Episode Title: Moments of Truth
Season 02, Episode 14
Episode 027 of 344
Written by Rob Gilmer
Directed by Jeff Bleckner
Original Airdate: Thursday,
February 26th, 1981
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com):. The men take Kenny out to celebrate and the women give Ginger a baby
shower at Val's house. Three criminals break into the house to rob the women.
Diana, in the kitchen, escapes and calls police. The robbers then take the women hostage. A swat team is called.
Tempers flare among the men, who are feeling helpless. After eight hours, the SWAT
team apprehends the robbers and everybody is okay.
Oh bleh, I knew I’d have to sit
through this episode again at some point; I just couldn’t remember exactly what
episode it was or where it would pop up in the second season. What a shame, too, as the second season has
really been pumping along, giving us some great stuff. No, I maintain it’s not as great as the great stuff we’re gonna see in, say, seasons four
through twelve, but there have been a lot of excellent episodes so far and only
a few stinkers (Kristin, for
one). Well, everything pretty much comes
to a grinding halt with Moments of Truth,
an episode that exemplifies all the worst aspects of early KL episodes, all rolled up into a ball and somehow packed into the
course of this one particular episode.
As I’ve noted quite a bit
throughout the season, I’ve been surprised at how many ongoing storylines
really do last over the course of several episodes. I remembered Richard and Abby’s affair, for
instance, but I did not remember how early Gary’s saga with the mobsters began,
or the way his affair with Judy Trent evolved and then devolved. My memory of season two was that every
episode was, well, like this. Moments
of Truth is about as standalone as it gets with KL; I don’t think there’s one single thing on display here that
continues into another episode or is even ever mentioned again, and quite
honestly, you could just plain skip this one and miss nothing, probably the
first episode I’ve said that about since Land of the Free back in season one. However,
I am a completist, I do not skip, and in fact in the long future when I decide
to watch KL from start to finish
again, you can bet I will be sitting through both Land of the Free and Moments
of Truth again.
We open up on Ginger’s baby
shower. All the Seaview Circle ladies
are present, including Val, Laura, Abby, Karen, and even Diana, who is going to
have to heroically save the day later (well, not really). Everything looks peaceful and everyone is
having a good time, drinking it up and enjoying some cake or whatever. I’m firmly reminded that it’s 1981 as Ginger
casually drinks wine while pregnant, as well.
Anyway, we keep cutting away back from the women to the men: Gary,
Richard, Sid, and Kenny, who are enjoying some beers (all aside from Gary, of
course) down at a local bar. It is
interesting to note that Richard is hitting on every woman in the vicinity, but
in a very corny, not-truly-devoted way.
What do you make out of this? Is
Richard already tired of being a faithful husband and he’s ready for another
adulterous romance? Or is he just
casually flirting because he’s been drinking a bit and the girls are pretty and
it’s fun to flirt?
As we’re going to see throughout
the course of these fourteen seasons, Seaview Circle is a rather dangerous
cul-de-sac to live on. This is our 27th
episode and yet we’ve already had a violent biker invasion, and now it’s time for some evil
burglars. See, just as Ginger’s party is
in full swing, they are taken over by three burglars dressed in ski-masks, the
typical burglar gear ("So he says, 'Do you love me?' And she says, 'No, but that's a real nice ski mask!'"). The logic of these
three burglars is debatable, however.
After all, the entire
cul-de-sac appears to have all gathered at Gary and Val’s house, leaving all
the rest of the houses empty, right? I
guess the burglars couldn’t completely know this was going on, but I can’t
figure out why they didn’t just hit all the other houses while the residents
were occupied. Instead, they attack the one house that everyone is gathered in,
which obviously allows for someone to slip by.
That someone is Diana, by the way, who slips out a back window and
escapes to safety. I think she’s on her
way to call the cops when the cops just show up unexpectedly, as well,
frightening the burglars and causing them to haul up and camp out in the Ewing
house.
One of the things I love about
the experience of KL is watching the
times grow and change all around our characters. I think it’s interesting to note that, in the
early years, we are often still given episodes that feel straight out of the
‘70s in tone and style, episodes just like this one. The whole obsession with home attack and
particularly women being attacked by strangers feels very ‘70s to me, and
watching the ladies be terrorized even made me think of ‘70s exploitation like Death Wish. My point is that this would not seem unusual
for a TV drama in 1981, but as we get a few seasons deeper, this style is going
to completely disappear and become just a memory and we’re going to see the
entire ‘80s come and go as we watch, even dipping into the early ‘90s before
the show ends. Of course it goes without
saying that an episode with this style would just not fly during those early
‘90s years of the series.
Okay, so we got three burglars,
right? There are two guys and one
girl. Now, the two guys are played by
Glenn Withrow and Gary Graham, while the lady is played by Rita Taggart. I really only note this because the entire
episode I was like, “I recognize that lady,” but when I took the time to look
it up, there’s nothing I would know her from.
Okay, she is credited for David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive but for the life of me I have no idea who she
played, and she’s also credited as “Reporter” in the Steven Spielberg
masterpiece 1941 (that was
sarcasm). In any case, she is certainly
the most striking of the burglars, and not just because she’s a woman. There’s something really withered and haggard
and sad about her face, like she’s been through a lot and she just has no
patience for the world anymore; she is a beaten down woman who is now stuck in
this life of crime, and we don’t know how she got there, but we can see it’s
probably been a long and hard road.
So what do these burglars want,
anyway? Just money and expensive items,
mostly. They make the women get down on
the ground and start to steal their rings and their jewelry and all that. Karen is wily and manages to hide her ring in
her mouth before the burglars get to it.
This is kinda touching, actually, that even in the height of this chaos,
she won’t part with her ring because of what it represents to her. I will take a moment to note that I just
plain didn’t like….this. I didn’t like
seeing the women be terrorized in the early stages of this episode, and seeing
them bent down on the ground, having their home invaded, crying, all of that gave
me an icky feeling. I can’t entirely
explain why; it’s not like we get a graphically violent rape scene or anything
like that, but there’s just something about watching the women be victimized
that I simply did not enjoy. These are my
girls and I think of them as tough and smart, not girls to be victimized. Make no mistake, later in the episode the
women do manage to get the upper hand on their attackers, so I guess you could
view this through a feminist theory lens, but the early portions still make me
feel icky and uncomfortable.
Interestingly, we do get quite a
bit of backstory on these burglars. For
instance, we find out that the lady (Rose) was married to one of the men (I
think the one played by Glenn Withrow) but that they are now divorced. There’s a sense of tension in the
relationship also mixed in with a certain amount of marital understanding; that
perhaps even if these two aren’t married anymore, they still kinda like
eachother in some strange way.
The dullest portions of this
episode all involve the men, so I’m just gonna breeze by that part of the
plot. Basically, they get back to
Seaview Circle and realize what’s going on.
The cops come, then a SWAT team, Bob Loblaw, and all the men are
really upset and nervous about it.
Basically anything involving the SWAT team and the men speaking to each
other is the perfect opportunity to go take a nice, long pee. This stuff is dull. Why is it so
dull? I’m trying to figure out if it’s
because I have seen this episode before and obviously know everything’s gonna
turn out okay or if it’s just that the episode is lame. I’m going with option #2, as I remember not
caring for this ep even the first time I watched it. It doesn’t grip and so all this “suspense”
with the cops just falls flat.
It was only upon watching this
with My Beloved Grammy and taking notes that I realized there is one potential threat in this ep,
although the writers do nothing with it.
My Beloved Grammy kept repeating how she was convinced that Ginger was going to
lose her baby. Now, I never really
thought about that, but she’s right, I could see that being a distinct
possibility. Don’t forget that we just
recently finished watching all fourteen seasons of Dallas and that show killed off unborn fetuses left and right; they
couldn’t get enough of it. So far, we
haven’t had a lot of fetus-killing on KL (aside
from Ginger’s backstory in The Constant Companion and Karen’s miscarriage in Small Surprises), but I can see why one would assume that’s what’s gonna happen
to Ginger. After all, most nighttime soaps loved getting a
character pregnant for the sake of the drama and then killing the baby before
it could be born just so they didn’t have to deal with any pesky baby
storylines. Even so, I’m not in any
suspense over Ginger and her stupid baby as I watch this episode; if I’m supposed to be, well, the writers failed
in this instance.
Since I found this episode so
terrifically dull, I found myself drifting into different types of feminist or
classist theory while watching it, pulling out some of that old (and useless)
criticism I learned back in college. I
think there are themes in this episode that could be explored, but please note
that I’m only exploring them because there’s nothing more interesting to talk
about. Really, I think I’m kinda forcing
these little theories just because the actual onscreen action is so boring and
lifeless. But here we go with some
CLASSIST theory.
The Texas Ewings over on parent
series Dallas really have it made,
right? They live on a big fat ranch with
tons and tons of land on all sides of them, they have a maid and a butler to
cook for them and pamper them and serve them and clean for them, they get to go
to work in a big office building where they are allowed to drink all the
livelong day with no consequences, and of course they have their own private
jets and helicopters to use at their convenience. In conclusion, they are a very, very rich family, living in the lap of luxury
and getting just about whatever they want.
Hell, just look at our last Brief Dallas
Interlude (End of the Road: Part Two)
in which they gave Lucy her beautiful, lavish wedding. Do you think that big wedding was even a bit of an expense for the Ewings? Hardly.
I imagine Jock Ewing was able to fund the whole thing with the money
he found under their couch cushions.
By contrast, the gang over at
the cul-de-sac on KL, particularly in
these first three or four seasons, feel much more grounded, much more
realistic, much more relatable, and finally much less rich. Watching the series, a lot of scenes feel
like things I saw or did when I was a kid, and I certainly don’t look at these
characters as rich people. However, just
because they are not doing nearly as well as the Texas Ewings does not mean they are scraping for cash, you
know? All four of the couples still live
in nice houses on a nice street and have enough money to support their
families. They may be middle class, and
J.R. may sneer and make fun of them when he comes to visit, but they are
definitely upper middle class and are
doing much better than a lot of people, such as these burglars.
The reason I bring this up is
because Rose (the lady burglar, you’ll remember) gives a terrifically angry
speech to Karen about how she (Karen) is a have while Rose and her buddies are
have-nots. She says how all the women
are living the “Great American dream,” that they are pampered and spoiled. It’s a notable little moment and reminds us
that there are plenty of people in the world who have it bad and who would be
happy to steal from those who are more fortunate. It also gave me flashbacks to Conchetta Ferrell in the two-part Hitchhike eps, attacking Karen for having more money and opportunity than she.
As for feminist theory, well,
the women do eventually manage to
kick some ass and get the best of their attackers, which feels sorta
inspirational in an I Spit on Your Grave kinda
way. Abby uses her sexuality to distract
one of them (the really dumb guy) and eventually manages to get him to submit
through use of a fire extinguisher. We
also get one classic exchange between Laura and Abs that reveals how different
two women can be. Abs is trying to get
things done by acting sexy and distracting the bad guys, while Laura prefers to
just keep calm and wait for some help.
The classic exchange comes when the two women are in the kitchen
together and Laura says, with the disgust really creeping into her voice, “God,
you are such a slut,” to which Abby replies, “Well, it takes one to know
one,” and then of course Laura slaps her, which is fabulous. Okay, I love this scene (so there
you go! I like one thing about this episode!) and the dialogue, but at the same
time Abby’s comeback is a little, um, weak.
After all, has Laura really done anything slutty? The last time we saw her behave in a
promiscuous way was way back in The Lie,
and that was over a year ago at this point, before Abs was even on the
show. So I’m not totally sure Abby’s
little insult actually makes any sense, but it’s still a cute little scene and
it helps to demonstrate that, even though Abs and Richard have terminated their
affair, Laura and Abs are never gonna get along too terribly well because of
what has transpired.
There’s nothing much more to say
about my feminist theory except that the women do eventually take charge, giving it a motivational, perhaps even
inspirational bent. I love stories where
women toughen up and kick some ass (most of James Cameron’s movies would
apply), but this one doesn’t really get me fist pumping because, again, I don’t
care. Also, any patience I had for this
ep is completely depleted by the time we reach our final scene, where the bad
guys are hauled away and all the women come running out to embrace their
husbands. It’s a very corny little
wrap-up scene that puts a button on all the proceedings. Jerrold’s classic theme starts to play over
footage of all the couples, together again, everybody happy, wrapping up the
storyline for this week. Barf.
In television lingo, this episode would definitely be called “a
filler.” I think it’s very interesting
to note that, as we get deeper into the ‘80s, the seasonal episode count of KL is gonna grow. For instance, season one was a mid season
show and only had thirteen episodes, while season two only has eighteen
episodes. Our next season will leap up
to twenty-two, and by seasons six, seven, and eight, there will be a whopping thirty eps per season. The reason I note that is because those
seasons are huge and have a lot of episodes, but I don’t remember them having
much in the way of filler; it really feels like every episode is growing the
ongoing story and keeping things moving.
So it’s funny that this season, which is one of the shortest of the
entire series (it remains the second shortest after season one, followed years
later by season fourteen, which has nineteen episodes) seems packed with so
much more filler. It helps to show that,
even though I become something of a drooling sycophant as far as KL is concerned, we are still very early in the show’s run and the writers are still
honing the style and sharpening their writing skills, getting ready for those
glorious peak seasons that are on the horizon.
However, for the purposes of
this one single episode, I have to say this is one of the worst. In fact, I’m gonna make a shocking statement
and declare that this may very possibly be worse
than Land of the Free. I think that episode is often cited as the
worst of the series run, and I think I might have even declared that a time or
two, but at least that one was goofy enough to keep me entertained. It was incredibly stupid, of course, but I
was never bored by it, whereas I was bored through most of Moments of Truth. So which
is the worse one? Personally, I’m gonna
declare this one as one of the worst,
maybe even the worst, because it
doesn’t even have that camp appeal that made watching Land of the Free relatively painless. It is a boring and useless filler episode
that can be skipped, no problem.
My sphincter is tightening as I
prepare for our next episode, which may also
wind up ranking as one of the worst of the series. Next week, we’ll be visiting with Karen’s
oldest boy, Eric Fairgate, along with SPECIAL GUEST STAR Eric Stoltz,
apparently playing the same character he would go on to play in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Next week we’ll be discussing the 28th
episode of the series, Man of the Hour.
I actually like this episode. The men show such vulnerability and are scared. And then when everyone goes home with their spouse we end with Abby looking wistful and sad.
ReplyDeleteI didn't mind it either. I thought "Land of the Free" was worse, because it was such a cliche (stereotypical bikers, tipping over garbage cans, circling victims for no particular reason, the "wonka-wonka" music). But overall, Brett is correct that this isn't a highlight of the series and can definitely be skipped.
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame that this episode is so basic. The other home invasion/hostage situation episode in Season 13 is also absolutely diabolical, although for entirely different reasons. One of the best things about 'Knots Landing' is that slow-burn pay off that runs throughout the entire series. So when it's all condensed into a short 45 minutes it just doesn't work and, more importantly, doesn't feel like the show we love. Kudos to you for providing some interesting commentary on it though. It'll be interesting to see what you make of 'The Three Sisters' when the time comes.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, "The Three Sisters". I believe that is my least favorite Knots episode. It turned Val from eccentric to crazy in 45 minutes.
ReplyDeleteVal went nuts several times through. Maybe that was the catalyst for it all.
ReplyDeleteWell, you may not skip, but I skip. I skipped this episode because as a kid I remember hating it. CBS was just probably looking for something to promote in commercials. Anyway, I did not skip your recap.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't seen this episode the first time around when I watched the show as a kid and it also struck me as predicable and corny. As a viewer in 1981 I would have hoped that the home invaders take out Kenny and Ginger in a dramatic mid-season cast reshuffle, but no. I had some hope that Kenny would be gunned down when trying to run to Val's house, screaming "Giiiiiiiiiingerrrrrrrr" - this was such a supercamp moment! Also, what was up with the reporter trying to interview the men in Richard's and Laura's house, saying that his was his first amendment right? Ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteBut there were also some good parts, including the scene in Val's kitchen, when Laura slaps Abby. I agree it's weird given that we haven't seen any inappropriate behaviour from Laura onscreen recently. But maybe her sleeping with strangers (like in season one) still continues from time and we just haven't been shown? And Abby knows?
In any case, at my home invasion I'd rather have Abby fake-fraternizing with the enemy in order to get a gun rather than Karen trying to give a lecture...