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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 32612" data-attributes="member: 22">21 May 86: DYNASTY: The Vendetta v. 22 May 86: THE COLBYS: Checkmate v. 22 May 86: FALCON CREST: Captive HeartsDYNASTY’s Blake currently faces a business crisis similar to the one recently confronted by JR Ewing on DALLAS. Each man has secured a billion dollar loan — Blake from a financial consortium, JR from a group of bankers — using as collateral his China Sea Oil leases and Marinos Shipping deal respectively. Just as Ewing Oil ran into trouble when the Marinos wells were capped, so does Denver Carrington now that Blake has lost control of the China leases. Financial go-between Farouk Ahmed helpfully spells it out for the less business-minded among us: "The China Sea oil leases now belong to your brother — your collateral has ceased to exist.”  Whereas JR's season-long female nemesis, Angelica Nero, proved to be an unlikely solution to his problem, Blake’s series-long equivalent, Alexis, is the problem. With the consortium demanding payment on the loan, Blake asks to appeal to them directly. This leads Farouk to utter the immortal line: “The consortium is Alexis Colby.” What this ultimately seems to means — this being a more (enjoyably) convoluted plot than its DALLAS equivalent, I can’t claim to have kept track of every twist and turn — is that all of Blake’s assets now belong to Alexis.Broadly speaking, it's pretty much the same trick Alexis pulled on Blake at the end of Season 4. What distinguishes this version of events is the strength of Blake’s reaction. He starts off the episode furious with his ex-wife, and his rage builds and builds until he finally snaps in the closing moments of the ep.While Blake’s anger is directly chiefly towards Alexis, he also finds time to lose his cool with son Adam after learning he has betrayed him once again. ("When you were too sick to know what you were doing, your devoted son Adam had you sign a power of attorney so that he could steal from Denver Carrington,” an attractively grungy Claudia informs Blake during their final scene together.) Blake’s response to this news parallels Zach Powers’ on THE COLBYS when he discovers he too has been betrayed, by his stepson Spiros. (Turns out it was Spiros who framed both Jeff and Miles for murder, but with the intention of making it appear as if Zach himself was ultimately responsible.) “I have taken enough from you, Adam,” snarls Blake at his firstborn. "Now get out of here … Get out of my sight. I can’t stand to be in the same room as people I can’t trust!” “Get out of here,” Zach orders Spiros. "Get out of my life and don’t ever, ever interfere in my affairs again or I swear on my father’s name, it’ll be the last thing you do!”In the same way that Angelica Nero kept her final act of revenge — the explosions intended for JR and Jack — up her sleeve until almost the last moment of this season’s DALLAS, Alexis does the same on DYNASTY. Whereas Angelica had murder on her mind, Alexis has eviction. “Take this junk and your blonde tramp and get out of my home,” she orders Blake as she stands at the top of the staircase of the Carrington mansion. Like Angelica, she has underestimated her opponent. Where the last we saw of Angelica was her being dragged off by the police, yelling at JR to “call them off!”, this season’s DYNASTY ends with Alexis crying out for help as Blake’s fingers tighten around her throat.Elsewhere on the DYNASTY finale, Dominique and Garrett’s engagement party proves to be even more of a disaster than Sable and Jason’s anniversary bash did on last week's COLBYS. Alexis gatecrashes the affair to inform Dominique that the woman Garrett was supposedly married to during their original romance twenty years earlier — the wife that kept Dominique and Garrett from raising their daughter together — simply never existed. Meanwhile on THE COLBYS, Dominique’s executive employee Monica also catches her man out in a marital lie when she finds him in bed with his apparently estranged wife.Back at La Mirage, Claudia is lighting candles in her room and intoning the names of her enemies when a curtain is randomly set alight. The fire soon spreads. We don’t see what happens next, but are left to imagine the worst. Shortly after, we see smoke seeping through the air vents towards the dance floor below as the oblivious guests continue to make merry. This juxtaposition between onscreen revelry and a fiery catastrophe looming offscreen recalls some of the early scenes from The Towering Inferno. There’s also a '70s disaster movie vibe in the closing moments of this season’s FALCON CREST — but rather than a manmade crisis like hotel fire, this time the characters are endangered by a natural disaster, which (minor hurricanes in DALLAS and FLAMINGO ROAD aside) is a Soap Land first.The earthquake sequence on FALCON CREST is more satisfying than I remembered. Having several combinations of characters in different places and situations yet all linked by one overriding event works very well. My favourite of these scenarios is a great example of "When Storylines Collide”. Shortly after the quake, lovebirds Greg Reardon and Jordan Roberts happen upon an overturned police car on the highway. As they approach to offer their assistance, they are stopped in their tracks by a gun-toting Jeff Wainwright, whom neither has ever met before. Meanwhile, the possibility suggested in the episode’s final scene — that Angela and Julia have drowned in a cellar full of their own wine — is kind of great.If Claudia Carrington’s immediate response to the fire at La Mirage is puzzling — she crumples to the floor in transfixed horror rather than attempting to escape — it can, at a pinch, be attributed to her being “a bit mad”. Harder to rationalise is the behaviour of the customarily level-headed Monica Colby upon finding boyfriend Neil in bed with his ex. Rather than jump behind the wheel of a car and start driving erratically (standard behaviour for a highly strung female character in Soap Land — just ask fellow attorney Jordan Roberts, bailed out of jail on a reckless driving charge at the beginning of this week’s FC), Monica chooses to do the same thing while flying a plane. Eventually, she stops crying long enough to realise she’s completely out of fuel. As she plummets towards the nearest mountaintop, it becomes her turn to continue this week's disaster movie theme with a one woman reenactment of Airport 75. The whole thing’s gloriously nuts.There is shock baby-related news for THE COLBYS’ Fallon and FALCON CREST’s Richard Channing this week. Fallon’s joy at finding out she’s pregnant is severely undermined by the discovery that the father may not husband Jeff, but rapist Miles. The components of the scene in which she makes this discovery — a well-meaning obstetrician cheerfully informing her that the pregnancy is further along than she assumed, a flashback to the rape conveying the mother-to-be’s realisation to the audience — are the very same as those employed the last time a Mrs. Jeff Colby mistakenly assumed she was expecting his baby,  i.e., Kirby, back in the DYNASTY Season 3 finale. Over on FALCON CREST, Richard’s discovery that he has a newborn son, Michael, but that the mother, Cassandra Wilder, has died in childbirth, feels comparatively straightforward.Last week’s gunshot victims, THE COLBYS’ Sable and FALCON CREST’s Chase, are both transported to Soap Land Memorial Hospital at the beginning of this week’s eps via paramedic helicopter — regular ambulances are suddenly so last season. As Jason tells an unconscious Sable that “it’s going to be all right”, a semi-conscious Chase assures Maggie and Cole that, “I saw worse in 'Nam." While Sable’s surgeon (Dave Culver from DALLAS) assures Jason that "the bullet didn’t enter the brain”, Chase’s equivalent (Claudia’s psychiatrist from DYNASTY Season 1) tells Maggie that “we managed to remove the bullet from his chest.” In each case, there’s a caveat. “She could lose her sight,” warns Sable’s doctor. “The damage was extensive … I can’t offer you much hope,” admits Chases’s. Eleven minutes into her episode, Sable is given the all clear while Chase regains consciousness after eighteen minutes of his. Whereas Sable is well enough to return home and wear a variety of turbans, Chase remains in hospital in a serious condition. As Chase’s opponents pay solemn tribute to him — “Chase was one of the strongest adversaries I’ve ever had. I admire him a great deal,” says Greg Reardon — Sable’s deliver ironic one-liners about her: “I expected to find an invalid, not the Queen of Sheba. I must say, you take a bullet in your head very well,” smirks Connie.Original assumptions made by the police about each case — that Jason’s shooting of Sable was accidental and that Jeff Wainwright’s gun was the one that hit Chase — are overturned. To prevent Jason from leaving the country so that he can divorce her and marry Frankie, Sable informs the local DA, who nurses a serious grudge against the Colbys, that he deliberately tried to kill her. (“My husband is a very possessive man, Mr Moretti, a very jealous man”). Meanwhile, a ballistics test reveal that Chase was shot by an unknown third party during the FC shoot out. “This has all the markings of a contract hit,” the sheriff tells Maggie and Cole. If this were not drama enough, five minutes before the end of the season, Chase starts haemorrhaging.When set against an earthquake, a fire, a plane crash and an ex-spousal strangulation, it seems odd that the latest round of Jason and Sable’s apparently endless marital war should prove the most compelling cliffhanger of the week, but it does. Every time Jason forces himself to tell Sable that he wants out of their marriage, she reacts as if she were hearing the news for the first time. It’s as though the perfect world she has created for herself consists of layers and layers of denial that must be painstakingly peeled away one by one. “But why? What I have done?” she asks in wide-eyed amazement this week when he tells her for the nth time that the relationship is dead. (“What have you done?” he repeats in exasperation. "What haven’t you done? You lied and schemed, you tried to get Connie committed, you dragged Jeff into court, you turned the house upside down and made life hell for everybody. Then there was Zach Powers ...”) Each time Jason makes a bid for freedom, Sable comes up with an ever more ingenious (or desperate) way to stop him. The repetition and escalation of this situation is funny, almost parodic, but also thrilling in its soapiness. Crucially, for all its absurdity, there is also something about it that rings psychologically true. The sheer difficulty Jason has in severing his ties with Sable feels entirely appropriate — surely it’s not meant to be easy to walk away from twenty-nine years of marriage.And this week’s Top 3 are:1 (2) THE COLBYS2 (3) FALCON CREST3 (4) DYNASTY</blockquote>

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