KNOTS LANDING’s? When did that happen?), with a nice little running gag that starts with James suggesting to Sly that she invite him over for a home-cooked meal. “Sorry, my microwave is broken,” she tells him cheerily. Later on, he stops by her desk with a cookbook: “My favourite recipe’s on page 21 and you don’t need a microwave to cook it.” A few scenes after that, JR passes by and notices her reading said book. “You’re not going domestic on me, are you?” he checks. “No, I still have a black thumb when it comes to baking,” she assures him. “I’m glad to hear that!” he chuckles. Meanwhile, poor old Kendall is left out in reception, wondering if and when James is ever going to call her following their night together.Last week’s KNOTS introduced us to Oakman Industries, yet another corporation run by shadowy, sinister figures. Unlike the Wolfbridge Group or Empire Valley storylines, however, this one was not initiated by a wicked, wicked blonde with blue eyeshadow and limitless ambition, but a random friend of Val’s Aunt Ginny, a sixty-three-year-old “minimum wage worker who could never even afford a home of her own” named Jeri Maddux. In her very first scene, Jeri swiped $17,000 from the company safe, which she later insisted was the pension she’d been cheated out of. She was subsequently arrested. Mack took her case, but the episode ended with her lying dead outside her apartment building, having either jumped or been pushed out of a window. The last time a minor Soap Land character met such fate, Roger Grimes’s son turned out to be the guilty party, but the fact that he’s now trapped in a disused mine shaft for all eternity gives him a firm alibi this time around.Instead, the finger of suspicion points at Aunt Ginny herself. Aunt Ginny — a killer? It sounds ridiculous — but then Val finds her wearing a solid gold bracelet of Jeri’s. She claims she and Jeri had made a pact (“Whoever went first, the other one could choose whatever they wanted”), but helping oneself to a dead, or potentially dead, woman’s jewellery is an act that one has come to associate with those of evil intent: Charley St James on FALCON CREST (Maggie’s ring, Angela’s necklace); Tommy McKay on DALLAS (April’s pendant). While Mack is convinced that Oakman bagman Mark Baylor (a terrifically conflicted performance by Adam Arkin) is “the son of a bitch who did it”, Ginny is the one who ends up behind bars at the end of the episode.Like KNOTS, this week’s FALCON CREST shows that you’re never too old to be suspected of cold-blooded murder. The mystery surrounding the death of Frank Agretti’s wife combines with Soap Land’s first ever Hallowe’en themed episode to create the nightmare sequence to end all nightmare sequences. As thunder roars, a hand-held camera follows Frank through a graveyard at night, a dead woman in his arms. He then falls into an open grave, the woman’s body landing on top of him. A demented Genele appears and proceeds to bury him alive while leering at the camera in a distorted, fisheye lens closeup that only serves to make look her even more insane. Frank wakes up in a cold sweat. What happens next isn’t a dream (at least I don’t think it is), but it still feels like one. Spooked by his nightmare, he drives to a forest and, armed with a shovel and a torch, searches for the shallow grave where his wife is buried. Meanwhile, disembodied screams and gunshots play on the soundtrack. “Renee, be there,” he pleads as he starts digging. Just as in his nightmare, Genele appears out of nowhere. “Looking to dig up the evidence, Frank?” she asks. “She’s not there anymore. I dug her up a long time ago. She’s in a box, safe and sound and as long as you do what I tell you to do, she’ll stay that way.” As she laughs, Frank cries, telling she’s “some kind of a witch from hell.”It later transpires that Genele, rather than Frank, bumped off his wife/her sister (“I did it because I knew you loved me”) — but she used his gun and he helped her to bury the body (“the greatest mistake of my life”). Genele uses this to blackmail Frank into finishing off Angela so she can get her hands on his inheritance. “The courts say Angela won’t recover anyway,” she reasons. “She probably wants somebody to pull the plug.” As with Charley St James, it’s the sheer lack of respect for the show’s biggest star (an elderly woman, to boot) from a trashy, murderous outsider that both thrills and impresses. “Just a little air bubble. She won’t feel a thing,” Genele urges, handing Frank a syringe. He gets as far as Angela’s hospital room but ultimately can’t go through with it.Back on KNOTS, the coroner in charge of Jeri’s autopsy turns out to be an old buddy of Mack’s from Vietnam. (“Well, if it isn’t the most laidback medic that ever crawled through a rice paddy. You know, we should have let you fight for the other side — we’ve have been out of there a hell of a lot sooner!” Mack joshes.) Just as it took until DYNASTY’s final season before we learned that Dex Dexter was a Vietnam vet, this is our first indication that Mack served in the same war.Further military exploits are revealed on DALLAS as the riddle set by Jock’s old air service pal, Tom Mallory, is finally solved. Miss Ellie and Clayton’s search has led them to a Jewish family that Jock and Tom rescued from Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II and who have since settled in the States. The crux of DYNASTY’s recent Nazi-related story was Blake’s fear that the Carrington name would be forever tarnished. Here, that situation is reversed as the saved family explain that they have proudly adopted their rescuers’ names, Ewing and Mallory, in their honour. “None of these people would be alive today if it wasn’t for the heroism of Jock Ewing,” declares Sarah Ewing, introducing the Farlows to her extended family. This is an atypical story for DALLAS to be sure, but a nice one. Lest all this warm-hearted fuzziness prove too much, however, it is handily offset by the dysfunctional goings on back in Dallas itself.“Will you really pay a small fortune to get Cliff outta Ewing Oil?” Michelle asks JR. “That’s probably the most serious offer I ever made to anybody in my life,” he replies. “Then it’s Michelle with two ‘l’s,” she grins. “I wanna make sure you spell my name right on that huge cheque you’ll be writing me!” There are similarly soapy shenanigans in the opening scene of FALCON CREST. A three-way family court battle is underway to decide who gets conservatorship of the winery while Angela is a coma. Her husband Frank, her son Richard and her grandson Lance have all thrown their hats into the ring.“There’s a better than fifty-fifty chance the judge will hand Falcon Crest over to Frank,” Genele tells Richard before proposing a similar deal to the one Michelle’s just made with JR: “If Frank drops the suit and you end up with Falcon Crest, I wanna half a million dollars.” Unfortunately for Genele, such a deal proves irrelevant when Lance, prompted by Charley, persuades the judge to base her decision on Angela’s will, i.e., whomever Angela bequeathed Falcon Crest to after her death gets to control it while she’s on life support. Lance is confident it’ll be him.Back on KNOTS, Danny the computer guy is angry because, thanks to Gary, Val now knows that he is married to, albeit separated from, Sally’s Friend, aka Amanda, and is refusing to talk to him. The scene from Danny and Amanda’s estranged marriage where he comes by her place late at night is very interesting. Because they’re not regular characters, their situation is allowed to be more messily complicated, more stuck-in-the-past than the relationships of those who are required to drive the show’s action forward. Their marriage might be over, but their lives and emotions are still intertwined. “You sleep with the cowboy yet?” Danny asks Amanda, before ranting sarcastically about what a catch he is: “My wife left me because I’m a stifling person … ‘Hi, I’m a jerk, obnoxious, oppressive. Would you like to be the next woman that I smother? Would you like to be the next woman that I systematically destroy?’” He then tells Amanda, “I would do anything to keep you. I hate this divorce.” “… You’re the one who’s dating,” she points out, “and oh boy, you’ve found the woman you’ve always wanted!” I love the description of Val that follows: “A housewife who cooks and cleans for you during the day and watches Johnny Carson with you at night, perfect makeup, perfect Miss Junior League, with kids to boot.” It’s the Valene we know, yet seen through the eyes of someone with her own issues and insecurities. “Why are you even over here?” Amanda asks. “For the same reason you haven’t filed the divorce papers,” Danny replies. When they wind up in each other’s arms, it feels less like some huge soapy betrayal of Gary and Val than simply unfinished business between the two of them.The following morning, Val comes by Danny’s place. She’s in a conciliatory mood. “Every year,” she begins, “I vow to become a stronger person, a new me, every year, and then I slowly slide back into my old ways. I become more reclusive and I stop taking chances. You see, I’ve been hurt a lot and I don’t put myself out there to get hurt again … I cut you off because of one mistake … I’ve made a few mistakes myself before … but I think the biggest mistake that I could ever make would be not seeing you again.” Like Amanda’s description of her, this doesn’t really tell us anything about Val that we didn’t already know, but it somehow presents what we do know in a fresh way, and it shows her relationship with Danny as part of a bigger picture: her ongoing attempt to be something other than Poor Val.Over on DALLAS, Bobby is given a speech that serves a similar purpose. It’s prompted by James, who is eager to know what makes his secret father tick. “JR’s gotta be a part of the company that Daddy built,” Bobby explains, “no matter what his position is … JR made Daddy his obsession … It tore him up when Daddy died. He lost all sense of direction, he had no drive.” “… What got him back on track?” James asks. “His son, John Ross … JR decided that if he couldn’t please Daddy anymore, he could be Daddy. He could build his own empire and pass it along to his boy.” Once again, none of this is new information, but hearing it anew through the ears of JR’s eldest boy adds a different perspective.In the lieu of the annual Oil Barons Ball, the Ewing clan, plus April, James and Vanessa, assemble at the Oil Barons Club for a big family dinner. Bobby’s toast to absent friends is JR’s cue to start badmouthing Ray — whose conception is a timely reminder of one of Jock’s less heroic war efforts. “Daddy’s big mistake,” JR explains to the ever curious James, “a half-breed, born on the wrong side of the blanket … He’s a bastard in every sense of the word.” James’s response is brilliantly soapy. “I heard you wanted to take after your daddy in every way … Well, congratulations then, because you have … I’d like to propose a toast to JR Ewing — my daddy!” Cut to everyone’s individual reaction shot as they each turn to look at JR.While Danny and April are still waiting for Val and Bobby to make up their minds, Charley St James becomes the latest Soap Land character to propose marriage. “Emma, my darling, my sun, my moon, my galaxy, make my universe complete and marry me,” he asks her. She sadly explains that she can’t because her divorce won’t be final for another six months. Next thing we hear, Emma’s ex has mysteriously committed suicide offscreen. She is suitably devastated for about a scene and a half, but then Charley cheers her up by pretending to rob a gas station. The final scene of the ep sees them arrive in court just in time to hear the judge rule on who gets Falcon Crest. According to Angela’s will, “the one person whose integrity I trust to take care of the family legacy” is Emma — who then tops that with a bombshell of her own: “I’m Emma St James. We just got married last night!” While Charley snogs his new bride's face off in the middle of the courtroom, Lance seethes. “The guy knew! He knew!”And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (3) DALLAS2 (1) KNOTS LANDING3 (2) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?