Re-watching the DYNASTY-verse ... alphabetically!

James from London

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Broken Krystle (02 Nov 88) v The Bungalow (DYNASTY, 05 Oct 83)

Jeanette’s two big scenes of the series come in the penultimate episode of the first season, Blake Goes to Trial, and in the opening episode of the final season, Broken Krystle. In each, she, the loyalest of servants, reluctantly bears witness against one of her employers. In the former, at Ted Dinard’s trial, she hesitantly recounts how she heard Blake say, “I'll kill him” shortly before he, um, killed him. In the latter, in the Carrington master bedroom, she hesitantly recounts how she saw Krystle hovering outside in the middle of the night wearing only her nightgown. “I can’t describe the look in her eyes,” she says darkly.

Jeanette is sort of our way into this weird new storyline. We have no idea what has happened to Krystle or why Blake was so freaked out about her trashing their bedroom that it warranted an end of season cliffhanger. But if meek little see-no-evil Jeanette is worried enough to speak out then maybe we should be worried too.

Fallon doesn’t know what’s going on either. She can’t understand why Blake is receiving urgent calls from a doctor in Los Angeles after Krystle suddenly disappears any better than she can understand why, five years earlier in The Bungalow, a pregnant Kirby refuses to call a doctor after falling off her horse. The reason, as Kirby later explains to Krystle, is that she is trying to lose Adam’s baby. Similarly in Broken Krystle, the prospect of raising Adam’s child doesn’t exactly fill Dana’s heart with joy which is why she failed to show up in court for his surrogacy/custody verdict thingy and why she now walks out on him for good. (Thus far in my alphabetical re-watch, Dana is the character I like the least, but I really like her scenes here. Her low key exit is just great.)

While Krystle’s mysterious absence is a cause for concern for Blake in Season 9, Joseph’s is a worry for Kirby in Season 3. Neither of them have been seen since the previous season and when Joseph eventually does show up, he’s behaving as weirdly as Jeanette says Krystle was by the reflection pond. I know Joseph’s always been weird, but his line readings are now completely off the scale. He sounds like a broken down robot reading an autocue at gunpoint.

Worried about his major domo’s acting, Blake and Jeff race to Joseph’s old house in a mad hurry, but a truck pulls out in front of them, blocking their path. The exact same thing happens to Blake five years later when he is trying to catch up with the elusive Krystle’s car. Sometimes, even life or death Carrington emergencies fail to take precedence over everyday truck drivers going about their nonspecific business.

Meanwhile, Alexis is recovering from various end-of-season murder attempts. In 1988, following her fourth husband’s efforts to shoot her in the bath, she flies to LA, gets drunk and sings Cole Porter songs before passing out on the floor. In 1983, following the fire which we’ll later earn was started by her fourth husband’s father, she spends most of her time in bed eating caviar in a variety of turbans.

Both eps conclude with a juicy dead body cliffhanger. In ’83, Jeff and Blake arrive at the Anders house in time to see Joseph shoot himself in the cardigan — but why? In ’88, Jeff and Sammy Jo arrive at the Carrington lake in time to see a body washed up on the bank — but whose?

And the winner is ... Broken Krystle

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James from London

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Burden of Proof (THE COLBYS, 27 Feb 86) v The Cabin (DYNASTY, 20 Apr 83)

Burden of Proof pulls out all the stops. Following the revelation at the end of the previous episode that Jeff cannot possibly be a Colby because Phillip was firing blanks (kind of ironic for a gun runner when you think about it), Jason stands up in court and declares that Jeff actually is a Colby because he (Jason) secretly had it off with his sister-in-law all those years ago. From there, all hell breaks lose. Sable, who only seconds ago was smirking triumphantly, is immediately incensed and rushes back home to load the elephant gun. Confrontation follows confrontation, but the stand out character is Miles whose straight-to-video James Dean performance is as exciting as it is unpredictable: car crashes, middle of the night stalking, fraternal violence -- he does it all, while remaining sympathetic throughout. But when everyone and everything else is being so exciting, Frankie’s dithering and Fallon’s timidity are that much more conspicuous. As they are the prizes everyone else is fighting over, it creates a slight vacuum at the centre of the episode -- but that’s really a minor criticism. Part of Frankie’s appeal is that she never really knows what she’s thinking or feeling from one moment to the next.

Alexis and Krystle are much more lively in The Cabin. Krystle’s moved into La Mirage where she's started calling herself Krystle Grant and banging on about being her own person. Alexis, meanwhile, does some very funny hair-tossing and canapé nibbling as she recklessly racks up one enemy after another by being completely horrible to everyone she meets. The two women then convene at Steven’s cabin for the Annual General Meeting of the Sisterhood of Beautiful Women where they exchange some very amusing insults before going artfully up in flames.

Both episodes end in with an enemies-in-peril cliffhanger: we’re left with a close-up of Miles’s demonic face and the sound of Krystle’s agonised screams as Jeff goes over a cliff and Alexis is knocked unconscious during the fire.

And the winner is ... The Cabin

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James from London

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The Californians (DYNASTY, 09 Oct 85) v The Car Explosion (DYNASTY, 27 Jan 82)

In The Californians, Jeff tells Krystle he can’t live without Fallon, even though everyone else thinks she dead. In The Car Explosion, he tells Fallon he can’t live with her because she aborted their baby, even though she didn’t.

Back in The Beating (1981), Jeff told Fallon he wanted them to move out of the Carrington mansion away from her father, but she refused. In Burden of Proof (1986). he started packing to move out of the Colby mansion after finding out Jason was his father, but Fallon talked him out of it. In The Cabin (1983), he told Fallon that he and Kirby were planning to move out of the Carrington mansion because they’re living with his ex-wife and her family and that’s insane, but Fallon clearly didn’t want him to. Now, in The Californians, Jeff is planning to move to, um, California to look for Fallon, while in The Car Explosion, he actually does move out of the Carrington mansion (and quits his job at Denver Carrington into the bargain) following that pesky abortion of Fallon’s. But then he finds out she didn’t have it after all and moves back in again.

In 1982, Fallon is kind of miserable after deciding to keep her baby (as well as getting dumped by Nick Toscanni). In 1985, she can’t even remember that she had a baby and has a mini-freak out after flashing back to a little kid she doesn’t recognise. In the first instance, she falls into Alexis’s arms, calling her "Mother" for the first time. In the second, she falls into Miles’s, and they have a big end-of-episode kiss set against an absurdly gorgeous Californian sunset. The Car Explosion ends with an equally impressive explosion in the Denver Carrington parking lot, a spectacle unfortunately lost on Blake: “My God, I can’t see!”

And the winner is ... The Car Explosion

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James from London

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Carousel (21 Dec 83) v Catch 22 (DYNASTY, 10 May 89)

Alexis and Fallon show off their recently acquired love interests in Carousel, Dex Dexter and Peter de Vilbis respectively, both of whom are comparatively scrawny compared with your average C21st hunk, or even Father McBicep, whom Sammy Jo finds playing shirtless basketball in Catch 22 six years later.

PdV, like Miles Colby two years later, is a rich playboy whom Fallon meets under horse-related circumstances in California. A lot of his dialogue appears to be dubbed and, given that he still sounds like he’s talking backwards, . it’s hard to imagine how incomprehensible he must have sounded to begin with. He's posh and snooty, and Jeff is rankled when he sees him treating a waiter at the Carousel Ball like crap. In this regard, PdV is about as far away as you can get from Fallon’s Season 9 boyfriend: funny, down to earth Zorelli, who nonetheless also pisses Jeff off while they're staking out Captain Handler’s apartment: “You know, Zorelli, had I known you were gonna be having an eight-course meal, we’d have taken your car.”

“Anyone who puts her in danger is going to answer to me for the rest of my life!” Jeff vows at the end of Carousel after PdV takes Fallon for a reckless spin in his dinky little plane. He's as good as his word when, in Catch 22, he trains a gun on Handler while Blake throttles him with a poker in order to get him to reveal Fallon’s whereabouts (the Carrington mineshaft where she's currently being buried alive having been taken hostage and almost raped at gunpoint by Dennis Grimes, to be precise).

Back in '83, Lex/Dex (the Brangelina of their day) are a none-more-eighties power couple for whom games of onemanupship in the bedroom and boardroom are indivisible. While Alexis is keen to dismiss their Calgary fling as an out-of-town one-night-stand, Dex, who doesn’t have her suitcases full of soap opera baggage to carry around, is keen to turn it into the romance of the century. He’s in a not dissimilar position with Sable in Catch 22 — she wants to do the whole independent woman thing when he wants to be a father to their unborn child. Finally, he decides he's had enough of Sable and Alexis. “Sorry, girls, but I’ve run out of cheeks to turn,” he announces, before plunging off a balcony to his untimely death.

And the winner is ... Catch 22

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James from London

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The Celebration (THE COLBYS, 20 Nov 85) v The Chauffeur Tells a Secret (DYNASTY, 16 Feb 81)

Monica and Sable’s first on screen conversation, in The Celebration, has the very same setting as their final one, in Catch-22: Monica looking on as her mother titivates herself in her dressing table mirror. In the former scene, of course, Sable is Mrs Jason Colby, mistress of her domain (sister-in-law Constance notwithstanding), whereas in the latter, she’s a single pregnant woman living alone in a hotel (albeit a hotel that she owns). Nor is that the only difference. In 1985, Sable insists that “there is nothing devious about using your femininity … When it comes to men, no two women are ever on the same team.” Four years later, she’s had enough of manipulation and game playing: “I want this baby to come into the world with a clean slate — free of lies, free of vendettas, free of secrets.”

Also in Catch-22, Fallon is haunted by dreams of a music box merry-go-round. Is there a link between that merry-go-round and the one she rode in Season 4 when she heard all those terrible sounds in her head? In The Celebration, she, as Randall, is plagued by nightmares “of this terrible sound in my head and then something, somebody was opening the door and coming into the room and then and then …” And then what, Randall/Fallon — he tried to hurt your mommy so you shot him?! Oh, if we could only spread all of Fallon/Randall/PSM/Emma Samms' subconscious thoughts out on the floor at the same time, maybe they would all add up: the repressed fantasies about Adam, the repressed realities about Roger Grimes, the Nazi treasure, the abandoned wedding, even the cinnamon-scented alien. Randall’s nightmare about "something, somebody opening the door and coming into the room and then and then …” almost comes true when a happy-go-lucky rapist tries to force himself on her in a motel room, but luckily Miles is there to rescue her.

No such luck for little Lindsay Blaisdel five years earlier, who is forced to make terrible sounds of her own to fend off the advances of horny, Supertramp-hating Christopher. He then accuses her of being as crazy as her mom — which is approximately 37% less crazy than Randall/Fallon in The Celebration when she marries Miles, despite not having a clue who she actually is. Cue alarmed reaction shots from the entire Colby cast, but especially from Jeff who gets the final freeze frame cos he’s the new show’s romantic lead.

Fallon is also freshly married in The Chauffeur Tells a Secret, but this time to Jeff. Here, he's less of a romantic lead and more of "a jerk and you know it,” as Michael the eponymous chauffeur puts it to Fallon. There's a really great scene where Michael orders her out of the limo he’s driving and they take a walk in the woods before he pins her to a tree and tells her, in his own sullen, roundabout way, that he’s in love with her. It’s a gorgeous looking, almost cinematic scene. Both characters are feeling a lot but trying not to give anything away and there’s a really interesting shot where they’re facing each other in profile which you kind of wish was in widescreen so you could see them a bit better. The editor obviously feels the same because he blows up the two-shot to creates a close-up of each of them in turn. These close-ups are grainy and out of focus, but there’s something really filmic and evocative about them.

The end scene of Chauffeur ..., where Steven quotes poetry to Claudia in her kitchen, she breaks a dish and they end up kissing on the floor while her husband is upstairs helping their daughter with her homework, is really touching. It doesn’t feel like the watering down of Steven’s sexuality; It feels like one transgression on top of another transgression. They're like two lost souls groping blindly towards each other without really knowing why.

And the winner is ... The Chauffeur Tells a Secret

 
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James from London

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James from London

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I meant The Carousel song
Oh I see. Yes, that is lovely. Not very poppy though. I actually changed that one. It was originally 'Carousel' by Siouxsie and the Banshees, but then I realised I'd used that as a Bonus Beat in the alphabetical Ewingverse thread and it felt like bad form to repeat myself.
 

Willie Oleson

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actually changed that one. It was originally 'Carousel' by Siouxsie and the Banshees
Thanks. I wondered why I hadn't noticed this very noticeable song before, but this explains it.
and it felt like bad form to repeat myself
Thanks again. Fans could use it as ammunition and say that Dynasty also copies Dallas in the Alphabetically Rewatch-verse.
 

James from London

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The Check (DYNASTY, 11 Apr 84) v Checkmate (THE COLBYS, 22 May 86)

... aka the preantepenultimate episode of DYNASTY's fourth season versus the finale of THE COLBYS's first.

In The Check, it’s the supporting cast who provide most of the lols: Mark Jennings, overhearing Alexis lie to Blake about her involvement with Rashid Ahmed then blackmailing her for $100,000 and spending the rest of the ep foreshadowing his imminent demise like crazy (much talk of standing on top of the world but somebody wanting to push him off); Neil McVane glowering like a Batman villain; Kirby, making a total hash of shooting Alexis; Sammy Jo, getting beaten up in New York after insulting her sugar daddy’s “sleazy body.”

Checkmate, THE COLBYS’ season closer, begins the same way The Celebration, its season opener, did, with a helicopter descending from the skies accompanied by the show’s theme. The atmosphere is more urgent than triumphant this time around as Sable is being transported to DYNASTY-verse Memorial Hospital after being slightly shot in the head by Jason. She pulls through and uses the opportunity to wear as many turbans as Alexis did following the cabin fire on DYNASTY. Inevitably, she mistakes Jason’s guilty concern for marital devotion and assumes they’re back together, which teeters on the verge of monotonous, but once she returns home to be confronted by reality — that he still intends to divorce her and marry her sister —things quickly become compelling as the great Sable Colby paradox —her pathetic dependency on Jason and the incredibly, ruthlessly devious behaviour it inspires — comes to the fore once again.

Like Sammy Jo in The Check, she ends up with a rather fetching black eye after falling down the stairs, but alleges it’s the result of Jason beating her (no mention of whether she told him he had a sleazy body), leading to his super dramatic, end of season arrest on an airport runway.

Fallon and Jeff are almost blissfully happy in both episodes: On DYNASTY, they’re planning to get remarried, but there’s the small matter of her father losing his empire and not being able to pay for the wedding; on THE COLBYS, they’re overjoyed to find out she’s pregnant, but this time the fly in the ointment is that rapey Miles could be the daddy.

And the winner is ... Checkmate

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James from London

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The Choice (27 Nov 86) v Circumstantial Evidence (13 Feb 85)

For all of Caress’s complaints about how wronged she’s been by others, it emerges in The Choice that her own worst enemy is herself. After demanding $1,000,000 from Alexis and Ben “for each of the five years I was buried alive,” she is wrong-footed by Alexis who offers her a no-strings-attached job as the Denver Mirror’s new society columnist instead. Her response is very interesting. Even though she accepts the position, it soon emerges that she has no interest in working for a living, however well-paid. In her craving for wealth and luxury, she’s like an addict — she wants it all and she isn’t even prepared to wait for her first paycheque to get it.

Zach is well-utilised in a crossover appearance from THE COLBYS. As well as helping Michael Culhane infiltrate Blake’s latest business venture, his presence affords Caress the opportunity to call in an outstanding debt. “How much are your past mistakes worth to you, Zach?” she purrs. He responds by writing her a cheque for $250,000. “Is that fair?” he asks. “For now,” she replies smugly. Here, alas, she has overplayed her hand. “It would never end, would it, Caress?” he realises, snatching back the cheque and ripping it into pieces. “Therefore, it must never begin.” As much as Caress would love to be a true DYNASTY-verse femme fatale, she can’t quite pull it off. She’s too pathetic, too needy to compete with the big boys and so Zach — the man she has described as the love of her life — is able to swat her away without so much as a second thought. Caress is no more successful in her efforts to extort a measly $100,000 from Emily Fallmont. “I can’t raise that kind of money. Every cent I have is in Buck’s name!” Emily wails.

Each of these episodes contain a different looking Amanda involved with a different looking Michael. In The Choice, she writhes on a rug with crooked chauffeur (and secret billionaire) Michael Culhane; in Circumstantial Evidence, she’s joined in the shower by Moldavian Prince Michael. While Blake vehemently disapproves of Michael C (“You chose to be with that man rather than with your family. It’s a sad choice” — he tells her sternly after she fails to show up to a dinner in honour of his mother), Alexis does everything she can to bring Amanda and Prince Michael together — if only to keep Amanda away from her own husband. “No-one understands the working of the male psyche better than I do,” she warns Dex airily, "and nobody's more tolerant or even amused at a little casual harmless flirtation, but this time I think you might be going a little too far, husband dear." "There's an implication, an unsavoury one, hiding somewhere in that haystack of words,” he replies. "How clever of the Wyoming farm boy — can you find it?” she sneers before accusing him of "playing psychological mother/daughter games.”

While Blake is in Acapulco and Krystle is in Denver, each is sent photographs of the other in a compromising position with a third party. Krystle receives a picture of Blake dancing with Lady Ashley; Blake opens an envelope to find a snap of Daniel Reece kissing his wife. The photographer’s identity is a whodunnit. Deepening the mystery, how can the anonymous snapper be in two countries at the same time? And as well as the suspense aspect of this storyline, the photographs themselves become a paranoid symbol of the growing distrust in Blake and Krystle’s marriage. I’ve said it before, but the dynamic between them is never more interesting than when they’re estranged. Even an awkward overseas phone call between them is coldly compelling. In the ep’s final scene, Krystle greets Blake politely upon his return home and he shows her the picture of her and Daniel. "Do you want him or me?” he asks. The frame freezes before she can answer, and even though she already made her feelings quite clear in an earlier scene ("You'll always be special to me,” she tells Daniel, "but I love [Blake]”), it still feels like a suspenseful moment. Perhaps it’s because Blake and Krystle’s mutual devotion is so hardwired into their show’s DNA that when that relationship — the bedrock upon which the DYNASTY saga is built — starts to crumble, it feels almost as if the series’ whole world could come crashing down.

Blake never looks like he's having this much fun with Krystle:

68D89659-966B-45BC-8CFD-1CF86222CFB0.jpeg


And the winner is ... The Choice

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Willie Oleson

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As much as Caress would love to be a true DYNASTY-verse femme fatale, she can’t quite pull it off. She’s too pathetic, too needy to compete with the big boys and so Zach — the man she has described as the love of her life — is able to swat her away without so much as a second thought. Caress is no more successful in her efforts to extort a measly $100,000 from Emily Fallmont.
True, and I have mixed feelings about it. Caress' jailbird history could justify her eagerness to pluck as many dollars from the Dynasty tree as possible, but without having the patience to come up with a masterplan. At least that kind of patheticness doesn't make her an Alexis clone, and as we've learned from Dominique, Dynasty wouldn't allow it anyway.
When Alexis crushed Caress' pièce de résistance - Sister Dearest - so effortlessly, it kind of sealed the fate of this new Dynasty character.
Trying to extort the measly 100K from Emily is not a very memorable storyline (although I like the scene itself) and when she was gone nothing had changed.
But permanent damage has never been de rigueur in SoapLand, I think. Couples reunite, characters return from the death and everybody returns to the mansion.
It's usually circumstances beyond their control that forces them to choose a different path, and even then they won't hesitate to find a loophole to avoid or postpone that drastic change.
It's a pity that Dynasty wasn't a bit more adventurous in its narrative. Well, assuming that the Men With The Money would allow the writers to tamper with the money-making concept of their show.
Falcon Crest was more reckless in that regard but it didn't leave the show unscathed, so that also wasn't the perfect solution.
Sounds like a complaint, but actually I respect the soaps that churned out these mega-seasons year after year, and for making the merry-gp-rounds intriguing and addictive enough to entertain their audiences indefinitely.

Anyway, I don't see why Caress couldn't have caused a very serious albeit temporary dip for Alexis, or Blake, or Zach. Or all of them, like the end of season 1.
Heck, it even would have been fun if she had inadvertently caused the return of crazy Matthew. Connecting the dots, rather than presenting events in a random fashion.
Blake never looks like he's having this much fun with Krystle
Take note, all you Ashley haters.
 

James from London

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The Cliff (04 May 82) v The Close Call (04 Dec 85)

Both episodes open with Blake and Krystle being rudely awakened in their marital bed — in '82, by labourers knocking together a marquee for Alexis and Cecil’s wedding reception, and in '85 by Kristina's crying. The latter wouldn’t be that big a deal only Krystle is currently being played by Rita who doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body. Whenever Krystle stops behaving like Krystle — because she’s got a brain disorder or she’s been brainwashed by a mad scientist or she’s been replaced by a doppelgänger — it’s always really fun to watch. While the real Krystle sobs with convincing despair in an attic, the fake one makes out with Joel Abrigore in her bed — blasphemous!

Whereas deception lies at the very heart of the Carrington clan in The Close Call , The Cliff contains a notable absence of conflict between the central characters, which is all the more surprising given that this is the season finale: Steven’s gone, Fallon and Jeff are busy making nice, and Blake and Krystle go away on vacation rather than clash with Alexis over her wedding plans. That leaves outsiders intent on avenging the harm done to a close relative to stir things up : Nick Toscanni, Farouk Ahmed, Alfred Grimes. The ep’s two climactic set pieces — Alexis and Cecil’s disco-sex-death scene and Blake and Nick’s mountain showdown — are effectively staged. Nick’s exit from the series is interesting: after a season of alternately plotting to destroy the main cast and saving them from a succession of overdoses, drownings, shootings, car crashes and breakdowns, he finally breaks the cycle by choosing not to kill Blake when he has the chance — and then leaving him for dead anyway after his fall.

Claudia is nuttily subversive in both episodes, mocking Fallon and Jeff’s distress when their baby disappears in ’82 ,and accusing Blake of ripping her off when he refuses to sell her Walter and Matthew’s oil well in ’85.

And the winner is ... The Cliff

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James from London

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The Collapse (20 Feb 85) v Colorado Roulette (30 Mar 88)

There’s a really interesting scene between Alexis and Krystle in The Collapse. It starts off conventionally enough, with Krystle barging into Alexis’s office with an accusation ("Someone is sending photographs to me of Blake and another woman!”), only to develop into something more unusual when Alexis offers her erstwhile rival a genuine piece of advice: "Look for the person behind the camera.” This in turn leads to a scene where Krystle visits Ashley Mitchell (who has been photographing Blake for a feature in Life magazine) in her hotel room and cagily quizzes her about marriage and camera lenses. Ashley is clearly bemused. "Krystle, why is it I get the distinct feeling you've come here to accuse me of something?" she eventually asks her. Krystle apologises and leaves without actually saying what’s on her mind. The whole conversation is cryptic to the point of abstraction.

“You never could help trying to steal what wasn’t yours, could you?” Jeff asks Adam in The Collapse, referring to his interest in his sister-in-law Claudia, but the boot is on the other foot in Colorado Roulette where it's Adam’s baby that's been stolen — by the wonderfully crazy Sean Rowan. When Sean overhears Leslie Carrington reveal the baby's whereabouts over the phone, he becomes demented with anger. As the character teeters on the verge of madness so the man playing him, James Healy, reaches the edge of his acting abilities. Consequently, there’s an out-of-control quality to his performance that is quite compelling. Healy reminds me of George Lazenby, the weakest actor to play James Bond who nonetheless starred in the best Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Just as Lazenby’s limitations worked for that film (or at least didn’t impede it), Healy proves a perfect fit for this B-movie revenge storyline. Sean beats up Leslie in a brutal yet unrealistic way, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.

Then Adam and Steven join forces against Sean which results in Jack Coleman yelling the immortal line, “Adam, the baby’s in the canoe!” The sight of the kid in a basket floating down a river has always vaguely reminded me of the Bible story about Moses in the bulrushes. Maybe that’s what they should have called him: Moses Carrington.

After rescuing Moses, Adam and Steven finally bond . “I never thought I needed you,” says Adam. “You’ve always struggled to belong and in my own way, so have I,” Steven replies. It’s all very nice — which makes Adam’s betrayal in the Season 9 opener when he burns Steven’s goodbye letter to Blake all the juicier.

“All I’ve ever been to you is a substitute for your father!” shouts Jeff at Fallon. This makes her so angry she immediately goes to bed with him. It’s very interesting that her Electra complex should resurface just before the scene where, if David Paulsen’s original idea had been realised, she would have turned back into Pamela Sue Martin. I’m not sure what sort of complex Dex is suffering from in The Collapse when he dreams of Alexis and Amanda transformed into pouting predators, taking it in turns to leer lustfully down the camera lens while addressing him directly ("I want you, Dex!” “I love you, Dex ... You're mine!”) back and forth, faster and faster, till a tormented Dex can take it no more and wakes up with a cry of “NOOOO!”

The final scene of Season 8 has a horrified Blake exclaiming, “My God, Krystle!” to an empty, messed-up bedroom (which in reality, iis no more untidy than the average teenager’s). It’s kind of the reverse of the end of Season 2 which has Krystle frantically shouting Blake’s name into a walkie-talkie after she’s lost contact with him on the mountain.

And the winner is ... The Collapse

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