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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 239693" data-attributes="member: 22">Community Spirit (KNOTS, 03 Jan 80) v The Confession (KNOTS, 16 Jan 86)The first scene of KNOTS I can remember watching is from Community Spirit — Val on the beach looking admiringly out at the ocean where Eric is surfing. He offers to teach her but when she says she can’t even swim, he promises to teach her that instead. As I recall, we don't see Eric surf again after this ep and Val never does learn to swim. Then comes the enjoyably incongruous sight of a limousine pulling up in the cul-de-sac. Out steps JR Ewing from TV's DALLAS for his first meeting with Val since the motel room showdown that Lucy flashed back to in Comings and Goings.The whole concept of “us” and “them” gets kind of turned on its head with JR’s arrival. Traditionally, the “us” is the audience’s point of identification — the eyes through which we get to know “them”, like on  DALLAS and DYNASTY where we follow ordinary girls Pam and Krystle as they marry into rich larger-than-life families, or on FALCON CREST where we watch Chase and Maggie learning to live alongside his weird relatives. But in this case, we're already more familiar with the rich “them” (i.e., JR) than the ordinary “us” (the residents of Seaview Circle) so instead, we get to know the new characters via their contrasting attitudes to the pop culture icon in their midst. When Karen flirts with JR in his hotel suite, it’s like she’s been watching him on TV like the rest of the country and is having a fun half-hour pretending to be one of his mistresses before leaving to pick up her husband’s suit from the cleaners. When an obsequious Richard introduces himself on the beach, he could almost be a starry-eyed fan asking Larry Hagman for an autograph. When Gary and Val stand up to him, refusing to be blackmailed or intimidated any longer, it’s as if they’re proving themselves to be his televisual equals, worthy of helming their own series without requiring any further guest star appearances from him, thank you very much. Indeed, when JR congratulates his brother at the end of ep on finally “beginning to act like a real Ewing”, it sounds like a portent of Gary's own soapy shenanigans to come.Whereas Karen merely plays at being a soap opera vamp in this ep, Laura is living the messier reality of adulterous motel room assignations. For some reason, it’s never quite clicked with me before that her story about having previously met Chip Todson at summer camp is a lie and that he's actually one of her previous extra-marital Looking for Mr Goodbar pickups.Almost exactly six years later in The Confession, Karen locks horns with Abby over an environmental McGuffin just as she did JR in Community Spirit. This time, they’re in competition for an appointment on the state planning commission. Greg already has a stake in Abby getting the post (as part of his secret scheme to get Empire Valley back), but when an unwitting Laura asks him to use his influence to help Karen (just as Richard asked her to use her influence to help him in Community Spirit), he says he will. (Spoiler: he won’t.)The Karen that goes up against Abby in ’86 is far more serious than the one who took on JR for a lark in 1980. Back then, she seemed to enjoy the fight for its own sake; now she solemnly vows to fight Abby to her last breath. Abby just seems to find the whole thing amusing, the way Karen used to when she wore sundresses and a flower in her hair.  Whereas the resolution of the Community Spirit plot neatly enabled JR go out on a high even after he was defeated, it’s not enough for Karen to merely lose to Abby in The Confession, she has to make a fool of herself in the process. Goaded by her opponent, she makes a totally unwarranted confession about her problem with drugs to the governor before realising the appointment has already been decided.The other confession of the episode is Lilimae's as she finally comes clean to the police about the circumstances of Joshua’s death (i.e, he fell off the roof after trying to kill Cathy). This storyline, when viewed in its entirety, seems to drag on for ages, but watching this episode out of context makes it easier to appreciate Lilimae’s reasons for keeping the truth a secret. In a touching monologue where she quietly talks, or prays, to her dead son (“Oh God, Joshua, why’d you have to change? … Oh Lord God in Heaven, if only you’d come to me when things started going wrong. I know why you didn’t … I wasn’t there when you needed me”), it becomes clear that she regards lying on his behalf as her last chance to do right by him.There’s a lovely exchange between Lilimae and Mack in the police station where he gently coaxes the truth out of her and then watches silently as she makes her statement to the police (just as he did when Diana made hers about Ciji’s death a couple of years earlier). On any other soap, Lilimae’s cathartic confession (which is corroborated by Cathy) would be enough to bring this storyline to a close, but on knotty old KNOTS, the cops — following legal logic rather than soap opera convention — aren’t inclined to simply take the word of two women, each of whom has a previous conviction for murder. Again, within in the context of the whole season, this feels like another unwanted complication, but just within this one ep, it makes a pleasing kind of sense. (Still not sure about the saxophonist with the secret mini-tape recorder though.)And the winner is ... The ConfessionBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]mVsV9BjUSi0[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

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