Episode Title: Players
Season 02, Episode 12
Episode 025 of 344
Written by Susan Misty Stewart
Directed by Jeff Bleckner
Original Airdate: Thursday,
February 12th, 1981
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com):. Richard gets a job with Kippler, Janson, and Stern. He apologizes to
Laura for how he's been treating her, but secretly is upset that she earns more
than he does. Ginger finally tells Kenny that she's pregnant, but that they need to work out
their problems before he can move back in. Karen is upset that Linda is in love
with Sid, and is scared that they might be having an affair. Sid and Linda take
a test drive and the car breaks down on a deserted desert road. Linda tells Sid
she loves him. They kiss, but he says he can't have an affair with her. Sid
tells Karen he didn't have an affair with Linda, but jokes that if he had he
wouldn't tell her, because he hates to 'brag.' Karen is not amused.
Last week it was all about Abby
with A State of Mind, but this week
it’s all about her big brother Sid Fairgate, as his marital vows are once again
severely tested, stretched to their limits, perhaps. This may have a familiar ring to it, and the
reason is because we saw something rather similar back in season one with Civil Wives, when Sid’s ex-wife came to
town and started stirring up trouble.
However, just because we’ve seen similar territory covered before does
not mean it’s not worth exploring again; after all, it was Roger Ebert who said
“A movie [or, in this case, a show] is not about what it’s about; it’s about
how it’s about it.”
Last week we encountered an
episode I didn’t really remember at all, but with this episode, I remembered it
but I didn’t remember what the title was or where it fell in the course of the
season. In fact, I thought we were
getting this episode a few shows back
in Choices, when Linda invited Sid
out to some sort of auto event (a car race?).
But no, that wasn’t Choices;
it’s this episode, so let’s dive
right in and explore.
We open on Sid and Linda at
Knots Landing Motors, working, I think, on Sid’s engine. Have I mentioned Sid’s engine yet? I really should have because it’s been a
little plot thread weaving throughout most of the season, and we could see J.R.
taking an interest in it back in A Family Matter. In fact, I can’t completely
remember, but I think Sid’s sexy environmental engine might even be the impetus
for his evacuation from the series at the conclusion of season two/start of
season three. In any case, Sid’s been
working real hard on this engine so that he can get, like, a hundred miles to the
gallon or something; he wants to help the world and the environment by reducing
his carbon footprint (a phrase that probably hadn’t even been thought up when
this episode first aired). This is his
passion project but, as we see, it’s hard for Karen to muster up the same
enthusiasm for this engine that, say, Linda can. Because of this, we can see that Sid and
Linda are, in fact, forming a bit of a bond, a bond that reaches beyond an
employer and his employee. Certainly
they are starting to interact like good friends, but lovers? I guess we’ll have to watch to find out.
We see a little of Karen’s
jealousy right off the bat. This is
perfectly understandable, as she finds Linda and Sid together chatting it up
like two old buddies and drooling over Sid’s engine. However, much as she did in Civil Wives, Karen chooses to hide her
jealousy by being really nice and friendly, so she immediately invites Linda
over for dinner with the family that night.
I think she’s plotting just a smidge here, by the way. Make no mistake, it’s not an Abby Fairgate
Cunningham Ewing Sumner level of plotting, but she’s plotting, nonetheless,
plotting to have Linda over and say, “Look at my beautiful house and my
beautiful husband and my beautiful children,” to subtly (or not so subtly)
remind Linda that Sid is a married man with three children (or technically four children if we count Annie from Pilot, whom we sure haven’t heard from
in a long time). Since Abs is a sharp
cookie, she sees what’s going on and is happy to tease Karen about it. First she teases her by saying that Linda is
in love with Sid, then she starts to tease her for inviting her over to the
house, saying how she positively can’t believe
Karen would do a thing like that.
After seeing Karen dish it out to Abs in A State of Mind, it’s kinda fun to watch the tables being subtly
turned.
When we get to this Fairgate
family dinner, it’s a positively lovely affair, but I do take issue with one
aspect of it: The second completely made-up and invented character in the same
number of weeks. Seriously, what is
this? When Linda comes into the house,
she is immediately introduced to Paul Fairgate, who we are told is Sid and
Abby’s nephew. I immediately wrote in my
notes, “Who the hell is this guy?” The
answer is: Nobody. He was invented, just
like Laura’s little real estate friend from last week, simply to serve a small
plot purpose in this one episode.
According to TV.com, this character is never seen nor mentioned again,
and I can believe it, because I had no recollection of him at all. In any case, I’ll still be nice and take a
moment to note that Paul Fairgate, amazingly unforgettable character who is so
vital to all fourteen seasons of KL,
is played by Kale Browne and he is, get ready for this, yet another
Transmorpher. It appears that, prior to
this amazing Emmy winning performance on KL,
he appeared in two Dallas episodes. In Jock’s
Trial: Part Two, he is credited as “Reporter #2” and in A House Divided he is “KKGB Reporter.” Hmmm, could very well be the same character,
just credited differently, no? In any
case, aside from those two Dallas eps,
it looks like the guy is still working but he’s got no credits that I
immediately recognize, aside from a lot of guest spots on TV.
In any case, who cares? This character sucks. He is only in this episode and his only
function is to make the dinner party more uncomfortable for Linda, as Karen
basically shoves Paul Fairgate’s cock into Linda’s mouth and is like, “This is
Paul; you’ll love him!” Honestly,
Karen’s not at her most subtle this week, as this little attempt to keep Linda
away from her husband is painfully obvious to anyone in the vicinity. Obviously the plan doesn’t work, as Paul
Fairgate is super boring and has none of Sid’s charisma. Linda hangs out for awhile and makes polite
chit chat with him, but then she runs off awkwardly into the night.
The plot thickens the next day,
as Sid has to cancel a lunch date with Karen because he is too busy, just
booked solid down at Knots Landing Motors.
The only problem is that, despite being booked solid, he still manages
to find enough time to take Linda out to an arcade in the middle of the
afternoon for fun and shenanigans. I
can’t completely remember how all this comes about; I think an appointment of
Sid’s cancels or something, clearing up his time, but this is bad news, as he
should have called his wife and told her he had the time, now. Instead, Karen pops in unexpectedly for a
little coffee break, only to be told that Sid is out with Linda, doing whatever
it is he’s doing.
I wanna talk about a subtle
little detail that I loved in this scene.
When Karen goes to Knots Landing Motors to look for Sid, we see that
Gary and Abs are enjoying a coffee break together. Karen goes up to them and gets the necessary
information to keep the plot moving forward.
It is from Abs and Gary that she finds out that Sid is not around, that
he ran off with Linda. The reason I
point this out is because this episode is pretty strictly about Karen and
Sid’s relationship, but that doesn’t mean we can’t see things going on within
the confines of the episode that relate to the other characters. Abs and Gary are not going to consummate
their affair until well into the third season (I think well into the second
half of that season), but right here and now we are getting hints that their
relationship is heating up, all based on the way they are standing together and
enjoying their coffee when Karen enters. To a person who is just watching this one
particular ep and not really focusing on the over-arching storyline, you might
not even notice how cozy Abs and Gary look, but it’s there and it shows
foresight on the parts of the writers.
After all, Karen could have just walked in and talked to only one of
those characters and still received the same information, but by presenting it
in this way, we are able to deduce more than is spoken onscreen.
Now, even though this is a
Sid/Karen focused episode, that does not mean the other characters don’t get
moments to shine. Probably the most
significant other storyline in Players
is the miraculous character rehabilitation of Richard Avery. This I did not recall at all, in fact, but
after being dumped by Abby in last week’s show, it looks like Richard is ready
to get serious, to straighten up and fly right and be a better husband to
Laura. This is exemplified pretty much
right off the bat. Richard comes home
and announces he got a new job (remember he’s been out of work for a span of
eight episodes, starting back in Chance of a Lifetime) with some law firm, and then he sits down with Laura and
gives an actually rather lovely speech about what a bad husband he’s been. Now this
is classic Richard, and is the main reason why he’s very likely my favorite
male character in all fourteen years of the series. He is a truly complex and fully-fledged
character who can be equally vile or kind depending on the situation and his
own reactions to it. Watching with My
Beloved Grammy, I should note that she really dislikes the Richard character; she
thinks he’s just a plain old 100% jerk.
But it’s moments like these (and one coming up in the start of season
three, The Vigil, that I just adore)
that show him to be far richer than all that.
His apology to Laura feels very genuine, not at all like a guy who is
begging his wife for forgiveness after repeatedly cheating on her. This speech has more the tone of a person who
is truly remorseful and who truly means it when he says he wants to
change. Laura forgives him, keeping
nicely in line with her own speech from A State of Mind, and I do think we have a temporary bliss in their
relationship. The question, of course,
is how long can this bliss truly last for?
In my head, it’s all a big blur, but I’m almost positive I remember
Richard and Laura divorcing in either the third or fourth season of the show,
but I guess I’ll just have to keep watching to find out exactly what happens.
I guess to just write off their
current relationship as “temporary bliss” is not entirely accurate, as there
are already storm clouds on the horizon.
See, Richard is going to be making about $35,000.00 per year in his new
job, which is a start, but he’s not over the moon about it. Shortly afterwards, Laura closes a really big
deal on some sexy expensive house, and her commission for it comes to, you
guessed it, $36,000.00, more than Richard will be making in an entire year at
his new job. Should Laura tell him about
her fabulous success and risk a neurotic explosion? I’m not so sure, but she does tell him, even
buys him a nice, expensive briefcase.
She gives a little speech about how they will share success together;
her success will be his success and vice versa, and Richard smiles and nods,
but when she walks out of the room, we get a lingering shot of Richard staring
at his briefcase and looking rather troubled about it. After all, it is 1981 and he is the man and
we’ve seen that Richard can have old fashioned scruples; his wife making more
money in one day than he’s going to make in
an entire year is definitely eating at his self-confidence even as he holds the
beautiful briefcase.
Remember how weird it felt last
week to have J.V.A. sitting out an entire episode? Well, she’s back in this one and, even though
she doesn’t really get a major storyline, it’s still good to see her. I’m sure I would have rather seen her
interact with pretty much any other character besides Ginger, but beggars can’t
be choosers. Now, these two hardly take
up a lot of the episode’s time, as all we get is a quick little scene of Val and Ginger in a doctor’s office. I think this is put in here to set up next
week’s show, The Loudest Word, in
which Val spends the majority of the ep in
a hospital. In any case, I think she’s
having an appointment right now that will lead us nicely into our next show,
but I could be misreading this. The only
thing we really learn from this scene is that Ginger is, of course, still
pregnant and that she hasn’t told Kenny yet.
Okay, that’s helpful information, but I still don’t really care. I appreciate that the writers are giving
Kenny and Ginger something to do, but
they are absolutely still dead last on my list of KL characters, not just for this particular era of the series but
for all fourteen years. No matter what the writers give them, it
seems that the inherent blandness of James Houghton and Kim Lankford simply
prevents any storyline from being interesting.
Oh yeah, and then we reach a
rather splendid dovetailing of two separate storylines. I love when the writers can do this (and
I note with interest that this is the only episode written by Susan Misty Steward, although
she did write for plenty of episodes of the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series!). See, Karen is a little concerned that Sid may
have an affair, so it’s at this moment that Val chooses to announce that Gary
had an affair with Judy Trent. Okay, so
that affair is dead and gone since Choices
(two episodes ago, to be fair, so not that long), but it’s nice that it can
be mentioned here not just as a “Oh, this happened to me” thing, but as a way
to connect Val and Karen, to link their two storylines together; it both
reminds us of past events while also being pertinent to the current
situation. Another thing, this scene is
both dramatic and funny. I keep saying how seasons eight through
twelve are the most humorous years, and they are, sure, but I forgot how much
humor and wit is in these early episodes, as well. See, Val gives a tremendous speech about Gary’s infidelity and how it made her feel
and Bob Loblaw. Things are getting
nice and dramatic, heating up good, and then Karen puts a great button on the
scene by getting this really flat and emotionless expression on her face and
declaring, “Let’s go get a pizza.”
Genius, simply genius.
Through a series of events, Sid
winds up at Knots Landing Motors late at night and finds Linda there, as well,
burning the midnight oils. The two talk
a bit and then decide to try out the new miracle engine and take the car out
for a night drive. Things are going along
well, they are testing that engine out real good and nice, exceeding the speed
limit by a wide margin, when suddenly the car breaks down unexpectedly! So of course Sid and Linda are now stranded
out in the middle of nowhere at night in the cold. Before we go to our last commercial break, we
finally have Linda confessing her love to Sid.
Oh boy, is this scene uncomfortable.
Maybe it’s just something about that word “love” that frightens me, I
dunno, but I kinda expected Linda to say, “I’m attracted to you,” or “I want to
sleep with you,” or something like that, but what’s with this “love”
nonsense? Ick!
Now, let’s take a pause here to
explore whether or not we actually believe Sid will have an affair. I will go
ahead and say I do not. At no point do I
believe Sid will go through with sleeping with Linda; it’s just not in his
character. He is a man of decency, of
morals, of scruples. He always tries to
do the moral thing and he simply would never hurt Karen that way. That’s my belief, and it’s also my belief
that Sid is so wonderfully naïve in many ways that he was probably completely
oblivious to Linda’s feelings for him.
In fact, I’d even venture to say that Sid almost sees Linda as “One of
the guys.” The two of them can hang out
together and talk about engines and cars, stuff Karen has no interest in. I don’t think Sid has been doing anything
duplicitous all this time with Linda; I think he really is just very naïve and
honestly thought she was just his friend who happened to be a lady. When she confesses her, um, "love" to him, I think
he’s surprised; I honestly think that for him, this is coming completely out of
nowhere.
So, even though I say I never
believe Sid will cheat on Karen, that doesn’t mean I am not invested in
watching it. I don’t think this
situation is supposed to be suspenseful the way that a potential adulterous
romance might be handled on one of the other nighttime soaps; I think this is
more of a character study. This is just
setting up a situation for Sid and then exploring the way he deals with it. This is probably why I inherently love KL more than all of its contemporaries;
the writers wrote in a way that made sense for the characters; they didn’t
sacrifice character integrity for the sake of a little good, soapy drama.
Linda gives a long speech about
how she’ll be leaving in one week, going back to college or something. She and Sid can have sex tonight and then
she’ll disappear and never see him again and this will just be their secret to
take to the grave. At this point, a
truck emerges in the distance, a truck that represents CHOICES! I love how this is cut, by the way, because
that truck is getting closer, and Sid is gonna flag it down, but Linda wants
him to let it pass, and then the truck comes all the way up to the camera, and
its headlights fill the screen completely, and then we cut directly from the
lights to Karen sitting up in bed. We
don’t get to see what happened, but
we cut in a way that is very dynamic and very stimulating.
This leads to our final scene of
the ep, which is Sid coming home to an irate Karen. He slips into the bathroom for a shower,
which of course bothers Karen, who asks why he needs to take a shower right
now. Sid is calm and explains that he’s
been out in the desert, he’s sweaty, he’s tired, he needs a shower. Karen asks him if he slept with Linda and he
tells her no. I love classic calm Sid,
able to deal with these questions with skill.
He’s so wonderfully relaxed as he explains to Karen exactly what
happened and that no adultery took place.
At the same time, there’s an ominous tone to this episode ending,
because Karen asks if he would tell
her had he in fact gone through with it, and Sid smiles and says “No.” Then we actually go out on the image of
Karen’s troubled face, which is rather strange and unsettling, honestly.
Okay, so I keep mentioning this
and whenever I mention it I warn about spoilers, but it bears repeating: THERE
WILL BE SPOILERS RIGHT HERE! Anyway, we
only have eight more episodes with Saint Sid.
He will be making his final appearance on the series in episode two of
season three. Knowing that he’s not long
for the series, it’s making me really want to soak up as much of him as I can;
I find myself focusing heavily on every scene he’s in, because I know our time
is short. At the same time, I find
myself wondering about a different world where he didn’t leave the show or
perhaps doesn’t leave until much later in the run. Was this ending actually trying to plant some
seeds that had no time to grow since Don Murray left the show? Like I said, this is an ominous ending;
there’s something almost creepy in the tone of the ending, like perhaps the
writers were planning to give an
affair to Sid, but not just yet. I
wonder if they were planning something for further into the future and if that
something got derailed when Don Murray decided to quit. Perhaps I’ll never know…END OF SPOILERS HERE
As we get deeper into the
series, I am going to start taking issue with so many storylines being focused
on Karen’s husband maybe having an affair.
See, and here come some more future storyline spoilers, but Karen does
eventually get remarried to the lovely Mack MacKenzie, played beautifully by
Kevin Dobson, and the two stay married for the majority of the series (about
ten years, I do believe). Now, it seems
like the writers can’t get enough of testing Mack’s faithfulness to Karen; I remember thinking that it seemed
like every season they’d bust out some new hoe to tempt Mack into bed. By the third or fourth time that storyline
came up with him, I was starting to lose my patience. The reason I mention that is because it’s
being done here not even for the first time, but the second. We’ve already had Civil Wives, and now this episode, and then I think we really do
get four “Will Mack cheat on Karen?”
storylines in the upcoming middle-to-later seasons of the series. While it starts to feel old for me during
that juncture of the series, it is still fresh here, at least for me. I only mention this because it seems the
writers must have really liked this moral quandary, as they kept returning to
it time and time again.
So what of Players? Good episode? Bad episode?
Middle of the road? I’m gonna go
ahead and declare this a good one, though not a great one. This is no Let Me Count the Ways or Chance of a Lifetime or Breach of Faith or
Choices, but it’s definitely a solid hour
of entertainment and, of course, easily usurps those bottom dwellers like Land of the Free or Kristin. I enjoy watching a
simple story of a man’s marriage being tempted and seeing how he reacts to it,
and as usual the acting is stellar from pretty much all involved. In addition, I appreciated that this episode
kept other storylines moving, or at least reminded us of their existence, even
while focusing rather heavily on Sid.
Next week we get not only a
heavily Val-centric episode but also our sixth crossover from parent series Dallas, with A Very Special Appearance
by Patrick Duffy as Bobby Ewing. Stay
tuned for my write-up on The Loudest Word,
coming at you soon.
It is hard to believe that Saint Sid was only in 33 episodes. His impact in that short time was felt throughout the series much more than...Kenny (61 episodes) or Ginger (64). I often wondered if the series would have been different if Don Murray had stayed. Can you imagine how his opinion of Abby might have changed over the years with all of her scheming?
ReplyDeleteFun fact: Kale Browne is the ex-husband of Karen Allen, who played Annie Fairgate. So, Sid's nephew was married to his daughter in real life.
ReplyDelete"He is only in this episode and his only function is to make the dinner party more uncomfortable for Linda, as Karen basically shoves Paul Fairgate’s cock into Linda’s mouth and is like, “This is Paul; you’ll love him!”
ReplyDeleteLOL!
I don't like that we are getting supporting characters with the same names as other characters who will have bigger impacts later on. I can't explain why it annoys me, but it does. When they bring in a "Linda" later, maybe no one was still left around who was working when this show was written to say, "oh no, we've already used that name." I guess it's a testament to how long the show ran, but this is the third name of a character that is assigned to another character later in the series. It will annoy me forever.
I thought this was a good episode! Even though I was disappointed by the totally made-up and never-to-be-seen again nephew "Paul Fairgate". I guess another person who will not show up at SPOILER Sid's funeral -- like his first wife, his daughter from that marriage and any remaining sibling(s) other than Abby... It's odd that they never used these characters again, even in passing.
ReplyDeleteOne small correction: Val and Ginger are not the doctor's office but at Val's house (she's been baking) when they are having the little conversation about Kenny. So no real foreshadowing here...