04 Feb 13: DALLAS: Sins of the Father v. 23 Sep 15: EMPIRE: The Devils Are Here v. 07 Feb 18: DYNASTY: Nothing But Trouble
“Rich folks don’t go to jail,” says JR on this week’s DALLAS. Tell that to Lucious Lyon. As the new season of EMPIRE begins, he has been held without bail in the Soap Land Correctional Facility for the past three months.
This leads to a fantastically cynical “awareness-raising” concert produced by Cookie and Co. “Did you know there are 1.68 million black men being held in mass incarceration in America’s prison system today, right now, just like my brother Lucious Lyon has been for three months, held without bail?” Swizz Beats asks the audience. A horrible real-life statistic — but the concert is less concerned with the other 1,679,999 black men than it is with pressurising the authorities to grant Lucious a new bail hearing. The irony is not lost on his youngest son. “We out there frontin’,” Hakeem grumbles to his mother backstage. “You know and I know he killed Bunky … Mom, you got us here doing a Free Lucious concert when we should be performing for the brothers and sisters that are innocent.” But peel away another layer of the onion and we discover the
real real reason for the concert. “This is about us taking the Empire,” Cookie explains, “about impressing that investor lady Mimi Whiteman … We got to get her $250 million so we can get our Empire.”
As Soap Land’s first unequivocally lesbian character, Mimi Whiteman is a regressive stereotype — mannish and predatory. On the plus side, she’s a total blast and is played with verve and swagger by Marisa Tomei.
Amongst the real-life VIPs attending the concert is hugely respected civil rights activist the Reverend Al Sharpton. Cookie and her assistant Porsha approach him in awe. “Mass incarceration is such an important issue,” he tells them gravely. They nod in agreement, but as soon as Cookie realises he’s unwilling to speak out on Lucious’s behalf, she cuts him off mid-sentence and walks away, leaving him standing there with his mouth open. It’s Soap Land’s best celebrity cameo since Henry Kissinger wandered past the camera at the Carousel Ball in 1983.
To curry favour with Mimi Whiteman, Cookie invites her to “a little party we put together”, full of scantily clad girls making out with each other and sexy black waitresses wearing bowties and not much else. Mimi eyes up Cookie and every other female that crosses her path, before settling on Anika, whom she insists on calling Anita. “Anita, dance with her,” Cookie orders, suggesting that she also “take your little sweater off so she can see your sexy body.” Fallon and Monica are likewise waited on by black girls in bow-ties and not much else during a night out at a private club on DYNASTY, only this time the dancers are boys. Both gatherings yield a positive result: Mimi agrees to invest in Empire and Fallon surprises Monica by presenting her with the club as a gift. (At this point, Fallon is unaware that Monica and Jeff are currently planning her family’s downfall.)
The slow-motion sequence where Andre, Cookie and Anika stride purposefully towards the Empire boardroom to announce their takeover, Hakeem gliding alongside them on motorised roller blades, is fantastic. “Lemme explain how this is gonna work,” Cookie begins, addressing Jamal and the assembled board members. “In partnership with a woman named Mimi Whiteman, we have taken controlling interest in Empire. But that doesn’t mean we’re gonna take it from
you, Jamal.” “Our first order of business is removing Lucious Lyon as CEO,” adds Andre. “Sorry, brother, it’s just business,” Hakeem says to Jamal smugly. Jamal nods in agreement. “It’s just business — right, Mimi?” Cut to the chair at the head of the table which spins round to reveal … Mimi! “We had a deal!” Andre protests. “I met with Lucious this morning and made a better deal,” Mimi replies. (This is followed by a little side exchange between Cookie and Anika. “I thought I told you to sleep with her!” “I did!” “You can’t even dyke right!”) “You made all the right moves,” Mimi assures them. “You convinced me to invest in Empire. You just forgot one little detail. Lucious Lyon is Empire. Empire is Lucious Lyon. Without him, the company’s nothing.” As if to emphasise this point, Lucious appears on a giant video screen, chuckling in his prison cell: “Game over, bitches.”
Over on DYNASTY, Michael Culhane has Sam use his new position as Fallon’s assistant to keep tabs on Jeff: “Something’s not adding up and I have a feeling Jeff Colby can’t be taken at his word.” This leads, in a roundabout way, to Fallon discovering Jeff and Monica are plotting against her — but why? “I’m gonna find out and when I do, Jeff Colby is going down,” she vows. To that end, she accepts Jeff’s marriage proposal.
As two out three of Soap Land’s takeover plots falter, the remaining one continues apace. Prompted by his father, John Ross visits Sue Ellen, aka “the prettiest mother in Texas”, ostensibly to donate to her foundation but really to drip poison in her ear. “You do a lot for others, Mama, but isn’t it time you do something for yourself?” he suggests. “You wrote Elena that cheque to buy the Henderson oil lease. You should be getting paid on that oil … She played me like a fool, Mama. Don’t let her do the same to you.” This has the desired effect of Sue Ellen marching into Ewing Enterprises like, to quote Elena, “a bitch on wheels” and giving her (Elena) a one-month deadline to strike oil.
As fun as the Sue Ellen/John Ross dynamic is, the mother/son relationship between Cookie and Jamal is even juicier. “I didn’t betray you,” Cookie insists. “You were always gonna be a part of the company.” “Was I gonna run it? No, because
you wanted to,” Jamal replies. “It was my sacrifice that started this company!” she reminds him, which has become very much the EMPIRE equivalent of Alexis’s “When Blake Carrington exiled me from this house …” speeches on ‘80s DYNASTY. “I’m so sick and tired of hearing the same old thing,” sighs Jamal. “Yeah, Ma, you sacrificed, but that don’t give you the right to tear us down.”
“It’s not just your husband who’s one of them, it’s you too,” Rick Morales told Cristal on last week’s DYNASTY. “You can’t see it now because you’re becoming one of them,” Elena’s brother Drew Ramos tells her on this week’s DALLAS. In other words, power, or even the proximity to power, corrupts. Nowhere is this more compellingly illustrated than by Jamal on EMPIRE. “You’re turning into your daddy,” Cookie tells him. “I’m watching it happen.” And so are we. Lord knows, Jamal is not the first Soap Land innocent to be seduced by the dark side, but his transformation is the one that most closely resembles Michael Corleone’s in
The Godfather. Jamal is so calm, so gentle when he speaks to his younger brother that it takes one’s brain a second to register the actual words he’s saying: “I’m gonna bury your album, Hakeem. It’s never gonna see the light of day.”
“Anybody seen that lying snake Vernon?” Lucious asks. The only person who has seen him is Andre — in his nightmares. Rhonda urges him to keep calm. “If we were suspects, we would have been hauled in already,” she reasons. Meanwhile, the truth about Tommy’s death starts to catch up with Pamela on DALLAS. First, Christopher forces Becky Sutter to report his disappearance to the police (“Whether you wanna face this or not, Pamela Barnes did something to your brother”). Then Becky tries to shake Pamela down for a million dollars. “Pay her off,” Pamela tells Frank Ashkani, “but make her believe that if she comes sniffing around for money again she’s not gonna like the answer she gets.” Meanwhile, blood splatters found in Pamela’s old condo confirm that Tommy was shot there. Christopher texts Becky to tell her that her brother is dead and she’s in danger. She decides to make a run for it, but when she opens the door of her hotel room Frank is standing there …
Becky is never seen again. One wonders if Pamela knew that would be the case when she sent Frank to deal with her. I’m reminded of Miss Ellie in the DALLAS prequel novel by Lee Raintree who knew what she was doing when she told Bond Whitson to take care of Roberta Lessing, Jock’s duplicitous mistress. Whatever Bond then did cost Roberta her sanity. Bond was to Jock what Frank has been to Cliff: a reject he took under his wing who then became his driver and no-questions-asked right-hand man. As an albino, Bond was defined by his physical otherness. As Soap Land’s first Islamic character, Frank is also set apart from the rest of the DALLAS gang.
Indeed, of all the current players on DALLAS, Frank is the most mysterious. He has no on-screen confidante so we’re not privy to what’s going on inside his head — yet JR, of all people, seems to understand what makes him tick. Returning to his apartment after “dealing” with Becky, Frank is startled to find JR waiting for him in the dark. “It’s a sad day when an old man can sneak up on a super-ninja,” JR remarks. He’s heard about the “high-velocity blood splatter at Pamela Barnes’s old condo … It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know that you clean up whatever mess Cliff Barnes asks you to.” Frank makes a dig about JR being a retired old man with too much time on his hands. “I’m retired,” JR concedes, “but not by choice. Getting pushed out of my place at the table stung like hell, but you know how that feels, don’t you, Frank? After all the jams you’ve gotten Cliff out of, to be treated like a lapdog by that spoiled princess. You’re not a Barnes, Frank. No matter how much Cliff appreciates what you’ve done when push comes to shove he’s gonna protect his daughter. Now we both know that rich folks don’t go to jail. However, the people that clean up after them do … Tell me where the body and the gun are. I’ll make sure they pop up. You can get your place back at the Barnes Global table and I make sure that Barnes girl doesn’t get a piece of Ewing Energies.” “… Why should I trust you?” Frank asks him. “Because we both wanna destroy Pamela and it’s a rare and beautiful thing when enemies share the same enemy,” he replies. The JR we see here is the same shrewd operator we were introduced to at the very beginning of the series who had an instinctive sense of other people’s weak spots. As he told Cliff in 1979, “You wanna know how I do so well? It’s because I know how to play the other man’s game.”
Two old adversaries, Ann Ewing and her former mother-in-law Judith, meet on screen for the first time. “You were nothing more than an egg donor for Harris,” declares Judith. “You were never worthy to be his wife.” “There is only one woman good enough for that job, isn’t there?” Ann replies. “Too bad it’s a crime to marry your son.” That last remark tells us pretty much all we need to know about Judith’s relationship with Harris, just as Andrew Laird’s similar line to ‘80s Fallon — “Most little girls realise by the age of six that they can't grow up and marry their daddies” — told us all we needed to know about
that relationship. Like Fallon, Judith’s first impulse is to lash out, but in the same way that Andrew grabbed Fallon’s wrist before she could strike him, Bobby blocks Judith’s path before she can inflict any physical damage on Ann.
This week, there are two instances of an estranged parent and child meeting in an institutional environment. On DYNASTY, Cecil Colby and daughter Monica sit across from each other in a prison visiting room and have their first conversation for eight and a half years. On DALLAS, Ann and daughter Emma sit opposite one another in a police station interview room and have their first conversation, well, ever. Ann is full of apologies and explanations (“When I lost you, I died inside … I spent years looking for you, praying you were still alive. I never stopped loving you”) but Emma is unyielding in her lack of forgiveness (“I think you’ve confused love with guilt … This is a waste of time … If you care about me at all, you’ll leave me alone.”) Things go better for the Colbys. In their situation, the child is the contrite one. “I am so sorry,” Monica tells Cecil. “I spent all this time thinking you had turned your back on us … I had no idea what they [the Carringtons] did to you and I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt, but I know now.” Cecil, who is due for parole, assures her they’ll be together soon.
DALLAS and DYNASTY also feature pleasingly familiar scenes of Soap Land's rich folk bribing the little people to do their dirty work. John Ross approaches Bubba, the drilling foreman on Elena’s rig, in a bar. “I would consider it a favour if you did not strike oil for quite some time,” he tells him. “What’s in it for me?” Bubba asks. “My undying friendship for every month till I say different,” he replies, placing a roll of banknotes in Bubba’s shirt pocket. We understand John Ross’s motives — delaying Elena’s oil strike will mean Sue Ellen calling in her loan which will mean he can get his hands on Elena’s share of Ewing Enterprises. Things are more mysterious on DYNASTY. Anders meets with an unknown man in a remote location, all tumbleweed and wire fencing, where they converse through their respective car windows. “We need this to happen today and of course we need this whole arrangement to remain thoroughly discreet,” Anders says, before handing over an envelope thick with cash.
All is revealed later in the episode, during one of two “prison violence with a twist” scenes in this week’s eps. The man Anders paid turns out to be a prison guard at the Soap Land Correctional Facility. He approaches Cecil Colby in an empty corridor in much the same way the Scary Venezuelans did John Ross before they beat him within an inch of his life on last season’s DALLAS. Here, the guard produces a knife — but then stabs
himself in the thigh while shouting that Cecil has attacked him. There goes Cecil’s parole — or does it?
Fresh character type of the week: sexy middle-aged black women in positions of authority within the justice system who wield their power over incarcerated black men. Roxanne Ford, EMPIRE’s new federal prosecutor who has the most amazing cleavage, makes an off-the-record visit to Lucious in prison. He asks if he can call her Roxanne. “What you should call me is your worst nightmare because that’s exactly what I’m gonna be,” she replies before making him an offer: “Plead guilty and then we can start talking about some of the other killers in your business. You help us take them down, I promise you won’t die in here.” Lucious is unimpressed, to say the least: “You’re planning on running for attorney general, but as a Republican, and you think that being the black bitch in cheap shoes who took down hip-hop, that’s your way to victory. Let me share something with you, Miss Clarence Thomas, I don’t care how many of us you lock behind bars, you ain’t never gonna be nothing more than a black bitch in cheap shoes to me.” “A black bitch in cheap shoes who’ll jam them right up your yellow ass,” she counters, “and they’re Tom Ford, by the way.” The meeting between Jeff Colby and Nell Winters, DYNASTY’s Board of Parole Commissioner, is more restrained, but still frustrating for Jeff. “There’s nothing I can do for you, Mr Colby,” she says when he asks her to intercede with the parole board on his father’s behalf. “What does our fine government pay you anyway?” he persists. “I’m sure I could triple it. You’d never have to work again.” She makes it clear that she cannot be bought off but then gives him a look to suggest she might be susceptible to another kind of offer. Later on, we see Jeff outside a hotel room where Nell is waiting in bed for him. He has a moment of hesitation before entering, which implies she might not be exactly his type.
When the parole board ruling goes against Cecil, it looks like Jeff has prostituted himself for nothing, just as Anika did with Mimi Whiteman, but then the commissioner overturns the ruling and Cecil is released. At least that’s one less incarcerated black man in America’s prison system.
While Lucious identifies Roxanne the prosecutor as a Republican, Steven Carrington outs himself as a Democrat when he announces his intention to run for city council on DYNASTY, and maybe Cristal does too. “Personally, I think we could use more good people in politics,” she says when Blake opposes the idea. “We could certainly use more Democrats.” Blake reminds Steven that “you don’t exactly have a great track record. A month ago, you were snorting half of Manhattan up your nose.” “Daddy, don’t be so old-fashioned,” Fallon pipes up. “A couple more felonies and he could be President.” Speaking of Presidents, back at the open-air concert on EMPIRE, Porsha informs Cookie that Bill Clinton is in the audience. “Yeah, he needs to be, if he wants to get his wife elected,” she replies. There’s more ripped-from-the-headlines stuff as Cristal tells Blake they “should have a conversation about our UK operation depending on Brexit.”
DYNASTY’s Steven and EMPIRE’s Jamal are each reunited with their former boyfriends, Ted and Michael, this week, but strictly for professional reasons — even if personal feelings still linger. When we last saw Michael, he was a cooking student. Now, like his other self Sam on DYNASTY, he has a new job, organising an LGTB event at which Jamal has agreed to appear. However, Jamal is more interested in talking about Michael himself. “I miss you so much,” he tells him. “What about Ryan?” Michael asks, referring to Jamal’s current beau. “Ryan is a ho,” he replies simply. Meanwhile, Steven warns Ted that press attention surrounding his election campaign might spill over onto Ted himself. Here, it’s Ted who has other things on his mind. “It means a lot to know that you’re thinking of me,” he sighs dreamily.
By way of thanks for agreeing to attend the LGTB party, someone who answers to the name of Miss Lawrence appears in Jamal’s office to perform an overtly camp version of ‘(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real’ while lying on top of a piano. Jamal smiles politely, but is quietly repelled by the display and subsequently withdraws from the event. His interestingly complicated reaction makes up for the simplistic rap battle at the end of last season where he appeared to cure an entire crowd of homophobia by hitting a few high notes. “You just hate him cos he’s too real for you,” suggests Michael, referring to Miss Lawrence. I googled Miss L and it turns s/he is very real. S/he is a former regular on THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF ATLANTA. There’s another real-life reference at the end of the scene that I also didn’t understand before I looked it up: Becky is thrilled when Miss Lawrence mentions that Donnie McClurkin will be at the LGTB party. “Donnie McClurkin? I love him!” she gushes. Googling “Donnie McClurkin Empire” reveals a mini-internet controversy within religious circles:
http://lookupradio.com/2015/10/4-lessons-from-the-donnie-mcclurkin-empire-fiasco/
“I deserve to be King!” Hakeem shouts in frustration on EMPIRE. “That land is mine and I’ll get it back one way or another!” Drew Ramos vows angrily on DALLAS. Such passion is notably absent from Fallon as she delivers another of her child prodigy quips: “I’ve always wanted to own my own company … While other kids were drawing rainbows and unicorns, I was workshopping my letterhead.”
Drew is one of two faces from the past to show up this week, even though we’ve never previously heard of him. The other is Frank Gathers, the drug kingpin Cookie testified against during a confidential hearing last season. Now he has been transferred to the same prison as Lucious. When we first see Frank, he is walking down a prison corridor, stony-faced. Inmates move deferentially out of his path as he passes while ominous music plays on the soundtrack. For added kudos, he is played by Chris Rock. Drew’s screen entrance is much more lowkey. He simply wanders into the Southfork living room unannounced (“You think rich people would lock their damn doors!”), surprising Elena and their mother Carmen in the process. It’s a bit like when Joshua Rush just suddenly materialised out of nowhere on his sister and mother’s doorstep.
In contrast to the other prisoners, Lucious greets Frank with a smile: “What you trying to do, scare somebody?” “Lucious Lyon — seems like yesterday you were moving biscuits for me at fifty a pop,” Frank recalls. “Yeah, that was twenty years ago, fool!” he replies with a laugh and a hug. There is similar banter on DALLAS. “I told you if you didn’t get out of this town, you’d end up with one of these dopes,” Drew tells Elena, pointing at John Ross and Christopher. “I got a fast car. Not too late to run!” “… You’re here under a minute and you’re already stirring up trouble? That’s gotta be a new record,” quips Christopher, while John Ross jokingly recalls Drew as a bad influence: “If you’d have stuck around, I’d be doing hard time in Huntsville.”
In both instances, the jocularity and back-slapping belie an unspoken tension, which inevitably rises to the surface. While it doesn’t take Frank long to discover it was Cookie who snitched on him, it takes even less time for us to learn that Drew has all the emotional baggage one could ask of a Soap Land black sheep. Like Tommy Mackay, Dan Fixx and Mickey Trotter, he has a criminal record (“When you chose the army over jail, life went on back here,” Elena tells him). Like Dan, he feels guilty about a past event (he blames himself for his father’s death). And like so many others before him, he has a dream that borders on obsession. “I came back to Dallas to drill our father’s land,” he tells Elena. “It’s a dry hole,” she argues. “No! You’re wrong!” he insists. This obsession is laced with resentment — when Elena tells him that their mother sold their father’s land to Bobby (“We had bills to pay, debts you owed on”), he becomes convinced Bobby swindled her out of it: “He bought it because he knows there’s oil under there.” This gives him an immediate goal (“That land is mine and I’ll get it back one way or another”) which is met with a prophecy of doom (“Him getting back that land ends one of two ways — chaos or tragedy,” predicts Elena). It’s great stuff.
Things turn nasty on EMPIRE when Frank sends Cookie a gift from prison — a box containing the severed head of her cousin. This sparks off one of those high stakes situations we’ve gotten used to in C21st Soap Land where the feuding family puts its differences aside to band together against a common enemy. But the only family member who can deal with Frank is the one who’s locked up with him. And so, while the rest of the Lyons hide out in Lucious’s house, Cookie visits her ex to ask for his help. “They messing with us, Lucious … I need you to fix it,” she tells him. On last week’s DALLAS, JR fixed things for
his ex-wife when he got the bribery charges against her quashed. This week, he’s back to manipulating her for his own ends and using their son to do it. Lucious’s relationship with Cookie is just as complicated. “It’s crazy how I can love your ass and hate you at the same moment,” he tells her.
He agrees to help, which brings us to the week’s second “prison violence with a twist” scene, as Lucious has a sit-down meeting with Frank and his crew. Frank assures him that his beef is with Cookie alone: “Me and you are cool — unless you tell me something different.” Lucious tells him something different: “I love Cookie and if you’ve got war with her, you’ve got war with me.” “Kill him,” Frank tells his men. “Make it fast and quiet.” He gets up to leave, but one of his own crew blocks his path. Seems they’re no longer his crew, but Lucious’s. “See, Frankie, you always wanted to run the streets, but me, I wanted to rule the world,” Lucious explains before going on to list all the strings he’s been able to pull for his new friends on the outside. “Kill him,” Lucious tells them. “Make it loud and make it long.” Then he starts to walk away, smiling to himself as he hears Frank’s screams echo in the distance. This is where the casting of Chris Rock really pays off. Because Frank is played by someone so famous and cool, the last thing one expects is for him to die suddenly, especially in such a squalid and gruesome way.
When news of the bloody deed reaches the outside world, the Lyons let out a collective sigh of relief. “Yeah well, your father’s a son of a bitch, but he’s still your father and I’m still your mother, don’t you ever forget that!” Cookie tells her sons. She smiles lovingly at Jamal and he smiles back almost bashfully. It’s a moment of peace. Then, still looking at her, still smiling, he tells her to get out. He turns to Hakeem, Andre and Rhonda. “Get out of my father’s house. You betrayed him, all of you.” Cookie ushers the rest of them out and then turns back to Jamal. “Look, I can fix this, baby,” she pleads. “Get out,” he says again. She slaps him hard across the face. “Who you think you’re talking to?!” He says nothing, just looks at her. She slaps him again, even harder. “You done now, lady?” he asks, moving towards her, edging her out of the house. He closes the door behind her, allows his face to crumple for a second and then hardens again.
The other two soaps also feature an unexpected death (or at least, an unexpected
apparent death) in their final minutes. “Write me [a play] about a nice normal woman who just shoots her husband,” requested Margo Channing in
All About Eve. There were comparatively few such women in ‘80s Soap Land: Sophia Stavros, Sue Ellen Ewing and Emma St James all shot their (ex)husbands, while Sydney St James stabbed hers to death in self-defence. Soap Land women are a lot more violent in the C21st. In just the past few weeks, we’ve seen Iris kill Alejandro, Pamela kill Tommy, Rhonda kill Vernon, and Cristal and Cookie almost kill Alejandro and Lucious. And now this week’s DALLAS ends with Ann Ewing, who is as close to a nice normal woman as Soap Land gets these days, deliberately shooting her ex-husband Harris in the chest at point-blank range.
Even whackier, DYNASTY has a stoned Ted Dinard drop by Steven’s apartment, yank Sam’s earring out of his earlobe and hurl himself out of window shouting, “My life may be over, but I am not going down alone — I’m taking you and Steven down with me!”
And this week’s Top 3 are …
1 (2) EMPIRE
2 (1) DALLAS
3 (3) DYNASTY