Episode Title: Silver Shadows
Season 03, Episode 16
Episode 047 of 344
Written by Rocci Chatfield and
Ray Goldstone
Directed by Nicholas Sgarro
Original Airdate: Thursday,
March 25th, 1982
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Abby tells Gary
they need $20,000.00 to keep their Methanol business going. Abby meets an engineer
named Larry, but casts him aside when she meets Andrew Douglas, a famous
silent-movie director. Larry, meanwhile, becomes more interested in Karen, and Abby is jealous. Abby uses Andrew, who says she
reminds him of his deceased wife, Terry Clarington. Andrew is rich and
somewhat senile and, at times, thinks Abby is Terry. He tells Abby that he will
put her in his will. However, when he dies, he has left the money to Terry
Clarington, so Abby gets nothing. She's also lost Larry to Karen, which further
upsets her.
Oh Jesus, what a letdown. I can only imagine how a first time viewer
would feel going from the high of highs that was our last episode, Best Intentions, to this week’s, um…..thing,
which is titled Silver Shadows. Let’s just talk about it so we can get it
over with, move on, and know that great stuff lies for us in the future, just
around the corner, in fact.
I tell you, My Beloved Grammy
and I were on such a high from the last episode that we immediately started
this one with supreme eagerness, ready to see how things would continue on for
Val and her Ewing family exposé and especially
Laura and Richard’s relationship.
Sadly, absolutely none of this is explored in Silver Shadows (despite that bizarre old TV Guide ad I've posted above, which seems to be describing a totally different ep) as we have to endure yet another one of those boring
one-off episodes that could pretty much be skipped without missing a thing
(well, that’s almost true). As we open up on Abby in some sort of dress
shop suddenly being asked to model some clothing for some random dude, my heart
started to sink and I thought to myself, “Oh no, it’s that episode.” Yes, for we
have come to yet another episode that I had totally forgotten about and, had I
remembered its existence, I would have tensed up long ago knowing it was
approaching; I would have known, “Somewhere in season three lies that
unbelievably boring episode with Abby and that old rich guy,” but instead I
thought Best Intentions was the start
of smooth sailing for us KL fans, and
thusly I was hit with this one like a gut-punch. I wanted to turn to My Beloved Grammy and
say, “I’m sorry for what we have to watch this,” yet I also didn’t want to bias her,
thinking two things. I was thinking
maybe she would find some enjoyment out of this, for one, and I was thinking
maybe this episode wouldn’t be as bad as I remembered. Well, I was wrong on both counts.
Okay, so Abby’s modeling for
this boring and ugly white guy. His name
is Larry Wilson and he’s actually gonna follow us into the next episode, Letting Go, as well. I don’t want to insult the guy personally, but
it’s doubtful he’ll ever see this, so let’s insult away. This guy is ugly, man, and I’m fine with him being ugly. I don’t really care if he’s ugly, honestly,
except for the fact that he is presented as this eligible and desirable
bachelor that both Karen and Abby
start to fight over. I’m sitting there
and I’m like, “Huh?!” The idea that this
motherfucka could get with Michele Lee and especially
Donna Mills just turns my stomach.
Abby, what are you thinking?! You are one of the most beautiful women in
the world and you’re gonna let this man be
your date? What universe is this? I finally had to settle on the fact that it’s
the 1980s and back then, I think a man could pretty much score any woman he
wanted so long as he had money and coke.
Oh yeah, and one last thing I almost forgot to note, he’s played by
Joshua Bryant and he’s actually a Transmorpher as he appeared in the 1978 Dallas episode, Election, playing Peter Larson.
Anyway, the whole “try on these
clothes for me” angle serves as the catalyst for Abby to meet this Larry Wilson
guy, but then just a few minutes later she’s hanging out on the cul-de-sac and
this really fancy old car pulls up and this really old guy played by Lew Ayres
(he was a famous person and I remember him from Omen II and I've attached a pic from that movie below) gets out and is like, “Will you wear this necklace?” So Abs puts it on and the guy gets all
excited and is like, “You look just like my ex-wife who died like a million
years ago, omigod!”
It was about at this point,
really early in the episode, that My Beloved Grammy said, “What is this? What’s happening?” and I was just like, “I
know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” After all
the excitement of shenanigans from last week, this is probably the moment where
we the viewers realize what we are in for, that we are just going to have an
entire ep devoted to Abs and some boring old guy we don’t care about, have
never seen before, and will never see again.
Anyway, the guy’s rich and lives
in a mansion with a butler that he treats like shit. He takes Abs to his mansion and shows her the
photo of his dead wife, and wouldn’t you know it, but it looks like Donna Mills
put on an old-fashioned hat and posed for a painting, very similar to that old
photo of Diana that we got to take a look at back in One of a Kind. So Abs is
like, “Golly gee whiz, I sure do look like your dead wife!” From there, she starts an unbelievably boring
relationship with this old guy and his snooty butler.
Meanwhile, we also have a little
“jealousy” storyline brewing between Karen and Abs that I simply have no
patience for. It’s not just that this
boring generic white guy is so ugly (and that’s the last time I’ll say that;
I’m starting to feel bad for picking on the poor actor so much), but that this
storyline feels right out of a sitcom; you can almost hear the live studio
audience being told to laugh their heads off when Abs has to turn down Larry
Wilson for a date and then he immediately drives over to Karen’s house and asks
her out instead, all while Abs glares and wonders what’s going on. Then she marches over to the Fairgate house
and is like, “Karen, what are you doing talking to that boring white guy? He’s my
boring white guy!” Then they argue
for awhile and I yawn.
If there’s anything to grasp
onto here, it’s that Abs is definitely doing a bit of scheming with Lew Ayres
here, as she knows that he is not only suffering from dementia (he keeps
confusing her for his dead wife and he sometimes refers to things as happening
right now even though they happened forty or fifty years ago, plus he has these
little bursts of anger that come out of nowhere), but also that he has a ton of
money and he’s at death’s door. Earlier
in the ep, Gary tells Abs that they need to raise money fast, around
$20,000.00, or else their little methanol venture is gonna fall flat. My Beloved Grammy helps me stay somewhat
invested when I’m struggling with an ep, because she does this super cute thing
where she sorta talks out loud about what she thinks is gonna happen. In this case, she’s like, “I’ll bet it’ll
turn out the old guy doesn’t actually have any money,” and I kinda thought that
might happen, too; I really couldn’t
remember.
Abs decides to throw a big party
at the mansion after she sits through a screening of one of the old guy’s
silent movies (oh yeah, I forgot to mention that; he’s like supposed to be some
great filmmaker from the silent movie era).
I definitely think a part of Abs is trying to get the guy to leave her
all his money, but I also do believe that there’s another part within her that
kinda falls for the guy, not necessarily in love, but I think she starts to
have some special feelings for him.
She’s not totally duplicitous, which is part of what makes her character
so rich and interesting as we go through her nine years on the series. The writers could just write her as a bitch
or a gold-digger or a really awful, evil person, but they consistently keep her
fully fledged from the day she’s introduced to the day she leaves the show.
Anyway, during the party, Abs
and the snooty butler (the character is named Henry and he is played by Walter Brooke, who was in a lot of stuff and
is also a Transmorpher since he
appeared in the Dallas episode The Red File: Part Two, playing Cole
Young) have some bickering throughout the party about who’s gonna get the money
when the guy from Omen II dies, and
the butler says how he deserves it cuz he’s put up with forty years of his
nagging and degradations and what have you, but he also tries to puncture
Abby’s balloon a little bit by telling her that there won’t be that much money
when all is said and done thanks to taxes.
I’m watching the clock at this point and waiting for the episode to end.
Okay, so the guy finally dies
and I guess this was an okay scene. In
my notes, I actually wrote down one thing that I liked about it, and that was
the very final shot of it. See, Abs is
by his bedside to watch him expire, and I think maybe the audience is supposed
to be crying at this point, which is an absurd notion. The guy was just introduced at the head of
the episode and I am not going to cry about him dying here, but I guess Donna Mills does a good job acting. I mean,
she always does a good job acting
(aside from that “Nooooooo” scene from the end of season two when her kids were
kidnapped), so I might just be taking it for granted. But anyway, after the guy finally expires, I
kinda liked the shot of him lying dead in the bed with Abs beside him and the
way the camera pulled back slowly and sorta framed them.
Then there’s a twist ending
where it turns out in his will, he left all the money to his wife. The only problem, of course, is that his wife
has been dead forever. Abs tries to
argue that the money was meant for her, that he just got confused because they
looked so similar, but then Henry the butler is like, “Oh no, the will says the
wife,” so Abs is left with nothing. Then
she looks in a mirror and puts on that hat from the photo and we get a little
stylistic flourish where her face becomes enclosed in that little circle before
the screen fades to black, the way an old silent movie would end. It’s an okay little bit of style but it’s
there to conclude an episode I had zero interest in, so I didn’t really care.
Okay, so I was about to apply my
“episodes aired out of production order” theory to this episode, because who in
their right mind would produce an episode this bad and boring after the genius
of Best Intentions? So many wheels started spinning last week that
I just couldn’t understand why the writers would put all that on pause for this
terrible episodic storyline. However, my
theory can’t be true because there is one
bit of continuity maintained from our last episode. See, we get a scene where Laura comes over to
the Avery house and is mad because Richard is there. She says how she calls to find out when he’ll
be gone so she can go there when he’s not there, and then he tries to invite
her to the party Abs is throwing and there’s some dialogue where Laura
reiterates that they are, in fact, getting a divorce. Thanks to the inclusion of this one scene, I
officially know that this episode is meant
to be watched right after Best Intentions.
Oh yeah, and of course the fact
that Larry Wilson (who, by the way, arrives at Karen’s doorstep at one point
with a sweater wrapped around his neck,
which prompted both My Beloved Grammy and myself to scream and start throwing
tomatoes at the screen) will be back as Karen’s romantic interest in next
week’s episode, so the writers are clearly introducing him in this episode as a
plot function for next week. So, thanks
to those two little details, we know that Silver
Shadows is, indeed, meant to come in-between Best Intentions and Letting Go. What were they thinking?!
Also, I know that I rarely
really talk about the airdates, but I have to note that there was a two week
gap between the airing of Best Intentions
and Silver Shadows. So just imagine being an at-home 1982 viewer
and seeing the excitement of Best Intentions and then waiting two solid
weeks for a new KL episode only
to be faced with this episode. No wonder
the third season is the lowest ranked of the whole series! You pull crap like that with the viewers, why
would you expect them to keep tuning in?
However, there is good news, and
that is the fact that, as far as I can recall, I really truly believe this is
the last time we have to deal with
this. I think after this episode, the
writers never give us a one-off disposable episode again. I think the ending of Silver Shadows marks the end of the “Let’s introduce a story in
this episode and then wrap it up by the end of the episode and never mention it
again” era of KL, and you all know
how excited I am to get to the full-on serialized soapy storytelling of season
four and beyond. So knowing that this is
gonna be the last time we deal with an episode like this does make it a little
easier to take.
You know, I’ve been so
resoundingly negative in this writeup that I almost feel guilty, as if I’m
mistreating my best friend. But you guys
surely know at this point how much I love KL,
you surely know that it’s one of my favorite things in the world, and you all
saw how much I came in my pants over last week’s episode, so you can understand
that this episode just really irked me, yeah?
You are gonna get plenty of gushing from me in the weeks and years to
come, so maybe it’s good for you to see that I am capable of insulting an episode, and I’m gonna continue to do
that just a bit more in my concluding thoughts.
Everyone get the drumroll ready,
please, because I am officially declaring this the worst episode of KL ever,
and when I say ‘ever,’ I do not just mean of the eps we’ve seen up to this
point, I mean of the entire 344 episode run.
I think this is the pits, the bottom of the barrel, as bad as the series
could possibly get. I am remembering
back to Land of the Free when I
declared that the worst episode ever and said it never gets worse than that,
but I was wrong, so wrong, and I want to send a wine and cheese basket to the
writer of Land of the Free as an
apology, because this episode is so much worse.
It’s so unbelievably boring, a word I never use towards KL, and
I do think its placement in the season is also a huge problem. If this was placed somewhere else in the
season, maybe a little earlier in the run, I might give it more of a
break. But coming off of Best Intentions, it’s painful to sit
through this 48 minutes and I have never felt less invested in a KL episode. I think this is the first and hopefully only
episode of KL I have actually hated.
But if that is so, then the good
news is that it’s all uphill from here and, yes, next week’s episode will be a
tremendous improvement. Stay tuned as we
witness Karen finally coming to terms with Sid’s death and learning to move on,
learning to let go (which they will say about ten thousand times in the
episode) in our next episode up for discussion, Letting Go.
I 100% agree that this is the worst KL episode. It was so boring it seemed like it lasted for 3 hours. At least "Land of the Free" had that late 70's/early 80's cheesiness about it that made it interesting to watch. The good news is, the viewer usually forgets this episode exists once season 4 gets going.
ReplyDeleteHere's my theory on the order of episodes, and I've spent next to no time developing it.
ReplyDeleteThe writers are split up into two groups. One group is working on crafting the continuing story lines, but there aren't enough of them to fill out scripts for an entire season. So the "B" team works up 7 or 8 stand alone episodes at the same time. Then they just threw a stand-alone into production whenever they needed an extra week to polish the next continuing-story show.
It helps explain why the stand-alones are always so clunky and the ones that move the larger stories along seem to have had more work put into them and a totally different story-telling vibe. And if KL wasn't doing so hot in the ratings yet, the network possibly only gave them a meager number of weeks to get the entire season completed, so splitting the writers into two groups to develop stories would help move the work along.
Is the interior set of Andrew Douglass home the same as the haunted mansion in "Three Sisters?" The stairwell area, though painted terracotta, looks awful familiar.
ReplyDelete