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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 16353" data-attributes="member: 22">6 Feb 85: DYNASTY: The Ball v. 7 Feb 85: KNOTS LANDING: Fly Away Home v. 08 Feb 85: DALLAS: Sins of the Fathers v. 08 Feb 85: FALCON CREST: RetributionThis week’s DYNASTY is written by KNOTS LANDING’s Richard Avery. The closest his script comes to a direct Knotsian reference is Krystle comparing her baby daughter to a Dresden doll in the opening scene. Richard’s former sanatarium roommate Nicholas, who memorably observed that “we’re all just china dolls”, would doubtless concur.It’s very much business as usual this week for Alexis on DYNASTY, still trying to get her hands on Blake’s offshore leases, and for Cliff on DALLAS, still trying to prove that Jock stole Digger’s share of the Ewing fortune. To those ends, half the cast of DYNASTY travel to Acapulco for an oil lease auction while the majority of the Barnes and Ewing clans assemble in court where Cliff and Jamie attempt to get an injunction to freeze the assets of Ewing Oil.While in Acapulco, the Carringtons encounter Prince Michael of Moldavia, Soap Land’s very first royal character. Whereas previous aristocrats, DALLAS’s Lady Montford and DYNASTY’s Lady Mitchell, turned out to be more down to earth than other characters were expecting, here the opposite proves true — Amanda initially mistakes the prince for a waiter, but he proves every inch to the palace born, comporting himself regally and speaking in a self-consciously formal manner, even when asking her to dance. "I would be the saddest of princes if you turned me down,” he tells her, "a melancholy Mediterranean Hamlet."Sitting at the other end of the social scale is Alf Brindle, one of my all-time favourite DALLAS guest characters, who also makes his debut appearance this week. Brindle is a shambling old drill site worker who knew Jock, Jason and Digger back when they first struck oil. The Ewing brothers thrust him into the spotlight at the end of this week’s ep so that he can give Cliff, Pam and Jamie a first hand account of the early days of the Barnes/Ewing feud. He is by turns nervous, giggly, excitable and shy, and it’s a really great, funny and eccentric performance. Over on KNOTS LANDING, the Verna-in-Shlua story draws to a close, with the surprise twist that jilted bridegroom Parker’s aim was true after all — the real reason he wanted Val’s true identity kept under wraps is because he didn’t want to lose her. (This doesn’t stop Mack, the closest KNOTS has to a moral arbiter, later referring to him as "a louse”.) Meanwhile on DALLAS, Lucy and Eddie’s equivalent story-line literally breaks new ground as construction commences on their land development venture. Alas, Eddie’s motives turn out not to be as pure as Parker’s, for we now know that he has been sleeping with Betty Lou all along and his involvement with Lucy is merely a front for a get-rich-quick scheme.KNOTS' Tennessee based soap-within-a-soap was fun, but things get really interesting as soon as Val returns to California. For starters, there’s some wonderfully nuanced awkwardness in her homecoming scene, with everyone behaving as if everything were fine, while silently unsure of how much Val even remembers of her old life (Laura and Ben look particularly uncomfortable - does she even know who they are?), and Joshua later ordering everyone onto their knees to give thanks for Val's return.Having accepted that she is now Val not Verna, Val nonetheless clings to a time in her mind when she and Gary were still married. “We’ve always loved each other,” she tells him. Indeed, ex-wives with a hold on their former husbands is something of a theme in this week’s soaps. “You still love Fallon,” Nicole tells Jeff on DYNASTY, while Krystle is none too pleased to learn that Alexis is in Acapulco with Blake. JR’s reminder to Bobby on DALLAS that Pam is “not your wife anymore” is echoed by Abby on KNOTS pointing out to Gary that, “I’m your wife — Valene isn’t.” Unintentionally and/or otherwise, each of this week’s soaps contain several references to their own history. On DYNASTY, Nicole tries on the very dress that Fallon used to wear in the opening credits (a similar shade of red to the outfit Gary had Cathy slip into when he was attempting to turn her into Ciji on KNOTS — although Jeff is less than impressed to find his third wife dressing up as his first: “Take it off!” he shouts). And as well as Krystle calling Blake in Acapulco, only to hang up in surprise when Alexis answers the phone just as she did in Season 2, there’s a scene of Daniel teaching her how to skeet-shoot, an activity that recalls another memorable scene between Alexis and Krystle from the same year. Krystle then frets to Daniel about being left behind while Blake and Alexis are in a foreign country together (another familiar scenario). "She's there in Acapulco and I'm not,” she broods. "Amanda's there and I'm not ... I feel left out and it hurts.” Krystle’s sense of isolation gets to the root of the character’s self-doubt, as established in the show’s early days. Likewise, during a beach scene between Val and Gary in this week’s KNOTS, Val reveals some of her own deep-seated insecurities. Recalling the moment in the pilot episode when she saw the ocean for the first time, she also remembers her fear that it wouldn’t live up to expectations: “Even when I was little I always knew that the ocean would probably be the biggest and the most beautiful and the most powerful thing I’d ever see. I thought just by being close to it, it would make me better — make me think clearer and feel deeper and know more.” After Gary gently explains that they are now divorced, Val starts to wade into the ocean, perhaps hoping Gary will join her like he and Lucy did back in “Home is for Healing”, but he doesn’t.DALLAS in particular is chockfull of references to its past this week: Cliff makes mention of Bobby’s temper (calling to mind the punch he gave him at the end of Season 1), Ray Krebbs alludes Cliff and Donna’s near-forgotten fling in Season 3 (thereby strengthening his motives for joining his brothers in the fight against Cliff for Ewing Oil), and Cliff and Sue Ellen have their first conversation in almost three years when she comes to Barnes Wentworth to resurrect her friendship with Pam. Mention is even made of the pilot who witnessed Jock’s helicopter crash in South America three seasons earlier. Best of all is the scene between JR and Sue Ellen that recalls some of their classic bedroom battles in DALLAS’s early years. When JR mistakenly assumes she’s arranged to have dinner with Cliff, Sue Ellen does not disabuse him of the notion. Instead she taunts him with it. “Well, he must have something," she tells him. "Look at all the women the two of you have shared — Julie Grey, Afton, myself.” Lance and Melissa similarly remind each other of past infidelities during an argument in front of their priest in this week’s FALCON CREST. First, Melissa accuses Lance of sleeping with “every floozy in town” during their marriage. Then Lance shoots back smartly with, “What were you doing with Richard Channing — playing ping pong?” As retorts go, Melissa’s “Your crazy mother murdered my father!” is hard to top, but back on DALLAS Sue Ellen manages it. "As a matter of fact, Cliff is a wonderful lover,” she informs JR devilishly. Thus provoked, he grabs her, pins her to the bed and kisses her, thereby following the current trend of Soap Land men trying to force themselves sexually on their wives or partners (Naldo/Jenna, Steven/Claudia, Greg/Laura, JR/Mandy). Sue Ellen comes up with the most effective way yet of fending him off — and it seems especially fitting that she should choose the very week that royalty makes its Soap Land debut on DYNASTY to finally knee JR in his crown jewels. There’s an equivalent scene to the JR/Sue Ellen bedroom encounter in this week’s KNOTS LANDING. Terrified that Paul Galveston will make good on his threat to reveal all to Gary about Val’s babies, Abby shows up at Greg’s hotel room at night (dressed, as Sue Ellen was in her scene, to the absolute nines) and begs for his help. When Greg tells her to scram, she abruptly changes tack, threatening to expose what she knows — or thinks she knows — about his connection to Galveston. She’s bluffing, of course — she has no idea that they are father and son — but Greg’s response to her blackmail is just great. He pushes her up against the wall and kisses her face off. She responds in kind; end of scene. With no subsequent reference to this passionate interlude, save for Abby tenderly asking Gary the next night to make love to her as if to cleanse her of her infidelity, this is a rare Soap Land instance of consequence-free sex between people otherwise committed to long term relationships. The last time it happened was when Lance and Melissa marked their divorce with some impromptu office-bound intercourse despite them each being in love with other people.Another familiar situation on this week’s DALLAS sees Pam caught between the Barneses and the Ewings once again. "Bobby wouldn't do the kind of illegal, underhand things that JR would,” she insists to her brother in an early scene. "A Ewing is a Ewing is a Ewing,” Cliff replies. Later, when Bobby suggests Cliff might have been the one who sent her to the Caribbean looking Mark, she finds herself having the same argument in reverse. ("Cliff would never do something like that to me.” "What wouldn’t Cliff do to get Ewing Oil?”) Not only does this recall the kind of debates Pam and Bobby used to have when they were first married ("Pamela, when are you gonna realise just how much your brother hates my family?!”), it also points the way forward to the events of New DALLAS, when it’s only after the deaths of both Pam and JR that we finally discover just how far Bobby and Cliff will go to defeat one another.In recent weeks, Val and Pam have each experienced their own version of "the dream — that you and I would get back together” with regard to their respective Ewing exes, Gary and Bobby. This week, it transpires that neither has entirely given up the hope of that dream becoming a reality. When Gary arranges to meet her the day after she returns home, Val is so excited, she dresses up especially for the occasion. “How do I look?” she asks nervously, waiting for him to arrive. “Beautiful, sweetpea,” Lilimae assures her. (It’s notable that she chooses the kind of simple summer dress she used to wear when she and Gary first moved to Knots Landing.) Meanwhile on DALLAS, after Bobby calls Pam at her office asking her to meet him for a drink, she surprises her secretary by deciding to go home and change first. "Might as well look my best,” she says girlishly. However, instead of realising "the dream — that you and I would get back together”, Val and Pam are each forced to face the fact that they cannot recreate what they’ve lost, no matter how much they might want to. “It didn’t work for us,” Gary tells Val sadly. "Our trouble was we always lived in our past, when you were fifteen and I was seventeen. It was so good then that we tried to recapture it and we just couldn’t.” “A part of me always feels like I belong at Southfork,” Pam admits to Sue Ellen. "I know that can never happen now that I’ve thrown in with Cliff.”It’s interesting that Val’s memory is fully restored not during her conversation with Gary, but in a subsequent scene in her own kitchen. This calls to mind the scene from DALLAS Season 4 where Miss Ellie overcame her own denial about Jock’s death, which was also set in a kitchen. Whereas Ellie ended up on her knees smashing crockery, this scene opens with Val on her knees scrubbing the floor. Jenna Wade has a mini-breakdown in the Southfork kitchen this week too. Like Val, she’s performing a domestic task — baking bread — when she drops a hot pan and sinks tearfully to the floor. Like both Val and Ellie, she is struggling with an issue of memory, but whereas the two other women achieve a kind of breakthrough, she remains tormented by the unknown: "Maybe he did try to rape me, maybe I did grab a gun and shoot him ... I just don't know anymore ... God, what if I really did kill him?!” Where Val has Mack to help her through her kitchen crisis, Jenna has Donna — DALLAS’s nearest counterpart to Mack in the robust common-sense stakes. The main difference between the two pairings is that Val and Mack have previous experience of this kind of thing — the scene where he finds her on the beach towards the end of Season 4 springs to mind — whereas this is the first time Donna and Jenna have had a scene alone together. If this week’s FALCON CREST has an equivalent, it’s the scene where Maggie (practical yet compassionate) breaks the news to Emma (emotional and highly-strung) that the dashing Jean Louis de Bercy, for whom Emma has fallen, is really the highly dangerous Gustav Reibmann. Emma is devastated and refuses to accept this, even though deep down she knows it’s true.While Abby orders Gary to stay away from Val on KNOTS (“a clean break — or we’re through”), Claudia orders Luke to stay away from Steven on DYNASTY. Interestingly, she employs the same emotional blackmail tactics that Abby tried on Cathy two weeks ago. “If you really care for him, you’ll stop seeing him,” Abby told Cathy then regarding Joshua. "I'm going to believe you genuinely care for him and I'm going to ask your help — stay away from him,” Claudia tells Luke now regarding Steven. Luke complies, but his caveat, “I think you’re fooling yourself, Claudia,” is, in turn, echoed by Cathy in this week’s KNOTS, if not word for word then certainly in sentiment. "You see things in black and white — things aren't that simple,” she tells Joshua.Random trend of the week: minor mishaps with major repercussions. In DYNASTY's final scene, Krystle is out riding with Daniel Reece when she is thrown by her horse. She tumbles down a slope and Daniel rushes to her side, but no bones have been broken. Instead, it leads to a freeze-frame kiss. Over on KNOTS, Ben Gibson is out driving with the delectable PK Kelly when he gets a flat tyre. A passing delivery truck on its way to Empire Valley pulls over to lend a hand. While the delivery guys are changing the wheel (and ogling Kelly’s legs), Ben takes a peek in the back of their truck and is intrigued to discover a vast supply of highly sophisticated transmitters, "very powerful and super hi-tech”. From this, he concludes that “Empire Valley’s being used as a cover."Whereas two of Soap Land’s “I see dead people” characters appear to have lost faith in their own convictions — DALLAS's Pam angrily dismisses Dr Matsuda’s claim that he saw Mark Graison in Hong Kong as a lie while DYNASTY’s Jeff is now sufficiently resigned to Fallon’s death to start a new life with Nicole — a third is finally vindicated when Angela sees Julia alive and well in this week’s FALCON CREST. “Emma was right all along,” she acknowledges.While being held hostage by the cartel, Angela and Julia manage to forge a reconciliation. This is more or less a retread of their spring house reunion at the end of last season when Julia was the one holding Angela hostage, only somewhat less effective. “In my whole life, that’s the first time I can ever remember you saying you were sorry,” marvels Julia. While Angela softens in the present, Jock Ewing is softened retroactively when Alf Brindle reveals in the final scene of this week’s DALLAS how he (Jock), contrary to perceived wisdom, protected Digger from Jason rather than exploited him. "Digger was a weak man but Jock cared for him,” Brindle maintains, describing Jock as “near a saint, putting up with the two of them."In order to save Angela, Chase and Greg Reardon embark on a Daniel Reece/Dex Dexter-style rescue mission — scaling walls, jumping hedges and overpowering gunmen with a single karate chop to the neck. There hasn’t been this much generic derring-do in Soap Land since the misconceived episode of THE YELLOW ROSE that required LC Champion to be sprung from a paedophile sex ring. It would seem that the same genre convention that allows Soap Land characters to periodically become super-sleuths also turns them into first-class action heroes whenever the need arises.Not that Angela herself is simply a passive bystander in this scenario. Instead, she fakes a heart attack in order to get the attention of her captors, thus providing Chase and Greg with a chance to overwhelm them. Conversely on this week’s KNOTS, Paul Galveston suffers a similar sort of attack for real, but fails to elicit the concern of Abby Ewing, whom he has discovered rifling through his papers in the early hours of the morning. Despite his pleas, Abby refuses to call his doctor. “Call him yourself — cookie,” she wisecracks on her way out the door, leaving him to his freeze frame.But however grim things are looking for Galveston, they’re even worse for FALCON CREST’s equivalent villain Gustav Reibmann, who ends this week’s ep buried alive alongside his coveted Nazi treasure. As this season’s long-lost-treasure stories go, DYNASTY’s ended on a more positive note a few weeks ago when the Inca statue in question was ultimately restored to its rightful place in a museum.And this week’s Top 4 are … this was a close one. For the majority of their respective episodes, DALLAS and KL were neck and neck, but then at the final furlong DALLAS pulled ahead thanks to the great Alf Brindle taking centre-stage in Cliff’s condo: "Beggin' your pardon, Miss Jamie, and I hate to say it, but your daddy was a black-hearted man.”1 (1) DALLAS2 (2) KNOTS LANDING3 (4) DYNASTY4 (3) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =