Skipping the Dream Season

Would you consider skipping the dream season when rewatching the series?


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Grangehill1

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Skip it.

The last rewatch I did I stopped in Swansong just after the scene with Ray and Donna by the pool and then went straight to Return To Camelot. I then watched the dream season as a stand-alone after the whole series

If you watch the dream season in context as part of the series prepares to be disappointed when you sit down for Return to Camelot and see

- Cliff hating Jamie

- Ray and Donna not close

- Sue Ellen and JR not close

- The treatment of Jamie and Jack
 

Grangehill1

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Put it this way.

Generally is everybody happier with what came after Swansong in the dream season or what came after Swansong in Return to Camelot
 

Billy Wall

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Skip it.

The last rewatch I did I stopped in Swansong just after the scene with Ray and Donna by the pool and then went straight to Return To Camelot. I then watched the dream season as a stand-alone after the whole series

If you watch the dream season in context as part of the series prepares to be disappointed when you sit down for Return to Camelot and see

- Cliff hating Jamie

- Ray and Donna not close

- Sue Ellen and JR not close

- The treatment of Jamie and Jack

Well said.
 

Billy Wall

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But that isn't the point. There was no reason why it HAD to get repetitive. They missed a trick (the writers). JR and Sue Ellen should have overcome their problems to become a super couple. Working together. Dallas would have lasted a lot longer. Sorry I don't have much time for the opinion that JR and Sue Ellen were solely one dimensional or that their relationship was just repetitive. There was SO MUCH potential there had the writers had the guts to do it and had certain powers that be not been so sexist in wanting to keep female characters in a certain bracket and not letting them expand or reach the potential they could have done. Even Larry Hagman said by the time we reached JR Returns that he would only do it if 'things were made right between JR and Sue Ellen'.

Parting JR and Sue Ellen permanently ruined the character of JR and ultimately the show. One change of storyline (not introducing the ridiculous way that JR had to leave Sue Ellen to marry Kimberly) would have made all the difference. No more break ups, JR finally grows up and realises that his strongest ally is Sue Ellen. The writers were stupid and didn't appreciate what they had in front of them until it was too late.

JR had mellowed some, but JR was never going to be THAT guy.
 

James from London

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I'm in the middle of a rewatch and skipped from Swan Song to Return to Camelot (and through the season) just to see how it flows as in previous rewatches I've found the transition from dream to reality quite jarring and difficult to remember where everyone was at in their lives after an entire season of development (off the top of my head Jamie and Cliff's relationship status as well as JR and Sue Ellen's dislike after being happy at the end of the dream). I was pleasantly surprised by how it did flow with the writers having to scrap a whole season and carry on with year old plots, but watching on DVD the transition was still a bit jarring, mostly visually but also in story development.

I enjoyed going straight from 'Swan Song' to 'Return to Camelot'. Seeing what flowed seamlessly and what didn't was all part of the fun - a bit like the normal difference between the end of one season and the start of the next where there's usually some shift in feel or emphasis and some of the actors have returned with a new haircut, only more so. I think I might have been a little disappointed if there hadn't been any discernible differences between one season and another.

In season 8 the search for Mark Graison is left on a cliffhanger with the man in the Hong Kong clinic on the phone to someone (not JR? Mark?). The cliffhanger is resolved in the dream but as it is a dream and they don't return to that story in season 10, we never get any resolution about what happened to Mark.

No, there's just that line from Pam to Bobby later on in the season, "Mark is gone." I don't mind the unexplained sadness of that at all. My assumption is that Mark was in Hong Kong, that he was on the other end of that phone, but that he then died.

The Jenna framed for murder and woman throwing her drink at the TV thing which is revealed to be Katherine's doing at the end of season 8, but since the dream starts with Bobby and Pam waking up the morning Katherine hits Bobby with her car and is never returned to in season 10, the plot is left unresolved. We are to assume it was Katherine seeing as Katherine shot Bobby, Katherine was plotting against Jenna with Naldo, Katherine drunkenly confessed her feelings to Bobby and was rejected by him etc. but there is no definitive end to that plot.

Practically speaking, the average viewer back in '86 would most likely have forgotten most of the details of the Naldo murder plot and there probably didn't seem a lot of point in going over old ground, so yes, I think we're left to assume that Katherine was behind it.

Dusty reappears at the Ewing Oil party at the end of season 8 and Sue Ellen asks Clayton to arrange a meeting for her, which he does and this occurs on the morning Bobby dies, which is all a dream. Pam wakes up in season 10 and Dusty is nowhere to be found again despite the fact that the foundation for a short return was laid.

There's a scene just before the dream where Clayton advises Dusty to stay away from Sue Ellen so I guess he listened to his daddy for once.

Sue Ellen also stops drinking much faster in season 10 than she does in the dream, so it feels much less significant but it's also sort of nice because I'm really not fond of the drunk storyline in the dream.

Sue Ellen's "road to sobriety" storyline during the dream season felt a bit pious and dull to me so I kind of like the way 'Return to Camelot' stuck two fingers up to all that and allowed her to remain her good old dysfunctional self. "Hating you the way I do's enough to keep me sober!"

Finally, some of the set changes from the dream remain, which isn't awful but does remind you there isn't a seamless transition from season 8 to season 10.

Yes, suddenly Mandy's condo has a jacuzzi! I kind of liked that.

Oh, and the Mandy/JR affair feels less eventful when you skip the dream season even though they're together before and after the dream. That could just be how I perceived things this time though.

It means we skip Mandy becoming JR's doormat in the dream - "I'll be your wife or your mistress or anything else" - and she retains her independence. I quite like that.

I intend to go back and rewatch the dream season at some point in this rewatch but I might keep it for the end

I've never watched the dream in isolation - that might be interesting! I watched it as part of the whole series during my last re-watch and it was kind of nice to see it again after so long.
 
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Toni

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Has Cliff´s vasectomy been mentioned here (I think not)? Maybe he went to Richard Channing´s doctor for it and didn´t work for him either.

upload_2020-1-18_20-52-15.jpeg

Funny that Pamela Rebecca had been just born in "Swan Song" (probably at the time if we remember that Afton left (secretly) pregnant at the beginning of that season).



PR: "By the way, Emmabeech, I´m giving you a family gift:
neurofibromatosis. And herpes too..."​

Of course, she wouldn´t have known anything about the vasectomy but she indeed knew about the neurofibromatosis, because the baby had the tests for it done when she was born.



Cliff: "I hope this is enough for her to leave me at once!"
Afton: "Wasn´t neurofibromatosis that odd word from "Mary Poppins"...?​

I don´t know but I can´t imagine Cliff talking to airhead Afton about such a disease...
 

Taylor Bennett Jr.

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Has Cliff´s vasectomy been mentioned here (I think not)? Maybe he went to Richard Channing´s doctor for it and didn´t work for him either.


Cliff: "I hope this is enough for her to leave me at once!"
Afton: "Wasn´t neurofibromatosis that odd word from "Mary Poppins"...?​

I don´t know but I can´t imagine Cliff talking to airhead Afton about such a disease...

she might have been inspired to pen a syrupy ballad about the malady, though, which would have been worth it for us viewers...



Neur - o - fib - ro-ma - TOOO - sisss!
 

Miss Texas 1967

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@James from London I guess my problem with it is that in watching the DVDs I'm looking for more explanation of a story than "Mark's gone" or "Dusty stay away". However, I know the show wasn't written for DVD viewers (obviously lol) or even people skipping the season because hindsight is 20/20 and they only wrote what they were doing at the time (if that makes sense). In saying that, I find it difficult to watch the season and then disregard it, so I'll skip it and watch separate from the season before and after.
 
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Luke_Krebbs_Ewing

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On a re-watch I won't skip the dream season.

The events may have been null & voided by Leonard Katzman when he took back control for season ten after having been absent for the previous season but the show is still Dallas.

I don't think the dream explanation was a good idea. It was actually quite lame & only because Katzman wanted to erase everything from that year when he wasn't on the show. How petty of him to be like that!

Long term the dream resolution didn't do the show any good! The viewers deserted Dallas which was further accelerated by the departures of both Victoria Principal & Susan Howard at the end of season ten. And let's not forget the departure of Philip Capice either. The show went downhill quite rapidly after Katzman assumed total control of Dallas. JR ended up a washed up buffoon, in stark contrast to the character written for the show's first nine years! A shame. Dallas went from must see television into a show which nobody really wanted to watch any more & all because of the resurrection of Bobby Ewing & more significantly the departure of Victoria Principal, who had the good sense to get out of what she saw as a show which was well past it's prime! Sad, but true! :(
 
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Snarky Oracle!

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The events may have been null & voided by Leonard Katzman when he took back control for season ten after having been absent for the previous season but the show is still Dallas.

I don't think the dream explanation was a good idea. It was actually quite lame & only because Katzman wanted to erase everything from that year when he wasn't on the show. How petty of him to be like that!

Long term the dream resolution didn't do the show any good!
Yes, the use of the dream scenario, perversely, froze the dream season in amber forever instead of erasing it.

And let's not forget the departure of Philip Capice either.
I'm not sure that was any great loss, though. But Uncle Lenny proved he himself couldn't write the show -- at least post-WhoShotJR? --- without certain key writers (pssst: David Paulsen).
 

Herofan

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I’ve always thought it would have been great if Donna Reed could have been in the dream season. That could have explained her presence.
 

Seaviewer

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all because of the resurrection of Bobby Ewing & more significantly the departure of Victoria Principal,
I can't quite agree that Bobby's return was the cause of the decline that followed. The choice to weaken JR's character, for example, might have been made in any case.
the use of the dream scenario, perversely, froze the dream season in amber forever instead of erasing it.
Very astute summation. I hadn't thought of it in those terms.
 

Kenny Coyote

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I can't quite agree that Bobby's return was the cause of the decline that followed. The choice to weaken JR's character, for example, might have been made in any case.

Bobby's return, while not popular here on this forum, was actually well received by the Dallas audience. The dream season, season 9, drew an 18.8 Nielsen rating. Season 10, the season of Bobby's return drew an 18.6 Nielsen rating.

Dallas had suffered much worse declines previous to that. In season 4 they scored a 27.6 rating. They dropped to a 23.2 in season 5! That's huge. Not that it was their fault they lost Jim Davis, and I think they handled the loss of the head of the family as well as they could have, but they sure felt the impact of it.

Then in season 6 they scored a 20.5 rating. That's a loss of 2.7. Nobody from the main cast died; there was nothing that happened that should have resulted in them losing that much but they decided to take the show in a negative direction that alienated millions of fans. Bobby and Pam were the most popular couple on Dallas with the fans, so what did the show decide to do? They split them up. Good call! Split up your most popular couple.

In a show with so much dysfunction and so much negativity, Bobby and Pam's marriage was the bright spot, it was the contrast the show desperately needed to show the audience that amidst all the problems in the Ewing family, there was great happiness too. The negativity of the other things going on - Jock's death, JR and Sue Ellen's brutally dysfunctional marriage, JR's underhanded business tactics - had to be balanced out with some optimism. Bobby and Pam's marriage was what had always provided that optimism.

People watch TV to be be entertained and as a temporary escape from their own problems. They watch TV to have a good time. Bobby and Pam's marriage symbolized something important. Bobby and Pam had always faced tremendous obstacles in their marriage and they always managed to over come them. People loved that! Pam and Bobby loved each other so much that there wasn't anything their marriage couldn't withstand. Then to add insult to injury, the thing that ultimately caused Pam to leave Bobby was her reaction to her mother dying in a place crash. She told Bobby that her mother died because of the contest he was having with JR. Huh? It wasn't pilot error? It wasn't the fault of the pilot of the plane that crashed into Rebecca's jet? How does that make any sense? And they're going to have that be the reason the show's most popular couple splits up. Wow.

It wrecked the character of Pam. This was supposed to be the couple whose love could withstand anything and Pam leaves Bobby because of something he had nothing to do with, something he had no control over. Then to make sure they wrecked the character, they had Pam fly to France on a vacation with Mark Graison a few weeks later. The show's most popular female character has just separated from the man who was supposedly the love of her life, and she's so grief stricken over what has happened to her marriage that in the blink of an eye, she's vacationing on a beach in France with another man. Yeah, if you wanted to wreck the character, that's pretty much how you'd go about doing it.
 
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Willie Oleson

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On a re-watch I won't skip the dream season
You know what it is so you're not going to be surprised and disappointed again.
When deciding to watch or not, the only relevant question is: how much Dallas do I want to see?
I don't think the dream explanation was a good idea
With the benefit of hindsight, I think the dream story and explanation was the best option - eventhough it was a matter of circumstances rather than a creative plan.
Technically speaking, a dream can happen in soap. It can last 5 seconds, 5 minutes or 5 hours. So, that itself did not jump-shark the Dallas story.**
Dallas' ultimate jump the shark moment was Bobby's death, because the Bobby Ewings are not supposed to die in the Dallas universe.
(incidentally, that also means that Christopher's death in the John Ross & Christopher Show would have been TNT Dallas' jump the shark story).

The dream corrected that mistake, but the timing - at the end of an entire season - resulted in a general feeling of "they've been wasting our time", which is true….or not. Again, that depends on how much Dallas you want to see.
Some might argue: rather a dream Dallas than no Dallas at all.
Furthermore, how terribly, terribly jarring it would have been if Pam had woken up right after the death scene or funeral, with the viewers' grief still 100% intact.
That would have been Dallas' answer to Dynasty's Moldavia massacre "resolution". Trust me, you don't want to go there.

Alternatively, they could have ended the dream after 10 episodes or mid-season, but then it gets really messy. Imagine if you had missed that particular episode.
At least the complete season makes it somewhat more comprehensible (too bad it was such a f**king long season) and Bobby's return was a shockingly fun.

** since the soap opera genre is all about continuation, and the dream is a standstill, they did betray/jump-shark its very genre. If they had followed the rules of soap opera then Dallas would have had a Bobby recast (again, Bobby's death was never an option).

Watch it, and be grateful that it never happened. Watch it, and tell those haughty Dynasty fans to eat their hearts out because "we had Angelica Nero" (this is off the record and should not be re-posted in the Dynasty forum. thank you)
 

Miss Texas 1967

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I've now gone back and watched the dream after finishing the entire series, I'd totally recommend doing it this way. To have a full cast again after watching years of disappearing cast members was a real treat and the entire season being a dream makes it self-contained therefore you don't really need to remember what happened in the season before or think about what comes after. In future I think I'll continue rewatching in this order, dream last, it ends on a cliffhanger but not nearly as depressingly or boringly as Conundrum.
 

Michael Torrance

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That would have been Dallas' answer to Dynasty's Moldavia massacre "resolution". Trust me, you don't want to go there.

Watch it, and be grateful that it never happened. Watch it, and tell those haughty Dynasty fans to eat their hearts out because "we had Angelica Nero" (this is off the record and should not be re-posted in the Dynasty forum. thank you)

(Said in an Alexis Carrington tone): "I'll see you in court."
 

Michael Torrance

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You know what it is so you're not going to be surprised and disappointed again.
When deciding to watch or not, the only relevant question is: how much Dallas do I want to see?

I agree with this. While the dream season was catastrophic for DALLAS as a brand and IP, and also for the prime time soap genre, the experience now is a different one. So many people write (and read!) fan fiction, which is just words on a page. This is an alternate reality with the original actors for a whole season. Although as @Miss Texas 1967 suggested, watching it separate from the flow of canonical episodes may make more sense.
 
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