Just as DYNASTY’s pilot episode addressed "taboo" topics the other ‘80s soaps scarcely acknowledged, much less spoke about in such irreverent terms, such as race ("At the upper management level, there are no Blacks, no Jews, no Eskimos and no women"), gays ("Give a cheer for a queer”; "The Steven Carrington Institute for the Treatment and Study of Faggotry") and even female masturbation ("Women have sexual fantasies just like men, except mine were always about you, Matthew"), it’s fitting that the series’ penultimate ever scene (reunions and reboots notwithstanding) should include Soap Land’s first ever reference to the menopause, with Alexis smirking about Sable’s “change of life baby.” The Alexis/Sable/Dex/Monica/Adam punch-up-cum-bitch fest at the Carlton is just so much fun. It may be the end of the series but everyone’s too busy spewing invective at each other to notice — at least until Adam’s blow that sends Dex and Alexis crashing through the railings (accompanied by some thrilling slow-motion screams). There’s something pleasingly traditional about this cliffhanger — it feels like a throwback to the great Falling Down epidemic of ’81 when Constance Carlyle, Kristin Shepard, Sid Fairgate and Jason Gioberti all plummeted off either a balcony or a cliff towards death or paralysis or, in Sid’s case, both.
The final seconds of the episode, following the staircase shoot-out which leaves both Blake and the crooked Captain Handler wounded (possibly fatally), are also interesting. Zorelli goes to Blake’s side and carefully takes the gun out of his hand without leaving any fingerprints on it. He then passes it, along with his own gun (which might or might not have fired the shot that hit Handler), to his former partner Rudy. Zorelli may no longer be a cop, but he clearly hasn’t forgotten police procedure. The same cannot be said for Rudy who simply grabs the guns, instantly putting his own prints all over them. It's an illogical moment on which to the end the series, and therefore a very DYNASTY one.
The traditional Soap Land cliffhanger is one where the drama steadily builds and builds, culminating in one event that somehow seems both shocking and inevitable — "Who shot JR?" being the classic example. At the end of the 85/6 season, however, both Ewing-verse finales deviate from this blueprint. Nothing that’s gone before prepares us in any way for what we’re presented with at the end of KNOTS and DALLAS. Karen Mackenzie awakens in a darkened cellar with no idea how she got there. She tries to escape when she hears a man call her name. Meanwhile, having remained offscreen since we watched him die a year earlier, Bobby Ewing is suddenly standing in Pam’s shower, smiling and telling her good morning. Just as there is no cutaway to the man speaking to Karen at the end of KNOTS, there is no reaction shot of Pam before the freeze frame, no clue as to how she, and therefore we, are meant to process this moment. As cliffhangers — and probably television moments in general — go, it simply has no precedent. The only downside, of course, is that this moment was heavily spoilered. One can only imagine the impact it might have had had we not been primed for Patrick Duffy’s return. The closest I've come to experiencing that would probably be the out-of-body sensation I felt when Kathy Beale suddenly appeared without warning with a “Hello, Phil” during the live 30th anniversary episode of EASTENDERS. Mind you, she’d been dead for nine years rather than Bobby's one.
DYNASTY!
FLAMINGO ROAD’s first season finale is a bit of an odd fish. Hurricane Michelle hits town, leading a motley assortment of series regulars and comedy bit players to seek shelter at Lute-Mae's wholesome whorehouse. Somewhere amongst them is the hitman who’s been on Lane Ballou’s trail since the series began. To identify the assassin in their midst, Lute Mae (in that Mae West wannabe way of hers) has the genius idea of dancing with all the men in turn in order to distinguish those with a holster strapped to their shoulder from those who are just pleased to see her. It's kinda fun, in a "Winds of Vengeance" meets THE LOVE BOAT sort of way, but altogether wackier than one might have expected from a Soap Land finale. After the briefest of shoot-outs, the bad guys are either all dead or under arrest and the episode is looming dangerously close to anti-climactic happy-ever-after territory as Lane is reunited with her true love Field. Fortunately, Constance Carlyle — the Sable to their Jason and Francesca — is on hand to renege on her promise to grant Field a divorce. A last minute fight between husband and wife at the top of Lute-Mae's staircase leads to Constance pre-empting DALLAS's season finale by a few weeks and DYNASTY's series finale by eight years by taking a slow motion dive through a broken railing to the floor below. Thus is regular Soap Land service resumed.
I kind of feel the opposite about Angela’s speech in the FALCON CREST finale to the way I do about Bobby’s return in the shower. Each comes at the end of a very atypical season for their respective show and is an attempt to restore that show to its more familiar self. Because I struggled with DALLAS’s generically nice, Bobby-less year (the only time I came close to giving up on the show) I welcomed his return — or more specifically, the subsequent dream explanation that wiped out the previous thirty-one episodes — with open arms. In contrast, I loved the mad, bad, completely unpredictable darkness of FC’s ninth season so I wasn’t crazy about having everybody hastily making nice and burying hatchets in the final ep to ensure a happy ending. It's not that I mind Angela’s ethereal eulogy in itself; rather, I find the events that pave the way for it somewhat underwhelming compared to the total insanity that had gone before.
Parts of Angela's eulogy dovetail with moments in the KNOTS season finale that aired the same week. Just as Angela looks back (“I think of all the people who have passed through these vineyards. There’s Chase, Maggie, Cole and Vicky — and that feisty Melissa Agretti”) so does Karen Mackenzie (“When you’re young, your whole life is new things, first times — your first date, your first prom, the first time you fall in love — and then one day, you look up and your life is full of last times.”) In the same way that Angela is aware of the pitfalls of nostalgia (“The past has its place, but I’ll keep looking to the future”) so are Val and Gary (“We can’t go back.” “So let’s go forward.”) As his wife Pat is disconnected from a life-support machine on KNOTS, Frank Williams quietly sings an old spiritual song: “Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world … I’m going home to live with my Lord.” For Angela, that home, that Higher Power, seems to be the land itself. “Always the land. People come and go, but the land endures,” she concludes. But ultimately, nothing endures like a soap character falling through a broken railing so …
FLAMINGO ROAD!