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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 161870" data-attributes="member: 22">04 Jan 90: KNOTS LANDING: Oh, Brother v. 05 Jan 90: DALLAS: Tale of Two Cities v. 05 Jan 90: FALCON CREST: Time BombThe first Soap Land scene of the ‘90s has Greg Sumner waking Paula Vertosick with a late night phone call. “I’m thinkin’ about ya bod,” he informs her. It’s a terribly modern form of courtship for a terribly modern sort of decade.DALLAS and FALCON CREST each welcome in the new year with a more traditional scenario: a scene in which a father impresses upon his son the importance of winning by any means necessary. On DALLAS, James is reluctant to return to Southfork after witnessing JR’s infidelity with Diana Farrington in Austin. “Maybe you can go in and face Cally. I can’t,” he tells his father. “What I did was business,” JR insists. “Well, your way of doing business stinks,” James replies. “It’ll save Ewing Oil and that’s all that matters,” maintains JR.FALCON CREST opens with a scene in Michael Sharpe’s office where he stuns Danny by giving him Falcon Crest to run. Greater love hath no Soap Land father than this, that he cedes control of a business asset to his son — but instead of the usual guff about legacies and heritage, Michael channels his emotions into an aggressively motivational speech based on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War which would sound utterly ridiculous were it not delivered with such conviction. “From this moment on,” he tells Danny, “you are in training. I’m not just gonna show you how to wield a spear, ride a horse, kill a lion; I’m gonna teach you how to become the lion. You must learn how to become your enemy in order to beat your enemy and everyone is your enemy — including me. By the time we’re done, you’re gonna know more, have more and be more than I ever dreamed of. And if not, then you’ll have failed and I’ll have failed — and I don’t fail.”There’s a very different, but equally juicy, office scene between a parent and child on KNOTS when Karen Mackenzie stops by the Sumner Group to confront Michael about his involvement in the breakup of Eric and Linda’s marriage. This is where an enjoyable if somewhat vanilla story about Michael’s latest inappropriate crush turns into something meatier: the first major conflict between Karen and her youngest son. “I don’t even know you anymore,” she tells him. “You quit college, you spend money as if it’s an endless supply and then you break up your brother’s marriage!”While Michael Sharpe preaches an amoral way of life to his son and Karen Mackenzie preaches moral righteousness to hers, DALLAS’s equivalent office scene explores the grey area that lies between the two. Here, the conversation is between an uncle and his nephew. Since arriving in Soap Land, hardly a week has gone by without James seeking Bobby’s perspective on either the oil business in general or JR in particular. Such scenes are an effective way of fleshing out James’s character and establishing his position within the wider Ewing family, but they also show us an interesting side to Bobby. He’s harder-edged, more cynical with James than we're used to seeing him. It’s as if he’s wary of allowing his newly acquired nephew to get too comfortable too quickly. Accordingly, he doesn’t sugar-coat the harsher realities of Ewing life. In this scene, James is still brooding about JR’s affair when he asks Bobby if he too would do anything for Ewing Oil. “Yes — just about,” Bobby replies. “The end always justifies the means, right?” James asks. “You can’t bribe an honest man,” Bobby shrugs. “It’s a pretty damn weak excuse, I admit … There are boundaries. You can bend them, but you never cross over them.” “… Who decides what these boundaries are?” James persists. “We’re playing in a game that doesn’t have any rules,” Bobby tells him. “We have to set our own — just like you’re going to have to set yours.”While Cally remains blissfully unaware of JR’s betrayal on DALLAS, Eric Fairgate has no idea that Linda and Michael have fallen in love on KNOTS. And just as James’s discomfort is compounded when Cally reveals her latest painting is of the husband she adores, so Michael squirms silently every time his big brother tries to confide in him about his troubled marriage. Eric’s ignorance is short-lived, however.Each of this week’s episodes features at least one variation on the lover-catches-their-partner-in-bed-with-someone-else scenario. Michael and Linda have yet to consummate their relationship so instead of finding them together, Eric overhears Michael assuring Mack that “I’m not gonna walk up to him and says, ‘Hey Eric, I’m in love with your wife.’” Eric then confronts his brother: “Now I know what the problem with my marriage is — you!” What follows isn’t the kind of furniture-destroying fraternal fracas one might have expected. Instead, Eric delivers a single punch to Michael’s gut before storming out of the house and returning to his job in Saudi Arabia. Linda subsequently relocates to a motel and the episode ends with Michael also moving out of the family home. The final shot, of Karen’s troubled face, feels like the suburban equivalent of Miss Ellie’s tearful close up following Bobby and Pam’s departure from Southfork at the end of DALLAS’s second season.As well as Eric and Linda’s on KNOTS, another marriage comes to an end on FALCON CREST. “Walker, things haven’t been good with us for a long time … I cannot do this anymore,” Lauren tells her husband. Walker reckons the real reason for her decision is the new man in her life. “Does Richard know you only want to be in his bed because you can’t get in your brother’s?” he asks her. Lauren responds the same way Monica Colby did when Adam Carrington made incestuous jibes about her and Jeff: she whacks him across the face. Walker has taken a job in Oregon, but unlike Eric on KNOTS, doesn’t leave right away. Instead, he sticks around long enough to peek through a window at Richard and Lauren making love for the first time, just as Miles Colby did when Fallon and Jeff first got reacquainted.While everyone else seems to be breaking up (including Olivia and Harold, who split just before Christmas), KNOTS LANDING’s Danny and Val and DALLAS’s Bobby and April are busy making wedding plans. For both couples, however, there is a fly in the ointment: Amanda’s accusations of rape and the ongoing investigation into Ewing Oil’s role in the tanker collision. Whereas Val refuses to allow anything to delay her plans for wedded bliss (“I am gonna marry this man and there is nothing that either one of you can say or do that’s gonna change that,” she tells Gary and Amanda), April suggests to Bobby that they put theirs on hold: “Why don’t we wait until this whole thing with Cliff Barnes blows over and the pressure’s off?”Taking Bobby’s advice about setting his own moral boundaries, James comes up with an unusual proposition. He approaches Diana Farrington and offers to replace JR in her bed for the remainder of their arrangement. “At least he can look his wife in the face,” he reasons. Here, James is essentially volunteering to do with Diana what FC’s Pilar did with Ned Vogel and DALLAS’s Rose did (at her husband’s urging) with Cliff Barnes, i.e., prostitute himself for business reasons. But because the genders are reversed, and Diana isn’t a fat old sleaze bag like Vogel, it doesn’t feel as degrading. In the event, Diana turns him down. “You can’t do what JR can do,” she explains. “He got Charles [her husband] a very important job … I love my husband very much and I go to bed with JR so he keeps that important job.” So it turns out Diana, rather than James, is the one prostituting herself.As far as we can tell, Diana takes this arrangement in her stride — unlike Pilar and Rose who are both still suffering the consequences of their sexual encounters. In a terrifically acted scene, Pilar bares her soul to Lance one last time: “When I was little and working in the fields, I’d watch your family up in this big house and I’d dream that one day I’d live here … and I dreamed of having the handsomest man in the valley too … So I studied and I scraped and I worked my way up from the fields and you know what? One day, I realised I didn’t need you anymore because I was somebody, all by myself. There was just one small catch — I’d fallen in love with you. I loved you so much, I’d do anything to keep you …” “Even sleep with Ned Vogel?” asks Lance, through angry tears. “Yes!” she replies. “If that’s what it took to keep Falcon Crest, yes. Look at me. Look at me! Do you think I enjoyed it? Do you really think I enjoyed it? It was wrong, I know it was wrong and if I could change it I would, but I can’t … All I can do is ask you one last time to forgive me.”While Pilar wants Lance to forget what he saw on her sex tape, Rose wants McKay to remember what’s on hers. In fact, she even puts it on for him. “Why don’t you look at it, not as some business move, but as your wife in bed with another man?” she pleads. “Doesn’t that bother you? ... When you married me, I thought it was gonna be the start of a whole new life, not just you using me.” Her words sink in. “When I lost Tommy, something in me died,” Mack admits. “I did use you, Rose, and I’m sorry.”While Rose gets through to Mack, Lance walks away from Pilar. She ends up drowning her sorrows at Delta Rho where she encounters a psychic chess champion from Yugoslavia (“He’s got a mind like a computer and a camera rolled into one!”) and they wind up in bed together. When she sobers up, she is full of remorse and hurries home to Lance — only to find him in bed with a nameless redhead.On DALLAS, JR, Diana, James, Cally and Michelle all end up at the same Hotel of Adulterous Liaisons where JR once took Kristin for a dirty weekend, Gary began his affair with Jill Bennett and Field Carlyle used to hook up with Lane Ballou on FLAMINGO ROAD (I’d recognise that blood red carpeting anywhere). The sequence that follows takes the catching-your-lover-in-bed-with-someone-else scenario to a whole new level.It starts off with JR in his hotel room, about to climb into bed with Diana. James interrupts them with the news that Cally is on her way up from the lobby (having flown in from Dallas to surprise her hubby). JR manages to intercept her in the hallway, leaving James and Diana alone in the bedroom. Then there’s a knock on the door followed by a female voice asking for JR. Assuming Cally somehow got past JR, James hastily takes his clothes off to make it look as if he’s the one about to bed Diana. He then opens the door to find … Michelle! Seeing James and Diana in a state of undress, she jumps to the same conclusion as Eric Fairgate, Walker Daniels and Pilar Cumson: that she has been betrayed by the one she loves. She runs off, James tries to chase after her — but then realises his trousers are down around his ankles. Perhaps surprisingly, this is the first time Soap Land has ventured so fully into bedroom farce territory — complete with lies, panic, mistaken identities and James as the quintessential fall guy — and even more surprisingly, it works really well. Crucially, no-one plays the situation for laughs (although there's an inherent goofiness about James) and there are lasting dramatic consequences for James and Michelle. “We’re finished, over, through!” she tells him.James finds himself in the same gloomy position as Michael Fairgate at the end of this week’s KNOTS. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Michael tells his mother. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with a woman I shouldn’t fall in love with. Eric didn’t do anything wrong, Linda didn’t do anything wrong. We all did what we thought was the right thing to do.” “You two are the cheaters and I’m the one that gets caught,” James tells Diana.In DALLAS’s final scene, Cliff receives a visit from a nervous young naval officer who knows what really happened the night of the tanker collision. “I was on radar,” he explains. “The West Star tanker started drifting out of its lane and the Ewing tanker was just barely in its lane … With the weather conditions and all, I don’t think it was anyone’s fault, sir. They just sort of collided in no man’s land.” He cannot come forward as a witness for fear of being court-martialed and so Cliff is left with a moral dilemma: does he keep this information to himself and frame the Ewings or does he put his personal animosity to one side and Do the Right Thing? This question results in Cliff getting the freeze frame for the first time in about two and a half seasons — which, following Ken Kercheval’s recent death, feels like a touching bit of synchronicity.Jovan the psychic chess master on FALCON CREST isn’t the only Soap Land character with mysterious mental abilities. On KNOTS, Aunt Ginny impresses the twins with her psychometry skills. “I can get feelings and pictures of things [by holding objects] that have been close to people,” she claims. Val is sceptical, but when Ginny picks up a belt Julie Williams has borrowed from her mom and 'sees' Pat “working as a doctor in a hospital,” we realise that she, like almost every other psychic in Soap Land, is genuine. (Of course, if she’d seen Pat appearing on screen for longer than five minutes every other week, we’d know she was faking.) Later, when Ginny picks up Danny’s watch, her vision is predictably alarming. “I have never felt such anger, such violence!” she tells Gary — but when he offers her a gun as protection, she is even more appalled. “No, Gary, no! … I will not allow a gun like that loaded in a house with children! Shame on you!” It’s a testament to KNOTS’ versatility that this storyline can veer from the “social issue” earnestness of “Twice Victim” to the psychic visions of a wacky aunt, incorporating a punchy message about gun control along the way.While Ginny declines Gary’s pistol, Walker Daniels practically buys out an entire gun store on FALCON CREST. “Planning to invade a small country?” enquires the storekeeper conversationally. Instead, he hijacks the second half of this week’s FC as, just like the Danny/Amanda storyline on KNOTS last month, a marital crisis involving a couple we scarcely know reaches a violent climax.“Did you think I was just gonna slink away and let you take my wife and my home?” Walker asks, brandishing a shotgun, as he takes Richard and Lauren hostage in his former home. When Lauren’s brother Michael and girlfriend Genele show up unexpectedly, Walker takes them hostage too. (“This must be my lucky night,” he says.) Lauren explains that she had arranged a surprise dinner party to bring Richard and Michael together. “I wanted you two to be friends again,” she tells them, exhibiting the same streak of insane Soap Land optimism which decrees that if you put two lifelong enemies together at the same dinner table or barbecue, everything’s gonna work out fine. The next plot reveal — that Walker has rigged his own body with explosives which are set to go off in thirty minutes time — seems almost logical in comparison.A couple of seasons ago, FALCON CREST kept putting its characters in elaborate life-threatening scenarios so often it became monotonous. But this situation is different, more personal. “You lose your children, you don’t think you can go on living,” Walker tells his assembled guests. “You don’t want to, but you do. Your marriage starts to go bad, but you go on. Your career comes apart at the seams, you lose everything you’ve worked for fifteen years, but you go on. That’s the trouble with being human, you can always go on. Well, I just don’t want to anymore.” This mirrors McKay’s words to Rose on DALLAS: “When I lost Tommy, something in me died.”There are echoes of previous hostage situations in this one. Like Richard Avery in “Night” (KNOTS Season 3), Walker is a suicidally desperate man faced with losing what remains of his family. Like Luther Frick in “Winds of Vengeance” (DALLAS Season 1), he’s also a blue collar worker consumed with resentment for the millionaire he believes has taken his wife from him. When he orders Genele to sit on his knee, it recalls Frick forcing Sue Ellen to parade in her bathing suit. The dirty look Genele shoots Michael when he makes no effort to help her matches the angry glare Sue Ellen gave JR when she was made to pay for his sins. And Genele kissing Walker recalls Abby making out with one of the gunmen in “Moments of Truth” (KNOTS Season 2), or Leslie Carrington doing the same thing at the start of DYNASTY Season 8, only there’s no suggestion that Genele is taking one for the team the way Abby did: she is solely interested in saving her own skin.As Walker’s wife, Michael’s sister and Richard’s lover, Lauren is theoretically at the centre of this scenario, yet she's the least interesting character involved — just as Amanda was during the recent rape-themed episode of KNOTS.Just as Laura struck Abby in "Moments of Truth", the hostages also turn on each other in this situation. “I’ll pay you a hundred thousand cash to kill him,” Michael tells Walker, referring to Richard. “If you were half a man, you’d do it for nothing. He took your wife … pull the trigger!” But Walker is just as angry at Michael for destroying his career as he is at Richard for wrecking his marriage. Then Richard delivers a game-changing speech which ties several plot threads together in a way that suggests this season has been more carefully thought out than it might previously have seemed. He begins by comparing Walker’s grief to his own: “The day I got out of prison, I lost my wife in a freak accident … A couple of days later, they came and they took my boys away from me. I knew who was behind it [points at Michael] but I couldn’t prove it … I hit bottom, just like you have now … It is not possible to hate this man as much as I do. I followed him one night. I had a gun. I pointed it at his back for a good thirty seconds but I couldn’t pull the trigger … because I couldn’t do it to the memory of my wife. Now Walker, do you wanna do this to the memory of your children?” He gets through to Walker who agrees to call the whole thing off (at which point, Genele bolts for the door) — but then, just as it did when Julia and Angela finally reached a moment of understanding during the spring house siege (FC Season 3), fate intervenes and all hell breaks loose: Walker discovers the detonator on the explosive vest he is wearing has malfunctioned and he cannot turn it off. “I’m so sorry, Lauren … I really love you,” he says, backing away into the woods. Then Richard, Lauren and Michael watch in horror as what Tommy McKay hoped would happen to Bobby Ewing when he opened his attache case happens to Walker.And this week’s Top 3 are …1 (1) FALCON CREST2 (3) DALLAS3 (2) KNOTS LANDING</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?