Episode Title: Mistaken Motives
Season 03, Episode 08
Episode 039 of 344
Written by Rocci Chatfield and
Ray Goldstone
Directed by Jeff Bleckner
Original Airdate: Thursday,
January 7th, 1982
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Ginger and Kenny
argue over whether they should let Erin Molly cry or pick her up. Karen goes to a
grief group, and makes friends with Bill Medford, whose wife committed suicide.
Bill tries to kiss Karen, but she says she isn't ready.
Diana misinterprets their friendship and is enraged that Karen is dating. Out
of spite, Diana goes to a party with Roy, a biker who Karen hates. He drinks as
he's taking Diana home. When a police car tries to pull them over, Roy tries to
outrun them, and he and Diana are arrested. Later Karen and Diana have a
terrible argument, but then begin to talk and make up.
I know I keep saying this, so
forgive me, but Mistaken Motives is
yet another episode of KL that I had
pretty much forgotten all about, aside from maybe one or two details hidden away
in there somewhere. Watching it,
memories came flooding back, and I actually found this to be a pleasant
surprise and one of the more enjoyable episodes we’ve seen of the third season
thus far.
We begin Mistaken Motives with maybe the worst A.D.R. in KL history, and that’s really saying
something considering how much bad A.D.R. we hear on this show. In this case, it’s Diana and her new
boyfriend Roy riding around on his motorcycle.
Now, we don’t even really get a closeup of either character to establish
who we’re looking at, but rather the motorcycle is filmed from a great
distance, far away so you can’t make out the riders, and the dialogue is looped
in. We hear Diana saying like, “Oh gee,
I sure hope my mom isn’t mad that I missed my curfew!” Then Roy is like, “Your mom’s a square, man,
let’s go smoke some grass!” There is
more dialogue, but I can’t remember it.
What’s interesting about this first sequence, aside from the bad A.D.R.,
of course, is that really this is not going to be our main focus storyline this
week, even though it leads us into the episode.
Really, the saga of Roy and Diana is secondary to the main story, which
is Karen finally going to a grief counseling session like she probably should
have done way before this.
Or should she? My Beloved Grammy often helps to provide
context to these shows as we watch, and during Aftermath she said how in 1981 there just wasn’t the same type of
support and grief counseling available for people who had lost a loved
one. Well, now it’s 1982, dammit (well,
barely), so in Mistaken Motives,
Karen does indeed go to a grief session, but I can believe these wouldn’t have
been too easy to come by way back when, that perhaps she had to do a bit of
digging before finding a place she could comfortably go.
Basically, Karen winds up at a
grief session early in the episode, prompting the only scene of the whole
episode I didn’t like. Now, did I not
like it because of what happens in it or did I not like it because I didn’t
understand it? I’m not entirely sure, so
I’ll settle on a little bit of both.
Whatever was intended to be displayed by this scene just does not work
for me, and My Beloved Grammy also took a dislike to this sequence, as well. Follow along here.
One of the first ladies to speak
at this grief session is some old lady whose husband has been dead for two
months or so. She talks about how she
finally gathered up the courage to go and collect his ashes, how she didn’t
want him cremated, how he insisted on it, what the crematorium looks like, the
little paper sack they put his ashes in, the look of the ashes, and so on. Now, I for one felt pretty bad for this old
woman; you can tell she was probably with her husband for a long time and it’s
probably very hard for her to accept life on her own and it takes a lot of
courage for her to speak aloud about the cremation and how all that stuff looks
and feels.
The whole scene, they keep
cutting back and forth from the old lady to Karen, and Karen is looking mighty
uncomfortable, kinda fidgeting in her seat, covering her face up, looking
generally distressed. Of course, I’m
watching this and thinking that she’s upset by the old lady’s story,
right? It’s making her think of her own
loss, of losing Sid, and it’s making her sad.
She kinda gets up and excuses herself from the meeting, disappearing out
into the hall. Her romantic interest for
the week follows after her to make sure she’s okay, and he finds Karen laughing. See, she’s sitting on some stairs and at
first we think she’s crying, but then when she reveals her face we realize
she’s laughing, and she chokes out some dialogue that’s hard to understand
about how the old lady kept repeating her husband’s name, Burt, over and over
again, and something about that, I guess, made Karen have to laugh.
Okay, what is this? If anyone knows for sure, please write in and
explain it to me, because I love my Karen, Karen is my favorite KL character and I just don’t believe
she would laugh at an old woman’s grief.
So why is she laughing? I wondered
if maybe she was experiencing that hysterical laughter people sometimes get
when they’re in intensely emotional situations, like at a funeral. This is what I want to believe, that Karen is
just overwhelmed with emotions and ends up having a bit of a hysterical
laughing fit, needing to leave the vicinity of the meeting to get herself
together. However, the scene is shot and
played so confusingly that I almost feel like Karen is making fun of the old
woman, and that I can’t get behind. Even
if the old woman maybe seems a little silly (I didn’t think so, but whatever),
you should show proper respect for her feelings and her grief, which are a very
real thing. In any case, I didn’t like
this scene and neither did My Beloved Grammy, and I wish they could have found
a different, less uncomfortable and confusing way to introduce Karen’s romantic
interest for the week, Bill Medford.
Boy, that Bill Medford sure
looks familiar, don’t he? I wonder
why. Hmmm, maybe because he’s quite
possibly our biggest Transmorpher ever!
Bill Medford is played by David Ackroyd, remember him? He played Gary 1, Fake Gary! You remember the very first time we ever met
Gary and Val, back in our first two Brief Dallas
Interludes? Well, in those two
episodes (Reunion: Part One and Reunion: Part Two) Gary was played by this guy. I guess when they were ready to launch KL off into its own series, Ackroyd was
like, “I’m too busy for this shit,” or something like that (I have absolutely
no evidence to back this up), so now
here he is in a one-episode guest spot as a completely different
character. The reason I declare him
the biggest Transmorpher ever is because usually our Transmorphers are like, “Oh,
this guy plays a doctor in one episode of KL
and then he’s also some random oil dude in one or two episodes of Dallas,” or something similar. In this case, we have the man who, for two
hours of television, first brought Gary Ewing to life, and Gary is one of our
main, most important characters in all fourteen years of KL. So, unless anyone can
think of another Transmorpher who’s even more noticeable, I’m officially
declaring David Ackroyd The Biggest Transmorpher Ever.
There’s something very intense
about this actor, I have to say. I noted
that in the two Dallas eps, and I
briefly imagined a world where David Ackroyd continued to play Gary on KL and how that might have changed the
series, for good or ill. But even here,
playing a man whose wife committed suicide (yikes!), the guy’s just kinda
charismatic and hard to take your eyes off of.
There’s a real sadness to him, just the look in his eyes, and I can
believe this is a man going through a dark time in his life. Even as he does this, he’s pretty nice and
decent to Karen the whole episode, and even though this is another one of those
relationships that’s somewhat contrived for the purposes of one episode and
then quickly disposed of, there are some important character moments in this
episode all brought on by Bill Medford.
But wait, this episode isn’t all about Karen. Nope, we’ve gotta make time for my three
favorite characters: Kenny, Ginger, and Erin Molly, that little bundle of
joy. My God, these characters are so interesting; I’m totally not
kidding. The thrilling storyline of the
Wards this week involves Erin Molly crying.
See, she’s crying all the time, night and day, and Kenny and Ginger are
arguing about how to handle it. When
Erin Molly cries in the middle of the night, should they get up and go make
sure she’s okay and soothe her? Or,
should they just let her keep crying and get over whatever the hell is
bothering her? This storyline is so
dramatic that they seek the aid of a doctor to help them deal with Erin Molly
and he advises them to….oh, wait, who cares?
Seriously, who cares? Why are these two even still on the
show? Why were they ever on the show?! I almost
feel sorry for Houghton and Lankford because the material they get to work with
is so unbelievably boring, but then I also wonder if the writers are simply
writing for the people they can depend on to give a good performance (Michele Lee) and are leaving Kenny and Ginger a bit out in the cold because they are
simply not good actors. It’s been a few
weeks since the writers even bothered giving them anything to do, so I guess
they felt they had to write something for
them this week, and I guess we just have to watch it.
Everyone says babies kill TV
shows. This is obviously not true in the
case of KL because we are gonna see
lots of pregnancies and babies as we work our way through, and the series keeps
powering along just fine (Val’s babies, omigod, Val’s babies, I can’t wait to get
there), but Erin Molly is the perfect example of a baby serving as an absolute
dead end for plot. So Ginger got
pregnant while she was separated from Kenny and Bob Loblaw, I suppose you
could call that “drama.” Well, now that
she’s had the baby the two characters are just kinda hanging out; they’re not
really doing anything interesting, there’s nothing interesting about this baby,
and the two characters feel so isolated from all the other interesting
characters on the cul-de-sac; do you ever notice that?
Anyway, this story is a complete
joke, so lemme just go ahead and tell you how it resolves. Near the end of the episode, after Kenny and
Ginger have had a lot of arguments about what to do with Erin Molly, after
they’ve visited the doctor, after every viewer in America has slipped into a
coma thanks to the mere onscreen presence of these two, Lilimae pays them a
visit one night and does something or other that finally soothes Erin Molly to
sleep. She leaves and at first Kenny and
Ginger are both like, “Boy, what a weird lady,” but then they realize their
house is filled with silence and they’re like, “Wow.” That concludes the thrilling tale of Kenny
and Ginger, at least for this week. Believe it or not, but later on this season
James Houghton is gonna write some episodes and, if I recall correctly, those
episodes actually make an alright attempt to give Kenny and Ginger something to do, so let’s all stay tuned
to see how those play out.
For me, the best scenes of this
episode are the ones between Karen and Bill.
I might make fun of the fact that Ackroyd is such a huge and obvious
Transmorpher, but I think he’s a good guest star to work alongside Michele, so
in the end I’m glad he’s here (although there is a scene where him and Ted Shackelford are in the same room together and I vaguely wonder why the universe
doesn’t implode). Probably one of my
favorite scenes from the episode is Karen and Bill sitting in front of the
fireplace, just talking. I believe this
is the scene where Bill confesses that his wife didn’t just die; she killed
herself with pills. This is also where
we get the title of the episode, because the two share a hug which is witnessed
by mega bitch Diana. She sees two people
who have lost spouses and are seeking understanding with eachother, but she
interprets it as her mom going after some guy, playing the dating game just
months after Sid’s death.
I make fun of Diana a lot for
being a bitch and a brat and just generally abrasive, but in this particular
episode, her hostility is actually somewhat understandable. She is going through grief of her own, so her
misinterpretation of her mother’s actions (her mistaken view of her motives omigod!)
is a little easier to relate with. In
her eyes, Bill is not a man who has lost a spouse; he is just some new guy
infiltrating her mom’s life, tarnishing the legacy of her own father. There are episodes before this one and after
this one in which Diana is just unbearable and I wouldn’t cut her a break, but
this week I’m letting it slide.
The hug is clearly not a
romantic thing, but later the possibility of romance looms. Bill wants to push their relationship into a
more physical direction because he is a man.
Perhaps you readers at home think I’m oversimplifying things, but I
disagree. Us men (especially us gay men,
but I digress) like to have sex and it makes us feel good. I don’t know that Bill wanting to have sex
with Karen means he wants “a relationship” with her; I think he’s just a man
and he needs to get laid or he’s gonna go crazy. But Karen has only had those two men in her
life (Teddy and Sid, you’ll recall), so it’s a much bigger deal for her, and
she has to decline. Bill almost gets rapey here, but not
quite. In a sort of sad tone of voice,
he’s like, “I suppose even if I forced myself upon you, you would accept it
just because you feel sorry for me,” and Karen tells him no, that is not
so. For the time being, she is simply
not ready to have another man, as she is still grieving for Sid. Like a gentleman, Bill departs from her life.
Oh yeah, I was just about
getting ready to wrap up this episode when I realized I had completely
forgotten about the completely forgettable little B-storyline going on here
involving Diana and Roy. I forgot to
mention that Roy, despite being a complete cliché and a non-character who we
will never be seeing again is actually played by a sorta real person, Michael Bowen, who has popped up in a few Tarantino movies including my very favorite, Jackie Brown. Believe it or not, but this is actually his
very first acting credit ever, followed by an episode of CHiPS and then an
episode of the other Lorimar/CBS nighttime soap, Falcon Crest. So there you
go, even if you start off your career by playing a total non-character, you can
always go on to have an illustrious career working for a great director.
This storyline is just sorta
blah, although it does have some high camp value. See, Roy takes Diana out for a joyride in
which he’s got the steering wheel in one hand and a can of beer (seriously,
it’s just labeled “Beer”) in the other hand, when wouldn’t you know it, a cop
shows up behind them and starts flashing his cherries. Oh shit, and just before the cop pulls them
over, Roy hands his “Beer” over to Diana and is like, “Let’s have a high speed
car chase!” Obviously things go about as
we expect them to and Diana, along with Roy, winds up in prison.
I gotta take a moment to shout
out some appreciation for this very over-the-top prison scene. It’s not quite up there with Sue Ellen being
put into the drunk tank with the inexplicably screaming woman during the dream
season of Dallas, but it’s still good
camp and is worth a chuckle, as basically all these SUPER SLEAZY AND NASTY AND
SUPER EVIL OMIGOD whores are looking at Diana while she’s all curled up on the
ground and are like, “What are you in for, honey?” Then Diana epicly jumps up and clutches the
bars of the jail cell and looks outward, as if her very life is over. It’s a short scene, but I certainly laughed
and made sure to note it. In any case,
Diana isn’t imprisoned for long, and Karen comes to pick her up pretty fast.
But that’s not quite the ending of the episode. Bill may be outta the picture and Diana may
have gotten bailed from prison, but we’ve still gotta wrap up the tension
between Diana and Karen. This scene is
mostly good, serving as a bit of a catharsis, at least for the week. This is good stuff because both characters
get to explain their positions, their opinions.
After Diana says that she thought Bill was taking the place of her
father, Karen assures her that she is mistaken, that for the time being she is
still far too in love with Sid to even look at another man. The conflict for this particular week is
resolved with a rather dreadful final line that I wish could have been excised
where Karen says, “Now let’s go get some ice cream!” Yeah, it’s bad, and it brings everything good
about this scene to a grinding halt.
Since it’s the last line of the episode before we go to credits, it’s
double unfortunate as it leaves a bit of a sour taste in the mouth.
We know KL isn’t afraid to end
their episodes a bit cryptically (witness our last ep, Secrets, with that fabulous final shot of Richard and Laura sitting
across the table, not speaking at all to each other), so I don’t know why this
ep had to end with such a tidy little bow wrapped around it. In this case, with absolutely no research or
anything to back me up, I’m just gonna blame network suits. I’m gonna just say that some suit was on the
set and was like, “This is boring, all these human emotions and crap, and it’s
bumming me out, so throw in some nice little final line about something gay
like ice cream.” Damn you, network suit!
But aside from that, how did I
find this ep? I enjoyed it a lot, both more
than I expected to and more than I remembered.
It’s not perfect, and it’s not even close to Secrets, but I found a lot to appreciate in it. Again, I just need to express my respect for
the fact that the show will just do full 48 minute episodes that are
essentially just quiet character studies, along with the fact that they don’t
just kill off Sid Fairgate for DRAMA and then forget he ever existed; instead
the characters mourn his loss in a very realistic way all year. The anchor of the show continues to be
Michele Lee and, yes, I do think this will probably wind up being her finest
season of acting from the entire run (we shall see). There was even one great, hilarious, gut-busting line of dialogue that I forgot to
mention where Lilimae assaults Kenny at some neighborhood gathering and pulls
him away, saying, “I want to talk to you about my music!” I’m not quite sure why, but I laughed at this
for about two or three solid minutes after it occurred; something about it just
tickled my funny bone real good.
Obviously the Kenny and Ginger footage is toxic and very unfortunate,
but that’s just something we’re gonna need to accept as we work our way through
the first four seasons of the show.
So what’s up next? We shall be in the presence of yet another
Transmorpher when Lilimae makes a new friend in The Rose and the Briar.
I've often wondered if the creators of Knots had wished they never cast Houghton and Lankford or created those characters. They had nothing to do, and when they did do something, they brought down the quality of the shows. It would be interesting if someone edited out their scenes that didn't involve other characters to see if their absence would affect the show whatsoever.
ReplyDeleteLOL, one could easily do a Jar Jar Binks edit of the series in which Kenny/Ginger/Erin Molly are completely removed and I am fairly certain absolutely nothing would be missed and, if anything, the series would be improved.
DeleteThat would be awesome! Although someone would have to have a lot of time on his/her hands to be able to do that. Maybe when I retire! LOL
DeleteI can't even with this episode. I'm skipping it.
ReplyDeleteThough the thing I remember from watching it as a kid was LM moving the crib so the moon would shine on BratWard's face. I remember thinking "when I'm a dad I'll do that." Well, I didn't end up having kids, so thank god for your post so I could admit remembering that scene. Otherwise, I would have carried it around all these years for nothing.