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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 121711" data-attributes="member: 22">25 Feb 88: KNOTS LANDING: Bouncing Babies v. 26 Feb 88: DALLAS: Malice in DallasIt’s all about the kids this week — the futures of Val’s twins, Meg Sumner and Christopher Ewing are all in the balance. Two of these cases end up in court. On KNOTS, there is a “law in motion hearing” where Val’s attorney intends to ask the judge to dismiss Gary’s suit regarding the twins. The lawyer assures Val that she has nothing to worry about because the case will never go to trial. That’s what they told Bobby about Lisa Alden’s bid to get Christopher, but this week’s DALLAS finds him facing a full-blown custody hearing.While Gary blames his ex-wife for their situation (“I wouldn’t be in this mess today if Val had told the truth in the first place”), Bobby blames his brother, even more than Lisa, for his (“She’s doing what you paid her to do in the first place … You better hope that hearing never takes place, JR, because if it does, what I did to you before is going to be nothing!”). Whereas Karen surprises Gary by taking his side against Val (“I think you should be able to see your kids”), Miss Ellie has had enough of both her sons. “I want this stopped, do you hear me?” she snaps upon finding Bobby about to rough JR up yet again, “or both of you can get the hell out of this house and off this ranch!”When the judge in the KNOTS case doesn’t immediately dismiss Gary’s lawsuit, Val panics. She lashes out at Gary and Jill (“Did she put you up to this? Is this all her idea? … Is she so desperate to keep you that she decided to help you go after my children?”), everyone starts talking over everyone else and Val’s attorney has to physically restrain her from going after Gary — all of which is more dramatic than anything that happens during Christopher’s hearing on DALLAS.The star of that hearing is Sue Ellen. We’ve never seen her on the witness stand before, but it turns out to be her natural habitat. Alas, this isn’t a juicy murder trial so we don’t get to see her lips trembling under cross-examination, but we do get some cool flashbacks (still a novelty on DALLAS), first to the momentous scene where Kristin reveals herself to be pregnant with JR’s baby (“It was a cloud over our marriage for a long time,” Sue Ellen informs the court with almost laughable understatement), then to a scene two years later where Bobby tells Sue Ellen that JR is the daddy of the baby he and Pam have “accidentally” adopted. Bobby himself also flashes back to Jeff Faraday selling him Christopher. Ultimately, we don’t learn anything new from any of this — just as Krystle’s recent investigation into the circumstances surrounding Cecil Colby’s death on DYNASTY yielded nothing but a few nice cameos from some minor Season 3 characters. However, it makes for a surprisingly satisfying trip down memory lane.(Speaking of Jeff Faraday, David Shulton, Laurel Ellis’s slobby painter friend, makes an enjoyably sneaky modern-day equivalent. He’s been blackmailing Clayton over his nonexistent affair with Laurel for a couple of weeks now, but Clayton’s only just realised.)Val later has a change of heart about Gary, prompted by a seemingly unrelated conversation with Mack about how much he’s missing Meg now that her father has taken her home. She presents Gary with a notarised document confirming that he is the twins’ daddy and an apology: “I guess with Ben gone, I was afraid that I might lose them too and I just didn’t wanna see your side of it and for that, Gary, I’m sorry.” Lisa Alden’s equivalent change of heart on DALLAS comes as result of Christopher telling the judge that, “I don’t wanna go with Lisa. I wanna stay in my house with my daddy.” She immediately offers to drop the case. While Val’s backtracking feels true to her character, erratic and overemotional as that character is, we don’t really know what makes Lisa tick so she just comes across as a bit of an idiot. (It hadn’t occurred to her before Christopher’s speech that a six-year-old kid might not relish being ripped away from the only family he’s ever known?) DALLAS ends with a freeze frame of Bobby and Christopher in an emotional embrace. Gary and Val share one of those too — but there’s an extra beat beforehand where he rips up the legal document and hands it back to her. “I know you’ll do what’s best for them,” he says.Meanwhile, the Mackenzies are left quietly heartbroken by the loss of Meg. Mack’s grief manifests itself not in a DALLAS-style duel in the pool, but by him chopping up a banana for Meg’s breakfast then remembering she’s not there anymore. “I’ll eat them,” he tells Karen, adding the slices to his own breakfast bowl and then turning the situation into a joke. Then she leaves, his smile fades and he empties the whole lot into the sink. By way of contrast, there’s an impressive restaurant scene on DALLAS where David Shulton continually stuffs his face with food and beer (at Laurel’s expense) while still managing to deliver all his dialogue. He makes DYNASTY’s Sammy Jo (both of them) look positively restrained in comparison.Just as speaking to Mack prompts Val to make up with Gary, observing Val and Gary’s reconciliation inspires Karen to talk candidly to Greg about Meg. “You’re in trouble and I don’t know if you can take care of her,” she tells him. “I think we can give her a happy home.” “You’re very presumptuous, lady,” he replies quietly. “I think you better get the hell out of here.” Like Lisa Alden and Val, he later has a change of heart, conveyed during a speech delivered directly into the camera lens in the penultimate scene of the episode: “In many ways, I’m a lot smarter than my old man was. He was a lousy father, but he did one smart thing. He got other humans to raise me.” Only as the camera slowly pans out do we realise he’s talking to Karen and Mack in their living room. “Meg is gonna be a lot safer with you all,” he continues. “She’ll be your child. She’ll grow up thinking that you are her parents. I won’t participate in any way.” This speech carries a similar charge to the scenes where DYNASTY’s Sammy Jo and FALCON CREST’s Melissa gave away their babies and DALLAS’s Pam first took Christopher out of Bobby’s arms and claimed him as her own. In each case, there’s a sense that things will never be the same again. The difference is that this situation plays out in such an understated manner. No-one’s crying or hysterical, there are no tearful goodbyes. Everything is calm and matter-of-fact, which paradoxically makes it seem all the more momentous. The final scene is particularly striking — Greg watching impassively as the dollhouse he built for Meg earlier in the episode burns. It feels metaphorical as if he were watching his last chance to be a decent man go up in flames. Looked at another way, by giving his daughter to those better equipped to raise her, he’s selflessly putting her needs before his own.Elsewhere on KNOTS, Abby reprimands Olivia for “staying out late, sulking” and generally making Abby and Charles’s split all about her. “If you’re such a good mother then why do I feel so screwed up?” Olivia yelps. “Because you’re a bleedin’ teenager,” I find myself replying to the screen. Jenna then backs me up on DALLAS. “Teenage girls can be difficult,” she says after learning that Charlie has been cutting classes and hiding bad grades by forging her (Jenna’s) name on her report card. Ray, meanwhile, is intent on making Charlie’s problems all about him. “This has all happened since our marriage — I guess I haven’t done a very good job with her,” he concludes.A month ago, Gordon Wales, arguably DYNASTY’s finest recurring character, made his last appearance on the show. This week, one of DALLAS’s best supporting figures, Mavis Anderson, also bows out for good. Neither departure is acknowledged on screen yet in each case, the character’s final scene acts as a fitting swan song. Mavis’s scene is particularly lovely and brings her character full circle. Prompted by Miss Ellie confiding her suspicions about Clayton’s infidelity, she reveals that Punk also once had an affair with a younger woman and that she knew about it but never said anything. “It was shortly after Jock’s death,” she explains. “In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what caused it.” This timeline puts the affair at around the same time Mavis first appeared onscreen as Ellie’s confidante encouraging her to resume public life following the loss of her husband. To think that Mavis would have been silently dealing with her own turmoil at the same time! We never knew, of course, because her function has always been to act as a sounding board for Miss Ellie’s problems. It’s only now, at the end, where we finally get a glimpse into her inner life.Meanwhile, the ongoing plot about April digging into Nicholas Pearce’s murky past ramps up a gear when the private eye she hired to help turns up dead. This leads to one of those occasional noir-ish scenes I’m a sucker for where two characters pull up alongside each other in a rainy, dimly lit side street for a clandestine meeting (previous examples include Melissa and Pamela Lynch in FALCON CREST and Ben Carrington and Caress on DYNASTY). Here, it’s April meeting with Nick to tell him what she’s been doing and how much danger he’s now in. “I have never hit a woman in my life before, but I am tempted to start with you,” he tells her angrily.What April doesn’t know, and we’re about to find out, just as we did regarding the Williamses in last week’s KNOTS, is that Nicholas’s family are in some sort of Witness Protection Programme. Whereas Pat had just returned from testifying against some unknown criminals, Nick’s father “testified against The Family” twenty-three years ago. “I broke the code of omertà … You are never forgiven for that.” Nick visits his parents at their equivalent of Seaview Circle, a suburban neighbourhood in Indiana, to warn them that the bad guys are on their trail and they need to run. Nick’s papa reacts the same way Pat did: he refuses to move. “One change of identity was enough,” he declares. (Meanwhile, whatever the casting of Australian actor Rod Taylor as Carlo Agretti’s brother on FALCON CREST lacks in Italian-ness is more than made up for by the actress playing Nicholas’s mother, who mama-mia’s the heck of out of her small role as if her linguine depended on it.)And this week’s Top 2 are … a surprise. Given that this episode of KNOTS is a pivotal one for both Greg and the Mackenzies and that Gary and Val’s custody storyline is so much more character driven than Bobby and Lisa’s, I fully expected it to come out on top. However, DALLAS’s sheer soapy momentum pushes it into the lead. Plus there are some surprisingly juicy scenes involving the supporting characters — Kimberly Cryder teaming up with Casey Denault against JR? It's Kristin and Alan Beam all over again!1 (2) DALLAS2 (1) KNOTS LANDING</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =