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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 166293" data-attributes="member: 22">15 Feb 90: KNOTS LANDING: The Grim Reaper v. 16 Feb 90: DALLAS: The Crucible v. 16 Feb 90: FALCON CREST: Finding Lauren Following on from Greg’s shooting at the end of last week’s KNOTS come the traditional hospital waiting room scenes. Normally, these are populated by concerned family members, but in this case, there is no family and precious little concern. “Greg used to be your best friend … He could die!” Karen exclaims after Mack declares that he has no interest in visiting him. So instead of loved ones waiting anxiously for news of his condition, we have the Mackenzies debating whether or not “the world would be diminished by Greg Sumner’s death.” “I think all life is to be cherished,” Karen argues. “Oh yeah? What about Idi Amin or Hitler?” retorts Mack, giving the Führer his first Soap Land shout out since the DYNASTY finale. (“Does the name Adolf Hitler ring a bell?” Alexis asked Sable.)While Bobby Ewing continues to date a woman who willingly dresses up as his ex-wife on DALLAS, Lauren Daniels embarks on her own whacky voyage of self-discovery on FALCON CREST. Following Val’s example in KNOTS Season 6, she leaves her wealthy family to become a waitress in a diner — only she forgets to switch personalities first, and instead of a sweet little town like Shula, she decides to slum it in the scuzziest part of Chinatown she can find. As so often happens when Soap Land ladies venture outside of their glamorous comfort zone, almost every man she encounters is a predator of some kind — all her customers at the diner want to either date her or rape her. To start off with, her waitressing skills are as poor as Lucy Ewing’s at the Hot Biscuit, but by the end of her first shift, she’s slinging hash like Verna Ellers on a good day. Returning to the flophouse where she’s staying, she is approached for help by her neighbours, a Chinese couple, the wife of which has gone to labour. They speak only enough English to convey to Lauren that she must not call for help, which suggests they are in the country illegally, and so she ends up delivering the baby herself. FALCON CREST isn’t interested in this couple or their predicament; they exist solely to make Lauren feel good about herself in the same way that the Down’s Syndrome kids who appeared on DALLAS during the Dream Season were only there to make Ray feel better about the baby he and Donna were expecting.There is a different kind of Asian stereotyping on DALLAS when Carter McKay encounters Mr Inagaki, the front man for a highly powerful Japanese investment firm — Abby’s fictional Murakame Corporation come to life. Mr Inagaki delivers a speech to Mack very similar to the one Mack himself gave the Ewing brothers last season. “The days of the American oil barons are over,” Inagaki announces. “You are dinosaurs. I represent the real money in this world now … My countrymen are now travelling by the hundreds and thousands, spending millions of dollars abroad … We are building hotels and buying others, and malls and stores, so these millions of dollars that are spent are spent in our stores, our hotels, and that money returns to our homeland.” Yes, those “damn foreigners” that JR and Jordan Lee were so concerned about taking over their town last season have arrived!Back on KNOTS, we are introduced to Dianne Kirkwood, the producer of Karen’s talk show. The two women clash after Karen spontaneously introduces her son Eric to the audience halfway through her show. “You know that I’m your biggest fan,” Dianne begins, “but there is a fine line between being spontaneous and being corny, and that was just a bit much.” Dianne might be a little cold, but interestingly, every point she makes to Karen has a kernel of truth to it. When Karen argues that she cannot be “effective on the show unless I do it my own way”, Dianne accuses her of pulling a star trip. “Star trip — just because I’m interested in the content of my own show?” Karen argues. “‘My show’? -- The programme is called OPEN MIKE not THE KAREN MACKENZIE SHOW,” Dianne points out. Like Cliff’s new image-maker Stephanie Rodgers on DALLAS, Dianne is a big-haired, ball-busting throwback to the kind of female executive who ruled the Soap Land roost way back in Ye Olde ‘80s. Indeed, now that Angela’s in a coma, Abby’s in Japan and DYNASTY’s off the air, Dianne and Stephanie are the only two female bosses left. While Dianne clashes with Karen, Stephanie does the same with JR. “Why aren’t you home fixing lunch for your husband instead of taking up parking spaces?” he yells at her during a parking lot skirmish. “You need teaching a lesson, you truly do,” she tells him in a later scene after he calls her “a woman’s libber” — a term that was fashionable in the 70s but sounds decidedly archaic in 1990. There’s a similar feeling of the feminist clock being turned back on FALCON CREST when Lauren, after half an episode of starring in what feels like a pilot for her own insane spinoff series, returns home and tells Richard that she’d quite like to continue working for a living. “I want my independence,” she says. “I don’t know what that means,” he replies. “Separate bedrooms? … Separate lives? … What about the children?” “There are a lot of families that have both working parents and they do OK,” she explains patiently. This conversation is taking place twelve whole years after Pam Ewing introduced the concept of a working wife to Soap Land. It’s almost like the ‘80s never happened.No sooner is Lauren home than she finds herself caught up in another bizarre storyline as Richard takes a leaf out of Bobby Ewing’s book and tries to make her over in his dead wife’s image. First, he buys her clothes that resemble Maggie’s and then drops hints about her appearance: “Have you ever had your hair short? … A lighter colour?” “Unless I’m very much mistaken, most of the places we’ve gone are places you took Pam,” Jeanne O’Brien tells Bobby on DALLAS this week. “Did you ever go there with Maggie?” Lauren asks when Richard suggests they stay at a bed-and-breakfast in Santa Barbara. “Probably,” he admits. “I don’t wanna go,” she tells him. So he books them somewhere else to stay — the place, it turns out, where he and Maggie went on their honeymoon. Whereas Jeanne is willing to go along with the charade (“How else was someone like me gonna have a chance with someone like you?” she says to Bobby), Lauren is not (“What are you doing to me? I’m not Maggie … I can’t compete with a dead woman,” she tells Richard). Both situations come to a head in their respective show’s final scene. Bobby realises that, in order to say goodbye to Pam, he needs to say goodbye to Jeanne. In other words, he’s subconsciously created their entire relationship in order to end it — which makes a pleasing sort of emotional sense. After breaking things off, he leaves Jeanne’s apartment and then whispers into the night, “Goodbye, Pam”, which feels like a much sadder and more significant moment now we know for sure that Pam is dead. Richard isn’t quite as ready to let go of Maggie as Bobby is of Pam. “It would be like having her die all over again, I can’t bear that,” he tells Lauren. “I don’t want you to forget her, ever … I just don’t wanna have to be her,” she replies.There are two offscreen drownings in this week’s Ewing-verse. On KNOTS, former Oakman Industries executive Robert Willis is found floating face down in the ocean — eerily foreshadowing the death of his real-life lookalike, newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, the following year.Robert Willis, pension fund fraudster, drowned 1990 in KNOTS LANDING:<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcThijHulNjOQoziJ0Jp3J17hCgqpZwzSg7uD3ok112h8NoLmqMd" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Robert Maxwell, pension fund fraudster, drowned 1991 in REAL LIFE: <img src="https://o.aolcdn.com/images/dims?image_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fimage.assets.pressassociation.io%2Fv2%2Fimage%2Fproduction%2F5ccf3ab47cf1da92a4926231790e193aY29udGVudHNlYXJjaCwxNTM2NTg5NTIz%2F2.1069309.jpg&format=jpg&quality=85&resize=640%2C427&client=14d356460ccd1a3da7ce&signature=ccb2e796a2a073c42ca5e4d5130bc5e2e07283c0" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Meanwhile on DALLAS, we learn that Atticus Ward, a never previously mentioned acquaintance of Clayton, “was deep sea fishing in Florida when his boat went down in a storm.” The Farlows attend his will-reading where another old pal, Curly Morrison, mysteriously drops dead mere seconds after learning that he was to be the principal inheritor of Atticus’s estate. However, the real mystery is: what the hell does any of this have to do with us?Greg’s storyline takes a turn for the traditional at the end of this week’s KNOTS when his would-be assassin shows up at Soap Land Memorial Hospital to finish the job, thereby following in the footsteps of Katherine Wentworth, Pamela Lynch, Charley St James and whoever it was that tried to suffocate Alexis with that pillow. “There’s a chance you’ll die from your gunshot wound but I want to make sure,” Mary Frances’s boyfriend Robert (for it is he) explains to his victim,  as he injects his IV with poison — Camaride, to be precise — the very product that Greg himself, by turning a blind eye, enabled Oakman Industries to manufacture in Africa where it fatally infected hundreds of people including his own daughter. “I want you to suffer the way your victims suffered,” Robert continues. “Robert Willis, he didn’t suffer much when I killed him today … but it was satisfying. I hated killing Mary Frances, but I had to. We needed the publicity for the cause. Besides, she was dying anyway. She had Camaride poisoning — like you do now.”“What I don’t understand … is what are we trying to do with Falcon Crest?” Ed, Michael’s lawyer, asks him this week. He’s talking about the winery, not the series itself, of course, but the question still applies. “I haven’t decided yet,” Michael shrugs. “Meanwhile, it’s a good training ground for Danny.” “It’s a slap in the face to have a teenager running the show,” Ed replies. Long term viewers may feel the same way, but for me, the wanton disregard Michael displays for the legacy at the heart of the series is absolutely fascinating. “I never used to think much about wine,” he says during a great scene with Pilar. “I never drank the stuff. Occasionally, I’d look over in a restaurant and see people performing this silly ritual. I never quite got it. I mean, we’re Americans. We don’t care.” In nine years of listening to Angela speak so reverently and proudly about the many generations of Giobertis who toiled in the fields and nurtured the vines and passed down the heritage, it’s never previously occurred to anyone, friend or foe, to question the importance of it all. Now, finally, someone is saying, “So what — who cares?” As if to counteract such heresy, Lance goes the other way and gets a tattoo of what appears to be the show’s logo on one of his biceps. “Now you’re a warrior,” his tattooist assures him. Pilar’s initial reaction when he takes off his shirt is one of alarm and disbelief: “I don’t understand you! … What did I marry?!” She looks at him as if he’s gone completely nuts. What a difference twenty-nine years make — these days, getting a tattoo is about as shockingly unconventional as applying for a mortgage.James Beaumont and Danny Sharpe both stand up to their interfering fathers this week. “I’ve had it — to hell with you and the horse you rode in on,” James tells JR after he nixes his deal with Duke Carlisle. “You are an ungrateful little pup so if you wanna piece of me, boy, come and get it!” snarls JR in reply. Michael likewise accuses his son of ingratitude after he refuses to dump Sydney. “What have I done to you that you should treat me like this?” he asks him. “I gave you a place to live, a car, a job, a whole company to cut your teeth on. I ask one small thing in return.” “… I really don’t feel you have the right to ask that,” Danny replies. “You’re right,” agrees Michael. “It’s always a mistake to ask so I’m ordering you — get rid of Little Lady Macbeth.”And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (-) FALCON CREST3 (2) DALLAS</blockquote>

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