Episode Title: Hitchhike: Part Two
Season 02, Episode 02
Episode 015 of 344
Written by Don Murray
Directed by Edward Parone
Original Airdate: Thursday,
November 27th, 1980
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): After Sid fires
Richard as the attorney, Richard, in a drunken stupor, causes a scene in the
cul-de-sac. Karen is angry when she discovers Richard tried to pay off the
hitchhiker to drop the charges. Karen remembers a
vital clue which results in getting Sid cleared. Abby decides to move to Knots
Landing, and becomes a part of prime-time soap history.
“Here are some scenes from the first part of tonight’s
episode,” declares the omniscient narrator right at the head of this episode,
followed by about three minutes of recap from Hitchhike: Part One. I’ll
take another quick second to repeat how much I love that corny narration. Would it not be enough to say “Previously on KL?”
I guess not; instead we must have that big, bloated mouthful to explain
to the viewers at home that this is a Part
Two.
After the recap, we get into the episode proper, and
we have yet another ep that is ripe with talking points. Oh boy, where to start? I think I’ll actually start out on Richard,
as one of the first scenes is him talking with Laura about how he is
“invisible” down at his law firm. This,
I think, is some very vital information and it goes a long way towards helping
us understand Richard Avery. I’ve said
it before and I’ll say it again, but Richard is suffering from a Napoleonic
complex. He needs to prove he’s the man,
but in doing so, he only continues to dig himself into deeper and deeper holes.
After all, in last week’s show, Richard’s boss offered
him a partner to work with, someone who could help him with the Fairgate rape
trial, and Richard refused. He’s gotta
prove HE CAN DO IT ALL BY HIMSELF, DAMN IT!
Going down that path, Richard just made some very stupid decisions and
started to bribe Pam, behavior that is going to get him into big trouble right
here. This links back to a previous
episode, Courageous Convictions,
where Richard refused to admit that he was in financial trouble he couldn’t
handle, and by refusing to admit that, he only sunk deeper and deeper. Finally, Richard’s comment about being
“invisible” even after nearly ten years at that firm is going to be further
explored very shortly in Chance of a Lifetime, but we’ll discuss that when we discuss that.
One of the highlight scenes from this episode comes
pretty early on. As you may well know at this juncture in my writing
and watching, I am not a Diana
fan. No, she’s not toxic like Kenny or
Ginger, but my God is she shrill! Here,
she thinks she’s going to get to join that great, sexy band Zarris, but when she shows up to
practice, she is instead dismissed.
Basically, everyone in the band is a little nervous about having the
daughter of a potential rapist as a part of their group, so Diana is dismissed. In typically mature Diana fashion, she comes
barging into her house, screams a few nasty things at Sid, and then runs up
the stairs to pout on her bed, clearly waiting for Sid to come in so she can
yell at him some more.
Well, Sid does come in to speak with her, but I was
delighted to see him being rather harsh and firm with her. Diana is going on about, “You don’t know what
this is doing to me!” and that’s when Sid finally loses his temper. No, he doesn’t start beating Diana (although
I would enjoy seeing that), but instead he tells her he has bigger things to
worry about than her “Fragile little girl ego” (great great line delivered
perfectly by Don Murray). He reminds her
that whatever she is going through, it’s nothing compared to what he’s going through,
and then he delivers a fabulous speech about all the bad things that this
experience is going to do to everyone in general. He talks about how this will just make
everyone more cynical and more jaded and less willing to help out their fellow
humans. After all, this whole thing got
started just because Sid wanted to help out a young girl in trouble,
right? Now he’s being punished for this
act of caring and thought towards another human soul.
This is 1980, of course, and as Sid delivered his
fabulous speech, I found myself thinking of what was going on in the national
consciousness around this time. After
all, this is not the first time the
issue of hitchhiking has been brought up; it cropped up in a Diana-related B-plot back in The Lie. This is also the year that Ted Bundy
officially got locked up and Ann Rule published her legendary book, The Stranger Beside Me, about her
experiences with Ted. I think people’s
perceptions about their general safety are shifting in America at this
time. As we get deeper into the ‘80s,
people stopped being as willing to help others because of their own fears about
what that person might do to them. I’ve dealt with this paranoia myself, where
perhaps I’m driving around really late at night and I’ll see a car stopped on
the side of the road, broken down. A
part of me wants to pull over and help whoever might be in that car, but then a
darker part of me whispers that this could be a trick, a trap, that the car
could belong to a psycho who is just hoping someone will pull over to assist
them. Because of this, I understand Sid’s
feelings and I agree with them. Plus, I
just enjoy any heart-to-heart scenes where Sid gets to act like a father, and
I’ll send a gentle reminder that our time with Sid is very limited (as this is
episode 015 and he makes his final appearance in episode 033), so we gotta soak
up all the Sid-goodness we can while he’s still around.
Next up, we return to the shitty apartment complex
where Pam dwells with her fat mother.
This time, they are being visited not by Richard and his surfboards but
by Karen, who has only come to talk.
Now, I am no legal expert and I also generally don’t care to watch too
many legal shows (because, as we all know, if I watched a couple of legal
shows, I would become an expert on all things relating to American law), so I’m
not sure if Karen is doing the right thing or not. During a trial, isn’t it generally understood
that there should be no interference from plaintiff to defendant and vice
versa? Like, couldn’t Karen perhaps get
into trouble just for visiting Pam? I’m
not sure if it works realistically, but I do enjoy the scene and Michele Lee’s
acting.
Not just Michele’s acting, but also Conchetta Ferrell’s acting. It’s here that I
started to realize that the mother does believe
her daughter. For awhile I was wondering
if maybe this was a mother/daughter scam team, that she was the one encouraging
Pam’s behavior. Here, it is shown that
she believes her daughter and she really does believe they, the “have nots,” are
going up against the “haves.” She goes
on about how they aren't going to hide their dirty laundry; in fact, their
method has been to release multiple statements to the press saying,
essentially, that Pam is promiscuous and loves to sleep around, but that
doesn’t make it okay for her to be raped.
This is an interesting tactic that I could see working in real life,
plus it provides an interesting statement on classism and reminds us that,
while the Fairgates are not up there with the Texas Ewings over on Dallas, they are still very well off
when compared to others in the community, specifically people like Pam and her
mother.
The key bit of information revealed here is that
Richard visited them with a bribe. The
mother says something like, “Don’t even try to send that lawyer down with
another bribe,” and at that point we see the light bulb go on in Karen’s
head. She realizes what Richard has done
and she is damn mad about it. She jumps
into her car and is about to speed away when she sees, GASP, the VAN! That’s right, friends, remember the van that
was only seen for a second right at the start of Hitchhike: Part One? Well,
here it is again, that red van with the lightning bolts on the back of it,
parked directly in front of Karen, with the license plate reading “Yuk.” This scene comes and it goes, but it’s
pivotal and it will end up saving Sid’s ass later in this ep.
Next up, we have Karen enjoying another cocktail
(again, I think it’s a gin and
tonic). For whatever reason, this
particular image has always stayed etched in my brain, as Karen is sitting
quietly in the living room, sipping her drink, all the windows closed and all
the shades drawn. There’s something
about this dark image of a woman drinking alone that has just stuck with
me. Anyway, Sid comes in and shit gets real when Karen tells him about the
shenanigans Richard has been up to. Sid’s
temper flairs up, which is a rare sight throughout his 33 episodes, he goes marching out of the house, and he fires Richard’s ass
right there in front of the Avery house.
He screams and yells and tells Richard he is off the case and it’s a
beautiful thing. I’ll again remind you
that this episode, as was the previous one, is written by Don Murray. I get the feeling that he was intentionally
trying to expand his character here.
After all, in the fourteen previous episodes, have we ever seen Sid lose
his temper and start yelling at someone?
I suppose he did slap Diana way back in Pilot, but he was under a lot of pressure back there and, again,
who wouldn’t want to slap Diana? Aside
from that, I can’t think of a scene where Sid got really, really mad and yelled
and screamed at someone. I wonder if Don Murray was perhaps getting a little tired of playing such a wholesome,
unflappable character, and was wishing to display a wider range of emotions in his
performance?
Okay, so things are not going well for Richard
here. He has to admit to his boss that
he lost the case, and not only that, but that the Fairgates are taking their
business to a completely separate lawyer, someone not even associated with
Richard’s firm. So, not only did he lose
the case personally, but he also cost his firm (can’t remember the exact name;
sorry) a big case. Short Man Syndrome is
rearing its ugly head yet again for Richard, and it’s pretty humiliating to
watch him have to admit all these things to his boss.
This leads to some lovely drunken acting from The
Plesh. I have to wonder how much method
acting might have been involved in this little scene, by the way, as The Plesh
is very realistic as a drunken
person, easily switching between happy and energetic to super angry and
nasty. The scene starts with him and
Laura in the kitchen, where he is drunkenly cooking and seems, at first, to be
in good spirits. However, he quickly
abandons the kitchen and runs outside to start screaming mean things at the
Fairgate house. I think this might be
the first usage of “Saint Sid,” which I really enjoy (although I think maybe
maybe maybe Karen might have used
that term once or twice in some previous episode). Sid comes outside and tells Richard to go
home, as he is drunk and depressed and making a real ass of himself.
Meanwhile, we have a few things going on with some of
our other beloved characters, particularly the new arrival Abby. Okay, I’m gonna do a bit of spoiling for
future episodes and seasons right here, so please skip this part if you haven’t
ever gone any further than season two and you don’t want things spoiled. Anyway, Abby and Gary do, in fact, wind up
getting together in 1982, right near the ending of season three, and then they
eventually get married and, of course, divorced after a certain number of
seasons. For me, the beautiful thing is
the wonderfully controlled pacing of all these developments. Abby has just arrived in the show and she
hasn’t even decided she’s gonna be moving in yet, but we can tell she
immediately has eyes for Gary. However,
the great thing is how long it takes for any of this to play out. I feel like another show would introduce Abby
and have her sleep with Gary immediately, right off the bat. Nope, not KL. Instead, we’re gonna have about two solid seasons, nearly forty episodes,
of pure sexual tension between the two before they finally get together, and I really like that.
The sense I get from Abby right here as she’s first
introduced is that she’d be happy to sleep with any of the men on the block.
When she sees Kenny, rather than being bored by him or critical of him
for being an uninteresting block of wood, she seems hot for him, wanting to
sleep with him. Same is true of Richard,
and it will not be long before she
starts shagging him. However, I get the
feeling that she really has her eye on the prize, and that prize is Gary. He’s the one she truly wants, but she knows
she’ll have to pace herself and be patient before she can have him. On that note, it’s also funny to watch this
particular episode and see Val and Abby being so friendly; they even go out for
a beach picnic together with Olivia and Brian!
In just two years, these ladies will hardly be able to be in the same room
as each other, but right here, for this brief moment, they can enjoy a lovely
picnic together.
The big scene between the two characters takes place
at Knots Landing Motors. Gary is working
on an engine or something and Abby comes strolling in, looking very sexy in the
afternoon sunlight. She sorta saddles up
to the car, making it into a very sexual act, and she is also accompanied by
this very sexy, rather jazzy little bit of music that I wish we heard
more. In her earliest appearances, this
saxxy little piece seems to follow Abby around wherever she goes, but I think
it’s abandoned by the time we reach season three, and that makes me kinda sad,
cuz the theme is just perfect for her
character.
Oh hey, and while we’re on the subject of music, is it
just me or am I hearing a lot of Dallas music in these early KL episodes, particularly in this one
and the episode previous? I noted that
Jerrold Immel composed the music for these two eps; did he just borrow sounds
from his stash over in the Dallas musical
studios? I can’t be specific about which
cues I’m hearing from both shows, except to say that there’s one sorta ominous
“Shit’s about to get real bad real fast” cue that was played a million times
over on the parent series and I think I heard it a time or two in this episode. I’m curious to focus on the music and see
if/when they completely ditch using any recycled music from their parent
series. I’d say they most definitely
would not use any Dallas music after
1986, but I’ll also bet they drop the music way earlier than that, like maybe
around 1982 or 1983? Well, I guess we’ll
have to keep watching to find out.
The episode comes to its climax thanks to the help of
Stan Lesser (that’s guest star Ron Rifkin, in case you’d forgotten). He encourages Sid to retrace all of his steps
from the night before. Karen comes along
and they wind up in the exact spot where Sid first spotted Pam hitchhiking
(it’s in front of a restaurant that will serve you a steak sandwich and a steak
sandwich). Stan Lesser’s experiment
works splendidly, as Sid has a flashback to the van he saw that night, all red
with the lightning bolts on the back.
Now, it takes a little longer for Karen to remember that she saw the
van, but eventually she has that epiphany, as well. Stan Lesser brings up the fact that Pam never
said anything about the van in her
official police report, and yet she yelled and screamed about the van when Sid
was leaving the police station.
Therefore, it shows she is intentionally leaving something out, and that
could be a breakthrough in the case.
Later, in bed, Karen has her epiphany and realizes she
saw that van right outside of Casa Del Shithole, and she even remembers that
license plate, “Yuk.” Boom, the case is
almost solved, with everything being tied up in a nice pretty bow when Rodney shows
up (no, we haven’t really seen Rodney yet, just in case you were wondering, and I find myself wondering if he would be called a deux ex machina) and
confessing to the police that this is a scam he and Pam have been running for a
long time; he acts like he’s gonna hurt her, some nice guy comes along to save
her, and then she squeezes some money out of said nice guy. It has worked multiple times in the past, but
it’s not gonna work now. With all that
said and done, the episode is pretty much over.
Oh wait, I forgot one last important thing! At the very conclusion of the ep, Abby
announces that she has purchased that for-sale house on the cul-de-sac and she
will be moving right in to 16969 Seaview Circle (is it a coincidence that her
new address has 69 featured in it not once but twice?). So yay, Abby is now officially the new
neighbor and she will be stirring up shenanigans for years and years to come.
One thing I noted with interest is Richard’s reaction
to Sid at the close of the episode. See,
while the episode’s events pretty much conclude and wrap up here, Richard is still mad at Sid, and vice versa,
presumably. I’m interested to keep my
eyes open and see how long it takes before the two of them are on speaking
terms again, and I note that the more serialized nature of the series is actually
starting to creep in right here. True,
the show doesn’t become a full-on serialized soap until season four, but I’m
seeing hints of it here. The rape
case is finished, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t repercussions from it that
can carry over into the next episodes. I’ll
also be interested to see if these accusations haunt Sid throughout the course
of the season or not. Will we proceed to
the next episode and find him happy as a clam and again a pillar of his
community? I’m not sure, because let’s
remember that in real life, the rape accusations get to go on page one, but the
revelation that the accused didn’t do anything wrong tends to wind up buried on
page six.
Taking in this double episode (which, remember, aired
over the course of two weeks; this did not originally air as some big fat two
hour CBS event or anything like that) for all it contains, I’d say it kicks
season two off into high gear pretty quick.
I appreciated that this was two episodes, not just one, because it really
gave us time to spend with Sid as his life starts to unravel, and I felt like
it gave the story a much more comfortable pace at which to unfold. Also, even though these were both heavy Sid
episodes, I think every character got a moment or two of interest. For instance, we saw Gary speaking about his
big bender to Karen, telling her she doesn’t have to hide the booze from him
when he comes for a visit. We also got
Val’s slightly creepy obsession with Olivia (but then I remember Val’s
tumultuous relationship with Lucy and I’m ready to forgive her for being a
little bit creepy). Kenny and Ginger are
also, um, there. Finally, the arrival of
Abby to the block is a very exciting development that will help to improve the
series greatly in the years to come. Oh yeah, and let's note the sweet, sweet irony that the very person to encourage Abs to move into Seaview Circle is none other than poor Val!
Oh yeah, and one last thing, for real. I guess Helen Hunt is in this episode? Despite trying to keep my eyes real sharp for
these kinds of random gonna-be-famous-one-day-celebrities, I must have missed
her in this one, but My Beloved Grammy pointed out her name in the ending
credits, and I guess she played “Betsy.”
I did a quick rewind through the episode and still am not sure where she
is, but I’m guessing she is one of the girls gossiping at her locker about evil
pedophile Sid Fairgate. I know Helen Hunt shows up for one more episode later in this season, but I honestly had no
idea she was in two, and I would have kept my eyes peeled for her had I known
in advance.
Coming up next is a Gary-centric episode. Airing just one week after our episode of
discussion right now, our next show will be all about alcoholics and it’s
entitled Remember the Good Times.
Great analysis as always Brett! With two episodes a day showing here in the UK (Mon-Fri) we are now almost halfway through Season 6 already...the Val's babies storyline is well underway. Loving it! Happy Sunday to you!
ReplyDeleteOmigod, the Val's babies storyline: Maybe the greatest storyline in all of KL history? I guess we'll discuss that when we discuss that, but holy shit, I remember that whole season being a masterpiece of television and just a complete work of art.
DeleteAbsolutely agree! The Val baby storyline was going on when I first starting watching Knots. It had me hooked. Everybody was involved, and this was Joan Van Ark's finest acting in the show imo. It was a few years before I went back and watched the preceding seasons, but this got me hooked!
DeleteDear David,
DeleteDo you think you would have been hooked if you had watched the pilot episode in 1979? Or do you think it helped to jump into the series when it was a full on serialized story and had an amazing cast and the writing was just at its absolute peak?
Speaking for myself (who else?!) I was about 13 when KL started here...I always loved it, having been already hooked on Dallas. I loved Karen, Sid and Val and always had a crush on Ted Shackelford...Laura grew on me, Mac was a brilliant addition and then over the years William Devane became my big secret! I used to blush whenever he came on screen as Greg...his and Paife's romance was one of the best IMO. I think KL has always displayed a reality not shown in the other soaps of that era...the characters are so well-rounded and multi-faceted and you can see their motivation clearly. For instance: Abby...much as I love Joan Collins, if she had played this character she would have been purely malevolent. But in KL, Donna Mills showed clearly WHY Abby behaved as badly as she did....and you couldn't really hate her (although I do/did sometimes!) Joan Van Ark in the babies storyline was so underrated...her pain is palpable. Ok enough already! I'll have to wait until you get there!
ReplyDeleteJerrold Immel didn't score this episode, its royalty free library music used on Dallas and Knots Landing for the early part of the 1980-1981 television season. It was due to some strike in Hollywood in 1980 I believe.
ReplyDeleteGreat analysis, once again. I had to laugh out loud when Abby and Val were at their picnic and it was really Val who suggested, almost pushed, Abby to stay in Knots Landing as opposed to moving to San Diego. Little did Val know what she was doing... later in the episode, she was also the one to suggest that Abby should buy the neighbor's house. (Small correction to the above: Abby had not bought the house at this point, she merely rented it on a month-to-month basis, without a lease, while the house remained on the market -- it's actually another nice piece of realism, given that Abby didn't really know what she was going to do, so it made sense for her to just rent the place.) And finally, I didn't spot Helen Hunt in this (second) episode, either. She was the girl by the lockers in the first episode who told the other girl sensationally how "creepy" Sid Fairgate had taken her home once and how we was all acting weird.
ReplyDelete