Episode Title: Nowhere to Run
Season 05, Episode 03
Episode 078 of 344
Written by Jeff Freilich
Directed by Nicholas Sgarro
Original Airdate: Thursday,
October 13th, 1983
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Abby and Gary
move to the ranch. Abby gets an office in town - complete with apartment. She
and Westmont secretly start a subsidiary of Gary's company. Gary offers Laura a
position as his real estate investor and
asks her to keep an eye on Abby. Police find that Diana used her credit card in
Oklahoma, so Karen and Mack fly there. Diana assures Chip she loves him. After
being spotted by a state trooper, they take off down a dirt road. They find an
abandoned shack. The next morning, Chip and Diana find they are surrounded by
police and Chip pretends to hold Diana hostage. A policeman shoots, which
causes confusion, and Chip is arrested. Karen tries to hug Diana, but Diana
pushes her away, and runs to police car and tells Chip she loves him. A
reporter asks Diana a question, and she replies "It's not Miss Fairgate.
It's Mrs. Tony Fenice."
If our last episode, Fugitives, was about suspense, then I
would say our episode up for discussion today, Nowhere to Run, is about action as we continue to follow the path
of Diana and Chip, now officially on the run from the law. I’m gonna spoil the very ending
of this episode right away just to sorta give you my perspective as I watched
this wonderful 48 minutes along with My Beloved Grammy. Okay, so at the end of the episode, the big
twist is that suddenly Diana doesn’t want to get away from Chip, but instead is
calling herself “Mrs. Tony Fenice,” and acting like the two are married. The reason I note this is because I want to
know: When does Diana makes this transition?
When we last left off in Fugitives,
she seemed legit terrified of Chip/Tony and wanting to get away as fast as
possible, and yet somewhere along the way, her feelings changed. So, does that mean they changed between
episodes or do they change right here within the course of this particular
episode? The reason I mention it is
because we start the ep with the two of them chatting and it seems remarkably
comfortable and casual, as if Diana is not afraid of him at all anymore. In fact, if I remember correctly, the two are
outside of the car, parked at a roadside convenience store, and then they climb
back into the car. This tells us that
they stopped, that Diana was allowed to wander off and buy soda or whatever,
and that she still chose to come right back to the car. Has she already made the bizarre mental
switch and now she loves Chip deeply? What
do you think, my dear readers?
Looking back on this episode,
it’s really very tightly focused on just Chip and Diana, even more so than last
week. In fact, the only other characters
I really wanna talk about (besides Karen and Mack, of course, and they’re sorta
involved in proceedings this week directly because of Diana) are Abs and
Gary. See, if it seemed like the show
was glamming up last season with the richie rich tennis club and Daniel and The
Beach House, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
This week we get to see the couple officially move into Westfork, which
is exciting, and we also get to see Abs unveil her absolutely ridiculous new
office, which is nearly as exciting. This office is like a cartoon
brought to life. Looking at it, I could
only imagine what the rent on a dream palace like this could possibly be
(something like a million dollars a month, perhaps?). Abs first unveils it when showing it off to
Westmont (who has morphed from the Transmorpher who played him in The People vs. Gary Ewing back into the
guy from Nightmare on Elm Street 3)
and they begin in the main entrance area of the office, which is already lavish
enough. It’s adorned more like an
apartment and has big open spaces and this bizarre light switch on the ceiling
(I believe later Gary asks, “Is that a waffle iron?”) and even steps that lead
to….well, I’ll get to that. First Abs
just takes Westmont around the main floor, showing the area where she will be
working and then showing an entire other office area where, presumably, her
staff will be working. It only gets better when she
takes him up the flight of stairs to show him what’s up there. We reveal it to be another floor which is basically a built-in apartment so that Abs
can conduct business without ever having to go home. If it gets too late (or if she wants to have
an affair with somebody), she can just climb the flight of stairs and she’s in
her own little apartment. But not only
is it this huge, lavish space fully adorned with couches and other furniture,
it also has an outdoor patio that she can go and enjoy the sun in. Did I mention that this is all a part of
Abby’s new office?
Now would be a good time to
discuss the inflation in monetary value and materialism of some of our KL characters. I’ve discussed in the past how KL somehow manages to go through all
these different eras and styles of storytelling while never betraying what it’s
always been about since the very first episode.
I feel that a set like this office, or a set like Westfork, couldn’t
even be allowed to exist back in season one, and yet now that it’s here, it
doesn’t feel out of place. I think the
reason for this is because the writers are so good at organically weaving
change into the series. Abs may have
started the series as a recently divorced housewife used to the suburban
drudgery, but she’s always had her eye on the prize, and now that she’s got
Gary and the two are just inches away from being married, she is starting to
enjoy living in the lap of luxury. It
makes sense for Abby’s character that she would buy such a lavish and
ridiculously over-the-top office to conduct her own business. Contrast this with Dallas, where, when the writers started to get nervous about the
competition from the glamorous Dynasty,
they decided to suddenly start dressing all the characters in lavish ball gowns
and ridiculous outfits for no real good reason and it made no sense and it was
awful. Here, KL allows the characters to drive the change throughout the series,
the hallmark of good writing.
As for Gary, he’s continuing
nicely along that path we found him on last week. He’s keeping busy, being super productive,
and working to get his life together. He
has a wonderfully candid chat with Laura this week that I’m gonna have about
seventeen talking points on. The two are
riding on horseback together, which is just a nice image, and Laura just flat
out asks Gary why he stays with Abs.
Gary has one of his wonderfully candid responses where he just says, “I
love her, but I don’t trust her.” He
elaborates on this somewhat and explains the appeal of Abs by saying, “Being
with Abby is like high speed racing,” which struck me as a strange bit of
foreshadowing since, if I recall correctly, Gary does in fact get involved with high speed car racing a few seasons
down the line.
I wanna note the friendship of
Laura and Gary, which I feel we are seeing grow right before our very
eyes. I’m thinking back through the
first four seasons, and I don’t think we got a whole lot of Gary and Laura one-on-one,
did we? One moment that springs
immediately to mind is when Richard was holding Laura hostage back in Night and Gary came into the house to
check on her and see what was wrong.
Aside from that, though, these two have generally felt pretty isolated
from each other. Here, however, they are
riding horses together and look rather chummy.
In fact, the key development of this scene is that Gary asks Laura to
come work for him as his own real estate super smart lady. He’s all like, “Come on, Laura, we haven’t
even had any scenes of you in your real estate office since the end of season
three,” and that manages to convince, in addition to the fact that Gary makes
it clear he wishes for Laura to keep an eye on Abs and see what she is up to.
Last thing to note on this
scene: I also feel like season five unveils the Laura that I tend to think
about whenever I think about Laura. This
is the Laura who’s a little sassier, who talks back more, and who speaks her
mind very frankly and without shame.
This is also the Laura who is pretty damn funny, demonstrating KL’s very underrated ability to always
be pretty funny in the midst of all the drama.
I feel like now that Richard is gone, Laura is really coming into her
own, not having to worry about the fragile ego of her husband. By this point, the Laura of season one
(remember The Lie?) feels a million
miles away; she has grown so much throughout the last four seasons.
Okay, enough about that, let’s
back to the main storyline. So Chip and
Diana are continuing their big drive, but Chip’s getting nervous due to that
A.P.B. (“What is an A.P.B.?!”) that
was put out for them recently. When we
next catch up with them, they are at a sleazy used car lot talking to the Texan
dealer. As soon as we saw this guy, My
Beloved Grammy and I both looked at each other and said, “Why do we know that
guy?” Demonstrating my bizarre ability
to immediately recognize random actors and then connect the dots to whatever it
was I saw them in, I said, “I think that guy was in Django or something.” Well,
after the episode was over (no looking at cell phones during the show, of
course), I checked his IMDb and discovered that he was, indeed, in Django Unchained, playing Bob
Gibbs. The actor’s name is Gary Grubbs
and he has also been in five thousand other things; he’s one of those actors
you just recognize right away. Okay, so Chip and Diana wind up
getting screwed pretty bad by this guy, who tells them he’ll take a trade in on
their nearly brand new vehicle and then give them a clunker for $600.00. Chip reminds him that their car is worth
something like $8,000.00, but the dealer isn’t budging. He can probably tell that Chip is desperate
and so he uses the opportunity to take full advantage of him. Well, he’s right and it works because Chip
agrees to trade in for the clunker and he and Diana take off.
Their getaway doesn’t last long,
however, because the two pull off to some side road to enjoy a nice picnic
together, only to be interrupted by a cop.
Now, maybe I’m just having a hard time remembering the exact details of
this development, but I can’t really figure out what goes on here. See, the cop slowly and creepily drives over
to them as they have their picnic, sorta staring them up and down. Diana smiles and says, “How are you,
officer?” After that, the cop drives
away and Chip flips, convinced that he’ll just be waiting for them when they
drive back from this area. He insists
that they drive up through some trail that goes through the woods, or something
like that. My question is: Is Chip
correct? Watching this, it seemed to be
that this was just another useless cop who comes really close to Chip and Diana
and fails to recognize that these are the people they are supposed to be
looking for. We’ve already had two
useless cops in our previous episode, one in the diner and one driving on the
highway. Does this cop drive away and
then immediately report their whereabouts?
I’m just sorta blanking on the details here.
Meanwhile, back on the
cul-de-sac, Karen finds out that Diana used her credit card 24 hours ago to get
gas, giving her some notion of where she might be, which is somewhere in
Oklahoma. As soon as Karen hears this,
she prepares to take off and find her, and no matter how hard Eric tries to
persuade her to stay, she won’t budge.
Mack comes home to find Karen gone, but not too long after that, he gets
a call from her. We find out that Karen
checked into some shitty motel (The Something Or Other Hideaway) and that she’s
just gonna hang out for awhile until she hears more about Diana's whereabouts. Well, after a brief bit of
thinking, Mack decides to fly to Oklahoma and meet up with her. There’s a nice bit of detail in continuity
when we see Karen asleep and she’s in the same pajamas that we saw her packing
as she was leaving (I wouldn’t have even noticed this if My Beloved Grammy
hadn’t pointed it out; she has a sharper eye for wardrobe than I do). Anyway, the two fight a bit and Mack is mad
that Karen just up and left town without any warning, but Karen gives an
impassioned speech about how she’s closer to Diana now than ever and she’s not
gonna give up until they find her.
By this point, Chip and Diana
are hauled up in some super shitty, like, farm.
In any case, it’s some sort of big shed out in the middle of the
country. At first Chip doesn’t want to
stay there because it’s probably cold and smelly, but Diana says it’ll do just
fine. The two get some sleep but are
interrupted in the morning by a large gang of police officers surrounding them. The main sheriff guy (who is a Transmorpher,
by the way; I looked him up and he appears in four Dallas episodes, two from 1988 and two from 1989) is rather jovial
and humorous in his methods of threatening Chip. He takes the loudspeaker and is all like,
“Good morning, Mr. Fenice, and welcome to Oklahoma! Now come out with your hands up or we’ll
shoot you.”
Inside the shed, things are
getting complicated. This is where that
query I brought up near the start of this writeup comes to the forefront
again. See, Chip is panicking and saying
how it’s hopeless and they have to give up, but Diana has ideas for how they
can escape. She grabs this, like, wrench
or something and tells Chip to hold it against her back and act as if it’s a
gun. They will open the door long enough
for him to tell the police that Diana is his hostage, then they’ll figure out a
way to escape.
Okay, so as we’re watching this,
My Beloved Grammy is sorta speaking aloud, and she says, “Diana must be
tricking him.” In the back of my mind, I
remembered how these events played out, so I knew that Diana was serious in her
efforts to protect Chip. Upon a first
viewing, you might think that she’s working on a plan to lure him out into
public so that the cops can handle him, but really she’s being sincere and
wants to keep him safe. This is expanded
upon in just a few moments, but first we have Mack, rocking an utterly fabulous
pair of 1983 sunglasses, creeping up to the shed to try and talk some sense
into Chip, all while Karen watches and hyperventilates from the hill above.
Mack makes it to the door and
manages to speak with Chip face to face, but to no avail. Eventually, some shooting breaks out, there’s
some general chaos, and Chip is, in fact, apprehended by the police. Of course, if you thought this incarceration
marked the ending of this exciting storyline, you would be wrong, because then
Karen runs up to try and hug Diana, who pushes her away. Wow, what a bitch! Then, when some reporter or other asks Diana
a question and addresses her as Miss Fairgate, Diana spins around and says, “It
isn’t Miss Fairgate; it’s Mrs. Tony Fenice!”
The music swells as we get our “Executive Producers” credit and then the
episode ends.
Before I discuss my final
thoughts on the episode in question, can I just ask: What the hell is wrong with
Diana? Watching it this time, really
focusing in on her character and trying to figure out what’s going on in her
brain, I finally came to this conclusion: Diana is, in fact, crazy. Now, follow me here, because I’m not just
saying that as some bold piece of hyperbole or as an insult to the
character. While I think you could make
the argument that she’s suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and feeling a
connection to her kidnapper, that’s not how I see it. I really think Diana is mentally ill and has
something wrong with her brain. That
explains this sudden and bizarre turnaround from being terrified of Chip to
suddenly wanting to protect him, and it also explains her generally erratic
behavior throughout the last four seasons.
Remember how sometimes she would be a total mega-bitch and then other
times she would be randomly nice? Or how
about her insane belief that everything in the world revolves around her? Okay, you could make the case that all teenage girls think the world
revolves around them, but Diana really takes it to the max.
The final argument in my thesis
is her reaction to finding out Chip killed Ciji. Ciji was a bright, sweet, beautiful, and
talented young girl and Chip bashed her over the head, smashed her skull, and
then dumped her dead body in the ocean.
Not only did he take a life, but he went through all the trouble of
cleaning it up and hiding the evidence and trying to get rid of the body. Now, when most normal people hear about
something like this, they realize the killer is a crazy person. When Diana hears about it through his
twisted, “I did it for you,” logic, I would say she feels flattered, like she
is really loved. Need I say more? Only a mentally ill person could be so
twisted as to think this cold, nasty murder committed in the name of love could
possibly be romantic or noble in any way.
Therefore, my thesis that I plan to stick with all the way through
season five is that Diana is a mentally ill person.
So how about the episode
itself? Well, obviously it was pretty
damn great. I may have said this in the
past, but I fear I’m going to be sounding like a real broken record for many
seasons, because KL just starts to
blur into this one amazing run of quality and awesomeness. It’s happening right now, in fact, because
even though we are starting a new season and we got some new cast members and
we lost some old ones, because of the way the stories are propelling and
everything is building and growing from week to week, it really feels like it’s
fusing with season four and just creating this big, amazing season of
television, like the longest but greatest year of television ever made. I’m curious to see if this feeling in my
brain fades as we get deeper into season five or perhaps as we begin season six.
In an effort to keep every
episode as its own special little snowflake, let me note a few things I
especially liked about this ep. For one,
like all the best KL eps, it just
zooms by and it’s over before you even feel the time. 48 minutes of Dallas could so often feel like such a slog, but when KL is at its best, we’ll reach the
closing credits of the ep and I’ll be like, “Oh, it’s over? I felt like we just started.” That tells me that I’m hooked into the show
in such a way that I don’t even feel the time going by. I’ve often declared that I could sit through
an entire season of KL without ever
having to get up, and even though I sorta say that in a joking way to show how
obsessed I am with the show, it is actually true at this juncture. If I didn’t know I’d be going home to write
detailed essays about all these eps, I guarantee you I would have just asked My
Beloved Grammy if she’d like to power through another disk of five eps.
Secondly, there’s a real sense
of urgency to this ep that I appreciated.
Like I said, Fugitives was
about slow building tension while this one is about immediate excitement. If Fugitives
was a slow hand job, then Nowhere to
Run is violently fucking you in the ass, and I mean that in the best way
possible. It stays exciting and frenetic
for its entire run; you feel the emergency feeling that Karen must be having
all through this week. Also, I like the
way that this ep (along with the last one) kinda takes us on a road trip and we
get to leave the California setting for a little while to follow Chip and Diana
on their adventures. There’s even a
feeling of authenticity in the small details, like the accents of the cops at
the end as they swarm Chip and Diana.
The Transmorpher who plays the sheriff just feels exactly right as an
Oklahoma sheriff; I buy him as a real person even though it’s a teeny tiny
little role.
So yup, in conclusion, Nowhere to Run keeps up the quality of
last week and continues us down this fabulous voyage. Coming up next, the plot thickens ever more
and we also have our very first appearance of the glorious William Devane as
Greg Sumner with Marital Privileges.
If there was ever a misstep on the part of KL's writers, it's with Diana Fairgate's character. Not even mental illness can explain what happens to Diana beginning in this episode. She makes a leap here off a cliff from which her character never recovers, and it's just unfathomable that a child of Sid and Karen Fairgate would ever defend a cold-blooded sociopathic killer.
ReplyDeleteI thought she suffered from Stockholm syndrome and the desperate need to be loved.
ReplyDeleteMy theory on Diana's behavior-- because it absolutely does not make sense to me otherwise-- is that we have to stop and look back and what has happened to her over the past few seasons. She lost her father-- which was a devastating blow to the entire fabric of that family. The rest of her family has the ability to sort of "move on" ,for lack of a better word, and adapt to a new life. I think that Diana, coming off all this, then has to deal with Mack being in her mother's life and ultimately marrying her. And Mack didn't like Chip. I still think there might be the slightest bit of this may be in reaction to Karen and Mack's marriage and possibly even Karen/Mack appearing in Oklahoma like they did. In Diana's world, she just can't be wrong, and she's out to prove to her mother and to Mack that's got her shit figured out, and that shit involves Chip. I think Diana doesn't know where she fits after the death of her father-- that she desperately longs to be loved and feels like she belongs somewhere-- and she finds that in con artist Chip. I think she twists the story of Ciji's death and Chip's guilt in her head. There's something about Diana that likes the romance of it at all-- He did it for HER. Also, I think Diana inherited the worst combination of 3 personalities: Karen, Sid, and Abby. I think that Diana knows deep down that what she is doing is wrong-- that he is wrong--- but she is sunk in. I don't know that I would call Diana mentally ill as much as one fucked up human being. I would like to think that she re-evaluates later down the road. Maybe.
ReplyDeleteYou hit it on the nose... I loved the line, maybe it's actually in the next episode, where Diana says, paraphrasing, "We got married in Vegas, just like my mom!" She's so desperately wanting to compete in the adult world, even though she's still a child.
DeleteI think you all are right! Diana is insecure, craves attention and will take it from anyone AND she is a little crazy. I think she does turn it around b/c she ends up living in an awesome apartment in Manhattan in season 14.
ReplyDeleteOn another note...I LOVED Abby's office with the sexy upstairs bedroom. This is about the time I started watching the show during the original run, and this office is one of my first Knot's memory. Abby truly became J.R. this season. We are so close to the Sumner affair and the awesome speech! (...if it comes to a choice between love and money, money is going to win every time.). Can't wait!
One thing I remember about Abby's fabulous office. In some random future episode, the receptionist buzzers her and says over the intercom, "You have a call on line FOURTEEN!"
ReplyDeleteI agree Diana is off mentally. She is at a period in her life where she rejects everything "Karen". I noticed it when she took abby's side against Val, practically blaming Val for Gary cheating. She rejects her mother and father's values. Then she snaps when Chip says he killed Ciji for her. It;s them against the world. There is some stockholm at play. He tells her over and over how much he loves her. She's never had that kind of love before. It is very sick. I loved Abby's beach house and now her new office. I don't remember if Laura was helpful to Gary at all since he goes ahead and marries Abby. But now I sort of understand his obsession with her. His addict brain craves excitement. She's just another addiction.
ReplyDeleteI believe Diana has bi- polar which explains why her emotions are on and off and I think the death of her father intesnfied it, which also explain her rebellious behavior and unhealthy attraction to bad boys.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I feel like some of the steam from S4 has been let out of the bag in S5. I can appreciate where the season is heading with the formation of Appaloon, but S4 was just magical the way the entire cast was intertwined. So far this season, it just feels like the Chip/Diana show, and I just don't care about either of them at thus point. Part of Chip's allure was his ability to manipulate so many different people in different ways. Now that he's running out of options - and DIANA starts calling the shots, he's no fun anymore...
ReplyDelete