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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 256033" data-attributes="member: 22">Double Jeopardy (KNOTS, 02 Mar 89) v Double Wedding (DALLAS, 21 Oct 78)It’s a Double double bill!Double Jeopardy does a great job of blending lots of disparate KNOTS ingredients into one big soapy stew. There’s straight ahead juicy melodrama (Gary’s arrest for Jill’s murder), neighbourly kitchen confessionals (Pat admitting her attraction to Gary, which elicits an intriguing response from Karen: “Every woman gets a crush on Gary once in her life”), unpredictable character moments (Val collapsing with hysterical laughter over Jill’s death), gritty procedural stuff (we attend Jill’s autopsy and learn she had a half-digested pizza inside her when she died) and some deliciously noir-ish backstabbing over at the Sumner Group where Paige secretly sabotages Greg’s mayoral campaign and Abby plays the supportive wife, but then forges an alliance with Ted behind Greg’s back.There are some intriguing echoes of past and future episodes: Val is called in for questioning for the same murder Gary has been arrested for, just as she was following Ciji’s death in The Burden of Proof. The cop who then interviews her is played by the crooked detective Abby hired to find her after she disappeared in Distant Locations. And when asked why she threatened Jill with a pair of scissors, Val exhibits the same highly strung self-justification she will when questioned about why she stabbed Danny with a letter opener in Devil on My Shoulder.In a way, Double Wedding is to Pam Ewing what Constant Companion was to Ginger Ward — a teen romance with a boy who went to Vietnam that had a major consequence she’s never told her husband about (an abortion for Ginger, a marriage for Pam) now returns to haunt her in the present. And Ed Haynes is a kind of a one-episode Naldo Marchetta prototype: a trouble-making ex-husband who shows up claiming he’s still in love with Bobby’s girl, but really wants to get his hands on some Ewing money.Given that Double Wedding is a self-contained episode which focuses an incident never mentioned before or since, it might be regarded as dispensable. Indeed, when the BBC repeated the first two seasons of DALLAS on a nightly basis at the height of the “Who Shot JR?” hoo-ha, this is one of a handful that they skipped. But there is still a surprising amount of notable things going on in this instalment.Ed is the first (but definitely not the last) person to get the Ewing brothers confused when he confronts JR thinking he’s Bobby and asks him what he knows about his wife’s past. “Mrs Ewing doesn’t have a past,” JR replies amusingly. When Ed then claims he and Pam are still married, JR is all ears. After he tried to make Pam look like adulteress in Digger’s Daughter, JR admitted that he “underestimated the new Mrs Ewing,” and vowed not to repeat his mistake. So when he brands her a bigamist in this ep, he makes sure to do so in front of Jock. In that same scene in Digger’s Daughter, Bobby declared that, “Pamela’s past is none of my business. She was not my wife in the past.” However, his anger when he learns that she had a secret husband foreshadows his anger when he finds out Ann had a secret daughter in New DALLAS.This ep is the first time Cliff and Bobby spend any significant time in each other’s company when they’re obliged to work together to help Pam. Interestingly, Bobby is as uptight and angry as Cliff is clear-headed and humorous. (“Do you ever stop with the wisecracks?” Bobby snaps at him. “It’s in lieu of a bill,” Cliff assures him.) By the end of the ep, you sense they’re starting to like each other, thus setting the tone for their see-sawing relationship over the next 36 years.It also marks the first time Cliff steps foot on Southfork, and his first of only two encounters with Lucy (“Hmm, you’re not bad,” she decides, looking him up and down). We’re shown a tougher side to Bobby’s personality than we’ve seen previously (he threatens to strand Ed’s accomplice in the Texas desert: “No water for miles, just plain dirt as far as the eye can see — a man left out there alone might not ever be heard from again”) as well as a nobler side to Digger’s (“Pamela’s marriage is very painful to me but I’m not about to see her suffer because of something I may or may not have done”).Digger’s cigar box, in which he keeps various family photos and keepsakes, including Pam’s birth certificate, makes its debut appearance. It will resurface six years later in Do You Take This Woman? when Cliff searches for his daddy’s copy of the document splitting Ewing Oil into thirds, and again three years after that, in Brother, Can You Spare a Child? when he meets with Miss Ellie to end their family feud. Its New DALLAS equivalent would be Cliff’s safety deposit box, where Pam’s death certificate is discovered.A stand alone episode this may be, but there are plenty of ongoing storylines simmering away in the background: Miss Ellie fussing over Jock as he recovers from heart surgery, Bobby juggling ranch work with starting his own construction business, Pam's new job at The Store, Cliff's upcoming election campaign and his ongoing flirtation with Sue Ellen. None of these story strands are developed in any significant way, but they do a good job of fleshing out the world of the Ewings.Val and Danny, Paige and Pierce, Karen and Phil, Jenna and Naldo, and now Pam and Ed: there is certainly no shortage of Ewingverse women at the mercy of predatory men. Occasionally, they get to fight back as Val does with the letter opener. Here, Pam adopts a more devious approach when she calls Ed’s bluff and asks him to take her away from all this. “If I’d spent another day on that ranch, I’d have gone out of my mind,” she pouts, channelling the sex-starved wives married to boring old men played by Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck  in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity (and even Abby in Double Jeopardy). It’s as close as Pam ever gets to playing her own evil lookalike.All this plus a cosily traditional TV ending where the rest of the family chortle over JR’s bemusement at finding Digger asleep in his office.And the winner is ... Double WeddingBONUS BEATS:[MEDIA=youtube]6sRQ9q4hzv4[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?