Menu
Forums
New posts
Search forums
What's new
New posts
Latest activity
Awards
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
New posts
Search forums
Menu
Log in
Register
Forums
Dallas the TV series
Knots Landing
KNOTS LANDING versus DALLAS versus the rest of them week by week
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 141129" data-attributes="member: 22"><p><u>08 Feb 89: DYNASTY: Tankers, Cadavers to Chance v. 09 Feb 89: KNOTS LANDING: Without a Clue v. 10 Feb 89: DALLAS: He-e-ere's Papa! v. 10 Feb 89: FALCON CREST: And Baby Makes Three </u></p><p></p><p>As Pam Ewing learnt to her cost way back in the DALLAS mini-series, barns can be dangerous places in Soap Land — and never more so than this week. DYNASTY opens with the stables at Delta Rho not only on fire but with Sammy Jo and her assailant Gibson unconscious inside, each wounded after shooting the other. Over on KNOTS, Jill steals into Gary’s barn and sabotages his saddle. The last person to play such a trick was Sable on THE COLBYS as part of a scheme to gaslight her sister-in-law Constance. We’ve already seen Jill shopping for a wheelchair (“My fiancee broke his leg,” she informs the shop assistant) so she presumably has a more Misery-inspired scenario in mind. (Although the movie version of Misery had yet to be released in early ’89, the original novel had been a big hit the previous year.)</p><p></p><p>It’s an unwritten Soap Land rule that characters trapped in a fire must be rescued by one of their show’s leading men rather than an anonymous member of the emergency services. So it is that Jeff Colby joins the heroic likes of Mark Jennings, Bobby Ewing and, most recently, Lance Cumson as he drags Sammy Jo to safety. Gibson makes it out of the barn on his own and, like Sammy Jo, winds up at Soap Land Memorial Hospital where KNOTS LANDING’s Mrs Bailey is also in residence. Whereas Jill is satisfied that Mrs B no longer poses a threat to her (“They can ask you all the questions they want, you’re never gonna be able to answer,” she gloats during one of her thought bubble thingies), Gibson remains a thorn in Sable’s side. “You’ve got something to hide from somebody,” he tells her over the phone. “Either you get me out of here fast or I’m gonna spread my name and yours in every newspaper in this city.”</p><p></p><p>Mrs Bailey may not be able to incriminate her verbally, but Jill suspects she has “a lot of interesting things at home — I bet you’re the type of woman that holds onto all sorts of thing that should have been thrown away.” Mack reaches the same conclusion, but while he’s waiting for a warrant to search her apartment legally, Jill simply lets herself in. Back on DYNASTY, there’s a parallel scenario as Adam, intrigued after seeing Dex hand Virginia a letter (“I put some thoughts down on paper — please look it over, maybe you’ll understand what I did”), sneaks into her room to look for it. He and Jill each rifle through the drawers of a bureau (the place where Julie Grey once hid her key to the Red Files), but without success. Jill then finds a shoebox under the bed (Digger Barnes’s hiding place of choice for various legal documents), but this also proves a red herring. Adam eventually hits pay dirt when he locates the letter in a bedside dresser (the same place Jessica Montford and Caress Morelle hid their own highly confidential documents) while Jill gets lucky when she finds copies of Mrs Bailey’s forgeries in a hatbox (where Sue Ellen used to secrete her booze). Before either has time to savour their victories, they hear the sounds of voices and approaching footsteps. Hark, it is Mack arriving with his warrant and Virginia returning to change clothes. Tension mounts: are Adam and Jill about to be caught redhanded? Not likely — while he dives into a wardrobe, she makes her exit through a conveniently placed back door.</p><p></p><p>We don’t get to see what is in Dex’s letter, but it apparently contains enough about Virginia’s unhappy past for Adam to pull the same “we’re both outsiders” shtick he used on Kirby in an attempt to get her into bed. Over on FALCON CREST, Anna Cellini uses nostalgia to try to rekindle the passion between her and Nick Agretti. “Let’s be seventeen again,” she suggests. Virginia and Nick each succumb to these methods of seduction. Jill, on the other hand, becomes only further isolated from her former KNOTS friends. Following Mrs Bailey’s all-too-convenient stroke, neither Mack nor Gary bother to conceal their suspicions about her. Ironically, this allows her to play the “Poor Jill” victim card. “It’s Val, isn’t it? … She sucked one more person into her little fantasy … What you think I did, Mack? Do you think I had Mrs Bailey write her suicide note?” she asks indignantly over the phone while burning the very papers she swiped from Mrs B’s closet (and wearing one of her hats for good measure).</p><p></p><p>“What do I have to do to prove to you people I’m innocent — take a lie detector test?” she continues. And so Jill Bennett becomes the first Soap Land character to submit such a test since Wes Parmalee on DALLAS two years ago. Just like Wes, she passes with flying colours. In both cases, there is no explanation as to how the character has been able to outwit the machine, beyond a reminder that it is not a hundred per cent accurate. Karen’s suggestion, “Maybe Jill’s so far gone, she actually believes what she said was true”, echoes a similar line about Wes (“Maybe he went back to a time in his mind when he believed he really was Jock”) and is as close as we get. When the results of the test fail to convince anyone of Jill’s innocence, she begrudgingly agrees to see a shrink of Gary’s choosing, played by the same therapist who counselled Sue Ellen during her stay at the Dream Season Sanatarium. Dr Gilbert, as she is now known, turns out to be as wrong about Jill (“It is my considered opinion that she is not a danger to anyone”) as she was perceptive about Sue Ellen (specifically, her tendency to blame others for her problems). Lie detectors, shrinks and psychics — ultimately, they are as accurate as Soap Land’s plots require them to be.</p><p></p><p>Just over a year ago, FALCON CREST’s anti-hero, Richard Channing, became a respectable married man when he wed the wholesome Maggie Gioberti. More recently, his Ewing-verse equivalents, Greg Sumner and JR Ewing, have followed suit by marrying Abby and Cally. Whereas JR is unhappy with this state of affairs (“Marriage was not on my agenda and married I do not wanna be,” he informs his new bride, who responds by planting a cream pie in his face), Greg appears to embrace it: “I didn’t think I’d ever get a shot at a life like that again. I didn’t want one. Things have changed. I feel like I’m part of a family now.” Both he and Richard make a public display of their new “family man” image this week.</p><p></p><p>Mack watches briefly while Greg and Abby are portrayed as “the perfect American family” during a TV interview before turning his attention to Meg’s diapers: “I’d rather change it than listen to it.” On FC, Maggie has other concerns when she watches Richard being interviewed alongside Pilar Ortega on the 6 O’Clock News regarding his role as “benefactor of the new community centre.” “I told Richard not to wear that purple tie,” she frets. Richard goes on to explain that his newfound altruism is due to “the example set for me by my wife Maggie, to whom generosity is second nature.” Beneath the public facades, however, lie more complicated questions. “Is there anything going on between you and Pilar Ortega?” Maggie asks. Richard assures her there isn’t. “Did you know Pilar before she came back to the valley?” she continues. Again, he says no. Neither answer is the full truth. Back on KNOTS, Ted Melcher broaches an even thornier subject: “Why did Greg Sumner give up his baby?” “… Who cares? It doesn’t relate to the issues,” Greg replies. “That’s what Dukakis said when Bush started to talk about the pledge of allegiance,” retorts Ted.</p><p></p><p>This is Soap Land’s first reference to George Bush Sr, who was sworn in as President of America just three weeks before this episode originally aired (Ronald Reagan having held the office since the day before Abby first met JR until the day after she married Greg). In another sign of the times, Michael Fairgate and his latest unrequited crush Ellen more or less invent the internet — or at the very least Google. “First, you start with your knowledge base which is kind of like a library of facts … then you write a programme called an inference engine which uses the knowledge base to draw to conclusions,” Ellen explains. “You guys must have been eating your Wheaties,” marvels their professor. Over on DALLAS, Sue Ellen, after rolling her eyes at the concept of an ATM machine a couple of weeks ago, claws back a modicum of credibility by introducing the term “significant other” to Soap Land. “That’s what they’re calling them these days,” she informs a slightly baffled Carter McKay. (DALLAS seems to be setting McKay and Sue Ellen up as future allies, but I think this ep is the last time we see them together.)</p><p></p><p>While Clayton and Miss Ellie are off screen “having a wonderful time” in Europe for the second week in a row, Alexis is finally back from Natumbe. As this is her first appearance since Krystle’s poignant departure, one might have expected an acknowledgement in the same “let bygones be bygones” spirit of JR’s parting words to Ray Krebbs on DALLAS two weeks ago (“Right now, I only remember the good times”). Instead, Alexis’s sole reference to her former bête noire occurs as she is taunting Sable for trying to move in on Blake. “What a pity that Krystle’s still alive; that does cramp your style rather. Maybe you should send one of your henchmen to Switzerland and pull the plug on her,” she suggests. Sable is genuinely taken aback: “I don’t know another soul on earth that would make a remark as low as that.” Maybe not, but JR comes close as he quizzes Sue Ellen about Nicholas Pearce’s background, the first time he’s mentioned the man since killing him at the end of last season: “You two must have talked once in a while — couldn’t have spent all your time in the sack.” But even this remark pales in comparison to what he says after a vengeful Joseph Lombardi abducts him and demands to know who should be made to pay for his son’s death. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s my ex-wife Sue Ellen,” he insists. “If it hadn’t have been for her, your boy would still be alive.”</p><p></p><p>The standout scene on this week’s DYNASTY is a mano-a-mano confrontation at the mansion. In front of the assembled Carrington clan, Zorelli angrily accuses Blake of using his influence with the police department to have him removed from the Roger Grimes case. “They put me behind a desk, took my gun … Do you have any idea what that means to a cop?!” he yells. “Sounds a bit like castration, doesn’t it?” snipes Adam on the sidelines. Blake is outraged by the allegation, Jeff and Adam take his side, Fallon defends her boyfriend, Virginia attempts to play peacemaker and pretty soon everyone’s shouting over each other, the camera’s shaking and Blake has to be restrained from physically attacking the younger man. “Get him out of here before I kill him!” he shouts. The whole thing is thrillingly out of control, in a KNOTS Season 4 type way.</p><p></p><p>Just as Jill is now an outsider on KNOTS, Fallon’s decision to side with Zorelli places them on one side and the rest of the Carringtons on the other. After all the convoluted romances and storylines Fallon has experienced over the past nine years, it’s kind of remarkable that this relationship should feel as important as it does. While it obviously helps that their affair is tied into a much bigger storyline and that Fallon herself has been revamped so successfully this season, another crucial ingredient is Zorelli — arguably the show’s most rounded and certainly most down-to-earth male character since Matthew Blaisdel back in Season 1.</p><p></p><p>KNOTS’ best scene is also a face-off between two men. Whereas Blake and Zorelli’s encounter is loud and chaotic, Greg and Mack’s is measured and controlled and takes place in the privacy of the latter’s office. In place of raised voices and snide remarks, there is small talk (Greg: “I was surprised to hear you were leaving the government” Mack: “I was surprised to hear you wanted back in”), prevarication (Greg: “Time has a tendency to change your perspective” Mack: “When did you become so philosophical?”) and an unspoken tension which is finally broken by Mack saying what Greg cannot bring himself to: “You want Meg back.” It feels significant that for this scene, Greg is dressed the same way he was for the speech in “Bouncing Babies” last season when he formally handed Meg over to the Mackenzies (camel brown overcoat, slicked-back hair). But whereas he stared directly into the camera lens back then, he now hides behind dark glasses, suggesting an inability to look either Mack or himself directly in the eye.</p><p></p><p>At one point, their conversation turns to Laura’s death. “You looked like it didn’t matter,” says Mack. “Just because I didn’t flip over backwards and break into tears on the casket doesn’t mean I didn’t care,” Greg replies. The same accusation could be levelled at Sue Ellen following the death of Nicholas Pearce. She hasn’t flipped over backwards either, even though we’ve previously seen her dissolve into a self-piteous heap over far less. Maybe she’s done her grieving in private, away from both the other characters and the audience — as if she’s already started receding from our view, in preparation for her departure at the end of the season. A simpler explanation is provided by Sue Ellen herself in the last and best scene of this week’s DALLAS which, like Mack and Greg’s, is an office-based encounter. “I wanted to shut it out, to forget that evening ever happened,” she tells Joseph Lombardi, who wants to know if her account of the events leading up to Nick’s death matches JR’s. “You’re the only one left who can speak for my son,” he tells her poignantly.</p><p></p><p>Given Lombardi’s “eye for an eye” philosophy, Sue Ellen essentially holds JR’s life in her hands — will she blame or exonerate him regarding his role in Nicholas’s death? The scene is also her only opportunity to express her grief on screen and Linda Gray makes the most of it, managing to imbue even a line as clunky as “I hated JR so much, I shot him and when he survived, I was furious” with genuine emotion. Proving how far she’s come since that Dream Season therapy session with Jill Bennett’s doctor, Sue Ellen ultimately takes the high road and admits responsibility for her own role in what occurred: “Nicholas loved me, he’d do anything for me, and because of that, he’s dead … If only I hadn’t insisted on him helping me look for John Ross, if only we hadn’t gone to JR’s condo that night, if only I had stopped the fight between JR and Nicholas before it got so violent. If only, if only — they’re such empty words.” It’s a little gem of a speech.</p><p></p><p>FC also saves its best scene for last. Pilar sees Lance’s revelation that Cookie Nash is carrying his child and raises him a nine-year-old-daughter he never knew he had. Heck, he doesn’t even remember it being conceived. In circumstances remarkably similar to Adam and Dana’s backstory on DYNASTY, Pilar was a high school girl from the wrong side of the tracks with a big crush, Lance was a troubled teen too inebriated to know what he was doing, and together they made a baby. While Dana had an illegal abortion, Pilar went the unofficial adoption route (as did Greg with Meg) and gave the kid to her aunt to raise as her own.</p><p></p><p>Minor trend of the week: witches. Dex Dexter alludes to Macbeth when he finds himself face to face with Sable and Joanna. “Now all we need is one more witch and a cauldron,” he quips. Meanwhile, Jill Bennett evokes Arthur Miller’s The Crucible during a wonderfully indignant speech to Gary: “During the Middle Ages, if they thought a woman was guilty of witchcraft, they’d bind her hands and feet and throw her in some water and if she sank, she was innocent — she was pretty much dead, but she was innocent — and if she floated, she was guilty. So they took her out, dried her off and burnt her at the stake. It was a no-win situation. Gary, I know exactly how those women felt.”</p><p></p><p>And this week’s Top 4 are …</p><p></p><p>1 (2) KNOTS LANDING</p><p>2 (1) DYNASTY</p><p>3 (3) DALLAS</p><p>4 (4) FALCON CREST</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I hope I'm not guilty of "Peggy-bashing" as that wasn't my intention and I have no objection to her role as Mack's sidekick, I just find her heavy-handed approach to comedy quite grating (which, given that she mainly functions as light relief, is not ideal!). I don't know if you're familiar with a character from <em>The Good Wife</em> (and its spinoff <em>The Good Fight</em>, which I haven't seen) called Elsbeth Tascioni, but she reminds me of Peggy an awful lot. The main difference is that her self-consciously whimsical wackiness is acknowledged by the other characters, which in theory, <em>should</em> make it slightly less irritating.</p><p></p><p>[MEDIA=youtube]0RRFHOZKHi0[/MEDIA]</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James from London, post: 141129, member: 22"] [U]08 Feb 89: DYNASTY: Tankers, Cadavers to Chance v. 09 Feb 89: KNOTS LANDING: Without a Clue v. 10 Feb 89: DALLAS: He-e-ere's Papa! v. 10 Feb 89: FALCON CREST: And Baby Makes Three [/U] As Pam Ewing learnt to her cost way back in the DALLAS mini-series, barns can be dangerous places in Soap Land — and never more so than this week. DYNASTY opens with the stables at Delta Rho not only on fire but with Sammy Jo and her assailant Gibson unconscious inside, each wounded after shooting the other. Over on KNOTS, Jill steals into Gary’s barn and sabotages his saddle. The last person to play such a trick was Sable on THE COLBYS as part of a scheme to gaslight her sister-in-law Constance. We’ve already seen Jill shopping for a wheelchair (“My fiancee broke his leg,” she informs the shop assistant) so she presumably has a more Misery-inspired scenario in mind. (Although the movie version of Misery had yet to be released in early ’89, the original novel had been a big hit the previous year.) It’s an unwritten Soap Land rule that characters trapped in a fire must be rescued by one of their show’s leading men rather than an anonymous member of the emergency services. So it is that Jeff Colby joins the heroic likes of Mark Jennings, Bobby Ewing and, most recently, Lance Cumson as he drags Sammy Jo to safety. Gibson makes it out of the barn on his own and, like Sammy Jo, winds up at Soap Land Memorial Hospital where KNOTS LANDING’s Mrs Bailey is also in residence. Whereas Jill is satisfied that Mrs B no longer poses a threat to her (“They can ask you all the questions they want, you’re never gonna be able to answer,” she gloats during one of her thought bubble thingies), Gibson remains a thorn in Sable’s side. “You’ve got something to hide from somebody,” he tells her over the phone. “Either you get me out of here fast or I’m gonna spread my name and yours in every newspaper in this city.” Mrs Bailey may not be able to incriminate her verbally, but Jill suspects she has “a lot of interesting things at home — I bet you’re the type of woman that holds onto all sorts of thing that should have been thrown away.” Mack reaches the same conclusion, but while he’s waiting for a warrant to search her apartment legally, Jill simply lets herself in. Back on DYNASTY, there’s a parallel scenario as Adam, intrigued after seeing Dex hand Virginia a letter (“I put some thoughts down on paper — please look it over, maybe you’ll understand what I did”), sneaks into her room to look for it. He and Jill each rifle through the drawers of a bureau (the place where Julie Grey once hid her key to the Red Files), but without success. Jill then finds a shoebox under the bed (Digger Barnes’s hiding place of choice for various legal documents), but this also proves a red herring. Adam eventually hits pay dirt when he locates the letter in a bedside dresser (the same place Jessica Montford and Caress Morelle hid their own highly confidential documents) while Jill gets lucky when she finds copies of Mrs Bailey’s forgeries in a hatbox (where Sue Ellen used to secrete her booze). Before either has time to savour their victories, they hear the sounds of voices and approaching footsteps. Hark, it is Mack arriving with his warrant and Virginia returning to change clothes. Tension mounts: are Adam and Jill about to be caught redhanded? Not likely — while he dives into a wardrobe, she makes her exit through a conveniently placed back door. We don’t get to see what is in Dex’s letter, but it apparently contains enough about Virginia’s unhappy past for Adam to pull the same “we’re both outsiders” shtick he used on Kirby in an attempt to get her into bed. Over on FALCON CREST, Anna Cellini uses nostalgia to try to rekindle the passion between her and Nick Agretti. “Let’s be seventeen again,” she suggests. Virginia and Nick each succumb to these methods of seduction. Jill, on the other hand, becomes only further isolated from her former KNOTS friends. Following Mrs Bailey’s all-too-convenient stroke, neither Mack nor Gary bother to conceal their suspicions about her. Ironically, this allows her to play the “Poor Jill” victim card. “It’s Val, isn’t it? … She sucked one more person into her little fantasy … What you think I did, Mack? Do you think I had Mrs Bailey write her suicide note?” she asks indignantly over the phone while burning the very papers she swiped from Mrs B’s closet (and wearing one of her hats for good measure). “What do I have to do to prove to you people I’m innocent — take a lie detector test?” she continues. And so Jill Bennett becomes the first Soap Land character to submit such a test since Wes Parmalee on DALLAS two years ago. Just like Wes, she passes with flying colours. In both cases, there is no explanation as to how the character has been able to outwit the machine, beyond a reminder that it is not a hundred per cent accurate. Karen’s suggestion, “Maybe Jill’s so far gone, she actually believes what she said was true”, echoes a similar line about Wes (“Maybe he went back to a time in his mind when he believed he really was Jock”) and is as close as we get. When the results of the test fail to convince anyone of Jill’s innocence, she begrudgingly agrees to see a shrink of Gary’s choosing, played by the same therapist who counselled Sue Ellen during her stay at the Dream Season Sanatarium. Dr Gilbert, as she is now known, turns out to be as wrong about Jill (“It is my considered opinion that she is not a danger to anyone”) as she was perceptive about Sue Ellen (specifically, her tendency to blame others for her problems). Lie detectors, shrinks and psychics — ultimately, they are as accurate as Soap Land’s plots require them to be. Just over a year ago, FALCON CREST’s anti-hero, Richard Channing, became a respectable married man when he wed the wholesome Maggie Gioberti. More recently, his Ewing-verse equivalents, Greg Sumner and JR Ewing, have followed suit by marrying Abby and Cally. Whereas JR is unhappy with this state of affairs (“Marriage was not on my agenda and married I do not wanna be,” he informs his new bride, who responds by planting a cream pie in his face), Greg appears to embrace it: “I didn’t think I’d ever get a shot at a life like that again. I didn’t want one. Things have changed. I feel like I’m part of a family now.” Both he and Richard make a public display of their new “family man” image this week. Mack watches briefly while Greg and Abby are portrayed as “the perfect American family” during a TV interview before turning his attention to Meg’s diapers: “I’d rather change it than listen to it.” On FC, Maggie has other concerns when she watches Richard being interviewed alongside Pilar Ortega on the 6 O’Clock News regarding his role as “benefactor of the new community centre.” “I told Richard not to wear that purple tie,” she frets. Richard goes on to explain that his newfound altruism is due to “the example set for me by my wife Maggie, to whom generosity is second nature.” Beneath the public facades, however, lie more complicated questions. “Is there anything going on between you and Pilar Ortega?” Maggie asks. Richard assures her there isn’t. “Did you know Pilar before she came back to the valley?” she continues. Again, he says no. Neither answer is the full truth. Back on KNOTS, Ted Melcher broaches an even thornier subject: “Why did Greg Sumner give up his baby?” “… Who cares? It doesn’t relate to the issues,” Greg replies. “That’s what Dukakis said when Bush started to talk about the pledge of allegiance,” retorts Ted. This is Soap Land’s first reference to George Bush Sr, who was sworn in as President of America just three weeks before this episode originally aired (Ronald Reagan having held the office since the day before Abby first met JR until the day after she married Greg). In another sign of the times, Michael Fairgate and his latest unrequited crush Ellen more or less invent the internet — or at the very least Google. “First, you start with your knowledge base which is kind of like a library of facts … then you write a programme called an inference engine which uses the knowledge base to draw to conclusions,” Ellen explains. “You guys must have been eating your Wheaties,” marvels their professor. Over on DALLAS, Sue Ellen, after rolling her eyes at the concept of an ATM machine a couple of weeks ago, claws back a modicum of credibility by introducing the term “significant other” to Soap Land. “That’s what they’re calling them these days,” she informs a slightly baffled Carter McKay. (DALLAS seems to be setting McKay and Sue Ellen up as future allies, but I think this ep is the last time we see them together.) While Clayton and Miss Ellie are off screen “having a wonderful time” in Europe for the second week in a row, Alexis is finally back from Natumbe. As this is her first appearance since Krystle’s poignant departure, one might have expected an acknowledgement in the same “let bygones be bygones” spirit of JR’s parting words to Ray Krebbs on DALLAS two weeks ago (“Right now, I only remember the good times”). Instead, Alexis’s sole reference to her former bête noire occurs as she is taunting Sable for trying to move in on Blake. “What a pity that Krystle’s still alive; that does cramp your style rather. Maybe you should send one of your henchmen to Switzerland and pull the plug on her,” she suggests. Sable is genuinely taken aback: “I don’t know another soul on earth that would make a remark as low as that.” Maybe not, but JR comes close as he quizzes Sue Ellen about Nicholas Pearce’s background, the first time he’s mentioned the man since killing him at the end of last season: “You two must have talked once in a while — couldn’t have spent all your time in the sack.” But even this remark pales in comparison to what he says after a vengeful Joseph Lombardi abducts him and demands to know who should be made to pay for his son’s death. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s my ex-wife Sue Ellen,” he insists. “If it hadn’t have been for her, your boy would still be alive.” The standout scene on this week’s DYNASTY is a mano-a-mano confrontation at the mansion. In front of the assembled Carrington clan, Zorelli angrily accuses Blake of using his influence with the police department to have him removed from the Roger Grimes case. “They put me behind a desk, took my gun … Do you have any idea what that means to a cop?!” he yells. “Sounds a bit like castration, doesn’t it?” snipes Adam on the sidelines. Blake is outraged by the allegation, Jeff and Adam take his side, Fallon defends her boyfriend, Virginia attempts to play peacemaker and pretty soon everyone’s shouting over each other, the camera’s shaking and Blake has to be restrained from physically attacking the younger man. “Get him out of here before I kill him!” he shouts. The whole thing is thrillingly out of control, in a KNOTS Season 4 type way. Just as Jill is now an outsider on KNOTS, Fallon’s decision to side with Zorelli places them on one side and the rest of the Carringtons on the other. After all the convoluted romances and storylines Fallon has experienced over the past nine years, it’s kind of remarkable that this relationship should feel as important as it does. While it obviously helps that their affair is tied into a much bigger storyline and that Fallon herself has been revamped so successfully this season, another crucial ingredient is Zorelli — arguably the show’s most rounded and certainly most down-to-earth male character since Matthew Blaisdel back in Season 1. KNOTS’ best scene is also a face-off between two men. Whereas Blake and Zorelli’s encounter is loud and chaotic, Greg and Mack’s is measured and controlled and takes place in the privacy of the latter’s office. In place of raised voices and snide remarks, there is small talk (Greg: “I was surprised to hear you were leaving the government” Mack: “I was surprised to hear you wanted back in”), prevarication (Greg: “Time has a tendency to change your perspective” Mack: “When did you become so philosophical?”) and an unspoken tension which is finally broken by Mack saying what Greg cannot bring himself to: “You want Meg back.” It feels significant that for this scene, Greg is dressed the same way he was for the speech in “Bouncing Babies” last season when he formally handed Meg over to the Mackenzies (camel brown overcoat, slicked-back hair). But whereas he stared directly into the camera lens back then, he now hides behind dark glasses, suggesting an inability to look either Mack or himself directly in the eye. At one point, their conversation turns to Laura’s death. “You looked like it didn’t matter,” says Mack. “Just because I didn’t flip over backwards and break into tears on the casket doesn’t mean I didn’t care,” Greg replies. The same accusation could be levelled at Sue Ellen following the death of Nicholas Pearce. She hasn’t flipped over backwards either, even though we’ve previously seen her dissolve into a self-piteous heap over far less. Maybe she’s done her grieving in private, away from both the other characters and the audience — as if she’s already started receding from our view, in preparation for her departure at the end of the season. A simpler explanation is provided by Sue Ellen herself in the last and best scene of this week’s DALLAS which, like Mack and Greg’s, is an office-based encounter. “I wanted to shut it out, to forget that evening ever happened,” she tells Joseph Lombardi, who wants to know if her account of the events leading up to Nick’s death matches JR’s. “You’re the only one left who can speak for my son,” he tells her poignantly. Given Lombardi’s “eye for an eye” philosophy, Sue Ellen essentially holds JR’s life in her hands — will she blame or exonerate him regarding his role in Nicholas’s death? The scene is also her only opportunity to express her grief on screen and Linda Gray makes the most of it, managing to imbue even a line as clunky as “I hated JR so much, I shot him and when he survived, I was furious” with genuine emotion. Proving how far she’s come since that Dream Season therapy session with Jill Bennett’s doctor, Sue Ellen ultimately takes the high road and admits responsibility for her own role in what occurred: “Nicholas loved me, he’d do anything for me, and because of that, he’s dead … If only I hadn’t insisted on him helping me look for John Ross, if only we hadn’t gone to JR’s condo that night, if only I had stopped the fight between JR and Nicholas before it got so violent. If only, if only — they’re such empty words.” It’s a little gem of a speech. FC also saves its best scene for last. Pilar sees Lance’s revelation that Cookie Nash is carrying his child and raises him a nine-year-old-daughter he never knew he had. Heck, he doesn’t even remember it being conceived. In circumstances remarkably similar to Adam and Dana’s backstory on DYNASTY, Pilar was a high school girl from the wrong side of the tracks with a big crush, Lance was a troubled teen too inebriated to know what he was doing, and together they made a baby. While Dana had an illegal abortion, Pilar went the unofficial adoption route (as did Greg with Meg) and gave the kid to her aunt to raise as her own. Minor trend of the week: witches. Dex Dexter alludes to Macbeth when he finds himself face to face with Sable and Joanna. “Now all we need is one more witch and a cauldron,” he quips. Meanwhile, Jill Bennett evokes Arthur Miller’s The Crucible during a wonderfully indignant speech to Gary: “During the Middle Ages, if they thought a woman was guilty of witchcraft, they’d bind her hands and feet and throw her in some water and if she sank, she was innocent — she was pretty much dead, but she was innocent — and if she floated, she was guilty. So they took her out, dried her off and burnt her at the stake. It was a no-win situation. Gary, I know exactly how those women felt.” And this week’s Top 4 are … 1 (2) KNOTS LANDING 2 (1) DYNASTY 3 (3) DALLAS 4 (4) FALCON CREST I hope I'm not guilty of "Peggy-bashing" as that wasn't my intention and I have no objection to her role as Mack's sidekick, I just find her heavy-handed approach to comedy quite grating (which, given that she mainly functions as light relief, is not ideal!). I don't know if you're familiar with a character from [I]The Good Wife[/I] (and its spinoff [I]The Good Fight[/I], which I haven't seen) called Elsbeth Tascioni, but she reminds me of Peggy an awful lot. The main difference is that her self-consciously whimsical wackiness is acknowledged by the other characters, which in theory, [I]should[/I] make it slightly less irritating. [MEDIA=youtube]0RRFHOZKHi0[/MEDIA] [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?
Post reply
Forums
Dallas the TV series
Knots Landing
KNOTS LANDING versus DALLAS versus the rest of them week by week
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
Accept
Learn more…
Top