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Falcon Crest
FALCON CREST versus DYNASTY versus DALLAS versus KNOTS LANDING versus the rest of them, week by week
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<blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 158256" data-attributes="member: 22"><p><u>16 Nov 89: KNOTS LANDING: The Good Guys v. 17 Nov 89: DALLAS: Daddy Dearest v. 17 Nov 89: FALCON CREST: Doctor Dollars</u></p><p></p><p>Tom Ryan, Paige’s new boyfriend on KNOTS, is a policeman — just as Fallon’s was on last season’s DYNASTY. But whereas Fallon’s father strongly disapproved of that relationship, Mack could not be happier about his daughter’s new man: “He’s a nice guy! I approve!” This infuriates Paige. “You approve of him, Mack approves of him, everyone approves of him,” she complains to Karen. “That bothers you?” Karen asks. “Yes!” she replies. But in the same way that Blake was wrong to suspect Zorelli of being a dirty cop, Mack is wrong to assume that Tom is a clean one. In fact, as we slowly come to realise during this week’s episode, he’s as dirty as they come.</p><p></p><p>The $17,000 Aunt Ginny discovered at the end of last week’s ep is all Mack needs to prove Mark Baylor innocent of Jeri Maddux’ murder. He and Baylor arrive at the Soap Land courthouse to submit the evidence to a judge when Baylor tells him, “I gotta make a pitstop. Had too much coffee this morning.” While this is a more discreet euphemism than the one Charley St James used for the same function on FALCON CREST last month (“pointing Percy at the porcelain”), it does lead to Soap Land’s very first depiction of urination, albeit occurring below camera level, as Tom Ryan joins Baylor in the men’s room and strikes up a conversation with him. We aren’t privy to their entire chat, but by the time Baylor has rejoined Mack, he has had a dramatic change of heart. “I don’t want you to get me off … I want you to plead me guilty,” he tells him. When Mack refuses, insisting that he has proof Baylor is innocent, Baylor threatens him: “You turn in that money, I’ll have you disbarred. I’ll say it’s manufactured evidence.” This is our first big clue that Detective Ryan may not be the stand-up cop everyone thinks he is.</p><p></p><p>Ewing-verse trend of the week: Macks filing lawsuits. On KNOTS, Baylor pleading guilty means that Mack has lost his opportunity to expose Oakman Industries — until Frank suggests he look for “some other Jeris … people in her situation, people who have lost a pension they thought they had, people who hate Oakman Industries because of it.” Enter Mr Artie Zimmer, a former colleague of Jeri’s. “You lost your pension too,” Mack reminds him. “I have a chance to get it back with a class action suit … If I can prove malfeasance or mismanagement or fraud, Oakman Industries may be forced to compensate everyone under the pension fund.” Zimmer is persuaded and Mack files the suit on his behalf. Meanwhile, DALLAS’s Mack, Carter McKay, marches into Ewing Oil and informs JR and Bobby that he is slapping them with a civil lawsuit “for negligence, for operating an unsafe tanker, maliciously ramming a West Star tanker, damages for all the oil I lost, for the total cost of the cleanup and FOR ANY OTHER DAMN THING I CAN THINK OF TO BREAK EWING OIL ONCE AND FOR ALL!”</p><p></p><p>Back on KNOTS, Mack’s suit suffers a serious setback after Mr Zimmer is badly injured. “He’s pretty beat up … He fell down the stairs,” says Detective Ryan, who just happens to be at Zimmer’s apartment when Mack arrives. “No lawsuit,” mumbles Mr Zimmer, looking at both Mack and Tom as he is carried away on a stretcher. And that’s our second big clue about Tom. (This isn’t turning out to be a good season to be old in Soap Land — first Angela gets suffocated on FALCON CREST, then Jeri is tossed out of a window and now Artie takes a mysterious tumble down a flight of stairs. Watch out, Mrs Evander and Mrs Richfield.)</p><p></p><p>Thus far, the main players in the Oakman storyline have been elderly people and lawyers. While this has been dramatically rewarding, it’s not quite what one expects of a glossy ‘80s supersoap. Now, however, the story takes a more traditional turn with the introduction of one of the soapiest tropes of them all: “You’ve done a terrific job, but we don’t need any more surveillance of Mack Mackenzie so you’re off the case,” one of the shadowy bosses at Oakman tells Tom Ryan. A few scenes later: “You were taken off the Mackenzie case … but you’re still dating his daughter … Your actions jeopardise our position.” “Don’t even think that you can tell me who I can and cannot see … or who I date. You do not own me,” Tom insists. Yes, it’s the welcome return of “the spy who loved me” syndrome, where one character seduces another character for business reasons, usually at the behest of a third party, only to find themselves developing genuine feelings in the process. (In spite of Tom’s defiant words to his Oakman boss, the episode ends with an artful montage of Paige being stood up on a date. Of all the soaps, only KNOTS could make an artful montage out of someone being stood up on a date.)</p><p></p><p>The spy in “the spy who loved me” syndrome is traditionally a woman. Prior to Tom, I can recall only one who was male — Zach Powers’ nephew Sean who slept with Bliss on THE COLBYS in order to spy on her father and then fell in love with her. But on this week’s FALCON CREST, there is an all-male, strictly platonic, variation on this scenario as Richard is approached by Sal Tortino, a fellow inmate from his time in the Soap Land Penitentiary. Sal is recently out of prison and so Richard offers him a job, not realising that Sal has been hired by Michael Sharpe to bump him off.</p><p></p><p>Sal is kind of irritating — he’s excitable, never shuts up and makes a lot of crappy jokes. He also keeps bungling his attempts to kill Richard, but just when the whole thing starts to feel like one of those tiresome would-be assassin storylines I’d hoped FC had dispensed with after Season 7, there's a twist. Richard summons Sal to his office and hands him “a little bonus to help you get set up.” Sal is blindsided by both the amount of money (“You got four digits in here, man!”) and the genuine faith Richard seems to have in him. Confused, he pulls out a gun and points it at Richard: “You don’t get it, man, do you? I was gonna take you for a ride so I could blow your brains out! … I’d better leave. Just forget I got out of prison, all right?” But just as Bobby wouldn’t let JR simply walk away from Ewing Oil last week, Richard isn’t about to let Sal go so easily either. So Sal makes another suggestion: “Michael Sharpe wants a war. Why don’t you give it to him? I’ll help you.” From that point on, an apparently dull storyline becomes gripping. Wearing a wire, Sal meets with Sharpe in the back of his limo and tries to lure him into saying he ordered the hit on Richard. But Michael’s no fool — he realises what Sal is up to and has him driven to an alley and beaten up. Sal then tries to make a run for it so Michael calmly instructs his chauffeur to first run him down and then drive over him. It’s pretty brutal. By the time the police and Richard arrive on the scene, it’s too late. “Just another dead scumbag,” concludes one of the cops. “He was my friend,” Richard insists, and the episode ends with him cradling the body of a man who was pointing a gun at him only ten screen minutes earlier — proof, if it were needed, that Richard really is a changed man.</p><p></p><p>While Sal mostly spoke a lot of rubbish, he did come out with one memorable salutation during this week’s FC: “Peace, love, Phil Donahue.” Donahue, along with Oprah, Geraldo and a few others, is presumably the inspiration for Karen Mackenzie’s latest storyline, which finds her becoming the stand-in host of OPEN MIKE, the TV talk show she guested on a couple of weeks ago. Whereas Sue Ellen’s excursion into movie-making on last season’s DALLAS never felt remotely believable, it’s much easier to accept Karen sitting on a cheap-looking TV set being bombarded with instructions from the floor manager, ending with the ominous reminder that “there’s no post-production budget on this thing.” Despite having no experience of television presenting whatsoever, Karen inevitably proves a total natural in front of the camera (just as Joshua Rush did). In this regard, the storyline is just as much a fantasy as Cally Ewing’s overnight transformation into an accomplished artist. But it <em>feels</em> real and so we’re happy to suspend our disbelief.</p><p></p><p>In the same way that Karen breaks the fourth wall by looking straight at the camera to welcome viewers, both real and fictional, to OPEN MIKE (“The subject is credit cards — it seems we can’t live with ‘em, we can’t live without ‘em”), Cliff Barnes does the same thing when he announces to the press his appointment to a committee that will “investigate the Ewing/West Star disaster … Those guilty will answer for their crimes and … we will be able to take safeguards so that these kind of disasters don’t happen again, even if that means shutting down the companies responsible for what’s happening in the Gulf today.” In spite of the gravity of what he is saying, Cliff is unable to suppress a delighted smirk as he looks directly down the camera lens, directly at <em>us</em>.</p><p></p><p>Prior to his unexpected fall down the stairs, Arnie Zimmer touchingly admits to Mack that he and Jeri had been lovers before she was killed. “Stupid young people think they’ve cornered the market on passion,” he says. Actually, young couples are surprisingly thin on the ground in Soap Land these days. Instead, younger women are paired with older men almost as a matter of course: Paige and Greg, Cally and JR, April and Bobby, Michelle and Cliff, Sydney and Ian, Genele and Frank — even Olivia and Harold qualify. That leaves Pilar and Lance on FALCON CREST and Tom and Paige on KNOTS as the only “hot young couples” in Soap Land — until they are joined by a third: DALLAS’s James and Michelle. As with Tom’s initial interest in Paige, instant sexual attraction is accompanied by an ulterior, business-related motive, but in this case, both parties are aware of it. Michelle has already turned down JR’s request to spy on Cliff when James shows up at her door, hoping to change her mind. “I wanted to see if there was maybe some way I could convince you to help my father,” he explains. “I hear the Lord helps those who help themselves,” she replies invitingly. They kiss. “My father could really use you,” he continues, slipping off her jacket. “Cliff’s becoming a very important man,” she counters, unbuttoning his shirt. “You’re smart enough to know which side to back,” he replies, removing her blouse. (It’s a toss-up as to which “hot young couple” provides the sexiest moment of the week — Paige and Tom as she builds a house of cards on his bare chest, or James and Michelle as he unhooks her skimpy black bra. Lance, conversely, has a decidedly unsexy moment when he finds himself watching a videotape of Pilar going at it with Ned Vogel.)</p><p></p><p>Although Cliff and Michelle have been dating since the beginning of the season and even started living together as of last week, it’s been made clear that they do not share the same bed — yet no specific reason has been given. “He’s dumber than I thought!” concludes James when he finds out. It’s perhaps significant that each of Cliff’s relationships since Pam’s disappearance — with Lisa Alden, Tammy Miller and now Michelle — have been non-sexual.</p><p></p><p>While relationships between older men and younger women remain commonplace, Soap Land’s infatuation with older woman/younger man pairings seems to have died out in the post-DYNASTY era. So it’s perhaps fitting that this week’s DALLAS should see the final appearance of Marilee Stone, often depicted as the most predatory of man-eaters and whose interest in younger men was established long before the likes of Alexis and Sue Ellen started acquiring “toy boy” love interests. Insatiable to the end, Marilee’s last scene sees her flirting with the next generation of Ewing man, aka James. She also delivers one final zinger to JR: “Your son? Funny — at first, I thought he might be your wife’s older brother.”</p><p></p><p>Just as Abby continues to cast a shadow over Olivia and Harold’s marriage (“Did you ever discuss budgeting when you were rich, when you were using Mama’s credit cards … or is it just since you’ve become poor that money’s become so important, huh?”), there is also much talk of Ewings past on DALLAS. Now that James is living at Southfork, he receives a crash course in family history. While Lucy fills him on his father’s first wife (“He cheated on her so much, he made her an alcoholic”), JR tells him about Bobby’s: “Talk about a trouble maker.” “What happened to her?” James asks. “She’s long gone,” JR replies. “Good riddance to bad rubbish as far as I’m concerned.” This offhand dismissal of such a significant character feels cruelly effective, even more so in hindsight when one realises this is the series’ first reference to Pam since her death which, according to New DALLAS, fell between last season and this one. There’s also a sweet little scene where John Ross admits to his daddy that he feels excluded now that James is on the scene. “It’s gonna change everything, isn’t it?” he asks sadly. JR is sympathetic, recalling how he felt when he first learnt that Ray was a Ewing. But the mood of the scene changes when JR makes the outrageous claim that he was “the first one in the whole family to treat Ray like a real brother.”</p><p></p><p>The most significant reference to a past DALLAS character comes in the final scene of the episode. Just as last week’s FALCON CREST ended with an other-worldly message for Emma when her mother briefly awoke from her coma to warn her against Charley, DALLAS ends with JR receiving a letter from his long-dead daddy, originally written during World War II when Jock thought he was dying. Before hearing from their respective parents, both Emma and JR are at a particularly low ebb. “You trusted me and I failed you miserably,” wept Emma at Angela’s bedside. “I hurt the company and I hurt Bobby … Right now, I think my daddy would be ashamed to call me his son,” JR tells Miss Ellie. Both Jock and Angela’s words serve the same narrative purpose: to inspire their discouraged child into rededicating themselves to their primary Soap Land objective: fighting the good (or not so good) fight, all in the name of family. While Angela makes Emma promise to stop Charley, Jock’s letter reminds JR that “the future of the family and Ewing Oil is in your hands.”</p><p></p><p>Among the rallying words in Jock’s letter are two phrases I’ve always associated with movies that weren’t made until long after the second world war was over. The first, “Keep your friends close but your enemies even closer,” is an oft-repeated maxim in Soap Land. In fact, Pilar said it to Lance on FALCON CREST only last week. I’ve always connected it to <em>The Godfather Part II</em> (1974), where Michael Corleone quotes it as a piece of advice handed down from his own father, just as Jock does to JR in his letter. The second phrase, “Never let the bastards get you down”, is a variation on “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”, a line delivered by Albert Finney in the gritty British working class drama <em>Saturday Night, Sunday Morning </em>(1961), which is about as far away from DALLAS as you can get. However, a quick google suggests (although no-one seems certain) that both phrases were first coined somewhat earlier, by Machiavelli and in the trenches of WWII respectively — so it seems that, sadly, we can’t yet add time travel to Jock’s list of achievements. Conversely, when Tom Ryan accuses Paige of being a “cop kisser” on KNOTS, I <em>so</em> wanted it to be a play on ‘Cop Killer’, the massively controversial Death Count song penned by Ice-T, but apparently, that wasn’t even written until 1990.</p><p></p><p>This week’s Ewing-verse contains a couple of interesting ‘what if?’ scenarios. “Did <em>you</em> ever wear a dress like that going to your father’s house on a date?” Mack asks Karen indignantly after Paige shows up with Tom for a family dinner wearing a particularly revealing outfit. “My father would have grounded me for a year!” Karen laughs. “I wonder if he’d have been like that if he’d married my mother?” wonders James after Lucy tells him how notoriously unfaithful JR was to Sue Ellen. “He’d have been like that if he married the Queen of England,” she replies.</p><p></p><p>And this week’s Top 3 are …</p><p></p><p>1 (3) DALLAS</p><p>2 (1) KNOTS LANDING</p><p>3 (2) FALCON CREST</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James from London, post: 158256, member: 22"] [U]16 Nov 89: KNOTS LANDING: The Good Guys v. 17 Nov 89: DALLAS: Daddy Dearest v. 17 Nov 89: FALCON CREST: Doctor Dollars[/U] Tom Ryan, Paige’s new boyfriend on KNOTS, is a policeman — just as Fallon’s was on last season’s DYNASTY. But whereas Fallon’s father strongly disapproved of that relationship, Mack could not be happier about his daughter’s new man: “He’s a nice guy! I approve!” This infuriates Paige. “You approve of him, Mack approves of him, everyone approves of him,” she complains to Karen. “That bothers you?” Karen asks. “Yes!” she replies. But in the same way that Blake was wrong to suspect Zorelli of being a dirty cop, Mack is wrong to assume that Tom is a clean one. In fact, as we slowly come to realise during this week’s episode, he’s as dirty as they come. The $17,000 Aunt Ginny discovered at the end of last week’s ep is all Mack needs to prove Mark Baylor innocent of Jeri Maddux’ murder. He and Baylor arrive at the Soap Land courthouse to submit the evidence to a judge when Baylor tells him, “I gotta make a pitstop. Had too much coffee this morning.” While this is a more discreet euphemism than the one Charley St James used for the same function on FALCON CREST last month (“pointing Percy at the porcelain”), it does lead to Soap Land’s very first depiction of urination, albeit occurring below camera level, as Tom Ryan joins Baylor in the men’s room and strikes up a conversation with him. We aren’t privy to their entire chat, but by the time Baylor has rejoined Mack, he has had a dramatic change of heart. “I don’t want you to get me off … I want you to plead me guilty,” he tells him. When Mack refuses, insisting that he has proof Baylor is innocent, Baylor threatens him: “You turn in that money, I’ll have you disbarred. I’ll say it’s manufactured evidence.” This is our first big clue that Detective Ryan may not be the stand-up cop everyone thinks he is. Ewing-verse trend of the week: Macks filing lawsuits. On KNOTS, Baylor pleading guilty means that Mack has lost his opportunity to expose Oakman Industries — until Frank suggests he look for “some other Jeris … people in her situation, people who have lost a pension they thought they had, people who hate Oakman Industries because of it.” Enter Mr Artie Zimmer, a former colleague of Jeri’s. “You lost your pension too,” Mack reminds him. “I have a chance to get it back with a class action suit … If I can prove malfeasance or mismanagement or fraud, Oakman Industries may be forced to compensate everyone under the pension fund.” Zimmer is persuaded and Mack files the suit on his behalf. Meanwhile, DALLAS’s Mack, Carter McKay, marches into Ewing Oil and informs JR and Bobby that he is slapping them with a civil lawsuit “for negligence, for operating an unsafe tanker, maliciously ramming a West Star tanker, damages for all the oil I lost, for the total cost of the cleanup and FOR ANY OTHER DAMN THING I CAN THINK OF TO BREAK EWING OIL ONCE AND FOR ALL!” Back on KNOTS, Mack’s suit suffers a serious setback after Mr Zimmer is badly injured. “He’s pretty beat up … He fell down the stairs,” says Detective Ryan, who just happens to be at Zimmer’s apartment when Mack arrives. “No lawsuit,” mumbles Mr Zimmer, looking at both Mack and Tom as he is carried away on a stretcher. And that’s our second big clue about Tom. (This isn’t turning out to be a good season to be old in Soap Land — first Angela gets suffocated on FALCON CREST, then Jeri is tossed out of a window and now Artie takes a mysterious tumble down a flight of stairs. Watch out, Mrs Evander and Mrs Richfield.) Thus far, the main players in the Oakman storyline have been elderly people and lawyers. While this has been dramatically rewarding, it’s not quite what one expects of a glossy ‘80s supersoap. Now, however, the story takes a more traditional turn with the introduction of one of the soapiest tropes of them all: “You’ve done a terrific job, but we don’t need any more surveillance of Mack Mackenzie so you’re off the case,” one of the shadowy bosses at Oakman tells Tom Ryan. A few scenes later: “You were taken off the Mackenzie case … but you’re still dating his daughter … Your actions jeopardise our position.” “Don’t even think that you can tell me who I can and cannot see … or who I date. You do not own me,” Tom insists. Yes, it’s the welcome return of “the spy who loved me” syndrome, where one character seduces another character for business reasons, usually at the behest of a third party, only to find themselves developing genuine feelings in the process. (In spite of Tom’s defiant words to his Oakman boss, the episode ends with an artful montage of Paige being stood up on a date. Of all the soaps, only KNOTS could make an artful montage out of someone being stood up on a date.) The spy in “the spy who loved me” syndrome is traditionally a woman. Prior to Tom, I can recall only one who was male — Zach Powers’ nephew Sean who slept with Bliss on THE COLBYS in order to spy on her father and then fell in love with her. But on this week’s FALCON CREST, there is an all-male, strictly platonic, variation on this scenario as Richard is approached by Sal Tortino, a fellow inmate from his time in the Soap Land Penitentiary. Sal is recently out of prison and so Richard offers him a job, not realising that Sal has been hired by Michael Sharpe to bump him off. Sal is kind of irritating — he’s excitable, never shuts up and makes a lot of crappy jokes. He also keeps bungling his attempts to kill Richard, but just when the whole thing starts to feel like one of those tiresome would-be assassin storylines I’d hoped FC had dispensed with after Season 7, there's a twist. Richard summons Sal to his office and hands him “a little bonus to help you get set up.” Sal is blindsided by both the amount of money (“You got four digits in here, man!”) and the genuine faith Richard seems to have in him. Confused, he pulls out a gun and points it at Richard: “You don’t get it, man, do you? I was gonna take you for a ride so I could blow your brains out! … I’d better leave. Just forget I got out of prison, all right?” But just as Bobby wouldn’t let JR simply walk away from Ewing Oil last week, Richard isn’t about to let Sal go so easily either. So Sal makes another suggestion: “Michael Sharpe wants a war. Why don’t you give it to him? I’ll help you.” From that point on, an apparently dull storyline becomes gripping. Wearing a wire, Sal meets with Sharpe in the back of his limo and tries to lure him into saying he ordered the hit on Richard. But Michael’s no fool — he realises what Sal is up to and has him driven to an alley and beaten up. Sal then tries to make a run for it so Michael calmly instructs his chauffeur to first run him down and then drive over him. It’s pretty brutal. By the time the police and Richard arrive on the scene, it’s too late. “Just another dead scumbag,” concludes one of the cops. “He was my friend,” Richard insists, and the episode ends with him cradling the body of a man who was pointing a gun at him only ten screen minutes earlier — proof, if it were needed, that Richard really is a changed man. While Sal mostly spoke a lot of rubbish, he did come out with one memorable salutation during this week’s FC: “Peace, love, Phil Donahue.” Donahue, along with Oprah, Geraldo and a few others, is presumably the inspiration for Karen Mackenzie’s latest storyline, which finds her becoming the stand-in host of OPEN MIKE, the TV talk show she guested on a couple of weeks ago. Whereas Sue Ellen’s excursion into movie-making on last season’s DALLAS never felt remotely believable, it’s much easier to accept Karen sitting on a cheap-looking TV set being bombarded with instructions from the floor manager, ending with the ominous reminder that “there’s no post-production budget on this thing.” Despite having no experience of television presenting whatsoever, Karen inevitably proves a total natural in front of the camera (just as Joshua Rush did). In this regard, the storyline is just as much a fantasy as Cally Ewing’s overnight transformation into an accomplished artist. But it [I]feels[/I] real and so we’re happy to suspend our disbelief. In the same way that Karen breaks the fourth wall by looking straight at the camera to welcome viewers, both real and fictional, to OPEN MIKE (“The subject is credit cards — it seems we can’t live with ‘em, we can’t live without ‘em”), Cliff Barnes does the same thing when he announces to the press his appointment to a committee that will “investigate the Ewing/West Star disaster … Those guilty will answer for their crimes and … we will be able to take safeguards so that these kind of disasters don’t happen again, even if that means shutting down the companies responsible for what’s happening in the Gulf today.” In spite of the gravity of what he is saying, Cliff is unable to suppress a delighted smirk as he looks directly down the camera lens, directly at [I]us[/I]. Prior to his unexpected fall down the stairs, Arnie Zimmer touchingly admits to Mack that he and Jeri had been lovers before she was killed. “Stupid young people think they’ve cornered the market on passion,” he says. Actually, young couples are surprisingly thin on the ground in Soap Land these days. Instead, younger women are paired with older men almost as a matter of course: Paige and Greg, Cally and JR, April and Bobby, Michelle and Cliff, Sydney and Ian, Genele and Frank — even Olivia and Harold qualify. That leaves Pilar and Lance on FALCON CREST and Tom and Paige on KNOTS as the only “hot young couples” in Soap Land — until they are joined by a third: DALLAS’s James and Michelle. As with Tom’s initial interest in Paige, instant sexual attraction is accompanied by an ulterior, business-related motive, but in this case, both parties are aware of it. Michelle has already turned down JR’s request to spy on Cliff when James shows up at her door, hoping to change her mind. “I wanted to see if there was maybe some way I could convince you to help my father,” he explains. “I hear the Lord helps those who help themselves,” she replies invitingly. They kiss. “My father could really use you,” he continues, slipping off her jacket. “Cliff’s becoming a very important man,” she counters, unbuttoning his shirt. “You’re smart enough to know which side to back,” he replies, removing her blouse. (It’s a toss-up as to which “hot young couple” provides the sexiest moment of the week — Paige and Tom as she builds a house of cards on his bare chest, or James and Michelle as he unhooks her skimpy black bra. Lance, conversely, has a decidedly unsexy moment when he finds himself watching a videotape of Pilar going at it with Ned Vogel.) Although Cliff and Michelle have been dating since the beginning of the season and even started living together as of last week, it’s been made clear that they do not share the same bed — yet no specific reason has been given. “He’s dumber than I thought!” concludes James when he finds out. It’s perhaps significant that each of Cliff’s relationships since Pam’s disappearance — with Lisa Alden, Tammy Miller and now Michelle — have been non-sexual. While relationships between older men and younger women remain commonplace, Soap Land’s infatuation with older woman/younger man pairings seems to have died out in the post-DYNASTY era. So it’s perhaps fitting that this week’s DALLAS should see the final appearance of Marilee Stone, often depicted as the most predatory of man-eaters and whose interest in younger men was established long before the likes of Alexis and Sue Ellen started acquiring “toy boy” love interests. Insatiable to the end, Marilee’s last scene sees her flirting with the next generation of Ewing man, aka James. She also delivers one final zinger to JR: “Your son? Funny — at first, I thought he might be your wife’s older brother.” Just as Abby continues to cast a shadow over Olivia and Harold’s marriage (“Did you ever discuss budgeting when you were rich, when you were using Mama’s credit cards … or is it just since you’ve become poor that money’s become so important, huh?”), there is also much talk of Ewings past on DALLAS. Now that James is living at Southfork, he receives a crash course in family history. While Lucy fills him on his father’s first wife (“He cheated on her so much, he made her an alcoholic”), JR tells him about Bobby’s: “Talk about a trouble maker.” “What happened to her?” James asks. “She’s long gone,” JR replies. “Good riddance to bad rubbish as far as I’m concerned.” This offhand dismissal of such a significant character feels cruelly effective, even more so in hindsight when one realises this is the series’ first reference to Pam since her death which, according to New DALLAS, fell between last season and this one. There’s also a sweet little scene where John Ross admits to his daddy that he feels excluded now that James is on the scene. “It’s gonna change everything, isn’t it?” he asks sadly. JR is sympathetic, recalling how he felt when he first learnt that Ray was a Ewing. But the mood of the scene changes when JR makes the outrageous claim that he was “the first one in the whole family to treat Ray like a real brother.” The most significant reference to a past DALLAS character comes in the final scene of the episode. Just as last week’s FALCON CREST ended with an other-worldly message for Emma when her mother briefly awoke from her coma to warn her against Charley, DALLAS ends with JR receiving a letter from his long-dead daddy, originally written during World War II when Jock thought he was dying. Before hearing from their respective parents, both Emma and JR are at a particularly low ebb. “You trusted me and I failed you miserably,” wept Emma at Angela’s bedside. “I hurt the company and I hurt Bobby … Right now, I think my daddy would be ashamed to call me his son,” JR tells Miss Ellie. Both Jock and Angela’s words serve the same narrative purpose: to inspire their discouraged child into rededicating themselves to their primary Soap Land objective: fighting the good (or not so good) fight, all in the name of family. While Angela makes Emma promise to stop Charley, Jock’s letter reminds JR that “the future of the family and Ewing Oil is in your hands.” Among the rallying words in Jock’s letter are two phrases I’ve always associated with movies that weren’t made until long after the second world war was over. The first, “Keep your friends close but your enemies even closer,” is an oft-repeated maxim in Soap Land. In fact, Pilar said it to Lance on FALCON CREST only last week. I’ve always connected it to [I]The Godfather Part II[/I] (1974), where Michael Corleone quotes it as a piece of advice handed down from his own father, just as Jock does to JR in his letter. The second phrase, “Never let the bastards get you down”, is a variation on “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”, a line delivered by Albert Finney in the gritty British working class drama [I]Saturday Night, Sunday Morning [/I](1961), which is about as far away from DALLAS as you can get. However, a quick google suggests (although no-one seems certain) that both phrases were first coined somewhat earlier, by Machiavelli and in the trenches of WWII respectively — so it seems that, sadly, we can’t yet add time travel to Jock’s list of achievements. Conversely, when Tom Ryan accuses Paige of being a “cop kisser” on KNOTS, I [I]so[/I] wanted it to be a play on ‘Cop Killer’, the massively controversial Death Count song penned by Ice-T, but apparently, that wasn’t even written until 1990. This week’s Ewing-verse contains a couple of interesting ‘what if?’ scenarios. “Did [I]you[/I] ever wear a dress like that going to your father’s house on a date?” Mack asks Karen indignantly after Paige shows up with Tom for a family dinner wearing a particularly revealing outfit. “My father would have grounded me for a year!” Karen laughs. “I wonder if he’d have been like that if he’d married my mother?” wonders James after Lucy tells him how notoriously unfaithful JR was to Sue Ellen. “He’d have been like that if he married the Queen of England,” she replies. And this week’s Top 3 are … 1 (3) DALLAS 2 (1) KNOTS LANDING 3 (2) FALCON CREST [/QUOTE]
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Falcon Crest
FALCON CREST versus DYNASTY versus DALLAS versus KNOTS LANDING versus the rest of them, week by week
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