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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 250327" data-attributes="member: 22">Designs  (KNOTS, 26 Mar 81) v Devil on My Shoulder (KNOTS, 08 Mar 90)In 1981, being a good Seaview Circle resident means alerting the police when your neighbour's ex-husband drives off with her kids and all their belongings; in 1990, it means performing an emergency tracheotomy with a pen on your neighbour’s estranged husband after she’s stabbed him with a letter opener.As if often the case with early KNOTS episodes, it’s the small moments in Denials that fascinate: Olivia, in possibly the Ewingverse’s earliest example of cultural appropriation, asking Val for cornrows; Richard making Laura laugh with an ad-lib after she mispronounces “Jason’s shoes” as “Jashon’s shoes.”Even though Denials is a JR episode and he gets the freeze-frame, he doesn’t dominate the ep the way he normally does. He’s more of a vehicle (no pun intended) for the show to explore the Abby/Sid/Karen dynamic. Karen correctly deduces that Abby has shown Sid’s engine plans to JR without his permission. Sid doesn’t believe it but nevertheless confronts his sister with his wife’s suspicions. Abby plays him like a violin, making him feel guilty, and he and Karen end up arguing. You wait for the satisfied smirk on Abby’s face after she’s pulled the wool over Sid’s eyes, but for once it’s not forthcoming. Maybe it’s not as much fun manipulating her brother as it is everyone else.Abby also has another storyline in Designs, involving ex-husband Jeff. The episode really catches fire in its closing minutes when the two stories collide as Karen interrupts Abby and JR in bed (a year before she does the same thing to Abby and Gary) to tell Abby that Jeff has absconded with Brian and Olivia. JR reacts very casually to this incident of spousal abduction — it’ll be a different story in a couple of months when it happens to him.In place of engine patents, the business storyline in Devil on My Shoulder involves Linda Fairgate’s early efforts to get ahead at the Sumner Group. Surprisingly, the plot in which she wangles her own desk and computer by pretending to have smoke allergies is at least as entertaining as Abby and JR’s machinations in Designs.Both eps have that KNOTSian thing of characters battling their way through protocol and red tape to make themselves understood. When Karen rings the police about Jeff in Designs, she can’t get them to take her concerns about a father driving off with his own kids seriously. When she then goes to JR’s hotel to find Abby, the staff won’t give out his room number so she has to bribe a bellhop who assumes she’s a prostitute. In Devil On My Shoulder, Val has trouble making the authorities believe that it was she who was attacked by Danny rather than the other way round.  “It’s your word against his,” Mack explains, “and he’s the one who got stabbed.”Ironically, Abby and Val have opposing problems with their exes in these episodes — while Abby can't find Jeff, Val can’t get rid of Danny. No sooner does she explain to the twins that he’s not going to be living with him anymore than he shows up at the front door. “I’m home!” he announces with a smile.And the winner is … Devil on My ShoulderBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]AS4gb_VYQZM[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

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