Spooky Owl!
Telly Talk Supreme
But somehow, it was just different. On the heels of Miss Ellie's multiple head switches, and Bobby's being shoehorned back into the show via a still-shockingly lazy dream explanation, bringing back Jock sounds like a horrible idea on the face of it (as it were).
Yet it worked -- even though some still disagree. The difference was that Wes Parmalee wasn't definitively Jock. And that ambiguity, an ambiguity that remained even after the deception had been ostensibly cleared up in the script, helped it work. And, had Bobby's resurrection been better handled, it could have been used to bolster (as Harve Smithfield would point out) the public and legal perception that Parmalee might be Jock because it's now established, via Bobby's return, that Ewings hide relatives and execute their wills despite that relative still being alive.
Miss Ellie should never have been re-cast, and Bobby's revival should have been handled differently (if it happened at all). But the Wes Parmalee plot was damned-near brilliant -- as outrageous as it was -- because it was at the very epicenter of everything DALLAS was really all about: a family haunted by the specter of a patriarch who'd given them all their status, affluence and power, yet whose domination left them with a damaged, wildly dysfunctional and internecine dynamic which ruined most of their lives.
As Susan Howard once described the show: it's one great big morality play about all these fabulously wealthy people with every imaginable advantage, constantly stabbing away at one another --- for nothing.
It wasn't necessary that Parmalee actually be Jock, but he essentially represented the ghost of Jock for the family, and whatever he'd meant to them. And the shoddy new video-edit visuals for that season (although I'm glad they've finally been fixed) somehow underscored the sense that this character, scammer or not, was perhaps an apparition the Ewings might or might not be imagining as the result of a group hallucination. (I always like to believe that Jeremy Wendell had begun poisoning the Southfork aquifer since 1984. But that's just me).
Had poor Donna Reed not been brought in, and had Bobby's return been rationalized via the requisite Federal Witness Protection Program explanation (imperfect, I know, but the only scenario that could have happened "realistically" and handled in a single episode instead of a single two-minute scene), I would have done the Wes Parmalee plot just exactly as they did it, and then ended the show in 1988, one year after Pam crashed and burned and disappeared (her accident explained as her careening coincidentally into a tanker truck doing illegal oil business for J.R. in the Texas badlands). Right after Sue Ellen shoots her ex-husband and possibly kills him... Ending on Sue Ellen leaving Dallas in 1989 would seem ideal, except that that season was largely crap-ish.
The two remaining years were too campy, DALLAS' mojo whittled away via too much silliness. I might have accepted Season 13 (DVD) with the Ewing-Valdez oil spill, and Lady Jessica's homicidal return (had it been done like a horror movie and not facetiously), and had Bobby's fixation with Jeanne O'Brien led to his and Cliff's learning of Pam's possible death by neurofibromatosis (making her Digger's daughter after all), the entire series ending with either JR trapped in that mental institution or Miss Ellie's dying out on the Southfork prairie, surrounded by the remaining family, as she was about to reveal the secrets buried under Section 40.
But that's not really what happened.
Ectoplasmic memories of the past should have framed and defined the last two or three years of the show. Going for shlock instead had a deleterious effect on DALLAS' esteem retroactively, and pushed the ratings way down.
So who they killed no longer resonated one way or the other.
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