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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 17761" data-attributes="member: 22">23 May 85: KNOTS LANDING: The Long and Winding Road v. 24 May 85 FALCON CREST: The Avenging AngelKNOTS LANDING and FALCON CREST offer up quite different season finales, but each includes a spot of breaking-and-entering crucial to their respective show’s plot. In both cases, the burglar is concerned with acquiring information rather than material goods. KNOTS opens with an exciting sequence of someone ransacking an office. We’re not sure who or where or why, but gradually it emerges that Mack has broken into Dr. Ackerman’s house looking for a list of people who may have adopted Val’s babies. FALCON CREST’s break-in takes place offscreen with Cassandra Wilder hiring a private eye to sneak into Angela’s house and locate a copy of Falcon Crest's bid for the Helios Foods contract. She then leaks this information to another company, ensuring Falcon Crest is outbid on the deal and thus rendering Chase and Richard bankrupt. And Cassandra’s motive for that … isn’t revealed until nearly the very end of the episode.There is an unusual atmosphere on this week’s KNOTS — calm and urgent at the same time. The episode does a great job of making the methodical and mundane — Karen and Ben calling everyone in the phone book whose names match those on Ackerman’s list of adoptive parents, Mack driving around in circles trying to recall the location of the Fisher house — feel tense and gripping. This paradox is best captured by Val placidly singing along to a country music station as Abby drives her to see her children for the very first time. As she has done in the past, Abby regards Val’s behaviour with quiet incredulity, but this time there’s no amusement or exasperation to accompany it. The circumstances are far too momentous for that.When Abby and Val reach their destination in the final scene, the mood changes. Val gets out of the car and walks slowly towards the Fisher house as if drawn by an invisible umbilical cord. She has gone from being the only person who doesn’t know what’s going on to the only person that matters. Everyone else recedes, with Abby only too willing to adopt the role of silent bystander alongside Gary and Ben. “Don’t ask,” she says, preempting Gary’s questions about her involvement in the situation.As in the climactic moments of last week’s DALLAS, there is a vehicular-based slow-mo sequence. Sheila Fisher’s elongated cry of “H-A-A-R-R-Y-Y!!” serves the same warning function as Bobby’s yell of "P-A-A-A-M!!” Just as Pam turned around in slow-motion to see the car being driven directly towards her so Val’s head spins round in stop-motion to see one of her two babies being driven away.The only scenes in this week’s KNOTS not directly related to the twins focus on Laura and Greg. In last week’s ep, in exchange for crucial papers pertaining to the babies’ whereabouts, Ruth had Abby pretend to Laura that she and Greg were sleeping together. It made for a fun scene, but I can’t help feeling this kind of Soap Land 101 trick is somewhat beneath such worldly-wise women as Ruth, Abby and Laura — and maybe even KNOTS itself. That this “childish prank,” as Greg describes it, should be what finally enables Abby to bring Val to her babies feels a little cheap. It’s a stunt perhaps better suited to the more naive and juvenile likes of DYNASTY’s Elena, Amanda and Prince Michael who went through their own version of the same charade only two weeks ago. Whereas Elena was obliged to disrobe completely in order to convince Amanda of Michael’s infidelity, Abby has only to pad around in Greg’s bathrobe for Laura to break off all ties with him. It’s interesting to compare Laura's angry reaction in this episode with her non-reaction in Season 2 as the very same Abby blatantly conducted an ongoing affair with her husband Richard in the next-door jacuzzi. Back then, Laura’s lack of response subverted soap opera expectations and took the storyline in a different direction. Now, she reacts how the plot requires her to in order to serve the bigger, soapier picture. All credibility is not lost, however — KNOTS characters are hardy enough to withstand the occasional contrivance, and it becomes clear that Laura’s rejection of Greg is less to do with his supposed infidelity than with the deceptions and secrets that constantly surround him. “I am so sick of this, I am so sick of all of this,” she says, echoing Dex Dexter’s “I got mixed up in a world I never should have become a part of” speech in last week’s DYNASTY. Like Dex, Laura had enough of living in a soap opera. Meanwhile on FALCON CREST, Maggie Gioberti walks in on a genuine case of in flagrante this week when she catches husband Chase in a passionate embrace with Connie Giannini.For the most part, the FALCON CREST finale lacks the feverish momentum of last week’s instalment. However, there’s a gloriously insane moment where Chase, after Maggie has told him that their marriage is over, goes into complete meltdown, trashing his office and bellowing, “WHAT’S GOING ON??”As three famous Hollywood movie actresses are unceremoniously bundled out of the Soap Land exit — Ava Gardner, Ali McGraw and Donna Reed each made their final Soap Land appearance last week without so much as a goodbye wave between them — another makes her entrance. Celeste Holm receives “Special Guest Appearance” billing on FALCON CREST for her role as Anna Rossini, mother of Cassandra Wilder and Damon Ross. The plot involving the Rossini family might easily have been sewn together from previous Soap Land storylines. A brother and sister infiltrating a small community as part of a plan to avenge the death of their father whilst concealing their own relationship? Then: Michael Tyrone and Sandie Swanson on FLAMINGO ROAD. Now: Cassandra and Damon. A female public relations expert who bewitches her tycoon client by keeping him at arm’s length romantically, all the while plotting to take advantage of him? Then: Leslie Stewart and JR on DALLAS. Now: Cassandra and Richard Channing. A deceptively simple scheme to bring down a millionaire businessman (or two), successfully executed in just a handful of episodes? Then: Alexis and Rashid Ahmed suckering Blake over the China Sea oil leases at the end of last season. Now: Cassandra and Damon luring Angela, Chase and Richard into a risky bid for the Helios contract that ends up ruining Chase and Richard. The arrival of a somewhat unstable older woman consumed by revenge plus a back story involving a house fire and a mysterious death? Then: Clayton Farlow’s sister Jessica, nursing a grudge against Clayton and a secret about the fire that killed his wife. Now: Cassandra’s mother Anna, nursing a grudge against Angela, whom she blames for the fire that killed her husband.“We’ve come a long way since Romeo and Juliet!” Lilimae told Eric Fairgate on KNOTS LANDING a few weeks ago. Maybe not so far. Legend has it that Bobby Ewing, Soap Land’s first Romeo, was originally meant to die at the end of the DALLAS mini-series, but of course, that didn’t happen. Only now, seven years later, has he met his preordained demise. FALCON CREST’s own star cross’d lovers, Lance and Lorraine, have actually adhered far closer to the Romeo and Juliet template. Despised by each other’s families, they were forced to keep their love hidden from the start. When Lance broke the terms of his parole by hitting Lorraine’s step-father, he was simply following the blueprint laid down by Shakespeare — when Romeo got into a fight with Juliet’s kinsman Tybalt that resulted in Tybalt’s death, he was in violation of the edict laid down by the Prince of Verona. Where Romeo was banished to Mantua, Lance was exiled to Chinatown. The subsequent separation between each pair of lovers led to a fatal miscommunication, resulting in the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, and the chase that caused Lorraine’s fall, her subsequent coma and the brain-dead condition in which she is found this episode.Where DALLAS's equivalent storyline — whether or not to pull the plug on Mickey Trotter's life support system — spanned several episodes and a murder trial, FALCON CREST deals with Lorraine’s fate, movingly and effectively, in two scenes. As Lorraine’s husband of one episode, Lance has the final decision and it falls to Richard to gently convince him that she is “already dead”. Fleetingly, it seems as if Lance and Richard will be reconciled over Lorraine's body, just as the Montagues and Capulets were over Romeo and Juliet's. (You can almost hear Bobby Ewing urging them to “be a family” from some Soap Land after-life.) However, the demands of a Soap Land whodunnit ultimately win out over Shakespearean convention. “You killed her,” Lance tells his father-in-law bitterly, thereby adding his own name to the growing list of people with a potentially murderous grudge against Richard.With his daughter dead and his empire in tatters, Richard ends the season in a similar position to the one Blake Carrington was in at its beginning. Instead of an enigmatic stranger showing up claiming to be his half-sister, Richard receives a more familiar visitor — Maggie, fresh from her fight with Chase and also upset about Lorraine. She tries to comfort Richard, he tries to comfort her, and … they kiss! They really, properly kiss! The unspoken, unacknowledged connection between Maggie and Richard — something we’ve only ever glimpsed out of the corner of our collective eye — is suddenly at the heart of the season finale. Both unthinkable and inevitable, their kiss is in its own way the dramatic equal of Katherine Wentworth ploughing into Bobby, the Moldavian wedding erupting into carnage or Val Ewing’s slow-motion head spin as her babies head off in opposite directions. And as if this kiss wasn’t enough, the house Richard and Maggie are in then explodes, courtesy of a bomb planted by … who knows who?If there’s a common theme running through each of this season’s cliffhangers, it's that ultimate happiness cannot be sustained and must be paid for with ultimate disaster. Be it Amanda’s fairytale wedding on DYNASTY or Bobby and Pam’s dream reconciliation on DALLAS or Richard and Maggie’s forbidden kiss on FALCON CREST, a dream soon becomes a nightmare, a fairytale swiftly turns into a tragedy. “Do you believe what they say about dreams … that they only last for a split second?” Val asked earlier in this season’s KNOTS. For Amanda and Michael, Pam and Bobby, Lance and Lorraine, Maggie and Richard, even for Val -- almost within touching distance of the babies she has never held -- they last scarcely any time at all.And this week’s Top 2 are …1 (4) KNOTS LANDING2 (1) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

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