Round 2 - Week 6
Match 1
This week's less easy choice for me.
In traditional
Dallas fashion, Pam's accident comes out of nowhere. It's not the culmination of a big plot, but a big moment with big visuals designed to create a big impression. Which they do. To be fair, most real-life car accidents come out of nowhere, so in that regard Pam's is arguably the more realistic of the two. There is definitely something in the air during this episode, which crackles with a feeling that something is about to happen. The moment Pam mentions her car is making a funny noise, the audience knows it can't end well. Here, instead of a clue that Pam's car is going to have a fail of cliffhanger proportions, it's a device to get her behind the wheel of Bobby's red Mercedes SL: an updated model of the car in which we first met her. The accident may not be the outcome of careful plotting, but care has at least been taken to acknowledge to the audience that Pam's story has come full circle.
There's also the foreshadowing reminiscent of that in
A House Divided. If memory serves, the earlier episode had several scenes of JR dramatically exiting his office to swelling music, leading me to believe that they were deliberate fake-outs, either because it was somewhat known that JR would be shot at his office or just in case the rumour got out. In Pam's case, we have her run into the path of an oncoming juggernaut by the boy racers on her way to the clinic. I've always believed this to be another "plant", put in there in case it it became known that Pam would exit in a car crash (which I'm sure it was in the UK). Viewers could watch the scene, think this was the "crash" that newspapers had hyperbolically exaggerated and be lulled into a false sense of security. Because nobody has two car accidents in one day. Do they?
I still have clear memories of watching Pam's accident when it first aired, almost exactly three years on from watching the
Dallas cliffhanger that had made a fan out of me. I watched it in my grandparents' bedroom while most of the family was watching something else downstairs. Sports probably. Even by this point, I was one of the few who still cared. However, I do remember outrageous cliffhangers coming up in conversation at school a couple of years later, with comments about the ridiculousness of the car instantly exploding like an oil refinery. Children can be so cruel. And so insightful.
Sid's accident was
Knots's first go at a big end-of-season cliffhanger. It strikes the best of both worlds, coming out of a season-long storyline about a stolen car parts ring, but with all roads - including some meddling from JR during a visit or two that year - leading to a memorably exciting final scene. The production values of the episode have a whiff of the Seventies to them, the brakeless car car screeching along the coast road feels as though it's lifted from an older police series or something. It feels endearingly earnest and square jawed. I've never been a fan of the sudden "Oh my God" freeze frame, and feel
Knots would have done it in a more cinematic, less
Dallas-esque way a year or two later. But it's early doors for the Eighties prime time cliffhanger, with the
Who Shot JR? phenomenon of the previous year the model for how to do it. I'm really impressed at how far this episode goes to create a sense that things have changed forever. When the cul-de-sac is protected by armed guards, with the Fairgates practically under house arrest with curtains drawn in the daytime, one really feels that there's no coming back and things have changed forever. It's often forgotten in the mix, but there's also the terrific pre-cliffhanger cliffhanger of Abby receiving the tape from her husband telling her he's taken the children and listing the reasons why she's a terrible mother. Of all the cliffhangers Abby would end up in the centre of, this could well be the most devastating for her because it's an assassination not just of her character, but of those aspects which are her virtues or saving graces. It drives her literally to her knees, howling on the floor with the kind of anguish that shocks not just because of its rawness but also because it's such an atypical response for Abby. Once again, one wonders where the character can go from here. After just two seasons it's a possibility that all avenues with these characters have been explored and exhausted. The characters themselves even comment about the extremities of their current predicaments which seem so far removed from the homely simplicity of middle class suburbia.
The
Dallas episode feels more definitively like the end of a chapter. Since it's clear that Pam is very dead(!), if one comes back back to the next season, it's out of a morbid curiosity to see how
Dallas works without the character who introduced us to this world and around whom so much of its original storytelling was centred. With the nature of his freeze-frame, it seems far more feasible that Sid could survive. There are no guarantees and the cliffhanger concept is still new, but certainly by the time I first watched this episode in the mid-Nineties, familiar with the cliffhanger concept, it would have been easy to believe we could tune in next time, feel a combination of relief and anti-climax at his dramatic, nick of time escape from the car. Except I already knew otherwise.
It's ironic that both ended up going the unexpected route with the resolutions to these cliffhangers. And both were tragic in very different ways.
Knots Landing - Season Two
Match 2
The post-cliffhanger pickup of the Southfork fire was the first episode I watched in a repeat daytime screening of Season Six in the summer following Bobby's shooting (the episode that made a
Dallas fan out of me). I had no idea what was going on, and I must confess that I didn't particularly care. Primary school me just wanted to look for clues regarding Bobby's shooting and was very frustrated to find precious few (I had very little idea of the structure of series in general and, less generally, the seasonal structure of prime time US soap). I'm not sure when I first watched the cliffhanger itself, but it would have been a repeat screening - probably on UK Gold circa 1993. Even then, it didn't make a huge impression on me. I suppose we got off on the wrong foot and so it didn't feel significant for me. I think it was on DVD that I first appreciated the storytelling. This is one of
Dallas's more artful cliffhangers because of the way it can be traced back to earlier in the season. The fire is the result of a chain reaction of events in a number of different threads weaved through the season - independently and with different levels of connectivity depending on the point reached in the story. On that level it's impressive.
In terms of pipe-laying for its cliffhanger,
Knots is even more impressive. Season Six was one of
Knots's longest and I can't think of another example of a storyline taking such a tortuous path to tell what could be loosely called one story. Val had given birth to the twins some six-and-a-half months earlier in viewer time, which might have been a lifetime for all the events that had taken place. Even in that space of time, within the same season, Valene alone had gone from giving birth to grieving to pushing her friends and family away to disappearing from California to Tennessee to an ongoing soap-within-a-soap that followed her entire dissociative personality disorder, right down to walking up the aisle with a new fiance. This was followed by entering therapy and trying to come to terms with her babies' deaths while her friends took the opposite path and went from powerless acceptance to a truth-seeking quest to uncover a black market baby ring. On paper it's all so outrageous, but it's written, played and produced with such truth it never feels anything but truthful.
In the UK, we were four years behind but in a fortunate twist of synchronicity, for most of Season Six we were were
exactly four years behind, week-by-week. I watched Val give birth in November 1988, so references to the November birthdates all fitted. And she arrived at the Fishers' home on 24th May 1989: pretty much four years to the day America tuned in to watch that same episode. Brits also had the agonising luxury of a proper hiatus between seasons, and this is the clearest example to me of why it's important to watch TV series' in the way they're intended to be shown. Without those five solid months of the scene resonating and its full, haunting impact taking hold I may have viewed this episode very differently (last week's Season Nine cliffhanger is an example of a cliffhanger not having enough time to resonate with British viewers).
The Long And Winding Road delivers the most effective emotional cliffhanger, because it's driven by character. Every one of the people around the Fishers' home has serious investment in this - all for very different reasons - and we fully understand what each of them is feeling. I dare say my teenage hormones helped. This came along at a time in my life when I was particularly impressionable. But even so, this still stands. In the entire World Cup, I'm fairly sure this is the only example of the hairs on my arms standing to attention just from looking at
@Angela Channing's recap.
I realise this is about the moment itself rather than the journey to it but it's important to acknowledge that good storytelling can really affect the way a cliffhanger is viewed. This one can has a far more significant impact when the storytelling makes the viewer feel as subjectively about what happens onscreen as the characters do. It's no exaggeration to say that I've never felt more invested in any prime time soap cliffhanger. Not before, and not since. And I haven't even mentioned that the final scene is accompanied by one of the most beautiful pieces of underscore in TV history.
Dallas ends with an image of its key piece of iconography symbolically burning.
Knots ends with a woman in a crop top and cutoffs standing on a lawn outside a house turning to watch a man she's never met return from his trip to the pharmacy. It's no contest.
Knots Landing - Season Six
