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Dallas the TV series
Knots Landing
KNOTS LANDING versus DALLAS versus the rest of them week by week
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<blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 145259" data-attributes="member: 22"><p><u>22 Feb 89: DYNASTY: Virginia Reels v. 23 Feb 89: KNOTS LANDING: Poor Jill v. 24 Feb 89: DALLAS: Country Girl/Wedding Bell Blues </u></p><p></p><p>Trend of the week #1: Intruders who turn out to be benign. On DYNASTY, Zorelli is returning to his apartment when he spots a light on inside. He does the whole cop-bursting-through-a-door-with-a-gun thing only to find Fallon making him coq au vin for dinner. On KNOTS, Frank Williams receives a frantic phone call from Val: “There’s somebody outside the house and I think they’re trying to break in!” While she arms herself with a kitchen knife, he does the whole ex-cop-wrestling-a-stranger-to-the-ground thing only to discover that the man is a security guard Gary has hired to keep an eye on his ex-wife.</p><p></p><p>Trend of the week #2: Inadvertent discoveries. After finding Fallon in his kitchen, Zorelli takes a shower. Like any self-respecting Italian American archetype, he starts singing ‘That’s Amore’ at the top of his lungs which is why he doesn’t hear Fallon when she asks where he keeps his matches. So she opens a drawer, only to find … a surveillance photo of herself in Zorelli’s office looking at a photo of her father with Tommy McKay — I mean Roger Grimes. Over on DALLAS, Carter McKay is depositing clean shirts in his son Roger’s — I mean Tommy’s — room when he opens a drawer, only to find … a wrap of cocaine. When challenged, Tommy uses the same explanation Gary Ewing once used to explain why he was working as a barman in a casino: “I keep it like some alcoholics keep one bottle — just to remind me the nightmare that stuff was.”</p><p></p><p>Trend of the week #3: Soap Land characters physically attacked in their own offices. Adam Carrington’s meeting with Jeff and Fallon is interrupted by an outraged Dex Dexter. “You couldn’t leave her alone, huh? How do you live with yourself? What kind of a warped mind, huh? … I’m talking about Virginia!” he shouts. Adam backs away nervously (“Get out of here! … Call security!”) as Dex pursues him around his desk, knocking over a display stand in the process, before throwing him onto a couch and proceeding to throttle him. “Did you play rough with her, Adam, huh?” he continues, “slap her around a little bit, make you feel like a man?” Jeff intercedes, Adam makes a run for it, but then Dex leaps after him and pins him to the floor. (“Get him off me! He’s trying to kill me!”) Security guards arrive and restrain Dex, allowing Adam to strike back verbally. “Dex is upset because I know all about him and his little whore,” he sneers. Furious, Dex makes one last lunge at him: “I’m gonna kill you, Adam. I’m gonna kill you, I swear!”</p><p></p><p>It’s a terrific battle and the fun doesn’t stop after Jeff finally drags Dex away to cool off. The allegations Adam then makes to Fallon are among the most sordid in Soap Land history: “Virginia was Dex’s little plaything years ago. She was fifteen, sixteen … Dex picked her up, made her do things even she hadn’t done before. He called her Ginger. Isn’t that cute?” Fallon is stunned: “Dex never said anything about …” “About what — taking a minor to bed, dressing her up like a whore, doing God-knows-what with her … taking pictures of her?” As anomalous as Virginia’s story has sometimes felt (it’s about the only plot-line of this season’s DYNASTY that isn’t somehow tied to the bottom-of-the-lake mystery), it’s all worth it for this scene. Fallon’s final response — “I always wondered what you were made of, Adam. Now I know: it comes out the back of a horse” — combines the scatological aspects of Mack Mackenzie’s recent comparison between Greg’s TV segment and Meg’s full diaper (“I’d rather change it than listen to it”) and Cliff’s putdown of JR last week (“You are proctologist’s dream — the biggest horse’s behind I have ever seen”).</p><p></p><p>There are two more workplace attacks, each of which occurs in Jill Bennett’s office on KNOTS. First of all, Gary appears in the outer office and startles secretary Joy by emptying a box full of the kind of paper cups Red Buttons disapproved of so vocally at the beginning of last season. He then barges into Jill’s office and starts filling the box with objects from her desk. “Time to go,” he informs her. “Time to pack up and move back to Ukiah or Sacramento or wherever the hell you come from.” As Adam did Dex, she tells him to get out of her office. “Get out of my life!” he snarls back. But whereas Dex immediately had Adam on the run, Jill keeps her cool. “I am not gonna give up my career just because you and a cul-de-sac full of your crazy friends wanna get rid of me,” she tells him firmly. By contrast, Gary’s anger builds and builds. “I will make you lose your job,” he vows. “I will make you lose your career unless you go away quietly and forever … I’ll do whatever I have to to get you out of my life. YOU GOT THAT?!” Finally, he sends the box he’s been packing flying across the room, overturns a chair and storms out. Where Adam started yelling for help as soon as Dex barged into his office, it’s only now that Gary has gone that Jill calmly instructs Joy to call the police.</p><p></p><p>Jill’s second unscheduled visitor is Val. This time, there is no meeting to interrupt, no secretary in the outer office — Jill is alone. Val strides straight into her office to find her seated behind her desk. “Stay away from my children,” she tells her, referring to Jill’s encounter with Bobby and Betsy earlier that day. Val is as angry as Dex and Gary were, maybe even more so, but her fury is colder and more measured, possibly making her even more intimidating. Certainly, Jill doesn’t wait before attempting to summon help this time around. “Joy, would you call the police, please?” she asks, only Joy isn’t there to hear her. “It’s one thing if you attack me,” Val continues, moving nearer to her, “but don’t you ever threaten my children. Do you hear me? Do you understand?” Jill stands, the shakiness of the camerawork mirroring her own reaction. “I had no intention of seeing your children,” she protests, “and I most certainly did not threaten them.” One can’t be sure, but one gets the sense that Jill’s meeting with the twins <em>was </em>accidental and so, for once, she is innocent of what she is being accused of. Val, however, is too far gone to listen to reason. She picks up a pair of scissors from Jill’s desk and wields them threateningly. “You’re lying, Jill,” she says, “just like you’ve always lied.” Jill calls out for Joy again, before making a grab for the phone, which Val knocks to the floor. “You think you can get away with anything but you can’t,” she continues, “not anymore because nobody believes you anymore, nobody trusts you anymore. This is the last time you’re gonna threaten anyone.” By now truly frightened, Jill picks up a chair with which to defend herself, but Val takes it away from her with ease. “You wanna know what it’s like to feel terror, huh?” Val asks, looking down the camera lens, thereby mirroring Jill’s position when she held Val at gunpoint at the end of last season, “To be afraid of every sound, not just for your own sake, but your children’s and your family’s?” She then casually overturns the desk, fuelled by the same unpredictable, what-have-I-got-to-lose strength as Krystle in her last scene with Alexis where she pushed that book into her throat. As she herself points out, “This is <em>not</em> poor Val talking — poor Val, poor Val, poor Val; from now on, it’s gonna be poor Jill.” Poor Jill then manages to escape by tossing a random bit of stationery in Val’s direction and making a dash for freedom.</p><p></p><p>Val is not the only meek and mild character pushed to violent extremes. Nor is Jill the only villainess to get a taste of her own medicine. Sable Colby has been having fun taunting Fritz Heath, Colby Co’s controller and a compulsive gambler whom she has threatened to destroy unless he supplies her with information she can use against Alexis. In the grand Soap Land tradition of “little men pushed too far” (Walt Driscoll and Edgar Randolph on DALLAS, Neil McVane on DYNASTY, Dr Lantry on FALCON CREST), he finally snaps and pulls a gun on Sable at the end of this week’s ep (“You’re pushing me against a wall and I just can’t take it anymore! … I can’t go to jail! I’d go crazy if I were to go to jail!” “Fritz, no!”).</p><p></p><p>Elsewhere on DYNASTY, Cousin Virginia packs her bags and leaves the Carrington mansion for good, somehow managing to fashion a happy ending from her humiliation by Adam: “In some ways, Blake, I think he did me a favour. All my life I’ve felt like I was less than everybody else … I don’t feel that way anymore.” Well, good for her. Over on DALLAS, Cally packs her bags and almost leaves Southfork — but is persuaded to stay by JR after casually mentioning that she’s pregnant.</p><p></p><p>DYNASTY’s Dex and KNOTS LANDING’s Ted Melcher both find themselves in the delicate position of brokering a meeting between two opposing parties this week. “It’s very important that I talk with Blake,” Sable tells Dex. “I don’t think he will take my call … so I want you to set up a meeting for me.” “The four of you need to sit down and talk,” Ted tells Greg and Abby, referring to their custody dispute with the Mackenzies. “I’ll make the approach.” While Dex’s intercession with Blake occurs offscreen, Ted’s visit to the Mackenzie house, whereupon Mack closes the door in his face, leads to further conflict. First, Mack picks on Paige over her association with Ted (“Is that the jerk you’ve been dating or the clown you just broke up with?”) and then Paige and Ted have a shouting match in the cul-de-sac. “You don’t care about reuniting a family,” yells Paige. “You wanna assemble a portrait, make a better photo opportunity. You don’t care about that little girl in there!”</p><p></p><p>However reluctantly, Karen and Mack show up for the meeting with Greg and Abby and their respective attorneys. The glass-walled office it takes place in is our first glimpse of the Sumner Group (although it has yet to be referred to as such). The bureaucratic red tape Tanner McBride must untangle on DYNASTY before he can help a sixteen-year-old girl in need is mirrored by the legal doublespeak the Mackenzies are faced with in this scene. “We’re here to find only mutually agreeable ways to minimise whatever adverse impact attendant publicity might have on Meg,” decrees the Sumners’ attorney. “Do you pay this guy by the syllable or what?” Mack asks Greg. From there, things go swiftly downhill. “This has nothing to do with Meg’s welfare,” argues Karen. “This is the most cynical, self-serving thing I’ve ever witnessed!” “Self-serving?” Abby retorts. “Karen, do you think no-one notices that you are totally unable to deal with the fact that you are not God’s gift to children?” “Who appointed you God anyhow?” echoes JR on DALLAS as he questions Bobby’s claim that going into business with Cliff is “what was best for Ewing Oil and the family.”</p><p></p><p>Sable’s scene with Blake is less confrontational than the Sumner/Mackenzie summit but does provide her with an opportunity to delineate her role in various storylines. “My search for what’s buried under the lake, my attacks on Alexis and my friendship with you and Krystle are three entirely separate things,” she explains. She is full of contrition and humility in front of Blake, but when Dex subsequently commends her on her honesty, she is offended: “I resent the implication that my telling the truth is some major event!” Yet for all her moral indignation, there is a darker side to Sable, one that enjoys belittling not only someone of equal standing like Alexis but also those socially and economically beneath her, such as employee Joanna or the hapless Fritz Heath. “Sable Colby is a bully,” Adam declares and he kind of has a point. The likes of Abby or even JR would never humiliate an underling as diligent as Joanna just for the hell of it. So which Sable is the real Sable — or can bad girls be good girls too? Karen asks a similar question on KNOTS. “Is that the new Abby talking or the old Abby?” she wonders after her sister-in-law insists that she would make an equally good mother for Meg. “It’s the new Abby until after the election,” Mack replies. The good intentions of two other so-called bad girls are also met with cynicism this week. “Like <em>your</em> character and nobility of purpose are above question,” sneers Ted during his argument with Paige. “I am no saint,” she concedes, “but I would never do to a child what you are doing to Meg.” Meanwhile on DALLAS, JR dismisses April’s misgivings about their scheme to double-cross Cliff and Bobby thusly: “I thought you were a businesswoman, not some bleeding heart social worker.”</p><p></p><p>When the Sumner/Mackenzie conference ends in a stalemate, Greg asks Paige to arrange another sensitive encounter, this time between himself and Meg. Their subsequent meeting strongly echoes a scene from DALLAS’s fourth season where Sue Ellen looked on as JR, from whom she was divorced at the time, played happily with John Ross. Both scenes are set in a park and this time Paige is the silent bystander. We watch as her attitude, like Sue Ellen’s before her, softens in spite of herself while Greg, like JR, merrily improvises his dialogue to accommodate the toddler’s spontaneous reactions.</p><p></p><p>Two of the Ewingverse’s morally dubious male characters end up setting self-interest aside and taking the high road this week. Towards the end of this week’s KNOTS, Greg makes a televised announcement that “for Meg’s sake, I have decided to leave her with the Mackenzies … It’s the best thing for her. If that loses me the election, so be it.” On DALLAS, John Ross overcomes his resentment towards Cally as he tells JR about his pool accident in last week’s ep. “She isn’t so bad … she saved my life,” he admits. While Abby and Ted are dismayed by Greg’s actions (“He doesn’t look like he wants to win”), John Ross’s confession brings JR one step closer to publicly acknowledging Cally as his wife.</p><p></p><p>Towards the end of this week’s ep, KNOTS does something no soap has done previously. It takes the two characters we’ve known longest and places them in an intentionally ambiguous situation where we’re not sure what they’re doing or why. The sequence starts outside Jill’s apartment building. First, Gary emerges from inside, wiping his hands clean. Then Val pulls up. He tells her to go home, but she persuades him to go for a walk with her instead. After that, the camera pulls away from them. We observe them from a distance talking intently on a park bench — Gary appears to be explaining something, Val gets upset — but their voices are drowned out by the musical score. They then embrace before returning to their cars and driving away separately. What’s going on? What were they talking about and why were we watching them? These questions are followed by more. What is the piece of material protruding from Gary’s trunk as he drives away? Why are the cops following him back to his ranch? Why does he not immediately comply when they order him to pull over? Then comes the shocking reveal when Gary, under police instruction, pops the truck to expose Jill’s body, bound and gagged. Even after the frame has frozen, the camera continues to move in on Jill's face, rotating anti-clockwise, thereby creating the visual equivalent of a stomach lurch. It’s Soap Land’s most disorientating freeze frame since I don’t know when.</p><p></p><p>DALLAS also teases us by withholding crucial information from the viewer. It’s not until the last scene of this week’s double bill that we learn of a scheme that has been previously cooked up by Cally and Sue Ellen at some unspecified point in time. Lying in bed after consummating their marriage, JR asks Cally the exact same question he asked Sue Ellen way back in the final scene of “Act of Love” (Season 1): “How long have you been pregnant?” The answer proves as controversial now as it did in 1978: “With any luck at all, about ten minutes.” Instead of slapping Cally round the face as he did Sue Ellen over <em>her</em> pregnancy deception, JR chuckles appreciatively. “This was Sue Ellen’s idea?” he asks. “No, my idea, but she helped me,” Cally replies. “You just might have the stuff to make a proper Ewing wife after all,” he declares.</p><p></p><p>Just as it emerged at the start of this season’s DYNASTY that Krystle had been keeping a diary all these years without our knowledge, so we learn the same thing about Sue Ellen this week. “You’ll know more about me than any other person alive,” she tells Don Lockwood grandiosely as she hands him her journals. As chance would have it, the first page he turns to leads to a flashback of DALLAS’s most-watched moment — the reveal of Kristin as JR’s shooter. Within this flashback is another flashback — the shooting itself. This “Russian doll” effect is similar to the scene in Zorelli’s apartment where Fallon looks at a photo of herself looking at a photo of Blake with Roger Grimes.</p><p></p><p>While Alexis is off on her travels once again (“Europe for a few days, some kind of business I think,” Adam tells his father), Miss Ellie is back from hers (Europe for a few weeks, visiting Ray and Jenna in Switzerland — one likes to imagine she and Clayton found time to drop in on Krystle). She wastes little time in making her presence felt. In fact, the highlight of the first of this week’s DALLAS eps is a mother/son showdown where she appears to be channeling Jock, first reprimanding JR for not showing up for meals (“Have you forgotten that this family still eats dinner together?”) then ordering him to sort out his marriage: “I want you to go upstairs and tell Cally you accept her as your wife — or divorce her.”</p><p></p><p>With its strong backstory and sense of place, its social traditions and array of recurring characters, DALLAS has always had the strongest and most consistent identity of all the soaps. Perhaps that’s why, now that the genre is in decline, it’s also the most visibly wounded. Dwindling budgets means not only the loss of central characters but also familiar supporting players and locations (Punk and Mavis Anderson and Harry McSween have all now made their final appearances, while no more filming in Texas means the end of the Oil Baron’s Ball and the Ewing barbecue, and that the real Southfork won’t be seen again until the reunion movies). What’s interesting, and somewhat touching, is that the series does not attempt to distract from these losses by reinventing itself creatively the way this season’s DYNASTY or FALCON CREST have done (and the way DALLAS did itself did during the Dream Season). Instead, it clings all the harder to what is left of the familiar. Hence this season’s hearkening back to the show’s pre-history — Section 40, the DOA, Miss Ellie’s horsewhip story, and her recollection this week of how raising chickens kept her and her daddy alive during the Depression. Nor is the show afraid to directly recall its glory days via Sue Ellen’s flashbacks — even as they threaten to eclipse the series’ present-day storylines. (This week we revisit the shooting of JR, JR bedding Afton at Lucy’s wedding and the duel in the pool at JR and Sue Ellen’s second wedding.) This isn’t a show that has lost touch with its own history; quite the opposite in fact.</p><p></p><p>Key to making the old seem new again is Cally: it’s through her unsophisticated, uncynical, undemanding eyes that we revisit DALLAS’s past afresh. By previous DALLAS standards, her wedding to JR isn’t particularly impressive. April Stevens may call it “the biggest show in town” but the cardboard patio has never looked cardboardier and in spite of Carter McKay’s assurances that there are “some big names here”, there’s not even a cartel member to be seen. In fact, the most notable guests in attendance are the Ewing Oil secretaries, previously considered too lowly to be invited to a Southfork wedding. (“I just love it when someone makes <em>me</em> coffee!” trills Sly excitedly, as well she might.) But through Cally’s eyes, which essentially become our eyes for much of the second ep, the wedding is a fairytale come true, cardboard patio and all. Heck, what does she have to compare it to? She most likely never owned a TV set, much less one that showed the '80s super-soaps in their pomp.</p><p></p><p>Running counter to Cally’s wide-eyed wonder is Tommy McKay’s caged-animal restlessness. I’m guessing he didn’t watch the' 80s super-soaps either, but you can still understand why he dismisses the entire state of Texas as “slightly south of boring”, makes a pass at every blonde under thirty (Cally, April, Sly), and ends up on the Southfork balcony during a thunderstorm, half-naked and howling at the moon.</p><p></p><p>The DALLAS wedding ep has much in common with “Stormy Weather”, the budget-saving bottle episode from last season’s FALCON CREST. In both cases, adverse weather conditions oblige all the major characters (including a pair of newlyweds who would otherwise be on their honeymoon) to spend the night under the same roof. For me, the FC ep suffered from an excess of winking-at-the-camera style comedy. A similar, if less extreme, self-awareness occasionally surfaces on DALLAS as well. Lucy introduces the idea of the Southfork wedding curse (“If I ever get married again, I’ll be saying my vows at the nearest moose lodge”) and later uses a camcorder to mischievously record a business argument between JR, Bobby and Cliff — something one could easily imagine Emma, Melissa or Carly Fixx doing. Cliff also joins with the larks himself: “I’ve never stayed here at Southfork — I think it might be fun!”</p><p></p><p>Sue Ellen’s having fun too. “Being married to JR is like a Hitchcock movie,” she quips. “You start out laughing and then you find yourself screaming in terror.” It’s a good line and also the first time that Soap Land’s most overt cinematic influence has been mentioned by name. (Not to be outdone, Greg Sumner name checks the director of <em>It’s a Wonderful Life</em>, among other films, over on KNOTS. “Me and Frank Capra — we don’t do makeup,” he jokes prior to his TV appearance.) And the episode ends with Sue Ellen popping a balloon outside JR and Cally’s bridal bedroom (insert your own Freudian gag). Aside from the levity, however, Sue Ellen also brings a lifetime of heartache and regret to the wedding. Alongside Tommy McKay’s dangerous restlessness, it provides another counterpoint to Cally’s innocence and optimism and prevents the episode from straying too far into sitcom territory. Just as Krystle’s wedding to Blake served as a backdrop to her departure from DYNASTY six weeks ago, so JR and Cally’s provides an opportunity for Sue Ellen to take one last moist-eyed, bittersweet look around the ranch. (Granted, she’s got nine more episodes until she actually leaves the show, but it’s this episode — where she hands the title of “Mrs JR Ewing” over to Cally — that really feels like the end of an era.)</p><p></p><p>Once again, Soap Land’s rich are provided with a glimpse of a grimmer world existing just beyond their glamorous confines. On DYNASTY, a frustratedly desk-bound Zorelli shows Fallon a couple of police files: “This kid here, he got in the way of a street gang fight. This animal, he killed his four-year-old kid … Putting these people behind bars, that’s being a cop.” Meanwhile, Sammy Jo finds her new pal Tanner McBride arguing with a hospital administrator about the teenage addict on his watch: “They’re trying to send her back to her parents, nice sweet folks who enjoy beating her senseless … Maybe she just slits her wrists. She has tried to kill herself twice.” Over at Southfork, Miss Ellie is keen to disabuse new daughter-in-law Cally of the notion that “everyone in Dallas is rich.” “No, they’re not,” she tells her. “That’s why the DOA was invented … We have programmes for the elderly and the homeless.” Following Krystle’s charitable crusade and Mack’s recent court victory, it would appear homelessness has replaced AIDS as Soap Land’s social issue du jour.</p><p></p><p>And this week’s Top 3 are …</p><p></p><p>1 (1) KNOTS LANDING</p><p>2 (2) DYNASTY</p><p>3 (3) DALLAS</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James from London, post: 145259, member: 22"] [U]22 Feb 89: DYNASTY: Virginia Reels v. 23 Feb 89: KNOTS LANDING: Poor Jill v. 24 Feb 89: DALLAS: Country Girl/Wedding Bell Blues [/U] Trend of the week #1: Intruders who turn out to be benign. On DYNASTY, Zorelli is returning to his apartment when he spots a light on inside. He does the whole cop-bursting-through-a-door-with-a-gun thing only to find Fallon making him coq au vin for dinner. On KNOTS, Frank Williams receives a frantic phone call from Val: “There’s somebody outside the house and I think they’re trying to break in!” While she arms herself with a kitchen knife, he does the whole ex-cop-wrestling-a-stranger-to-the-ground thing only to discover that the man is a security guard Gary has hired to keep an eye on his ex-wife. Trend of the week #2: Inadvertent discoveries. After finding Fallon in his kitchen, Zorelli takes a shower. Like any self-respecting Italian American archetype, he starts singing ‘That’s Amore’ at the top of his lungs which is why he doesn’t hear Fallon when she asks where he keeps his matches. So she opens a drawer, only to find … a surveillance photo of herself in Zorelli’s office looking at a photo of her father with Tommy McKay — I mean Roger Grimes. Over on DALLAS, Carter McKay is depositing clean shirts in his son Roger’s — I mean Tommy’s — room when he opens a drawer, only to find … a wrap of cocaine. When challenged, Tommy uses the same explanation Gary Ewing once used to explain why he was working as a barman in a casino: “I keep it like some alcoholics keep one bottle — just to remind me the nightmare that stuff was.” Trend of the week #3: Soap Land characters physically attacked in their own offices. Adam Carrington’s meeting with Jeff and Fallon is interrupted by an outraged Dex Dexter. “You couldn’t leave her alone, huh? How do you live with yourself? What kind of a warped mind, huh? … I’m talking about Virginia!” he shouts. Adam backs away nervously (“Get out of here! … Call security!”) as Dex pursues him around his desk, knocking over a display stand in the process, before throwing him onto a couch and proceeding to throttle him. “Did you play rough with her, Adam, huh?” he continues, “slap her around a little bit, make you feel like a man?” Jeff intercedes, Adam makes a run for it, but then Dex leaps after him and pins him to the floor. (“Get him off me! He’s trying to kill me!”) Security guards arrive and restrain Dex, allowing Adam to strike back verbally. “Dex is upset because I know all about him and his little whore,” he sneers. Furious, Dex makes one last lunge at him: “I’m gonna kill you, Adam. I’m gonna kill you, I swear!” It’s a terrific battle and the fun doesn’t stop after Jeff finally drags Dex away to cool off. The allegations Adam then makes to Fallon are among the most sordid in Soap Land history: “Virginia was Dex’s little plaything years ago. She was fifteen, sixteen … Dex picked her up, made her do things even she hadn’t done before. He called her Ginger. Isn’t that cute?” Fallon is stunned: “Dex never said anything about …” “About what — taking a minor to bed, dressing her up like a whore, doing God-knows-what with her … taking pictures of her?” As anomalous as Virginia’s story has sometimes felt (it’s about the only plot-line of this season’s DYNASTY that isn’t somehow tied to the bottom-of-the-lake mystery), it’s all worth it for this scene. Fallon’s final response — “I always wondered what you were made of, Adam. Now I know: it comes out the back of a horse” — combines the scatological aspects of Mack Mackenzie’s recent comparison between Greg’s TV segment and Meg’s full diaper (“I’d rather change it than listen to it”) and Cliff’s putdown of JR last week (“You are proctologist’s dream — the biggest horse’s behind I have ever seen”). There are two more workplace attacks, each of which occurs in Jill Bennett’s office on KNOTS. First of all, Gary appears in the outer office and startles secretary Joy by emptying a box full of the kind of paper cups Red Buttons disapproved of so vocally at the beginning of last season. He then barges into Jill’s office and starts filling the box with objects from her desk. “Time to go,” he informs her. “Time to pack up and move back to Ukiah or Sacramento or wherever the hell you come from.” As Adam did Dex, she tells him to get out of her office. “Get out of my life!” he snarls back. But whereas Dex immediately had Adam on the run, Jill keeps her cool. “I am not gonna give up my career just because you and a cul-de-sac full of your crazy friends wanna get rid of me,” she tells him firmly. By contrast, Gary’s anger builds and builds. “I will make you lose your job,” he vows. “I will make you lose your career unless you go away quietly and forever … I’ll do whatever I have to to get you out of my life. YOU GOT THAT?!” Finally, he sends the box he’s been packing flying across the room, overturns a chair and storms out. Where Adam started yelling for help as soon as Dex barged into his office, it’s only now that Gary has gone that Jill calmly instructs Joy to call the police. Jill’s second unscheduled visitor is Val. This time, there is no meeting to interrupt, no secretary in the outer office — Jill is alone. Val strides straight into her office to find her seated behind her desk. “Stay away from my children,” she tells her, referring to Jill’s encounter with Bobby and Betsy earlier that day. Val is as angry as Dex and Gary were, maybe even more so, but her fury is colder and more measured, possibly making her even more intimidating. Certainly, Jill doesn’t wait before attempting to summon help this time around. “Joy, would you call the police, please?” she asks, only Joy isn’t there to hear her. “It’s one thing if you attack me,” Val continues, moving nearer to her, “but don’t you ever threaten my children. Do you hear me? Do you understand?” Jill stands, the shakiness of the camerawork mirroring her own reaction. “I had no intention of seeing your children,” she protests, “and I most certainly did not threaten them.” One can’t be sure, but one gets the sense that Jill’s meeting with the twins [I]was [/I]accidental and so, for once, she is innocent of what she is being accused of. Val, however, is too far gone to listen to reason. She picks up a pair of scissors from Jill’s desk and wields them threateningly. “You’re lying, Jill,” she says, “just like you’ve always lied.” Jill calls out for Joy again, before making a grab for the phone, which Val knocks to the floor. “You think you can get away with anything but you can’t,” she continues, “not anymore because nobody believes you anymore, nobody trusts you anymore. This is the last time you’re gonna threaten anyone.” By now truly frightened, Jill picks up a chair with which to defend herself, but Val takes it away from her with ease. “You wanna know what it’s like to feel terror, huh?” Val asks, looking down the camera lens, thereby mirroring Jill’s position when she held Val at gunpoint at the end of last season, “To be afraid of every sound, not just for your own sake, but your children’s and your family’s?” She then casually overturns the desk, fuelled by the same unpredictable, what-have-I-got-to-lose strength as Krystle in her last scene with Alexis where she pushed that book into her throat. As she herself points out, “This is [I]not[/I] poor Val talking — poor Val, poor Val, poor Val; from now on, it’s gonna be poor Jill.” Poor Jill then manages to escape by tossing a random bit of stationery in Val’s direction and making a dash for freedom. Val is not the only meek and mild character pushed to violent extremes. Nor is Jill the only villainess to get a taste of her own medicine. Sable Colby has been having fun taunting Fritz Heath, Colby Co’s controller and a compulsive gambler whom she has threatened to destroy unless he supplies her with information she can use against Alexis. In the grand Soap Land tradition of “little men pushed too far” (Walt Driscoll and Edgar Randolph on DALLAS, Neil McVane on DYNASTY, Dr Lantry on FALCON CREST), he finally snaps and pulls a gun on Sable at the end of this week’s ep (“You’re pushing me against a wall and I just can’t take it anymore! … I can’t go to jail! I’d go crazy if I were to go to jail!” “Fritz, no!”). Elsewhere on DYNASTY, Cousin Virginia packs her bags and leaves the Carrington mansion for good, somehow managing to fashion a happy ending from her humiliation by Adam: “In some ways, Blake, I think he did me a favour. All my life I’ve felt like I was less than everybody else … I don’t feel that way anymore.” Well, good for her. Over on DALLAS, Cally packs her bags and almost leaves Southfork — but is persuaded to stay by JR after casually mentioning that she’s pregnant. DYNASTY’s Dex and KNOTS LANDING’s Ted Melcher both find themselves in the delicate position of brokering a meeting between two opposing parties this week. “It’s very important that I talk with Blake,” Sable tells Dex. “I don’t think he will take my call … so I want you to set up a meeting for me.” “The four of you need to sit down and talk,” Ted tells Greg and Abby, referring to their custody dispute with the Mackenzies. “I’ll make the approach.” While Dex’s intercession with Blake occurs offscreen, Ted’s visit to the Mackenzie house, whereupon Mack closes the door in his face, leads to further conflict. First, Mack picks on Paige over her association with Ted (“Is that the jerk you’ve been dating or the clown you just broke up with?”) and then Paige and Ted have a shouting match in the cul-de-sac. “You don’t care about reuniting a family,” yells Paige. “You wanna assemble a portrait, make a better photo opportunity. You don’t care about that little girl in there!” However reluctantly, Karen and Mack show up for the meeting with Greg and Abby and their respective attorneys. The glass-walled office it takes place in is our first glimpse of the Sumner Group (although it has yet to be referred to as such). The bureaucratic red tape Tanner McBride must untangle on DYNASTY before he can help a sixteen-year-old girl in need is mirrored by the legal doublespeak the Mackenzies are faced with in this scene. “We’re here to find only mutually agreeable ways to minimise whatever adverse impact attendant publicity might have on Meg,” decrees the Sumners’ attorney. “Do you pay this guy by the syllable or what?” Mack asks Greg. From there, things go swiftly downhill. “This has nothing to do with Meg’s welfare,” argues Karen. “This is the most cynical, self-serving thing I’ve ever witnessed!” “Self-serving?” Abby retorts. “Karen, do you think no-one notices that you are totally unable to deal with the fact that you are not God’s gift to children?” “Who appointed you God anyhow?” echoes JR on DALLAS as he questions Bobby’s claim that going into business with Cliff is “what was best for Ewing Oil and the family.” Sable’s scene with Blake is less confrontational than the Sumner/Mackenzie summit but does provide her with an opportunity to delineate her role in various storylines. “My search for what’s buried under the lake, my attacks on Alexis and my friendship with you and Krystle are three entirely separate things,” she explains. She is full of contrition and humility in front of Blake, but when Dex subsequently commends her on her honesty, she is offended: “I resent the implication that my telling the truth is some major event!” Yet for all her moral indignation, there is a darker side to Sable, one that enjoys belittling not only someone of equal standing like Alexis but also those socially and economically beneath her, such as employee Joanna or the hapless Fritz Heath. “Sable Colby is a bully,” Adam declares and he kind of has a point. The likes of Abby or even JR would never humiliate an underling as diligent as Joanna just for the hell of it. So which Sable is the real Sable — or can bad girls be good girls too? Karen asks a similar question on KNOTS. “Is that the new Abby talking or the old Abby?” she wonders after her sister-in-law insists that she would make an equally good mother for Meg. “It’s the new Abby until after the election,” Mack replies. The good intentions of two other so-called bad girls are also met with cynicism this week. “Like [I]your[/I] character and nobility of purpose are above question,” sneers Ted during his argument with Paige. “I am no saint,” she concedes, “but I would never do to a child what you are doing to Meg.” Meanwhile on DALLAS, JR dismisses April’s misgivings about their scheme to double-cross Cliff and Bobby thusly: “I thought you were a businesswoman, not some bleeding heart social worker.” When the Sumner/Mackenzie conference ends in a stalemate, Greg asks Paige to arrange another sensitive encounter, this time between himself and Meg. Their subsequent meeting strongly echoes a scene from DALLAS’s fourth season where Sue Ellen looked on as JR, from whom she was divorced at the time, played happily with John Ross. Both scenes are set in a park and this time Paige is the silent bystander. We watch as her attitude, like Sue Ellen’s before her, softens in spite of herself while Greg, like JR, merrily improvises his dialogue to accommodate the toddler’s spontaneous reactions. Two of the Ewingverse’s morally dubious male characters end up setting self-interest aside and taking the high road this week. Towards the end of this week’s KNOTS, Greg makes a televised announcement that “for Meg’s sake, I have decided to leave her with the Mackenzies … It’s the best thing for her. If that loses me the election, so be it.” On DALLAS, John Ross overcomes his resentment towards Cally as he tells JR about his pool accident in last week’s ep. “She isn’t so bad … she saved my life,” he admits. While Abby and Ted are dismayed by Greg’s actions (“He doesn’t look like he wants to win”), John Ross’s confession brings JR one step closer to publicly acknowledging Cally as his wife. Towards the end of this week’s ep, KNOTS does something no soap has done previously. It takes the two characters we’ve known longest and places them in an intentionally ambiguous situation where we’re not sure what they’re doing or why. The sequence starts outside Jill’s apartment building. First, Gary emerges from inside, wiping his hands clean. Then Val pulls up. He tells her to go home, but she persuades him to go for a walk with her instead. After that, the camera pulls away from them. We observe them from a distance talking intently on a park bench — Gary appears to be explaining something, Val gets upset — but their voices are drowned out by the musical score. They then embrace before returning to their cars and driving away separately. What’s going on? What were they talking about and why were we watching them? These questions are followed by more. What is the piece of material protruding from Gary’s trunk as he drives away? Why are the cops following him back to his ranch? Why does he not immediately comply when they order him to pull over? Then comes the shocking reveal when Gary, under police instruction, pops the truck to expose Jill’s body, bound and gagged. Even after the frame has frozen, the camera continues to move in on Jill's face, rotating anti-clockwise, thereby creating the visual equivalent of a stomach lurch. It’s Soap Land’s most disorientating freeze frame since I don’t know when. DALLAS also teases us by withholding crucial information from the viewer. It’s not until the last scene of this week’s double bill that we learn of a scheme that has been previously cooked up by Cally and Sue Ellen at some unspecified point in time. Lying in bed after consummating their marriage, JR asks Cally the exact same question he asked Sue Ellen way back in the final scene of “Act of Love” (Season 1): “How long have you been pregnant?” The answer proves as controversial now as it did in 1978: “With any luck at all, about ten minutes.” Instead of slapping Cally round the face as he did Sue Ellen over [I]her[/I] pregnancy deception, JR chuckles appreciatively. “This was Sue Ellen’s idea?” he asks. “No, my idea, but she helped me,” Cally replies. “You just might have the stuff to make a proper Ewing wife after all,” he declares. Just as it emerged at the start of this season’s DYNASTY that Krystle had been keeping a diary all these years without our knowledge, so we learn the same thing about Sue Ellen this week. “You’ll know more about me than any other person alive,” she tells Don Lockwood grandiosely as she hands him her journals. As chance would have it, the first page he turns to leads to a flashback of DALLAS’s most-watched moment — the reveal of Kristin as JR’s shooter. Within this flashback is another flashback — the shooting itself. This “Russian doll” effect is similar to the scene in Zorelli’s apartment where Fallon looks at a photo of herself looking at a photo of Blake with Roger Grimes. While Alexis is off on her travels once again (“Europe for a few days, some kind of business I think,” Adam tells his father), Miss Ellie is back from hers (Europe for a few weeks, visiting Ray and Jenna in Switzerland — one likes to imagine she and Clayton found time to drop in on Krystle). She wastes little time in making her presence felt. In fact, the highlight of the first of this week’s DALLAS eps is a mother/son showdown where she appears to be channeling Jock, first reprimanding JR for not showing up for meals (“Have you forgotten that this family still eats dinner together?”) then ordering him to sort out his marriage: “I want you to go upstairs and tell Cally you accept her as your wife — or divorce her.” With its strong backstory and sense of place, its social traditions and array of recurring characters, DALLAS has always had the strongest and most consistent identity of all the soaps. Perhaps that’s why, now that the genre is in decline, it’s also the most visibly wounded. Dwindling budgets means not only the loss of central characters but also familiar supporting players and locations (Punk and Mavis Anderson and Harry McSween have all now made their final appearances, while no more filming in Texas means the end of the Oil Baron’s Ball and the Ewing barbecue, and that the real Southfork won’t be seen again until the reunion movies). What’s interesting, and somewhat touching, is that the series does not attempt to distract from these losses by reinventing itself creatively the way this season’s DYNASTY or FALCON CREST have done (and the way DALLAS did itself did during the Dream Season). Instead, it clings all the harder to what is left of the familiar. Hence this season’s hearkening back to the show’s pre-history — Section 40, the DOA, Miss Ellie’s horsewhip story, and her recollection this week of how raising chickens kept her and her daddy alive during the Depression. Nor is the show afraid to directly recall its glory days via Sue Ellen’s flashbacks — even as they threaten to eclipse the series’ present-day storylines. (This week we revisit the shooting of JR, JR bedding Afton at Lucy’s wedding and the duel in the pool at JR and Sue Ellen’s second wedding.) This isn’t a show that has lost touch with its own history; quite the opposite in fact. Key to making the old seem new again is Cally: it’s through her unsophisticated, uncynical, undemanding eyes that we revisit DALLAS’s past afresh. By previous DALLAS standards, her wedding to JR isn’t particularly impressive. April Stevens may call it “the biggest show in town” but the cardboard patio has never looked cardboardier and in spite of Carter McKay’s assurances that there are “some big names here”, there’s not even a cartel member to be seen. In fact, the most notable guests in attendance are the Ewing Oil secretaries, previously considered too lowly to be invited to a Southfork wedding. (“I just love it when someone makes [I]me[/I] coffee!” trills Sly excitedly, as well she might.) But through Cally’s eyes, which essentially become our eyes for much of the second ep, the wedding is a fairytale come true, cardboard patio and all. Heck, what does she have to compare it to? She most likely never owned a TV set, much less one that showed the '80s super-soaps in their pomp. Running counter to Cally’s wide-eyed wonder is Tommy McKay’s caged-animal restlessness. I’m guessing he didn’t watch the' 80s super-soaps either, but you can still understand why he dismisses the entire state of Texas as “slightly south of boring”, makes a pass at every blonde under thirty (Cally, April, Sly), and ends up on the Southfork balcony during a thunderstorm, half-naked and howling at the moon. The DALLAS wedding ep has much in common with “Stormy Weather”, the budget-saving bottle episode from last season’s FALCON CREST. In both cases, adverse weather conditions oblige all the major characters (including a pair of newlyweds who would otherwise be on their honeymoon) to spend the night under the same roof. For me, the FC ep suffered from an excess of winking-at-the-camera style comedy. A similar, if less extreme, self-awareness occasionally surfaces on DALLAS as well. Lucy introduces the idea of the Southfork wedding curse (“If I ever get married again, I’ll be saying my vows at the nearest moose lodge”) and later uses a camcorder to mischievously record a business argument between JR, Bobby and Cliff — something one could easily imagine Emma, Melissa or Carly Fixx doing. Cliff also joins with the larks himself: “I’ve never stayed here at Southfork — I think it might be fun!” Sue Ellen’s having fun too. “Being married to JR is like a Hitchcock movie,” she quips. “You start out laughing and then you find yourself screaming in terror.” It’s a good line and also the first time that Soap Land’s most overt cinematic influence has been mentioned by name. (Not to be outdone, Greg Sumner name checks the director of [I]It’s a Wonderful Life[/I], among other films, over on KNOTS. “Me and Frank Capra — we don’t do makeup,” he jokes prior to his TV appearance.) And the episode ends with Sue Ellen popping a balloon outside JR and Cally’s bridal bedroom (insert your own Freudian gag). Aside from the levity, however, Sue Ellen also brings a lifetime of heartache and regret to the wedding. Alongside Tommy McKay’s dangerous restlessness, it provides another counterpoint to Cally’s innocence and optimism and prevents the episode from straying too far into sitcom territory. Just as Krystle’s wedding to Blake served as a backdrop to her departure from DYNASTY six weeks ago, so JR and Cally’s provides an opportunity for Sue Ellen to take one last moist-eyed, bittersweet look around the ranch. (Granted, she’s got nine more episodes until she actually leaves the show, but it’s this episode — where she hands the title of “Mrs JR Ewing” over to Cally — that really feels like the end of an era.) Once again, Soap Land’s rich are provided with a glimpse of a grimmer world existing just beyond their glamorous confines. On DYNASTY, a frustratedly desk-bound Zorelli shows Fallon a couple of police files: “This kid here, he got in the way of a street gang fight. This animal, he killed his four-year-old kid … Putting these people behind bars, that’s being a cop.” Meanwhile, Sammy Jo finds her new pal Tanner McBride arguing with a hospital administrator about the teenage addict on his watch: “They’re trying to send her back to her parents, nice sweet folks who enjoy beating her senseless … Maybe she just slits her wrists. She has tried to kill herself twice.” Over at Southfork, Miss Ellie is keen to disabuse new daughter-in-law Cally of the notion that “everyone in Dallas is rich.” “No, they’re not,” she tells her. “That’s why the DOA was invented … We have programmes for the elderly and the homeless.” Following Krystle’s charitable crusade and Mack’s recent court victory, it would appear homelessness has replaced AIDS as Soap Land’s social issue du jour. And this week’s Top 3 are … 1 (1) KNOTS LANDING 2 (2) DYNASTY 3 (3) DALLAS [/QUOTE]
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