Episode Title: Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
Season 01, Episode 05
Episode 005 of 344
Written by David Jacobs
Directed by David Moessinger
Original Airdate: Friday,
January 25th, 1980
The Plot
(Courtesy of TV.Com): Lillimae Clements, Val's mother, turns up in Knots Landing
to visit her daughter. Valene confronts her over being abandoned as a child as
Lillimae cared more about pursuing her music career than Val. As ghosts from the past come back to haunt the mother and daughter, they begin
to put the past to rest
And now we’ve come to a KL episode that I was honestly not all that
excited to revisit. For whatever reason,
I had a pretty clear memory of not particularly enjoying this episode, yet
recognizing that it was an important one for the series and for the further
character development of Val through the introduction of her mother, Lilimae
Clements, played perfectly by Julie Harris.
Upon revisiting the episode with my notepad and a few years between
viewings, I actually enjoyed it a lot more than before, although in all
honesty, it is probably going to rank last of the five episodes discussed thus
far (with, obviously, the sheer work of television genius that is Let Me Count the Ways being the best episode so far).
Let’s dive right in.
Julie Harris will wind up being
with KL for (according to IMDb) 165 episodes,
but this is actually the only appearance she makes in the first season, or even
in the first two seasons. She shows up
for this episode, then she goes away, and then she rejoins the show as a guest
star in season three before being a main cast member from seasons four through
nine, leaving right near the start of season nine in 1987. With her first appearance here, I may have to
slightly retract some earlier comments I made about the acting on this series. I believe I said that Michele Lee is the best
actress ever on the show, but actually, that honor probably goes to Julie Harris, who already had years of experience in television, film, and, most
significantly, theater before she came to KL. Now this is a classy lady and a fantastic
actress who really elevates all the material given to her throughout the
series, not to mention elevating the performances of all the actors around
her.
But I’m getting way ahead of
myself. Yes, Lilimae will be with the
show for quite awhile, but for right now, this is the only time we will be
seeing her until the season three episode Moving In, which aired December 3rd, 1981. So, at this point, she is really just a one
episode guest star who shows up and then leaves town, and I don’t know that
anyone watching originally would have predicted she would become such an
important character.
We start out Will the Circle Be Unbroken? with
Lilimae creeping around outside of Gary and Val’s house, peering in windows and
such, a cabbie standing by on the street corner and waiting for her. I do wanna take a moment to mention this
cabbie, because I thought this guest actor kinda elevated his small role up and
made it really special. I did a quick little
bit of research and I found that this guest actor’s name is Herb Vigran and,
well, it appears that he is one of those character actors who just appear in
absolutely everything, and every time you see him, you go, “Oh look, it’s that
guy who’s name I don’t know.” Looks like
he was in Airplane!, playing Reporter
#2 (I honestly cannot recall who he is in that film, however). Oooh, and lookie here, he appeared in not one
but two episodes of The Brady Bunch, playing two different
characters in the episodes, how exciting!
And hey, look at this, it does appear that Mr. Herb Vigran is also a
TRANSMORPHER, as he appeared in a Dallas episode! He appeared in Season 5, Episode 19 of Dallas in the episode called Adoption, playing “Judge.” Well, it’s been awhile since I watched that
particular episode (most of Dallas does
sorta become a big blur in my mind, honestly), but I’m sure he was most
excellent in it. Here, he doesn’t have a
lot of lines, he doesn’t have a lot to do, but somehow he really struck me as
memorable and, in his small role, he really made the most of it. So ladies and gentlemen, let’s take a moment
to appreciate Mr. Herb Vigran.
Anyway, as we first meet
Lilimae, we obviously have no idea who she is.
At this juncture in the series, I don’t even know that Val has mentioned
her mother, so we the audience are wondering who is this woman and why is
she hanging around? Fortunately Karen
approaches her to see what’s going on and is very excited to learn that she is
Val’s mother come to pay her a visit. I
do think there is a certain sense immediately that maybe Lilimae is up to
something, not to say that she is conniving, exactly, but that she is not
visiting Gary and Val purely out of the kindness of her heart or the desire to
see them after a long time apart. This
is absolutely reinforced when she is reunited with Val, who is, shall we say,
much less than thrilled to have her mother back in her life.
Before Val sees her mother,
however, Lilimae entertains everyone at the Fairgate house with a rousing rendition of Shady Grove. As we will come to see over the next eight
years or so, this is pretty much the only song Lilimae sings (although she does
enjoy a duet of Will the Circle Be Unbroken? with Ciji in season four), and she sings it a lot.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think there’s a future episode where she
plants a recording of the song in Kenny and Ginger’s record player….or
something. I guess we’ll find out when
we get to that in, oh, a couple of years.
Now, just to show my complete and total ignorance about, well, everything,
I had to do some online work to see if this was actually a real song or one
made up for the show, either by Julie Harris or by the musical genius Jerrold Immel. Well, I read that it’s a song
from the 18th century and has been recorded by, oh, everybody, so I
guess it was already an old, established song by the time this episode rolled
around.
What’s interesting is that I
could not, for the life of me, figure out whether the Fairgate family actually enjoys listening to Lilimae sing Shady Grove or if they were just being
polite. Thinking back on it, I have
decided that they do enjoy listening
to her. Everyone gathers at the stairs,
Michael, Eric, Diana, everybody, to listen to Lilimae, and Michael gets this
really cute and really cheesy SUPER HAPPY expression listening to her sing, and
basically the whole family acts like the Bradys acted when Greg composed
his own musical masterpiece (“Clowns never laughed before…” and so on). Also interesting about this scene is that
Lilimae is so clearly out of touch with her daughter’s life. For instance, she asks where Lucy is,
obviously assuming that Lucy lives with Gary and Val, and Karen has to tell her
that Lucy lives in Dallas as a part of the cast of a different, not-as-good
series. Oh yeah, and we also learn that
Sid’s full name is William Sidney Fairgate, something I completely forgot!
Okay, things really start to
heat up in this episode when Val is reunited with Lilimae. Let’s just say that Joan Van Ark, well, let’s
just say that she sure does pour her heart into this performance. The little thirty-second preview before the
episode shows Val’s face contorting like Jim Carrey on coke, turning all
grotesque and red as she screams, “MAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMAAAAAAA!”, really drawing
that word out longer than I thought anyone ever could. God bless Joan Van Ark, and please, dear
readers, please do understand that everything I say about her I say with
love. But anyway, Joan is hardly the
best actress on the series, and she’s really going over-the-top here, but it’s
all part of the fun.
In fact, this might be the
perfect episode to discuss the camp merits of KL. Perhaps you’ve been
reading my previous write-ups and thinking, “Boy, this guy really loves KL,” and of course I do, but camp is a tremendous part
of my enjoyment of the series. While I
love all aspects of the series and think it very often elevated itself to high
art, I also love the camp, and this is one of the first examples of that. Okay, I think we can all understand that Val
has a troubled relationship with her mother, right? So that part of the episode is very much
grounded in reality, in regular human drama that we see every day, but Joan Van Ark’s wildly contorting face and crazed performance are campier than a night
out at Camp Crystal Lake, and, again, I say that with love. In a few seasons, I will discuss my beloved
Kevin Dobson and his ability to alternately be an AWESOME actor and a master of
campy overacting, sometimes all within the same sequence.
At first, Val is just quiet towards
her mother. Lilimae is sitting around,
telling stories, being friendly and charming, and Val is just sorta glaring in
the corner. But then she goes upstairs
to make up a bed in the guest room for her mom, and Gary comes in to talk to
her. He’s all like, “I guess you really
don’t care for your mom, huh?” and Val says, get this, “Let’s not mince words,
Gary, I HATE her.” I was kinda like
“Damn,” when I heard that line. “Hate”
is a very strong word, but Val just throws it right out there, almost casually. Considering how close her and Lilimae become
through the course of the series, it’s interesting to see that we start out
with Val declaring her HATRED for her mother.
Okay, it’s time to talk about my
absolute FAVORITE part of this episode, and that is the recurring motif of the
creepy dreams and flashbacks. Oh
boy, everybody in Seaview Circle is suffering from these scary-ass visions and
flashbacks this week! While Val gets the
brunt of it, having about, oh, seventeen creepy flashbacks throughout the
course of the episode, we also have some for Karen and my two FAVORITE
characters, Kenny and Ginger.
Val’s creepy flashbacks come accompanied with this truly terrifying
piece of music that’s almost electronic in nature. Let me see if I can sorta set the tone for
these truly bizarre and rather terrifying bits of footage. Generally, you will start with Val, like,
peering out of a window, looking very introspective, and then suddenly the
camera will start to do a slow pan in on her face, followed by a sorta
half-dissolve and then whatever frightening vision she is having.
In the case of this episode,
Val’s visions mostly exist to show us why she has a tumultuous relationship
with her mother, and they also adhere rather loyally to what had already been
established on Dallas. If you’ll flash back to the parent series for
a minute, you’ll remember that we were told by Lucy (in the very first episode,
no less) that her parents were together when she was born, then her daddy ran
off on them, and then J.R. threw her mama off Southfork and sent his Good Old
Boys to steal baby Lucy back. Well, now
we actually get to see it here, which
I think is interesting. At any other
time in television history, has a past history like this been established on
one series and then actually physically seen on a spinoff? I’m not sure, but I like it and it reminds me
of how closely linked the two series are in these early three or four seasons,
where you really could just hop back and forth from the two series every week
and there is a sense of an overarching continuity.
But not only do we see something
that had been previously established; we also expand upon it. Here, we see Val clutching baby Lucy tightly,
running through the woods from the Good Old Boys, eventually stopping at
Lilimae’s house and asking her to protect the baby for her. Well, Lilimae will have none of it; she
doesn’t even stop to listen to her daughter’s pleas, because there’s a “big
record producer” (remember this is according to Lilimae, so take it all with a
generous helping of salt) in the house and she can’t have him know that she’s a
grandmother, now can she? Therefore, Val
is left alone, desperately running through the woods until the Good Old Boys,
well, push her down and grab the baby (gee, that was simple).
In addition, we have a quick
little mother-related flashback for Karen, although I don’t think we see any
footage; it’s all dialogue. Mostly it’s
dialogue between her and her mother (who I think we never actually see on the series, but I shall keep my
eyes open over the next 339 episodes) regarding Karen’s marriage to Sid. We can tell that her mother does not approve
of this man and does not want her daughter to marry him. Now this I like very much, because I would
say at this point in the series that Karen and Sid are the rocks; they are the
most stable couple on the show (despite Karen’s near affair a few episodes ago,
but we’ll let that slide), so it’s intriguing to note that mommie dearest was
against this union from the start.
But do you wanna know who I
really don’t care about? If you guessed Kenny and Ginger, you guessed
correctly. For whatever reason, we have
Kenny asleep and Ginger, like, flailing around and having some sort of nightmare,
maybe something relating to the abortion we find out she had a few episodes
later, but whatever. She awakens from her
dream and shakes Kenny and says, “I wanna have a baby.” And then the scene ends. Huh?
If I recall correctly, Kenny and Ginger do in fact have a baby in the
third season (and they give it some ridiculous double name that’s completely
stupid...um...is it Erin Molly?), but were the writers really looking that far
ahead? If I recall correctly, it’s gonna
be awhile before Ginger gets pregnant, so what’s this about? How does one creepy flashback then lead to
her telling Kenny (who is ASLEEP and probably can’t even register what she is
saying to him) that she wants a baby? In
any case, it’s not important because they’re not important, so let’s move on.
I do have a quick little gripe
that relates to this episode and the one immediately preceding it, The Lie.
Laura and Val are sitting around, and Val asks Laura if she gets along
with her mother, to which Laura says, “No, she died when I was twelve.” Oh, well that’s all well and good, except
that she JUST TOLD Val that one episode prior.
Val says, “I’m sorry,” and I had to wonder if she was saying it like,
“Oh yeah, you just told me that and I forgot; sorry about that,” or if she is
saying, “Sorry she died.” I’m going with
the latter option based on the tone of the exchange, but that doesn’t make a
whole hell of a lot of sense, does it?
Were these eps filmed in a different order? Should this have been aired before The Lie?
Because all of this was well established in Laura’s fantastic speech on
the stairs last week, so it doesn’t make sense that Val has already forgotten
about the death of Laura’s mother. Oh
well.
Val and Lilimae do begin to mend
some fences in the kitchen. As we will
come to see when Lilimae moves in from seasons three through nine (well, some
of nine), she is a hell of a cook and generally her cooking is so good that Val
never stops to ask why her mother never pays rent. So it is fitting that one of their first
moments of bonding is here, in Val’s kitchen.
See, Val has made corn fritters (which, by the way, I didn’t even know
what these were and I had to ask My Beloved Grammy, who I’m watching the series
with, what they are) and apparently they are totally delicious and everybody
loves them. There’s even a fantastic
dissolve where we zoom in on Val mixing a batter and then we dissolve to the
fritters all completed and ready for consumption, with Val and Laura enjoying
them together. However, when Val states
her intent to serve them at the party that night, Lilimae won’t have it. She’s all like, “These are not your Southern
country folk; these are sophisticated folk!”
So together they pull out a cook book and make, well, something. It appears to be some sort of a chocolate,
um, custard, um, whipped cream, um, thing.
I really appreciate the fact that we are never told exactly what this
dish is; all we see is people’s horrified reaction to it. Everyone tries to act nice about it, but is
secretly throwing it in the garbage or flushing it down the toilet or whatever. It’s a nice little comedic moment where
everyone takes a taste and you can just see in their face that they are about
to throw up.
Aside from the bad dessert,
pretty much everything is going okay until Lilimae starts to sing and talk
about her past and all her experiences, making a big awkward speech about how
Val never really understood or appreciated what she did for her, and of course
this is the big moment where Val has finally had enough. We all saw that thirty-second preview before
the show and we’ve all been waiting for it, and Joan Van Ark doesn’t
disappoint. The face turns red, the
mouth opens up super wide, and she starts to scream and scream about how
Lilimae ruined her life by not helping her when she needed help with baby
Lucy. “I lost her because of you and I
hate you I HATE YOUUUUUUUU!” she screams, followed by that incredible and
hilarious, “MAAAAAAAAAMMMMMAAAAAA!” Oh
joy, what a scene this is. We the
audience feel the uncomfortable-ness just dripping from the walls as everyone
is forced to watch this domestic disaster, this unleashing of fury from a woman
who has held in resentment at her mother for, well, at least twenty years, but
probably more. J.V.A. is glorious in her
over-the-top facial contortions and Julie Harris balances her out perfectly by
being, you know, a legitimately great actress, and together the two create
magic.
How does the episode wrap
up? The funny thing is it’s kinda a blur
for me. The creepy flashbacks are vivid;
I feel I will never get them out of my brain, but the last five or ten minutes
of the show….not so much. Basically Lilimae
and Val make up in a rather, well, creepy scene. See, Lilimae is packing up her bags, singing
a little song, and then Val comes into the room and, um, puts her head in her
lap. I guess this is supposed to be
moving, like even after all the anger and the fights, Val returns to the
comfort of her mother’s lap, but the fact that it’s a 40-something actress (or
does she claim she was still in her ‘30s during the early seasons?) cuddling up
to her mom is just, I dunno. Let’s just
say I wasn’t too moved by the scene, and as you know, I’m not a cynic when it
comes to KL, there are a plethora of
episodes in our future that make me cry; this is just not one of them.
Anyway, Lilimae does leave town,
but she leaves town having made peace with Val, and then Val returns to the
bedroom where Lilimae was staying and, just because the lap-scene wasn’t creepy
enough, she picks up a scary doll and starts singing to it and then the episode
freeze-frames on this image and, well, that’s it.
Okay, so that’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken? In my memory, this was one of the duller
episodes of season one, but I actually sorta enjoyed it this time around,
though not as much as the four previous.
I think it should be noted that David Jacobs wrote this episode himself,
and he is proving himself to be the master of planting seeds that will grow
into fantastic and beautiful flowers in the years to come. Here, he plants seeds that are very important
to the character of Val and her relationship with Lilimae. Now, if Lilimae never came back to the series
again, or if she was only a guest actor who appeared in five or six episodes
total, this episode would probably be far less interesting. But watching it with the knowledge that she will be an integral character for years on the series really
helps to make it more interesting, as we see a lot of the qualities that will
make her a delightful character in the future, such as her love of singing and
of cooking and her generally warm demeanor (although I don't think we get an “Ooooooooh”
in this episode and that’s a damn shame!). Really, this episode is at its best whenever Val and Lilimae are
one-on-one, and the other characters are secondary, most notably the atrocious
Kenny and Ginger. Also, I dunno, but
there’s just something fundamentally less interesting about this episode than
the previous four, particularly Let Me Count the Ways and The Lie; they just jumped out of the
screen and grabbed my attention and I was enthralled. This one is a little more regular, a little
less exciting, but it’s still good, you know? Overall, there’s definitely
plenty to recommend in Will the Circle Be
Unbroken?, even if it is maybe not an all-time classic like many other KL episodes will be.
Next week we get our third crossover of someone from Dallas crossing over to the spinoff series. This time it's Charlene Tilton as Lucy Ewing and the episode is Home is For Healing.
I absolutely love the moment at the end of the episode when Val tells Lilimae that she still loves her, almost choking the words out. Lilimae's only response is this sort of expression of stunned gratitude on her face as she is driven off. There's just so much you can read into it. Amazing how two such accomplished actresses can elevate 3 second material to such heights.
ReplyDeleteCan't wait for next week. My one and only opportunity to drag Charlene!
Karen didn't sell Knots Landing Motors. The show de-emphasized it, but she held on to it. In season 7, Eric wanted her to sell it because he didn't want to run it anymore. Karen said no but encouraged Eric to find his own path and then offered him a job at Lotus Point.
ReplyDeleteLOVED the over the top reaction from Patrick Petersen when he was watching Lilimae play and sing. That whole scene was the most memorable of this episode to me. The forced smiles on Sid and Karen's faces were priceless. I felt their embarrassment.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy the continuity and added details to Val's backstory. What I don't like is Val screaming "MAAMMAAA" like a banshee. Not a favorite episode of mine but it is an essential one in understanding the full scope of Valene's character.
ReplyDelete