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Um sure.... Anyways it was nice of her to actually see her son. I'll give her that much. Even it did take her almost 30 years to do so.
Jacqueline Bisset as Frankie?
- Thread starter Snarky Oracle!
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This discussion is actually a ruse by @Alexis and @Willie Oleson to get me to take THE COLBYS plots seriously and start discussing them, and I am not falling for it.
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Wise decision!
The Colbys is not an easy soap, it's not there to make you feel comfortable, and even after all these years we're still trying to interpret the show's many layers.
I don't disagree with Alexis just for the heck of it, I'm here to help him.
Maybe I should start a The Colbys ER Thread?
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Then I admit it has succeeded beyond its wildest intentions. Watching it (especially year one) was utter pain!
Like an onion...
I am, kidding aside, curious about Frankie. One of the reasons I hated the show was how much I hated her and the fact I considered that the show was trying to pass her off as decent (same with Jeff, who was the 24/7 focus here). I tend to agree with your reading of her (not the exaggerated version of her sainthood) and I would be very surprised if @Alexis was right. I kinda think it's his wishful thinking.
I thought, and the writers even confirmed that, the show initially tried to clone (with this as with all other items) the polar opposites of Krystle and Alexis in Frankie and Sable, but with Sable there was a course correction and she became a more nuanced character. Whereas Frankie was modeled not on original complex Krystle but on cardboard Krystle of seasons 4-6, the "most dangerous Carrington of all" as I think Claudia correctly assessed her. Cardboard Ross helped not at all. Sable actually became the way the Pollocks thought Alexis was in their interviews, someone who would do a lot of nasty things but her love of her children was the one core element they never violated (they violated it time and again in DYNASTY with Alexis). So, yes, Sable would try to get Connie declared mentally unstable--which I think did not require that much effort--and she would blame Jason of beating her and trying to kill her but she would be fiercely protective of Miles and Monica and the third half-baked one.
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Now that would have been ideal: Rigg can blend basic decency with regal bitch-o-rama very effectively.
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I think it did, but not for Katharine Ross herself. Frankie's lack of tact and inability to show genuine concern brought out the worst (=best!) in Sable. All that seething frustration, I loved it!
Maybe this is not how it was planned, but does it really matter if the result is so delightful?
Sable was a charming but also conniving and ruthless woman and I think she deserved to get her comeuppance. The question is, did she deserve to get it from her own sister?
I didn't feel sorry for Connie at all, that bossy old cow. But it's the reason why Sable did it, and the nastiest part was how she tried to manipulate Monica.
And it wasn't like simply telling a lie, oh no, she craftily planted the seeds of doubt. I don't think it worked, but it's the effort that counts. And it's one of those scenes that shows what a venomous snake Sable was (or could be, whenever the situation "required" it).
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Hang on. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remembered it being that Cecil blackmailed Frankie into giving him Jeff: when Frankie found out she was pregnant, she assumed it was Philip's (after all, she slept with Philip several times when he was on his third leave, and she had only one night together with Jason), and happily wrote to him about it. But Philip had already found out from one of the doctors that he was sterile. So he knew the baby his wife was carrying couldn't be his. Instead of writing her back, he wrote to Cecil, revealing all this.
After Philip was presumed dead, Cecil swooped in to take Jeff away from his mother. I always assumed it was his way of punishing Frankie, without robbing his dead brother of any dignity. I don't recall if Cecil told Frankie he knew the baby's father couldn't be Philip, but either way, Frankie alone knew who the other candidate could possibly be: her own sister's husband (the ironic part being that Jason had not yet met Sable when he and Frankie had their one night stand). And Frankie was already guilty of taking Philip from Sable, so she couldn't afford for Sable to find out Frankie was going to have a child with Jason.
So, not just for the sake of her son, but for the sake of *everybody*, Frankie left with no argument.
I do recall Jeff mentioning his mother sent him gifts (probably for his birthday and Christmas), though he was rather bitter about it. "You sent gifts, but that doesn't make up for abandoning me!" or something like that. So at the very least, he was on her mind all those years, and she gave a minimum of contact. Which is more than one can say about Alexis, who never contacted Fallon or Steven for those 16 years she was gone.
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Alexis was blackmailed into giving away custody and never come back to see her children by a man so violent he crippled Roger Grimes. They also lived in a mansion where she knew he controlled all communications and he made it clear he thought cheating on him made her an unfit mother (whereas his raping and killing made him father of the year) and he would not allow any contact. Frankie could not bother to show up when Jeff got married, when his child was kidnapped, or when his child-- and her grandchild-- was left without a mother after she was presumed dead. I am curious as to the thoughtful Hallmark card and present she sent on these occasions.
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But in the pilot of "Dynasty" Jeff mentioned that he just saw his mother. Oddly, she was not mentioned after that.
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Apparently she had no idea until it was revealed in court - which was supposed to be Sable's victory.
Cecil persuaded Frankie to have Jeff raised as a Colby heir, ironically he wouldn't inherit from his "father" at all and that's also why Connie gave her shares to Jeff.
Well, maybe we should take into account that there was not going to be another Colby family at that time - it was just Cecil and Jeff.
Jeff had parents (like every person) but since they weren't relevant at that time they kept the info about these characters as vague as possible.
If anything, I think it would have been quite confusing to see Jeff's mother showing up in Dynasty's first seasons.
He was raised by Cecil and he even saw Alexis as a substitute "mother" sometimes. That's all we needed to know.
Every soap has these kind of funny flaws, as long as it doesn't ruin the overall narrative I find it easy to ignore them.
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I understand, but that was the problem with THE COLBYS as a show, wasn't it, that there was suddenly a gazillion of them when for five seasons we were lead to believe there were only Jeff and Cecil. Would anyone, assuming it was a well written show, cared if the family Fallon married into was an ultra rich family where Jeff was not related? And Jeff could have relocated there on some DC or COLBYCO subsidiary wanting "to make a fresh start after Fallon's death." The premise of the show was just implausible to begin with. Again, I go back to how refreshingly different KNOTS was compared to DALLAS as a spin-off, and of course how KNOTS fared not only better than THE COLBYS (because how hard was that) but actually even outlived DALLAS.
But since the wise COLBYS team of the Shapiros and Pollocks decided to will them into existence, the characters then are judged by what we saw on the screen until then--which was nothing--not unlike Alexis in season two was judged against her complete absence in season one and supposedly before it.
Continuity was a four letter word for DYNASTY. I mean, what was the name of Blake's mother? How did she die? What about that brief reconciliation which gave rise to Amanda after Alexis knew Blake had crippled Roger Grimes? Krystle and not knowing how to ride in DYNASTY only to find out later she grew up with horses on her grandmother's farm? And don't get me started on Paulsen and his rewrite of the Grimes story. Or the fact that he had Dex claim he had "put the last eight years of his life on hold - so he could be there for Alexis" in season nine, which at the time he said it would have meant he was following her even while she was still in Mexico.
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Maybe in a magazine? One of her many weddings?
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And God know who Jeff thought his "mother" was at the time of the pilot.
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My money is on Doris Day.
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Turns out she wasn't a virgin at all!
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Actually, it was mentioned that Fallon and Steven were sent off to boarding schools, where it would be easier to send letters to them. And wouldn't they have gone off to college? Steven even moved away to New York for how long, a year or two? Of course, Alexis would not know which schools they would be going to... but couldn't she get information from Cecil Colby? Surely she'd know the number to his private phone line so she could occasionally check in on the kids. And she could do that while living up to Blake's blackmail; she'd still be away from Denver, and she could still go and see the kids whenever they traveled abroad.
But you do raise a good point about Frankie. A reasonable explanation could be that Jeff, right before the pilot, wrote to his mother and told her to stop sending him gifts, that they might as well cut off all connection. Heartbroken, Frankie nonetheless complied, and that's why she wasn't around those years; because she had no idea those incidents were going on.
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Oh, I think I remember it saying that Philip was disinherited. So yeah.
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You keep avoiding the fact that Alexis was threatened with physical violence, by a man she had apparently witnessed cripple a man, her lover, with a brass candlestick. A man who also had the backing of his millions and expert legal team. She saw it as pointless to even try to contact her children who had, in her eyes, been brainwashed into thinking she was a monster. She could go back and try and contact them, and maybe face more shame when her children reject her, or worse they could form a bond again, only for Blake to discover this and have her thrown out of Denver again. This time without the allowance that she was living on. She knew she was ruined in Denver anyways. It doesn't even look like Cecil made any attempt to contact Alexis in those 16 years when the two do meet in season 2.
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No, that's not a reasonable explanation. That is fan fiction on Frankie fans' part.
A reasonable explanation is that Frankie did not know how to wrap the first gift she bought him, took classes on gift wrapping, had an affair with her instructor, his wife kidnapped her and tied her up in her basement, and even though there were scissors and knives around, Frankie kept trying to untie herself for years to no avail. The wife changed Frankie's mail to the new address so she was getting all sorts of alimony checks from Frankie's previous husbands and that is how the gift-wrapping instructor and his wife raised a family of four. When the last kid went to college, Frankie was released. Ironically the wife had tied her in the same bow pattern Frankie had been trying to master.
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It certainly had to deal with some handicaps, and Francesca suffered the most from it.
She was pregnant when Philip died and she felt uncomfortable living with the Colby family so she went back to her parents (couldn't be her mother because she still lived in England).
She and Jeff lived there for three years, that's when Cecil came to visit her.
Apparently Philip had died before he came into his inheritance, there was no money at all. Cecil had no children and he offered Francesca to make Jeff his heir, and she accepted.
But, unlike Alexis, she never really had a good reason not to visit him unless that was part of Cecil's bargain, but they didn't mention that.
So I don't really understand why people keep saying that she was supposed to be the new Krystle when she was already such a flawed character from the very beginning.
She didn't fail as a saint because she never was.
But I think this is just what some fans had anticipated: Dynasty II, two women - oh then it must be a Krystle and Alexis clone.
No it isn't, because this is a different story, and that's raison d'être enough for me.
Another The Colbys aspect that's been largely overlooked is that Jason has had a life-changing experience: he thought he was going to die.
In episode 5 he talks to Francesca about his life, and all the things that matter to him.
J: "But Sable loves the prizes, maybe that's where I lost her".
F: "It takes two to kill a marriage Jason, you can still save this one if you try. You've got your life back, think of how much of it is invested in this marriage. Do you really want to throw it all away?"
And then some episodes later, when she and Jason can no longer hide their feelings for eachother she decides to move back to London.