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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 21254" data-attributes="member: 22">05/Feb/86: DYNASTY: Souvenirs v. 06/Feb/86: THE COLBYS: The Pact v. 06/Feb/86 KNOTS LANDING: A Key to a Woman's Heart v. 07/Feb/86: DALLAS: Missing v. 07/Feb/86: FALCON CREST: Gambit Exposed“I feel betrayed,” Karen confides to Val. “I feel so violated,” Krystle admits to Steven. Indeed, it’s been an emotionally volatile week in Soap Land, especially on DYNASTY and KNOTS LANDING. While Alexis smashes Dex’s picture against a wall (“Damn you!” she yells to an empty room), Mack breaks a bedside lamp during a shouting match with Karen. While Alexis scratches Dex’s face when his jealousy towards Galen erupts once again, the Mackenzies draw blood metaphorically as each aims for the other’s Achilles heel. “You think you can joke your way out of everything. You think it’s cute,” mocks Karen. “I’m married to the standard bearer — Miss Self-Righteous-Make-The World-A-Better-Place,” sneers Mack.Meanwhile, Krystle Carrington and Cathy Geary both behave erratically after finding themselves front page news. "CARRINGTON ABDUCTOR - POLICE STILL STYMIED: Will He Strike Again?” asks the Denver Chronicle. "Evangelist Rush Tried To Murder Songbird Wife,” reveals World Secrets. While Cathy trashes her dressing room after learning that Sonny betrayed her to the tabloids, Krystle startles Steven by frantically pulling dresses from their hangers and throwing them across her bedroom: “You were here, you saw her — did she wear this, or this?"The creepy scene where a kindly nanny turns out to be a reporter hungry for a salacious quote from Krystle is DYNASTY's equivalent of the Sonny the saxophonist storyline on KNOTS but told succinctly and effectively in one scene instead of being spread out over several episodes. The nanny’s warning as she is led away by security (“You people in your mansions with your fancy cars and your jewels, you’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in the real world … You cannot isolate yourselves in an ivory tower!”) echoes the sentiments of Susan, LB's real nanny from Season 3.By the end of their respective episodes, Krystle and Cathy have each achieved a kind of catharsis. Krystle revisits the attic where she was held prisoner (“I had to know that I could be in this room and be able to walk out … that I’m free,” she explains to Blake), an act which has always rung psychologically true to me regardless of the far-fetched circumstances leading up to it. Cathy, meanwhile, achieves closure by simply punching Sonny in the face.There’s more punching when Mark Graison and Matt Cantrell come to blows on DALLAS. The brawl is kind of fun but compared to the recent DYNASTY-verse fights between Steven and Bart Fallmont, Jeff and Adam, and Krystle and Krystle, a little conventional. Outbursts of emotion are no longer permitted at Southfork itself, however, as a grieving Jenna discovers when she attempts to visit her fiancee’s grave one evening. She is forcibly prevented from doing so by Clayton and after she has been bundled upstairs, he and the rest of the Stepford Farlow-Krebbs-Ewing clan discuss how best to suppress such behaviour. Mention is made of “something to quiet her” and “getting her some help.”Following the recent run of DYNASTY to COLBYS crossovers, the traffic flows the other way this week, with no less than three characters making the trek from California to Denver. While Fallon gets reacquainted with her relatives, Miles apologises for raping her and Zach drops by Alexis’s penthouse to inform her that she’s the most exciting woman he has ever known — in other words, the same thing he’s been telling her cousin Sable on a weekly basis since THE COLBYS began.Dominique, on the other hand, guests on THE COLBYS, but doesn't appear on her “home" show, which is a first of sorts. She also becomes the first person to compete with themselves in a round of Soap Land Song Wars. At the opening night of her new Los Angeles nightclub, Dominique sings two songs, jazz standard “Come Rain or Come Shine” as a solo, and Willie Nelson’s wistful country ballad “Crazy” as a duet with Wayne Masterson. Perhaps eager to prove she still has what it takes (her last musical performance on DYNASTY having ended abruptly when she collapsed to the floor mid-song), she delivers both numbers at full-throttle. While she steamrollers over “Crazy”, all but drowning out her singing partner in the process, “Come Rain or Come Shine” proves more resilient to her take-no-prisoners style. It also benefits from some good old-fashioned Ciji-at-Daniel’s staging, whereby the camera cuts to significant reaction shots of Jason, Sable, Fallon, Miles and Jeff (who are all sitting in the audience) whenever is most lyrically appropriate.Back on DYNASTY, King Galen once again offers to make Alexis his queen. She is clearly tempted but insists she loves her husband. Nevertheless, a quasi-coronation takes place when Galen persuades her to try on the royal tiara. As she kneels before him and he places it on her head, church bells toll on the soundtrack. Meanwhile, Sue Ellen is anointed “the new queen of Dallas fundraising” by the rest of the Ewings on DALLAS and Richard Channing predicts on FALCON CREST that “Angela’s days as the great queen are numbered” now that he and Chase have joined forces against her.Elsewhere on DYNASTY, King Galen is so outraged to learn Amanda has asked his son Michael for a divorce that he forgets to pretend he’s paralysed and leaps out of his wheelchair. (Constance Carlyle once made a similar faux pas on FLAMINGO ROAD.) Michael is appalled by the deception. "All my life I looked up to you and respected you … You make me sick!” he tells his father, sounding as disillusioned as Miles Colby did when he discovered Jason's involvement with Francesca a few weeks ago. (For his part, Galen’s power mad ravings resemble those of Cecil Colby during his Logan Rhinewood period.) Over on THE COLBYS, Miles’s own marriage to Amanda’s sister isn’t faring any better. When he begs Fallon not to file their annulment papers and she does anyway, one feels genuinely bad for him. Miles’s later line to his sister Bliss — “You ever feel like something inside you pushing you to the edge and you think, ‘Maybe, this time, I’m going over'?” — recalls the demise of KNOTS LANDING’s Joshua. Both Miles and Joshua are (or were) arrogant, self-destructive and guilty of extreme violence towards the wives they claimed to love, yet somehow they remain sympathetic. Following his death, a reporter compared Joshua’s celebrity and untimely passing to James Dean's. Miles also displays elements of Dean’s persona — his quasi-‘50s quiff, a history of reckless driving (Sable describes to Fallon this week how Miles once nearly killed himself in an auto wreck) and a profound disappointment in his father which resembles the father/son dynamic in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE much more than it does the traditional Soap Land equivalent — Miles is openly contemptuous of Jason in a way that neither JR Ewing nor Adam Carrington would ever dream of being towards their daddies.“I feel like a drive,” a skittish Miles tells Bliss. "Wanna come along? … Come on, let’s just leave the world behind us, huh?” Miles isn't the only character seeking to escape reality by speeding dangerously down Soap Land’s highways in a red convertible this week. “When I’m behind the wheel of a car,” Gary explains to Jill on KNOTS, "I can’t worry about anything but the road. Everything else just vanishes.” FALCON CREST’s Lance started out the season this way too — as a fast-driving thrill seeker trying to block out the death of his wife. Over the course of the season, Lance has gradually grown more responsible (even playing musical Svengali to Apollonia just as Gary once did to Ciji) while Gary has grown less so. Now, while Gary is driving fast cars and pursuing an extra-marital affair with Jill, Lance is focused on his family. This week, he goes to extraordinary lengths to learn what has become of his grandmother’s erstwhile fiancee.And just as Lance flies to Monte Carlo to find out whatever the hell happened to Peter Stavros, JR travels to Los Gatos to find out the same about the recently abducted Pam Ewing. Both trips require a degree of subterfuge — Lance adopts an alias while JR uses the same cover story as Jason did to explain his visit to Frankie in last week’s COLBYS: as far as anyone is concerned, he has taken a quick business trip to Europe. The best moments of this week’s DALLAS come when Sly delivers this cover story to Angelica Nero and Mandy Winger. While Angelica twitches nervously, afraid that JR has somehow gotten wind of Dimitri Marinos’s death and has flown to Athens to find out more, Mandy's dismay when she realises JR didn’t even bother to let her know he was leaving the country is a poignant indication of how far out of favour she has fallen.When I first watched this ep, I remember being disappointed by JR’s concern for Pam’s safety: “If something happens to that woman … I’ll never be able to look at myself in the mirror again." I saw it as yet another example of how the Ewings were being softened at this point in the series. I would have preferred JR to derive the same sort of sadistic pleasure from Pam's abduction as Alexis has from Krystle’s on DYNASTY. (This week, she taunts Krystle by speculating about how Blake and Rita got along “in their more intimate moments” together.) However, we do get an enjoyable cat and mouse scene between JR and Rueda, the local chief of police. (“I always like dealing with a man who can't be bought too cheap or too fast,” JR tells him approvingly.) And it’s not as if JR’s desire for Pam’s safe return is entirely selfless: “Nobody who knows how she and I felt about each other will ever believe I wasn’t responsible for this whole damn thing."Lance, meanwhile, goes undercover as a high-stakes gambler, complete with fake identity and 007 tuxedo, in order to infiltrate the guarded villa where Peter is being held captive by his son-in-law Philippe. This scheme contains elements of other recent Soap Land storylines. Where Sable and JR have each tried to prove that neither Constance nor Pam is sufficiently competent to manage her own business affairs (making Connie appear senile, tricking Pam into investing in a worthless emerald mine), Philippe and his wife Sofia have taken the even more drastic step of holding Peter against his will till they can force him into signing control of Stavros Shipping over to them. “The company needs a visible leader,” insists Philippe, echoing what Angelica Nero has been saying about Marinos Shipping on DALLAS. After several scenes where Lance feigns drunkenness at Philippe’s card table (whereas JR’s encounter with Rueda is brief but enjoyable, Lance’s with Philippe threatens to drag on forever), he finally manages to rescue Peter — only for the two of them to be apprehended by armed guards just before the freeze frame.And so to this week’s Soap Land Paternity Watch: While Sable has a vested interest in proving Jeff isn’t Phillip’s son on THE COLBYS, Abby has a stake in helping Peter Hollister prove he is Greg’s brother on KNOTS. Both ladies strike a deal. Sable promises not to challenge Jeff’s paternity (or Frankie’s reputation) in court on the condition that Jason drops divorce proceedings against her. Conversely, Abby agrees to fund Peter’s bid to prove his paternity in court in return for information about Galveston Industries. Likewise, FALCON CREST's Angela offers to foot the bill for Robin’s custody battle with Cole (who turns out to be Hope’s biological father after all) for no apparent reason other than to spite the Giobertis.Mack Mackenzie and Sue Ellen Ewing each delivers a similar line this week, but with a very different meaning behind it. "I don’t know how the world knew what it was doing until you came along,” a bitterly sarcastic Mack tells Karen during their big fight. “I don’t know what the world would even be like without Pam being around,” a super-earnest Sue Ellen tells Jamie in the wake of Pam's disappearance. Miss Ellie’s response to the news, meanwhile, sounds somewhat disingenuous. “I feel as if we were living under a curse — first Jock, then Bobby and now Pam,” she says. It’s the DALLAS equivalent of Maggie Gioberti’s and Eric Fairgate’s “I feel like I’m living in a soap opera” quips from earlier in the season.Dietary fad of the week: dessert. On DYNASTY, Alexis suggests to Fallon that they celebrate her return from the dead with a helping of “the most divine chocolate mousse pie" at La Mirage. When a heavily laden dessert trolley pulls up in front of them on KNOTS LANDING, Laura proposes to Greg they order “one of each, sport." Contrarily on DALLAS, Christopher is surprised when Miss Ellie tells him what his daddy’s favourite food was as a child. “He liked broccoli?” he asks in wonderment.And this week’s Top 5 are …1 (3) DYNASTY2 (1) KNOTS LANDING3 (2) THE COLBYS4 (4) DALLAS5 (5) FALCON CREST</blockquote>

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