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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 231082" data-attributes="member: 22">Cat and Mouse (DALLAS, 30 Jan 87) v Catharsis (KNOTS, 28 Oct 82)Bobby to Ray in Caribbean Connection (1983): “If JR is selling to an embargo country, and our government finds out about it and we don't stop him, that's the end of Ewing Oil!"JR to Bobby in Cat and Mouse (1987): “If the Feds find out about this, they’ll shut us down, Bobby. Ewing Oil will lose its franchise and we’ll go to prison!”So Bobby’s obliged to help cover JR’s tracks again, only this time they’re doing it together. This leads to some private eye-style sleuthing (Bobby learns bad guy BD Calhoun’s residence by blowing up a photo of his hotel room to reveal a helpfully monogrammed pillow) followed by some cop show derring-do (JR and Bobby burst into BD’s room, armed and dangerous). There’s more of the same in California, 1982, where Karen Fairgate takes the law into her own hands in an attempt to entrap her husband’s killers.I’ve never been overly impressed with Karen’s story in Catharsis — the hierarchy of interchangeable thugs specialising in stolen auto parts is little confusing, and Karen single-handedly succeeding where the legal system has failed by bringing the bad guys to justice has always felt like an unconvincingly pat conclusion to such a game-changing storyline. Watching it afresh, however, I realise that the whole point (and pleasure) of Karen’s scheme is that she is an “ordinary” woman out of her depth, but who blunders onwards regardless, as boyfriend Mack and brother Joe watching from the sidelines with increasing bemusement.I know Kevin Dobson likes to tell the story of how he watched Sid go over a cliff and then said, “I just got a job”, but another possibility is that the producers saw how well Karen bounced off Joe in Season 3, realised she couldn’t marry her brother (although you can almost imagine Michael Filerman pitching the idea) and so created another hotheaded New Yorker who continually yells at Karen while having her best interests at heart. It’s interesting to have Mack and Joe share both the screen and most of the same personality traits during this handover period. They actually complement each other really well.Meanwhile, Cat and Mouse is full of examples of what made the immediate Post-Dream Era of DALLAS so refreshing. There’s bad girl April chattering excitedly about suing Jack and Jamie for their shares of Ewing Oil while JR is doing unmentionable things to her just below screen level. “Malicious intent — it has such a nice ring to it!” she giggles. (Granted, that line’s not exactly Dorothy Parker, but it’s still more amusing than all of April’s limp jokes during her final three seasons combined.) There’s also the slow and sad, death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts dissolution of Ray and Donna’s marriage. While Donna concedes that she’s coming to terms with their breakup “little by little”, Ray’s jealousy over her friendship with Senator Dowling reawakens some old insecurities: “I could never be the man that Donna wanted, no matter what I did, how I felt about her. I could never measure up.” Ray is nothing but not consistent — he could have delivered this dialogue at almost any point in their relationship, even before they were married.There’s also some unfinished business between the equally estranged Gary and Val in Catharsis. In this situation, Abby’s the jealous one when she finds out Gary has invited Val to Dallas for the reading of Jock’s will. Val turns him down flat. "What in the world would he think I'd wanna go to Dallas for?!" she exclaims indignantly. Lilimae reckons the reality of his daddy’s death has just hit him "and he probably wanted to talk about it to somebody who loves him.” “Then let him go to her,” Val replies bitterly.When Sue Ellen fails to arrive home in Cat and Mouse, it’s notable that Pam is the Ewing most concerned she might have fallen off the wagon and ended up in trouble. Perhaps she’s remembering a dream she once had. When Sue Ellen finally does show up the next morning and is unable to remember where she’s been, the family assume the worst. “You all think that I’ve been drinking, don’t you?” she asks them accusingly before turning on JR. “And where were you last night, my love? Isn’t this yesterday’s suit? … Did you spend the night in your car too?!” It’s only recently hit me how much I enjoy these rare scenes where Sue Ellen loses her composure in front of her in-laws who then regard her as if she’s gone completely mad. It happened first in Black Market Baby when she accused Pam of sabotaging her adoption. It also happens in that great scene in Carousel where she loses her temper at Bobby for defending JR after he’s killed Nicholas Pearce. But the best example is in a very exciting episode that I haven’t gotten to yet because it begins with D. Perversely, but also kind of inevitably, the realisation that she was drugged and abducted (and possibly even raped) by BD Calhoun serves to bring Sue Ellen and JR closer together — even though he's the one who endangered her in the first place.Elsewhere, Cliff tricks confidential information about Ewing Oil out of Pam, passes it onto Jeremy Wendell and then feels so guilty he gets drunk and wakes up in bed next to a very young and kooky future Ann Ewing. From his drunken ramblings the night before, she has come to the conclusion that he is hung up on a woman named Pam. This causes Cliff to do a nervous double-take. Funny how the whiff of incest will follow Ann as she gets involved with Harris Ryland and his creepily possessive mother Judith.It seems as if Bobby has been super-smart in tracing Calhoun to his hotel, but when he and JR get there in the final scene of the ep and find a videotaped message he’s left for them (“Congratulations, JR. Now you’re an enemy worth killing"), they realise they’ve walked into a trap. Catharsis, meanwhile, ends with Joe coming to the conclusion that Karen, like BD, knew what she was doing all along and that he, Mack, the bad guys and the cops all took the bait she set for them. As I say, I’ve always found this ending a bit far-fetched. This time around, however, I've realised that KNOTS gives itself a get-out clause. When Joe asks her if she planned the whole thing, Karen has a mouthful of food and doesn’t answer. So maybe she really is some kind of only-on-TV master manipulator (i.e, one of "them") or maybe she’s just your every day, out of her depth widow who got lucky (one of "us"). The ambiguity is very KNOTS.And the winner is … CatharsisBONUS BEATS[MEDIA=youtube]WYeDJxWvA_I[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?