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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 167308" data-attributes="member: 22">22 Feb 90: KNOTS LANDING: Wrong For Each Other v. 23 Feb 90: DALLAS: Dear Hearts and Gentle People v. 23 Feb 90: FALCON CREST: Walking Money Eric Fairgate makes his last appearance on this week’s KNOTS. In his final scene, Karen watches as he packs to return to his job, sadder but wiser, resigned to the fact that his marriage is over. For the most part, he puts on a brave face (“I’m better off without her … chalk this one up as experience, you know?”), but then sort of crumples into his mother’s arms at the end of the scene. “You deserve to be happy,” she whispers to him. This is immediately followed by a scene between Karen and Mack where she delivers her lovely “I wish I’d raised my sons where it snowed” speech: “They would have known what it was like to have to shovel the snow … feel the cold air, slip on the ice. They could have seen how pretty the snow could be and how dangerous … how inconvenient, how wonderful, how out of our hands. Snow would have been good for them.”  This is Karen’s (and also KNOTS’) way of acknowledging, indirectly, how unusually meek and mild her sons have always been. As a genre, Soap Land is not especially interested in the ups and downs of conventionally boisterous adolescent boys, and so Eric and Michael have, by default, been muted — made conveniently placid and compliant. Perhaps, if they’d grown up somewhere harsher and grittier than glossy, sunny Soap Land, they might have been better equipped to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous storylines that now greet them as Soap Land adults. Not only does Karen’s speech — nay, aria — make dramatic use of this genre limitation, but it elevates it into something approaching poetry.Fascinatingly, Eric’s ex, Linda, then provides us with the flip side of Karen's perspective. Angered by Michael’s refusal to resume their relationship even after Eric has left town, she also addresses the brothers’ timidity. “You’re afraid of a good idea,” she tells Michael, “you’re afraid to enjoy life, afraid to fall in love. You’re just afraid. You’re as pathetic as your brother.” In a different context, Paula Vertosick makes a similar observation about Greg, Michael’s polar opposite, describing him as “sensitive, afraid of being hurt, so he alienates himself from the people who want to be close to him.”While Eric flies the nest on KNOTS, April returns to it on DALLAS, visiting her hometown of Springdale, Ohio to reflect upon her recent bust-up with Bobby. We meet her mother, who was also Ciji’s mother on KNOTS Season 4. Both moms are religious, but while Ciji’s was cold and judgemental, April’s is rosy-cheeked and apple-pie-wholesome, more interested in church socials and “singing some of those good old spirituals” than condemning her daughter from on high. Nevertheless, she, like Karen, has her own ideas of what might have improved her child’s life — only they don’t involve snow. “I think you’d have been happier if you’d never moved from Springdale,” she tells April. “You’d be raising kids by now, be married.” She urges her to consider “coming home to a small-town life. It’s still safe here, still decent.” Back in Dallas, Cally is no happier than April — her marriage to JR is going from bad to worse — but returning home is no longer an option for her. “I’m not a country girl anymore,” she laments. “JR’s changed me and now I don’t fit in anywhere.” The image we’re given of April’s picture perfect childhood doesn’t quite match up with the character who arrived in DALLAS three seasons ago and was willing to sleep with any man for financial gain, up to and including Jeremy Wendell. There’s a much clearer connection between Genele Ericson’s present way of life and the upbringing she describes on this week’s FALCON CREST. “I don’t need you to tell me what I am,” she tells Danny Sharpe during the best scene of a terrific episode. “Believe me, I’ve had a lot of help getting this way. Men have been coming on to me every day of my life since I was thirteen years old. They say they want me, but they don’t. They don’t see me, they don’t know me, they don’t care about me — just my body, and when they’re finished with it, they move on. You get used often enough, you become a user yourself.”While Cally has become increasingly disillusioned about life with JR — this week, he checks into a hotel just to get away from her — an even newer bride receives a rude awakening about her marriage on this week’s KNOTS. After Val puts an end to Danny’s plan to adopt the twins, he first sulks, then apologises, then loses his temper, then turns spiteful and sarcastic, and finally starts smashing furniture — all within the space of one scene. She looks astonished — this is a 180° turn from how Danny has presented himself to her thus far. When he informs her sneeringly, “If you don’t want your husband to adopt your fatherless children, you’re crazy, Val!”, it’s a shame Val’s daughter Lucy isn’t around to point out what she’ll tell her grandmother on DALLAS the following night: “Only poor people are called crazy; rich people are always called eccentric.” FC’s Genele, meanwhile, makes a brilliant observation about the rich: “Being rich might be a consolation prize for not being quite human.” This might just be the line of the week, if not the entire season. In the tense opening scene of this week’s KNOTS, a mute Greg eventually manages to convey to Mack that his IV has been tampered with. A subsequent analysis confirms that “it was heavily injected with Camaride … known to cause liver damage, kidney failure, blood disorders.” Meanwhile, autopsy results on DALLAS reveal that Clayton’s pal Curly Morrison did not die of a heart attack at the end of last week’s ep as had previously been assumed. Instead, he too was poisoned. In each case, a man called Robert is arrested for the crime — Mary Frances’s boyfriend, who hands himself into the police, and Robert, aka “Rabbit”, Hutch, who protests his innocence but was next in line after Curly to inherit Atticus Ward’s fortune. Clayton bails Rabbit out of jail, only to later find him hanging from a noose. Each of this week’s soaps includes a scene where a male character lays his feelings on the line for the woman he loves. For Tom Ryan, that means making a full confession. “I did everything your father said I did,” he admits to Paige. “I even arranged to meet you so I could find out what your father knew about Oakman Industries … I did these things before I fell in love with you … I’ve changed because of you … I’ll always love you.” For Bobby Ewing, it means following April to Springdale to try and make amends. “I said goodbye to Pam the other night,” he tells her, “and now I wanna make things up to you on whatever terms you want … I love you, April.” “I love you and I want you,” echoes Danny Sharpe, talking to Sydney on FALCON CREST, but in his case, it’s more of an ultimatum: “I’ve done everything I can to prove it to you … Do you want me or not?” Turns out she does.Two middle-aged blonde women return to the Ewing-verse this week. On KNOTS, Paige is surprised to find her mother Anne standing in her apartment. “I haven’t been the world’s greatest mother,” Anne concedes, “but I do know the importance of family — I was shocked to hear the news that Greg Sumner lost his daughter.” “It must have ruined a whole afternoon on the slopes,” Paige quips. “Where’d you drop from — Heaven?” asks JR when his favourite hooker Serena walks into his office after an absence of two years. While all Anne has to do is mention Tom by name for Paige to say, “He's too young for you, Mother”, JR blames his problems with Cally on their age difference. (“We don’t have anything in common and I can’t see that we’re ever gonna have anything in common.”) A slice of afternoon delight with Serena helps him put his marriage in perspective (“Why should old JR put up with incessant nagging and punching a time clock?”) and the episode ends with him making the symbolic gesture of scribbling out the ‘Ewing’ part of Cally’s signature on her portrait of him that hangs in his office. The “tycoon-defaces-art” theme continues at the start of FALCON CREST with Michael Sharpe unwrapping a $40,000 painting by “a hot young French painter” and then punching a hole in it — in order to access the $1,000,000 bearer bond smuggled within. “I bring these things in every week from overseas,” he explains to his son Danny. It’s some sort of tax dodge I don’t begin to understand.This episode of FALCON CREST is a brilliant hour of twisty-turny soapiness. It focuses on Genele who, like Kristin in DALLAS Season 2, is the seemingly ideal mistress who can’t resist pushing her luck a little too far. Having learnt of Michael’s bearer bond scam, she thinks it might be her ticket to freedom. So she seduces Michael’s dweeby assistant Brian — a younger version of Bob from the Sumner Group — into giving her the crucial information she needs to steal one and then bribes a clerk at the depot into looking the other way when she intercepts the next delivery. However, when Michael realises someone’s ripped him off, he puts a tracer on the bond which means Genele can’t sell it without him finding out. Meanwhile, she’s being blackmailed by both Brian and the clerk but doesn’t have the cash to pay for their silence. Desperate, she turns to Richard who agrees to sell the bond on the black market on her behalf. He then double-crosses her by keeping the money and — in his most devilish move of the season — frames Danny to make it look as if he was the one who stole the bond in the first place. Unable to bear the idea that his own son has betrayed him, Michael shifts the blame onto Danny’s girlfriend (“It’s the girl! I know it’s the girl!”) and pays a dodgy looking guy with a dodgy sounding name, Johnny Sacco, to tamper with her car. (“I don’t want her to get hurt. I just wanna send a message.”) Then he arranges to meet Sydney for lunch. Suspicious, Danny decides to take her place — and borrows her car to drive to the restaurant. The episode ends with a waiter delivering Michael the bad news: “We just got a call from the highway patrol. It’s about your son. It seems there’s been an accident.”It’s kind of ironic in that in its final year, FALCON CREST feels more like a new series than one that’s been running for almost a decade. Like DALLAS back in its second full season, when it was still writing the Soap Land rules as it went along, FC is no longer afraid to take risks, to explore its characters and see how far it can take them. It’s bold and reckless and not remotely interested in playing safe. And this week’s Top 3 are … 1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (2) FALCON CREST3 (3) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?