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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 17597" data-attributes="member: 22">02 May 85: KNOTS LANDING: A Price to Pay v. 03 May 85: DALLAS: Deeds and Misdeeds v. 03 May 85 FALCON CREST: And the Fall"We could have gotten a house of our own. I think it would have been better for us,” said Pam to Bobby on last week’s DALLAS. KNOTS LANDING’s Cathy has similar feelings this week when she and Joshua return from their honeymoon to find Lilimae expecting them to move in with her and Val. When Cathy puts her foot down, Joshua doesn’t object outright. Instead he finds more indirect ways to undermine her — abruptly walking out on her just as they’re about to make love; arranging to look at a prospective apartment with her, only to then send Lilimae along in his place. Shitty behaviour to be sure, but I wonder how differently JR or Bobby would have responded had either Sue Ellen or Pam really pushed for a life away from the Ewing ranch? (“Are you going to move out of Southfork?” Mandy Winger asks JR this week when he insists that he will not be living under the same roof as Sue Ellen for much longer. From her mocking tone, it’s clear that she already understands what an unlikely scenario this is.) For her own part, Lilimae proves to be as emotionally manipulative as Miss Ellie when it comes to keeping her loved ones around her. “It’s all right, Cathy,” she sighs when her new daughter-in-law tries to explain her position. "I finally get all my family under one roof and - I guess I’m being selfish.”Random trend of the week: morning-sex innuendo. “You’re looking very self-satisfied this morning,” Ruth tells Laura coolly when she and Greg eventually surface for breakfast on KNOTS. “Self had nothing to do with it,” Laura assures her. "I haven’t been to the office this morning,” Cassandra Wilder admits when her brother catches her playing hooky on FALCON CREST. "Richard and I have been firming up some things between us.” There are no such double-entendres on DALLAS, but there is an equivalent exchange which sounds positively chaste in comparison. “Good morning! I haven't seen you smile like that in I don't know how long,” Jackie observes as Pam arrives for work at Barnes Wentworth. “Well, I haven't felt like this in I don't know how long,” beams Pam, still aglow from the single kiss she and Bobby exchanged in last week’s episode.This week’s instalment of KNOTS is one of very few directed by series creator David Jacobs and it contains some very striking camera work — lots of cinematic long takes and lovely deep-focus shots. There’s also a prolonged, exquisitely indulgent sequence in Ben’s beach house during which Val and Ben, both resplendent in evening dress, slow dance to "Send in the Clowns”, sung beautifully by an off-screen Michele Lee.Jacobs remains faithful to his original “scenes from a marriage” conceit with a succession of intimate late-night bedroom exchanges between each of the show’s main couples — Ben and Val, Abby and Gary, Karen and Mack, Joshua and Cathy. The one exception is Greg and Laura whose attempts at alone time are invariably scuppered by Ruth. By contrast, none of DALLAS’s primary martial partnerships — JR and Sue Ellen, Ray and Donna, Bobby and Pam, Clayton and Ellie — interact with each other at all this week.During one such KNOTS scene, Ben proposes to Val. Meanwhile on DALLAS, Cliff springs a surprise wedding on Jamie. If the “almost a dress” Cathy married Joshua in a few weeks ago qualifies her as Soap Land’s most sexily dressed bride to date, then Jamie’s sweater-vest-and-jeans ensemble places her pretty much at the bottom of that list. Meanwhile, as part of her plan to help Lance to elude the authorities on FALCON CREST, Angela arranges for he and Lorraine to be smuggled aboard a ship bound for Italy and to be then married by the ship’s captain once they are safely out to sea.During another prettily shot KNOTS scene, this time on the beach, Val gently turns down Ben’s proposal, explaining that she is still preoccupied by her lost babies. She admits to regularly waking in the night, sensing instinctively that they are hungry. “I know they’re crying, but I can’t find them,” she says. If Val's maternal impulses are thwarted on KNOTS, then Sue Ellen's have become twisted on DALLAS as she insists on blaming herself for not being at home when John Ross was taken into surgery. "How could I neglect my little baby like that?” she broods. “You’re creating something that is very self-destructive,” Miss Ellie warns her. What’s interesting about this situation is that the alcoholic part of Sue Ellen needs to feel guilty so that she has a reason to continue drinking. There is yet further maternal drama on this week’s DALLAS as Donna deliberates how best to tell her estranged husband that she is carrying his baby, a predicament previously faced by both Ginger and Laura on KNOTS.While JR responds to the news of Sue Ellen’s drinking with a barely suppressed smile and immediately starts hinting of his plans to send her back to the sanatarium ("Your mama's real tired, John Ross, and we may just have to send her someplace where she can take a nice long rest”), Ben is appalled to realise Val still believes her babies are alive (“I thought she was getting better and she’s getting worse … She’s cracking up, man. I’m losing her”). Such is Ben’s despondency that Mack brings him home to see Karen, who tells him that she too is now convinced the twins were not stillborn. It’s a strangely moving moment.Whenever Sue Ellen has previously fallen off the wagon on DALLAS, Gary has done the same on KNOTS, but these days he has a new obsession — Empire Valley. “It’s his big chance to prove to himself and the world that he's capable of doing something great,” is how Abby describes it. As Greg Sumner is threatening to tell Gary the truth about Val’s babies unless Abby finds a way to get him out of Empire Valley, this puts her in a very tricky position.Meanwhile, in an attempt to distract Mack from his investigation into Galveston Industries, Ruth pulls some strings to have the governor offer him Greg’s former senate seat. Tracy Kendall was behind a similar scheme to have Blake named “chairman of the party" during last season's DYNASTY. While Blake took the bait straightaway, Mack is initially flattered (especially as the invitation is delivered by one Jill Bennett), but he is also suspicious that Greg himself is behind the offer.Earlier on this season’s KNOTS, Gary showed up at Val’s wedding in Shula to try to coax her out of her fantasy world and back to reality. On this week’s DALLAS, Bobby does the opposite when he shows up at the Rolling Hills sanatarium in Colorado and deliberately plays into Amanda Ewing’s delusion that is he is her young husband Jock returned to her. He does this so that the Ewing boys can get their hands on the evidence that proves Cliff and Jamie have no claim to their company. Likewise on FALCON CREST, Greg Reardon also visits a sanatarium (Camp Mary Jane in Canada) in the hopes of finding the man who can exonerate Lance. However just as Jenna’s key witness died of a heroin overdose before she could testify at her murder trial, so Joel McCarthy, who similarly holds the proof of Lance’s innocence, has also now died from a cocaine overdose.The end of this week’s FALCON CREST resembles the final scene of last season’s KNOTS, with several characters converging on the same location with disastrous, possibly even fatal, results. Rather than the lobby of the swanky Belmar Hotel, this time the action culminates outside Lance’s hideout — “a three-storey building in Chinatown, a laundry on the ground floor, a newsstand on the corner,” to quote loose cannon Pamela Lynch (who, after two years of loyal service to Richard, has spent the last half a dozen episodes selling everyone out to everyone else). Where Karen MacKenzie went to the Belmar to save Mack and wound up getting shot, a pregnant Lorraine goes to the hideout to help Lance and ends up being chased by Richard and the police. She climbs out onto the fire escape, loses her balance and falls to the ground below. Where Mack cradled Karen helplessly, Richard cries out in horror.And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (-) KNOTS LANDING2 (2) FALCON CREST3 (1) DALLAS</blockquote>

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