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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 199526" data-attributes="member: 22">20 Jun 12: DALLAS: The Price You Pay v. 21 Jan 15: EMPIRE: The Devil Quotes Scripture v. 11 Oct 15: BLOOD AND OIL: Hustle and Flow v. 25 Oct 17: DYNASTY: Guilt Is for Insecure PeopleThree episodes in, we find each of the soaps digging further into their backstories, the better to illuminate and explain their characters’ actions in the present. And once again, the overriding theme is father/son relationships.A good example of both is the terrific opening scene of DALLAS. JR is treating himself and John Ross to an old-fashioned shave in some kind of exclusive gentleman’s club. While a towel covers John Ross’s face, JR recounts a childhood anecdote about his own father that paints a much darker picture of Jock as a parent than we’ve ever heard before: “When I was eight years old, I asked my daddy for a horse and he said when I came up with the money, he’d sell me one. So all that summer, I worked in the oilfields, digging trenches and such, twelve hours a day, and true to his word, Daddy sold me a horse. I learned quick enough that horse was blind. Now I loved my daddy and I respected my daddy, but most importantly, I feared my daddy.” By the time JR has finished his story, he has taken the blade from John Ross’s barber and is holding it to his son’s throat. John Ross opens his eyes. “I went down to Mexico and talked to Mr Del Sol about the Southfork deal,” JR continues. “I know Marta is not Marta. Were you going to cut your daddy out of two billion barrels worth of oil? Hmm?”Meanwhile, EMPIRE’s Lucious Lyon imparts his own cheerful childhood tale to a tearful little boy at Bunky’s funeral. “My daddy died when I was little, just like you,” he tells him, “but you know, men don’t cry.” He hands the kid a hundred dollar bill. “You wanna be a rapper when you grow up? Here, I believe in you so here’s an advance on your first album. When you’re ready, come see me.”Lucious expands on his “men don’t cry” message during a blistering confrontation with his own son Jamal. “I tried to tell you since you were a baby that it’s not about black eyes or bloody noses in this world, it’s life and death and if you don’t toughen up, these streets will eat your ass alive!” “Since I was a baby, you beat me,” Jamal replies. “You told me that was to toughen me up. That was a lie. You beat me because you hate me and you always will because I’m always gonna be who I am.” “I don’t hate you,” Lucious counters. “I don’t know you. I didn’t bring any women into this world and to see my son become somebody’s bitch?! I don’t understand you!” Soap Land’s only previous example of a homophobic father was Blake on Old DYNASTY. Whereas his disparaging remarks about his son’s “lifestyle” were delivered with a kind of icy distaste, Lucious’s in this scene are impassioned, confused and strangely moving.After unnerving John Ross with the razor blade, JR abruptly changes tack. “I was never much of a father during your formative years,” he admits, “and I’d like to make up for that. I’d like to teach you all the things my daddy taught me about big oil. Can you find in your heart to give me that chance? I won’t let you down this time.” Hap Briggs makes a similar overture to his son Wick on BLOOD AND OIL. “You must have asked me a thousand times, ‘Daddy, how d’you get that oil out of the ground?’” he remembers. “I was so damn busy back then, I never answered you … Well, now it really is time for me to teach you. I want you as my partner.” “Pop, I want that … more than anything in the world,” Wick replies. John Ross accepts JR’s offer too and they embrace. Over his father’s shoulder, he permits himself a shy smile — clearly, this is the relationship with his daddy he’s always craved.This is all very nice, but can either father really be trusted? Just as we’re not sure if JR really has forgiven John Ross for trying to double-cross him, we’re also uncertain whether or not Hap has figured out Wick is the one who attacked him at gunpoint and is now setting him up for a fall. For now, Hap continues to pull on his son’s heartstrings as he explains why he named a particular oilfield Koala #1. “You were born premature,” he recalls. “Koala was the incubator they had you in and I bought this parcel of land the day you came home. It was always meant to be your first well.” Over on New DYNASTY, Blake also recalls the birth of one of his children. “I was on the golf course,” he tells Fallon, “when Anders called to tell me that your mother’s waters broke … Your being born was one of the greatest days of my life.” As he speaks, he gestures to a framed photo of himself as a young man, looking remarkably like Jake Hansen from MELROSE PLACE, cradling his newborn daughter.JR, meanwhile, finds a snapshot of Miss Ellie and Bobby when she was a young mother and he was a little boy, i.e., long before Barbara Bel Geddes and Patrick Duffy had been cast in their roles. This gives us a glimpse of a period of Ewing history we’ve never seen before. “She doted on that boy something fierce,” JR remembers “I spent a lot of my life hating how much she loved him — wasted years.”Now he knows Carlos Del Sol is not really involved in the Southfork deal, JR tells John Ross he wishes to meet “the real money men”. This leads to the introduction of Venezuelan businessman Vicente Cano in a great scene where it becomes clear that JR has lost none of his ability to negotiate a deal. “I wanna make sure we’re on the same page on this deal,” he tells Vicente. “After you buy Southfork from my brother, you’ll convey that property to me and my son for 14% of all profits received from the oil recovered from our wells.” At this, John Ross and Fake Marta exchange nervous looks. “The deal was 15%,” Vicente points out. “That was when I thought I was dealing with Carlos Del Sol — he’s a trusted old friend,” explains JR calmly. “If that oil should stop flowing to us for any reason … that would be unacceptable,” warns Vicente ominously. “The best way to understand a man is to talk to his friends and his enemies — my friends are in the statehouse. My enemies are gonna be harder to find,” parries JR. Vicente laughs and agrees to the 14%.Over on EMPIRE, Lucious demonstrates a more direct method of negotiation after he is approached by Mel, the manager of one of the singers on his label. “I’m-a hold you to all those promises you ain’t kept when you signed her or you gonna need some more protection,” Mel snarls. Lucious casually invites him to continue their discussion in his trailer. On his way inside, Lucious picks up a metal bar. We remain outside with Lucious’ security guards and overhear various thumps and groans coming from within. After a moment, Lucious emerges. “Mel had a little accident,” he informs one of the guards. “You might wanna clean that up.”But it is BLOOD AND OIL’s Hap Briggs who proves the week’s most devious businessman. The more the show’s ambitious young hero Billy LeFever hears about Hap and Wick’s new Koala venture, the more he wants a piece of the action. When Hap informs him that “the minimum buy-in on that piece is $500,000,” Billy offers to trade him his entire stake in the McCutching field (the deal he originally made with Hap). Hap accepts the offer — but then Koala turns out to be a bust. The whole deal was a trap by Hap to sucker Billy into handing over his fortune. “You used me, Pop!” Wick realises. “Damn right I used you,” admits Hap. “I needed to get McCutching back. That’s the prize — a trillion dollars worth of oil … That’s the one we do together.”Along with all the double-dealing, there’s plenty of espionage this week. On DALLAS, Tommy Sutter slips his sister Rebecca a little gizmo to plug into Christopher’s laptop so they can keep tabs on his gas hydrate research. However, Rebecca is suffering from the Spy Who Loved Me syndrome, i.e., she’s fallen in love with her own husband, and is reluctant to betray him any more than she already has. Meanwhile, her past crimes are catching up with her as John Ross’s detective informs him that it was she who sent the fake email that split up Christopher and Elena two years earlier.Meanwhile on EMPIRE, another private eye, hired by Anika, provides Lucious with photos of Cookie’s clandestine meeting at the end of last week’s episode. “I would bet my bottom dollar that those two are Feds,” the detective declares. Lucious duly confronts his ex-wife (“Did you snitch on me so you could get out of jail early?!”) which is bad news for Cookie’s FBI contact, Agent Carter: “Lucious can’t know we’re FBI. We’ve spent five years building this case … We won’t have it compromised by your nosy ex-husband.”Back on BLOOD AND OIL, Hap’s driver AJ has been spying on his boss for a no-nonsense bespectacled middle-aged woman who, like Cookie’s Agent Carter, looks a bit like Edna in The Incredibles. Is AJ’s Edna an FBI agent too? We don’t know yet, but she is not impressed by the snaps he took of his boss at the end of last week’s episode. “Those photos prove nothing,” she snaps at him during their secret meeting. “There’s a lot of people that you’re letting down. Get those soil samples and get what we need!”Blake’s chauffeur Michael is also being pumped for “front-seat intel” about his boss, this time by Fallon, who wants something she can use against her father now that he has taken out a cease-and-desist order to prevent her from trading under the Carrington name. Jealous about her close working relationship with Jeff Colby, Michael refuses. He does, however, divulge to Steven that Blake has had Matthew Blaisdel’s phone lifted from police evidence. This is of particular relevance to Steven as he was arrested for Matthew’s murder at the end of last week’s ep. When he asks his father why he has the phone (“The only reason that makes any sense is because there’s something on it that incriminates you!”), Blake gets defensive: “How dare you question me? … I am protecting you and this is the thanks I get!” “There it is,” snaps back Steven. “There’s that Carrington temper again. You think your name means that you can give everything with one fist and then smash it with the other? That’s why I don’t answer your calls, that’s why I left. And as soon as I’m exonerated, I’m gone for good!”Following some minor surgery, Bobby’s terminal condition ain’t so terminal anymore. However, he’s not entirely out of the woods — his doctor warns that the medication he’s on to prevent a relapse could have serious side effects. “Hair loss isn’t one of them, right?” Bobby joshes — but Ann is concerned, which suggests maybe we should be too. In fact, prescription medication is everywhere this week. Fake Marta is shown nervously popping a couple of pills on DALLAS while on EMPIRE, Cookie catches Lucious struggling to take the lid off his medication, which he pretends is merely for hypertension. And on BLOOD AND OIL, Lacey makes an intriguing jibe at her stepmother: “Careful Carla, I don’t think wine mixes well with anti-depressants.”Bobby’s remission leads to a change of heart about selling Southfork — bad news for JR and John Ross who have just made their deal with the scary Venezuelans. So they cook up a scheme that entails JR moving back to the ranch and getting his hands on Miss Ellie’s diary. He then passes this on to John Ross, who threatens to use its contents, including the fact that his grandmother “spent some time in a mental institution” after Jock’s death (presumably the Takapa resort had a psychiatric wing), to contest her will unless Bobby go ahead with the sale of the ranch. “There is nothing in Mama’s journal that will help overturn her will,” argues Bobby. “Maybe it won’t,” John Ross concedes, “but it’ll get me my day in court and if you push me, I will use that day to tell all of Dallas every private thought and secret shame Miss Ellie ever had … If I don’t hear from you in twenty-four hours, I’m filing!”JR feigns outrage at John Ross’s ultimatum and they stage a showdown in front of Bobby and Ann (although the shock on John Ross’s face when JR lands him a right hook looks real enough). There’s more play-acting on EMPIRE when Agent Carter pretends to be Cookie’s probation officer in order to put Lucious off the scent of whatever it is they’re really up to.A few more tantalising tidbits are revealed about Blake’s and Bobby’s first wives this week. “Secrets are what killed things between me and Alexis,” Blake tells Cristal. “Pam just disappeared one day,” Elena tells Rebecca. We also learn that Blake had the Carrington name trademarked after Alexis “tried to use it to start a line of lip-plumping kits," that she encouraged Steven to learn the piano as a child, was given to reading “crazy feminist books” and once presented Blake with some cufflinks “for Guy Fawkes”. As Guy Fawkes Night is a specifically British celebration (albeit one more associated with bonfires than gift-giving), this seems to suggest that the writers intended Alexis to be English at this point.Back on DALLAS, Elena goes into further detail about Christopher’s upbringing. “Both of his real parents died before he ever got to meet them … It was just him and Bobby. When Christopher found out he was adopted, he started to feel he had to earn being a Ewing — Ewings don’t fail.” This serves to explain Christopher’s strong reaction when he walks in on Bobby signing Southfork away, John Ross’s blackmail having had the desired effect. Bobby insists that he’s doing “what needed to be done, what’s best for everybody.” “That’s bullshit!” Christopher argues. “You’re selling because you don’t think I can beat John Ross … Stop protecting me like I’m still a little boy. I’m a grown man!” This prompts Bobby to tell him about his cancer. Devastated by the news and angry that his father kept it from him for so long (“I didn’t wanna burden you,” Bobby explains. “Telling me you have cancer isn’t being a burden, it’s letting me be a part of your life. Stop shutting me out!” Christopher yells), he breaks down in Elena’s arms. Their inevitable kiss is caught on camera phone by Tommy who sends the resultant snaps to Rebecca, in the hopes that they will turn her against Christopher once and for all. However, in the same way that the compromising photo of Cristal with Matthew Fallon sent Blake ultimately brought him and Cristal closer together, the same thing happens with Christopher and Rebecca. (Three weeks in, and it’s hard to imagine how Soap Land ever got along without camera phones. But, as Michael Culhane points out to Fallon this week, “There was definitely no texting in the ‘80s.”)“I’m a grown man!” Christopher tells his father on DALLAS. “I’m a man!” Jamal tells his father on EMPIRE. “My obedience is no longer for sale.” “Nice speech, kid,” Lucious replies cynically, “especially hearing it in the apartment that I pay for.” Jamal responds by moving out.From Zsa Zsa Gabor to Henry Kissinger, from Mary Lou Retton to the Mayor of Texas, ‘80s Soap Land was no stranger to the occasional, almost invariably awkward, appearance by a real-life celebrity “as themselves”. This week, EMPIRE ups the ante by having the Empress of Soul, Gladys Knight, perform at Bunky’s funeral as … Gladys Knight. The show has her do what she does best, i.e., sing up a storm, with an impassioned “Hallelujah for you, Bunky!” her only non-musical line.To use Cristal’s terminology from last week, Lucious “controls the narrative” at Bunky’s funeral just as Blake did at Matthew’s wake — even going so far as to deliver a eulogy for the man he murdered. But then an eyewitness to the shooting steps forward. Fortunately for Lucious, he’s a paranoid schizophrenic with a drink problem. But despite his Irish accent and silly hat, something about him moves the investigating officer (in a way that nothing about the disturbed Claudia moves anyone on DYNASTY) into paying his quasi-religious ramblings about Daniel and the lion’s den some heed. “Is this the lion?” he asks him, showing him a picture of Lucious. Of course, Lucious Lyon!When Lucious learns of a witness, he asks his son Andre to find out more details from “your contact down at City Hall.” Andre elicits this information while bending said contact, Deputy Mayor Alvarez, over her desk and taking her from behind. When he gets home, his wife Rhonda is curious to hear about the meeting. “It must have taken a lot of persuading for you to get her to dig up police privileged information,” she remarks. “I would love to know how you did that.” “You know the deputy mayor, babe,” he replies smoothly. “She likes it like this.” He then proceeds to do to his wife what he has just done to the deputy mayor. “Call me her name,” moans Rhonda, like nobody in Soap Land has since Lucy Ewing in that hayloft thirty-seven years earlier. He obliges, even though “Deputy Mayor Alvarez” is more of a mouthful for him than “Pam” was for Ray Krebbs.There’s further role play on EMPIRE as it emerges that Andre’s little brother Hakeem is two-timing his new girlfriend with an older woman. “Tell me, who am I to you?” she asks as they make love on a pool table. “You’re my mama,” he replies. “Tell me again,” she insists. Adding to the craziness, Mama is played by none another than Streatham’s finest, Naomi Campbell. (Combine this with Gladys Knight and a two-scene appearance by Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding Jr, and Old DYNASTY at its most guest starriest pales by comparison.)The kinkiness continues on BLOOD AND OIL where Jules Jackman achieves a Soap Land first by sleeping with a father and a son in the same episode. (I know we got pretty used to mothers and daughters bedding the same man back in ‘80s Soap Land, but when you switch the genders around, it somehow feels even more grubbily salacious.)And there’s even more sexy role play over on DYNASTY as Fallon straddles Michael while dressed as ‘Like a Virgin’-era Madonna. “You like it when I pretend to be someone else, don’t you?” she observes.The ‘80s just happens to be the theme for DYNASTY’s charity ball this week. Curiously, whereas Cristal’s and Fallon’s gowns pay homage to the sparkle and taffeta of the original series, the ball’s other period references belong more to the New Pop era of early ‘80s Britain — Sam’s pork pie hat recalls the ska revival heralded by 2-Tone and Madness, while the soundtrack is provided by UK acts like Billy Idol, the Human League and New Order. (In addition, Steven is shown playing Soft Cell’s version of ‘Tainted Love’ on the piano.) Anders, conversely, is dressed as a TV icon from later in the decade — no, not Jim Robinson from NEIGHBOURS, but Sonny Crockett from MIAMI VICE, aka Hap Briggs in BLOOD AND OIL. And while we’re on the subject, might Hap’s son’s habit of turning up the collar and pushing up the sleeves of his jacket also be a homage to Don Johnson’s former self?Speaking of the ‘80s, there are some notable references to DALLAS’s onscreen history this week. As well as the Pam stuff, JR assures Ann that “bullets don’t seem to have much of an effect on me, darlin’," after she mistakes him for an intruder and pulls a gun on him. And while New DYNASTY has already made a habit of repurposing dialogue from the original series, JR quotes the 1980/81 season of DALLAS directly when he says to John Ross, “I’m going to tell you the truest thing my daddy ever told me — ‘nobody gives you power, real power is something you take.'”There’s no sign of Sue Ellen Ewing or Monique Colby this week. As if to compensate, a few long lost relatives emerge out of the woodwork. Most exciting is Cliff Barnes — noticeably older, smaller and richer than the Cliff we last saw in “JR Returns”. The familiar goofiness and bluster have been replaced by an aura of power and mystery. Whereas he would once have been provoked by JR’s introductory greeting (“Time has not been kind to that face, but I do recall the smell of brimstone and crazy”), it now washes over him. Seems he’s been away from Dallas for some years, and no-one knows why he’s back or what he wants. Bobby looks pleased to see him, but JR and Christopher are each unnerved by his return. “You think it’s coincidental that he shows up in Dallas just when Southfork is for sale? If that land is in play, he’ll destroy everything in his path to get it!” JR warns. When Cliff offers to invest in his gas hydrate project, Christopher is openly hostile: “This isn’t about supporting me, is it, Uncle Cliff? It’s about screwing my family.” Cliff replies with an ominous warning about the Ewings: “You are never gonna be one of them, Christopher, and don’t let them destroy you like they did Pam.” Just like JR, this once familiar character has become dark and unknowable, and it’s absolutely fascinating.We are also introduced to Cookie’s and Cristal’s sisters, Carol and Iris respectively. Carol attends Bunky’s funeral while Iris appears in a Venezuelan flashback of Cristal’s. As we know from Caress Morelle on Old DYNASTY and Vicente Cano on New DALLAS, Venezuela is a dangerous place. We see Cristal in a squalid room twelve years earlier, frantically bundling wads of cash into a bag, then arranging with Iris for them to both flee the country. Then, for some unknown reason, she is forced to leave her sister behind. In the present day, Sam (Iris’s son) tells Cristal that his mother is in trouble and needs money fast. Cristal wants to help, but worries that a large cash transaction will alert Blake to the fact that “my entire past is one big lie.” She’s not alone there. “He’s in love with a lie,” says Tommy reminds Rebecca on DALLAS, referring to her husband Christopher.In the first episode of BLOOD AND OIL, Hap Briggs battled with a masked intruder, not realising it was his own son. In the first episode of New DALLAS, Ann Ewing chased a trespasser away from Southfork, not realising he had been hired by her husband’s nephew. On this week’s DYNASTY, Blake is attacked by a burglar in his own bedroom, not realising that the break-in was arranged by his wife’s nephew. “My husband got hurt!” Cristal tells Sam when she finds out. “He got in the way — and a little cut is nothing compared to what could have happened to my mom,” Sam replies. “My friends will sell the stuff. She’ll have the cash in the morning.” During the attack, Steven comes to Blake’s rescue, leading to a cessation of hostilities and a nice heart-to-heart between father and son.Blake admits to Steven that he procured Matthew’s phone from the police out of “morbid curiosity about Cristal’s affair … I returned it to evidence … If there was anything on there that would have helped exonerate you, I would not have hesitated to admit what I’d done … There is nothing I wouldn’t do to protect you.” His next words are in stark contrast to what Lucious told his gay son in their big scene (“If you don’t toughen up, these streets will eat your ass alive!”): “The thing I admire most about you is how much you care about other people, how you love.”Blake’s conflict with Steven in this ep is more interesting than his feud with Fallon, but she nonetheless has some great one-liners. On whether Blake is capable of killing Matthew: “I know Dad’s a Cristal addict, but do you really think he’d go that far?” On Steven’s credibility: “You don’t know anything — you wear a belt with jeans.” On the 1980s: “Ah, the ‘80s — when greed was good. I wasn’t born yet, but I do miss it.”EMPIRE and BLOOD AND OIL each end with a worm turning, as nice guys Jamal Lyon and Billy LeFever vow to get back at Lucious and Hap respectively. “I’m going after his empire,” Jamal tells boyfriend Michael. “I did not see this coming today, but you know what? When the time comes, neither will Hap Briggs,” Billy tells wife Cody.Just as Billy has seen through Hap (sooner than I was expecting — but then the series only has ten episodes so I guess they’re wise to get a move on), so Bobby sees through JR’s ‘reformed character’ act. In other words, he knows it was JR who was behind John Ross’s blackmail over Miss Ellie. His weary acceptance of the fact is unexpectedly moving. “Honey,” he tells Ann, “the fact that JR did it and he thinks he can make me believe he didn’t do it — that’s just who is he is and who he will always be.” And yet he loves him anyway.“I grew up in a family where stabbing everybody in the back was encouraged,” Bobby tells Christopher on New DALLAS. “Thanks for being so honest — kind of rare around this house,” Steven tells Sam on New DYNASTY. And as if to prove Steven’s point, we discover at the very end of this week’s ep that when Blake seemingly confessed all to his son during their reconciliation scene, he still wasn’t telling the whole truth. He didn’t return Matthew’s phone to the police — and now the burglar has it! “If what’s on that phone gets out, it will ruin the Carrington name!” he tells Anders. And the Top 4 are …1 (1) DALLAS2 (3) EMPIRE3 (2) BLOOD AND OIL4 (4) DYNASTY</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =