Episode Title: Second Chances
Season 05, Episode 17
Episode 092 of 344
Written by Joel J. Feigenbaum
Directed by Bill Duke
Original Airdate: Thursday,
January 19th, 1984
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Gary finds out
that Cathy was in prison for second degree murder. He asks Abby about it. Abby
tells Cathy to leave and threatens to tell her ex-husband Ray where she is.
Cathy counters that if she does, she'll
tell Gary that Abby hired her to distract him so she could steal him blind.
Abby calls Ray. Greg breaks a date with Abby and sleeps with Laura. Mack goes
to the D.A. who tells him that he might be disbarred. Mack goes to the Apolune
address and finds out it's a mail service. Some guys beat him up. Ben tells Val
he is taking a job in South America, and Val doesn't want him to. They hug.
Michael, Eric, and Gary talk to Diana about making up with Karen. Finally, Diana
and Karen make up. Mack has Eric drop off a bright orange mailer for Apolune at
the mail service, and then watches to see who picks it up. He sees Laura go in
and come out with the bright orange mailer.
Our last episode, Reconcilable Differences, was good but
not great, and I specifically complained about a lack of directorial flair
along with some clunky editing choices.
I am happy to announce that for Second
Chances, we have the return of the blackest of the black men, Mr. Bill “Cooke” Duke, proudly sitting in the director’s chair and bringing some style
and art to the proceedings, as is his wont.
We haven’t had to wait that long to hear from Mr. Duke, by the way, as
his last contribution was only two episodes ago with Forsaking All Others. I did
a little looking at his IMDb to see how many
more eps we’ve got from him, and I discovered this falls firmly in the
middle. This is his fifth KL ep following Power Play, A New Family,
Celebration, and Forsaking All Others. He’s
got five more episodes to contribute, Yesterday It Rained, Out of the Past, Fly Away Home, The Deluge, and then finally Nightmare
in 1987 as his final credit for the show.
Personally, I think it’s a nightmare
to have to imagine him no longer contributing to the series, but we’ll deal
with that tragedy when we deal with it.
For now, he’s here and I love it.
Okay, let’s get started; how did
we leave things off last week? Well,
like I said, I felt last week was kinda cleaning house and finishing up some
storylines that had been going on for awhile, specifically Karen and her
pills. This week Karen is better and has
returned home and is starting to act like her old self that we all know and
love. This is quite refreshing, because
even though I loved the pills storyline and thought it was fabulous dramatic
storytelling and acting, I also wanted Karen to get better and be sweet and
good to people again, and My Beloved Grammy felt the same way. Every single episode since Karen got
prescribed her pills, when we would rev up an episode and the glorious,
majestic scrolling squares would start to move across the screen, whenever
Michele Lee’s fabulous shot of her smiling in that big square in the middle
would float by, My Beloved Grammy would get sorta sad and say, “I want the old
Karen back.” Well, now she is back, and
we can all be very grateful.
The first order of business for
Karen is to do the right thing and go apologize to Gary for what she said last
week. She takes a little drive up to
Westfork and we see the two walking along through the great open land (breaking
news: If I haven’t mentioned it yet, I’ve officially decided that I would
rather live at Westfork than at The Beach House; that’s right!) and having a
nice conversation. What a lovely moment
this is, because then Karen starts to apologize to Gary for her behavior last
week (“You are a drunk!”) but since
Gary is becoming all cool and mellow and self-actualized, he’s just very calm
and says, “No need to apologize.” Again,
this is because Gary understands, because he’s been on an alcoholic bender more
times than he can count, and he knows what the addiction does to people, how it
makes you say horrible things to the people that love and care about you. I find it so lovely and touching how Gary
just gets it and he doesn’t hold it over Karen’s head; he doesn’t need or
desire her apology, because he inherently understands her. This also reminds me of how much I love the
friendship of Karen and Gary, and I’m glad it’s back in a good place (remember
they didn’t really get along throughout season four, starting out with her
firing him from Knots Landing Motors at the start of the season).
Anyway, a second after Gary and
Karen’s lovely little chat, a car comes pulling up and Gary says, “I forget to
tell you she was coming back,” and at first I’m like, “Huh?” I quickly realized who he’s referring to, and
that would be Diana, who has been absent for four episodes in a row now. Well, now she’s back and with a different
haircut, to boot (darker). Gary goes
away and Diana gets out of the car and we get an awkward exchange between her
and Karen. Diana says how she’s been in
New York with Uncle Joe (nice continuity; I appreciate that they still mention
this character we haven’t seen since last season and will never see again;
maybe he’s offscreen now but he still exists and they don’t Chuck Cunningham
him). In any case, not much progresses
in this scene, as the two characters sorta try to talk to each other and then
go on their separate ways.
Karen successfully mends fences
with Val this ep, however, and that makes me happy. I care more about this relationship than the
one with Diana, who is a nasty shrew about to leave the series forever. Val and Karen’s friendship, on the other
hand, spans the entire saga and is one of the central emotional hearts of the
series, and it’s been on rocky ground the last few weeks. Fortunately, in this ep they take a nice bike
ride (well, briefly, before hitting some sort of big hill and getting off the
bikes to just walk them along the street) and they make peace. Val is finally able to communicate the
information to Karen that she was trying to communicate so many eps ago, when
she came over to her house to talk about her pregnancy only for the
conversation to shift to addiction before Karen asked her to leave. Now Val gives her the scoop, telling her how
she’s knocked up, but not with Ben’s babies, but rather Gary’s. I appreciate the non-judgmental attitude in this
scene; Karen just listens and they talk a bit.
There’s no lecturing about how Gary and Val shouldn’t have slept
together or anything. Is it possible
that all the characters on the series see the same thing we viewers see, namely
that Gary and Val are soul mates and kindred spirits?
Let’s return to Karen and Diana
just to get it out of the way. Yes, they
do finally make peace in this ep after Diana has a good chat with her brothers,
raw seething testosterone sex machine Michael and regular old Eric. Even though I don’t want to violate Eric the
way I want to violate his brother, I’m really starting to respect this
character a lot, especially when he gets tough with Diana. In this case, Diana is whining about how
Karen treats her like a child (probably because she acts like a child, but
whatever), and Eric says, “I just hope when you’re at a low point in your life,
people treat you better than you’re treating her.” Yup, a fine point, and I think this is the
impetus for Diana to stop acting like such a psycho and go talk to her mother.
The chat occurs at the
Fairgate/MacKenzie house with the two girls sitting on the stairs. I think they’ve had a lot of chats sitting on
the stairs, but I could be hallucinating that bit. In any case, the scene felt like a bit of a
callback to those conversations they would always be having in seasons one
through three (I think their very first one was way back in episode four, The Lie) and it’s actually a pretty
productive chat. Karen asks Diana to,
“Take the label of ‘mother’ off of me and don’t live your life out of anger at
me.” After that, Diana gets up to leave,
and the scene is shot very well with her body in the foreground and Karen
framed in the background, standing on the stairs. Then Diana’s eyes start to well up and she
says, “Mommy” (I could have lived without that part), and then the two finally
hug as the music swells and peace is restored in their relationship.
I shit on the character of Diana
a lot, but this season along with the last one has caused me to reevaluate
Claudia Lonow’s acting, which I was so critical of in those early
episodes. Here, she’s pretty darn good,
particularly with how she has to start out dry eyed and then let the tears
start flowing as we watch her, a bit of acting I’m not sure I could pull
off. Michele is also good in the scene
and, overall, it’s nice to have peace restored and finally be done with this
whole fight that’s been going on since the climax of last season. Like I said, we’re not completely through
with the Diana character, as she’s still gonna be hanging around the show for
the rest of the season, but then she gets shipped off to New York at the very
start of season six, and I am definitely getting the feeling that the writers
are finishing up her story and getting ready to say goodbye to her. I could be mistaken, as I have no idea when
the decisions are made about who’s going to be in the cast lineup for the
following season, but that’s certainly the sense I’m getting while watching
this scene.
Okay, so how about our other
characters this week? Well, things heat
up nicely in the little affair between Laura and Greg, and it’s a delightful
thing to watch, particularly because I thought we still had a good chunk of eps
to go before we would see them get together (I swear I thought the two
characters barely even interacted until mid season six). In this case, Greg pulls an old favorite on
Laura by knocking on her door and, when she answers, you guessed it, he’s got
the rose in his mouth and says, “Bon soire, baby.” I love Laura’s nonchalant reply in which she
simply turns around and walks off and says, “Vodka rocks, right?” No mushy romance or kissing for Laura; she
wants to get right down to business.
This makes sense to me as Laura has been so severely hurt over so many
years by Richard; I imagine it would be hard for her to unclench and trust a
man again. If she’s gonna have a torrid
romance, she would rather keep it feeling almost businesslike.
Meanwhile, drama still sizzles
when it comes to both Val and Ben. Actually, Ben solo this week has a bit of
business to take care of, as well. He
wants to speak to the old Marcus couple (the Transmorpher judge from Moving In and the Critters 2 gramma, you all remember), but he has a hard time
getting into contact with them. Now that
their house is, you know, burned to the ground, I guess they are living with
Mr. Marcus’ daughter or something, so Ben goes to see them at this nice house,
but it takes two trips. During the first
trip, the young woman is like, “They ain’t here, so get out of here.” Oh, by the way, this little actress that
plays the daughter is named Jennifer Savidge (pictured below) and she appeared in an episode of
the short-lived series James at 15 that
I just watched the other day, which
is rather cosmic, as well as the 1994 landmark cinematic achievement Clifford (that was a joke, although I
did rent that movie a shit-ton when I was a little kid and for some reason my
dad really enjoyed it and would always watch it with me). Okay, anyway, upon Ben’s second visit to the
house, she starts to give him the same “They’re not here,” rhetoric, but then
we see feet creeping down the stairs behind her (nicely shot, Duke) and then
Mr. Marcus is like, “It’s alright, I’ll speak to him.” The conversation is brief and the old man is
clearly terrified of divulging any information because, you know, the
Wolfbridge group might come along and torch his daughter’s house or
something. So, he just blames the fire
on a grease fire in the kitchen and says it got out of control and refuses to
answer Ben’s questions. Now Ben is
getting a true sense of the scope of this evil organization.
In case it wasn’t clear that
this group was evil from them burning a cute old couple’s house to the ground,
we also see them beat the living shit out of poor Mack near the end of this
episode. Actually, I thought this was
gonna be the conclusion of the ep, the big cliffhanger to hook us back for next
week, but it’s actually just the end of act three before we go to a commercial
and return for act four. See, Karen is
at the rehab center with Dr. Reese from Psycho III, ready for a nice counseling session and waiting for Mack to
arrive. The only problem is that when
Mack pulls up to the parking lot and gets out of his car, a bunch of thugs come
up to him and kick his ass. I did not
enjoy seeing this because I love Mack and I don’t want to see him hurt, but of
course for storytelling purposes this is dynamic stuff that further illustrates
how insidious and wicked this Wolfbridge group truly is. Anyway, Karen ditches Psycho III doctor and says that something must be wrong or else
Mack wouldn’t be late, and she’s obviously right. She goes out into the parking lot and notices
his car parked, at which point she finds him slumped behind the wheel, all beat
up and bloody and out-of-it. Oh sweet
dear Jesus, what has happened?
Back to Ben and Val: How are
they doing right now? Well, the two have
a candid chat on the porch of Val’s house and discuss the whole
Gary-impregnated-me drama. Basically Val
asks if this is something Ben can deal with, and the two discuss how they have
missed each other in the last few weeks, how it’s been hard not seeing each
other or talking, and so on. The
conversation gets heated and honestly I wasn’t sure what to make of it, because
it felt like the conclusion of the scene was that Ben can’t deal with this
drama, even though the two are hugging.
I took the hugging as a, “We have to be apart but here’s one last hug
before we split,” kinda thing, but then in our next ep, the two are together
again and everything is cool, so I guess that’s
how we’re supposed to interpret this sequence. Oh yeah, one last thing on Ben:
This week he gets a dangerous assignment in Central America, specifically El
Salvador. He has the opportunity to go
out and report and have adventures in a far away land, and near the start of
the ep he opines how, “It was a mistake to think that I could settle
down.” Now, of course, if he and Val are
back together again, the central conflict is both will he go and should he go. Honestly, I remember this storyline being a
snooze, but it’s not so bad so far. My
least favorite storyline going on at the moment? Oh absolutely, but why sneeze at one
less-than-gripping story when a series is offering you such rich rewards in all
other departments? Anyway, we’ll talk
more about this saga as we proceed through the culminating episodes of the
season.
Meanwhile, Gary’s investigations
into Cathy’s sordid past continue to escalate this week, when he meets with
that investigator guy one more time and learns that Cathy served time in prison
for second degree murder. Hmmm, now what
could this mean? In his efforts to get
to the bottom of this mystery, he continues to play some nice games with Abs,
just like he did last week, kinda sorta dropping hints that he knows something
fishy is going on but never coming right out and saying it. Oh yeah, and we also get a super arty and
fabulous shot that I put into my notes in which Cathy is playing the piano and
singing. The scene begins with
everything out-of-focus and then the camera slowly comes into focus and we see
Cathy’s face reflected upside down in the top of the piano as she plays, and
then the camera moves up so that we’re looking straight at her face. Again, this is ‘80s TV and I’m sure the CBS
suits would be perfectly happy with Bill “Green Beret” Duke just shooting this
in the fastest, blandest way possible, but instead he takes his time to be
artistic. You just know a suit would
probably see effort being put into these shot compositions and be like, “What
is this shit? Just shoot the girl
playing the piano and the guy walking into the room and then move down the lot
to shoot an episode of some shitty sitcom!”
Instead, Duke takes his time and gives us a cool composition.
Going into panic mode, Abs meets
up with Cathy at her palace office (and Cathy is wearing a most fabulous ‘80s outfit;
I feel like Lisa consistently gets to be the most ‘80s character on the
show throughout the four years that she is with us) and orders her to get out
of town. The only problem is that Cathy
has sorta fallen for Gary and doesn’t want to leave, and Abby’s threats to her
are empty anyway because, of course, Cathy can just go to Gary and tell him
everything. Abs tries to threaten her
with, “I’ll tell Gary who you really are and what you did,” and without missing
a beat, Cathy says, “I’ll just tell him that you hired me to keep him
distracted while you stole his money and shagged politicians from Alfred Hitchcock movies.” Cathy wins this
argument and gets up to leave the office all good and triumphant, but the very
last thing we see is Abs picking up the phone and asking to speak with
Ray. Hmmm, who’s Ray? We shall find out next week, so patience dear
reader.
It’s going to take more than a
super violent ass-kicking for Mack to give up on his Wolfbridge investigations,
so we conclude our episode with a fabulously clever move on the part of
Mack. See, a little earlier into the
episode, he goes into The Beverly Hills Building and, probably wondering what
the hell this building is or what that incredibly vague title means, he approaches
the black woman working behind the counter (I notice there are always more
black men and women in Duke episodes and I like it; I think I counted three in
this episode alone; I remind you that black people were not allowed to exist
over on Dallas aside from some very
rare exceptions) and asks her what exactly The Beverly Hills Building is. She says how they handle outgoing or incoming
mail for all sorts of different people, but she’s very vague about it.
Later on, Mack parks his car
outside the building and then sends Eric in with some big piece of mail in one
of those long tubes (like the tube in that episode of The Brady Bunch where the whole family went to that amusement park
and Jan stupidly mixed up Mike’s super important blueprints) addressed to the
Apolune group. The receptionist looks
at the tube and tells Eric, “The Apolune group is very good about picking up
their mail.” Eric leaves and now all
Mack has to do is wait to see who comes to pick up the package and, of course,
it’s Laura. Our very last scene in the
episode is Laura coming out of The Beverly Hills Building with the big tube and
Mack saying, “Laura,” with some serious disappointment in his voice, knowing
now that she is involved in all this and has somehow become a traitor. From there, our episode ends and, if this was
1984, we would have to wait an agonizing fourteen
days for our next ep. If I was alive
at that time, I feel I may have very well killed myself knowing that I had to
wait two solid weeks for another KL ep,
for what else could possibly make life worth living?
So this was a great episode and
really picked up the slack from last week’s not-so-amazing ep. Even though Duke only directs ten eps of the
show, I’m starting to become tempted to say he’s my favorite director, even
more than our most consistent and prolific director, Nicholas Sgarro. I think Duke episodes are possibly the most
cinematic and artistic and they also give us some black faces onscreen which,
as a good little liberal boy, I appreciate seeing, since I know most white
people were still afraid of black people in the ‘80s and would probably rather
not see them on TV shows. Also, this
episode was just exciting and dynamic and everyone in the cast was well served
with good material. Overall, a home run
that leaves me wanting to dive right into the next one (which we did, of
course). Speaking of which, our next
episode which kicks off the 1984 February Sweeps period is Lest the Truth Be Known, so I’ll talk to you about that very soon.