Episode Title: Witness
Season 05, Episode 13
Episode 088 of 344
Written by Richard Gollance
Directed by Nicholas Sgarro
Original Airdate: Thursday, December
22nd, 1983
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Jane Sumner
comes to town, so Greg can't pay attention to Abby. Mack asks Greg to help him
find Tom Jessick. A man tells Greg to get rid of Mack or they'll drop his
campaign. Cathy goes to Abby and says she
wants out of their deal for her to impersonate Ciji, because she doesn't want
to hurt Gary, but Abby won't let her. Val and Mack are concerned about Karen.
Val finishes her book, "Nashville Junction," about Lilimae's life. Ben
asks Val for more of a commitment. Then Val finds out she is three months pregnant
with Gary's baby.
Welcome to Witness.
You’ll recall that when we last left off at the end of Denials, we saw Karen’s friends growing
concerned about her pill popping, her yelling at them that she didn’t have a
problem, and then we ended on that fabulous mirror shot of Karen running into the
bathroom to take some pills and then staring at herself in the mirror, the
camera going into a sorta slow closeup.
After that fabulous ending, I went to pee and My Beloved Grammy went to
the kitchen to make some popcorn. After
I peed, I returned to the kitchen so we could discuss the sheer brilliance of
what we had just watched, and My Beloved Grammy opined that she believed our
next ep would be about Karen doing something about her problem. Is that the case? Not so much, as it’s gonna take a little
while longer before Karen finishes spiraling out of control and truly hits her
rock bottom. Witness is about the escalation of her problem, but as we’ve come
to expect by this point in the series, when the stories are so dense and rich,
it’s about so much more, as well.
For instance, Val’s story this week
is big, and I mean really big. You all remember a few episodes back when
Gary and Val shagged (it was …And Never Brought to Mind and it was seven episodes ago)? Well, this week we are going to find out the
sweet consequences of that night of unbridled passion, but first we open on a
romantic little breakfast scene between Val and Ben. This breakfast takes place at his Plant House
on the outside balcony or whatever and looks rather pleasant, but then Val says
the word “love,” and Ben start to look slightly nervous. Well, of
course he does, because if there’s one surefire way to scare a man away
right and quick, it’s dropping the L-word on him when he least expects it. Even still, I think that Ben also has
feelings for Val that go behind that of a fling; even though he looks nervous,
I don’t think that necessarily means he is afraid of what she’s saying, and
perhaps he’s even feeling it too at this early juncture in their relationship.
However, the big plot twist
which occurs involves a trip Valene takes to her doctor near the middle of the
episode. We learn that she’s been having
some sporadic bleeding in her vaginal regions that she’s mildly concerned
about. I love that KL will actually have the doctor talk about Valene’s menstrual
cycles and spotting, by the way; it keeps the show feeling grounded even as the
plot points all around us get more and more twisted and convoluted. Can you imagine Sue Ellen going to see her
doctor on Dallas and having a
conversation about her own vaginal bleeding?
No, definitely not, no way; this is all KL territory. Anyway, the
doctor tells her there’s nothing to worry about, as she is simply
pregnant. He says it all excited and
happy and I think Val
is excited, too. I mean, duh, we all know
Val has mommy issues thanks to her incredibly fractured relationship with Lucy,
so of course she’s excited to have a baby, but I think she gets nervous when
the doctor tells her that she’s three months along. Uh oh, this doesn’t quite add up with the
idea of Ben being the father of the child, does it?
When we heard Val was three
months pregnant, I jotted it down in my notes and wrote, “How long does she stay pregnant?” I love to actually track the path of how long
TV pregnancies last, because usually they exceed nine months by a wide
margin. Perhaps the longest TV pregnancy
I’ve ever witnessed was on Roseanne (during
those pesky later years that are really not even worth watching at all) when
Roseanne announced her pregnancy on September 21st, 1994, and then
didn’t actually deliver the baby until October 31st, 1995, well over
a year later. Well, in this case, I
can’t remember precisely exactly 100% when
Val has her baby (and I know I could just use the internet to look this up,
but waiting to find out stuff like this is part of the fun of doing this
rewatch), but I know it’s somewhere within the early portions of season
six. So, we know that the big Gary/Val
shag occurred in …And Never Brought to Mind, and that was November 3rd, 1983. Hmmm, now my brain is already aching a bit,
because that’s just a little over a month before this episode, and yet we are
told that Val is three months along. How
did that wind up happening? In any case, I’m gonna do my own personal
retcon just for the sake of my own sanity and declare that the insemination of
Gary’s sperm to Valene’s egg occurred on November 3rd, 1983; now we
will just wait to see when she finally delivers the baby (or babies) and figure
out if she, too, suffers from TV pregnancy that lasts over a year.
In any case, I’m focusing on a
random thing when I should just be focusing on how this pregnancy complicates
Val’s life. One thing I appreciate (and
that I didn’t remember unfolding in this way) is that there is no mystery
presented about who the father is. With
stories like this, you often expect a “Who’s the real baby daddy?” story to pop
up, but here Val has no doubt that the father is Gary. All she does is do the math and realizes that
the gap between November 3rd and December 22nd is
apparently three months and, based on this timeline, Gary has to be the man who
knocked her up. The next step is
figuring out what to do about Ben.
One quick thing I was surprised
did not even get a mention: Abortion.
Now, I’m a good little liberal and so I’m obviously pro-choice, but
that’s not really what this blog is about.
I only mention it because abortion has been brought up on the show
before (remember Karen in Small Surprises or Richard and Laura and THE SLAP in Best Intentions?) and, by 1983, abortion had now been legal for
over a decade and I just feel like, realistically, the doctor would bring it up
as an option just to put everything out on the table. I don’t think that Val would even for a
second entertain the notion of having an abortion, but I still would have liked
to hear it brought up.
Oh yes, I forgot one very
important Val related thing that happens this week that does not relate to her
pregnancy; in fact, this scene occurs before her trip to the doctor, so forgive
my shoddy writing for jumping all out of order.
Anyway, we learn that Val has finished the manuscript of her second
book, Nashville Junction. Can I just say her titles are always
fabulous? Not only that, but don’t they sound like the titles of an ‘80s
nighttime soap opera? Can’t you just
imagine a CBS lineup of Dallas, Knots Landing, Falcon Crest, Capricorn Crude,
and Nashville Junction? Look how cozily they fit in there with the
other shows! I would love to know what
behind-the-scenes genius came up with these book titles, because they rock. Anyway, Val unveils her new manuscript to
Lilimae and we find out that it’s all about Lilimae’s life. This is somewhat similar to how Val took her
real life experiences with the Texas Ewings and used them to write the
pseudo-fiction book of Capricorn Crude. In this case, she has spun a fictional story
out of all the real-life stories her mama has told her about her time singing
and having adventures in her youth. The scene of Val presenting the
manuscript to Lilimae is extremely touching, by the way. It didn’t bring a tear to my eye (perhaps my
heart has turned cold, for I haven’t yet cried at a KL ep upon this rewatch, not even when Sid died), but it did move
me. While Lilimae has been a bit of a
pill these last few weeks, this scene is so cute because you can tell how
genuinely touched she is and it nicely displays her love for Val as well as
Val’s love towards her mama. I also
think that now that Chip is dead and buried and Lilimae had her little chat
with him in the coffin, coupled with this new book that Val’s gonna publish,
have both fused together to allow Lilimae to mellow out a bit, to be less of a
psycho. Certainly, there are no nasty
scenes of her yelling at Ben this week, which is a relief.
Only one person gets to find out
about Val being knocked up this week, but it’s not for lack of trying on her
part. The writing is so good and so much
better than anything I could ever possibly craft, that we manage to keep that
plot point kicking along while also expanding on the other plot points. For instance, when Val goes over to Karen’s
house, clearly wanting to tell her about the baby (and SPOILER ALERT: I know it
winds up being babies, but we don’t
know that just yet so, for the time being, I will just use the singular word),
but instead the scene turns into an impassioned speech on her part about how
watching Karen disappear into a pill bottle is tearing her up. What a fabulous scene this is, and I wish I
had transcribed verbatim exactly what she says to her. Again, I got so caught up in the drama and
the amazing acting of the scene that I just sorta sat and stared at the TV and
forgot to write anything in my notes besides, “Val gives Karen a speech about
pills.” The basic gist of the speech is
that she compares Karen’s pill popping to Gary’s drinking and says how, thanks
to living with Gary when he was heavy into drinking, she knows all the signs
and sees the same addiction problems manifesting in Karen. She says how she loves her and she doesn’t
want to see this happen to her friend, but then my soul died a little bit
because Karen has this glazed look on her face as she looks at Val and calmly
says, “Please leave me alone.” Oh my
God, now Karen is beginning to reject the advice and impassioned speech of her
best friend in the world, and it actually hurts
to watch.
So who winds up finding out
about the baby? The answer is Mack, in a
fabulous scene in which Val goes to visit him at his office. Mack’s been on the show for well over a year
now, and he’s felt like an established part of the show pretty much since the
moment he showed up. It’s interesting,
because I’m already having a hard time remembering a time of the series where
we didn’t have Mack; he has become a part of the core cast so gracefully that I
can’t imagine the series without him.
Even so, I don’t think we’ve gotten a lot of one-on-one scenes between
Mack and Val up to this point, which is part of why I enjoyed this scene so
much. See, Val stops by Mack’s office
to talk about Karen, and they do talk about Karen for a little while, but
eventually the conversation shifts and Val tells Mack that she’s pregnant. Mack is rather cute in his joy about this
news as he just gets all jubilant and starts going
on about how great this is. Only a
second later, Val tells him that the baby is Gary’s, not Ben’s. Again, I love the way Val just puts it out
there. It’s simply not in her nature to
lie, and perhaps a lesser show would have her keep this deep dark secret and
try to draw it out forever, but on KL,
the writers know their characters so well that they know inherently she
wouldn’t lie or try to keep a secret, so she just flat out tells Mack the
truth.
Val’s material this week also
serves as our final scene of the episode.
See, she winds up sorta accidentally running into Gary in the parking
lot of, I think, the dry cleaners (more of those little realistic touches that
I just love so much; at what point on Dallas
did we ever see somebody take a
trip to the dry cleaners?) and the two have a sorta awkward but also super cute
conversation in the parking lot. This is
another one of those scenes, like them talking about her not accepting any
divorce money, that just goes right into my heart and makes me feel feelings
like I’ve never felt before. In this
case, I’m pretty sure that Val wants to
tell Gary the truth about what’s going on, about what’s growing inside of her
and who really planted it there, but then Gary says something like, “It was
wrong of me to try and be part of your life again,” and you can see at that
moment that Val chooses not to tell him.
After all, the man is married now, and maybe he’s married to a wicked
woman that Val doesn’t like very much, but she’s still so inherently decent
that she’s not going to give him this news that could wreck his new
marriage. This is actually the way we
end Witness and while it’s not one of
your more SUPER EXCITING OMIGOD endings to an ep, it works very well for me
because it leaves you yearning for a Gary/Val reunion and wondering when/if
that will ever occur.
Gary is busy this week with
Cathy, and this is a big episode in that department, as well, because we get a
shocking twist that thickens the plot ever so nicely. See, this week we finally learn that Cathy
and Abby are in cahoots with each other, that Abs somehow found Cathy and,
impressed by her more-than-passing-resemblance to the late, great Ciji, hired
her to hang around with Gary and distract him.
One can imagine Abs thinking, “Say, this worked in an old Alfred Hitchcock movie; why wouldn’t it work now?”
The way we discover what’s going on is that Cathy pays Abs a visit at
her palace office and Abs gets upset and is like, “Didn’t I tell you never to
come here?” Then Cathy starts going on
about, “I want my money and I want it now and then I’m done with this.” Abs helpfully explains this plot twist when
she gives a speech to the effect of, “I hired you to distract Gary while I do
evil things with his money and his company, so you go on ahead and continue to
distract him.” I wanna discuss this plot twist
and how pre-planned it was. In an
earlier episode, we had a scene in which Abs walked in on Gary and Cathy
working out together and her eyes got all big and wide and shocked as she got a
glimpse of Cathy. In my writeup on that
ep, I said how Donna had to do some cool acting and balance conflicting
emotions, since she is already well aware of Cathy’s existence since she hired
her to be here. However, some sources
I’ve found state that, upon bringing Lisa Hartman back to the series, the
writers didn’t know immediately that she’d wind up being a pawn of Abby’s. So, looking at it that way, you could see
Abby’s big eyes upon first glimpse of Cathy as legitimate shock, but I still
prefer to believe that the writers had it all mapped out and that, even right
there, Abs was play-acting to sell the story to Gary better.
One thing the writers do a swell
job of is keeping Cathy likable despite this revelation. This could easily have led to Cathy seeming
villainous or despicable, but she stays sweet and good. Part of that is Lisa’s inherent warmth; she
brings a presence to the screen that is just kind and friendly and she seems
like someone you would like to hang out with.
Part of it is the writing which shows that Cathy wants to get out of
this deal with Abs as quick as possible and before anyone gets hurt. We are starting to learn that she has had a
hard life and is certainly not a rich woman (like when Gary takes her out to a
nice fancy dinner and she says, “I’ve never even been a waitress in a place as
nice as this”), so we can understand why she might get sucked into a scheme
like this just to get some money.
However, now her conscious is getting the better out of her and we get
the sense that she’s starting to really feel something for Gary and she doesn’t
want to lie to him anymore.
Meanwhile, we have Sumner. Remember that thing I said about Mack
immediately feeling like an established member of the cast? Well, the same is true of Sumner, which is
pretty incredible considering he was introduced only nine episodes ago, not
even at the premiere of the season but a couple of episodes into it. But just like Mack, I already can’t imagine
the show without him, even though we watched 78 episodes in a row that were
completely Sumner-free before we met him.
Anyway, he’s real busy this week because his wife, Jane, comes to town. Let’s talk about Jane. Much like M.F. (that’s Mary-Frances in case
you’ve all forgotten), I remembered having a distaste for this character and
being simply bored by her, and yet now I’m immediately changing my mind. Just like M.F., Jane goes a long way towards
helping us understand the kind of man Sumner is and the kind of life he leads. We definitely infer that she and he are
married by-law-only, that they don’t really have much of a relationship anymore
and don’t even really care to pretend like they do except when it helps him
politically. This strikes me as very
real, as I believe most politicians lead very fake “family” lives to try and
impress voters (I’m gonna state right here and now that there is absolutely no
way that Hilary Clinton and Bill Clinton have had sex with each other in well
over 25 years).
A real fast bit of info on
Jane. She is played by Millie Perkins (pictured below),
and that name sure sounded familiar but her IMDb presents nothing that I
recognize, even though she’s built up a nice roster of credits. Looks like she started her career playing
Anne Frank in the 1959 movie The Diary of Anne Frank, and I feel like we probably watched that in school at some
point, but I’m not entirely sure. One
thing that immediately surprised me is that she only has six episodes of KL to her name. This is another one of those cases where I
just assumed she was in a ton of eps, but nope, only six, making a final little
appearance way down the line in 1990 (season eleven, episode sixteen, the
episode called Out of Control). So anyway, Jane shows up in town
and she meets up and has coffee with Karen and learns about how M.F. has been
staying with them for the past few weeks.
While she and Karen seem to get along (and Karen seems to kinda sorta be able to hold her end of the conversation
and not act completely stoned the whole time, even though she’s still a little
loopy), Jane is mad that Greg is continuing to be such an absent father and
shuffle these parental responsibilities onto other people. Hmmmm, this might be a smidge hypocritical as
she herself has been flying around Europe or whatever for the last few months,
but I digress.
There’s a big political dinner
or something later in the episode, and Abs gets her first sighting of Jane and
her eyes get all big and wide and we can tell that she’s horrified. This definitely adds to my theory (well, a
theory My Beloved Grammy shared that I now agree with) that Abs is feeling
something more than lust for Greg; she’s really starting to kinda fall for the
guy. Why else would she be so upset by
the presence of his wife? She knows he’s
married, right? But having to see Jane
at this political function and be nice and civil to her clearly hurts Abs. Later, we see Abs getting all
prepared for a nice big dinner with Greg, similar to her efforts back in I’ll Tell You No Lies. In that instance, Greg never showed up and
Abs was damn mad, but this time he actually appears, although he’s a smidge
late. We can tell Abs is resigned to him
flaking on her because she begins to blow out the candles just as there’s a
knock at the door. She answers it to
find Greg with a rose in his mouth and the fabulous greeting of, “Bon soire,
baby.” Oh God yes, what an image and
what a line, and this little scene spiraled in my brain to a whole slew of
other questions. During my research, I
have learned that William Devane would basically just improvise a ton of his
dialogue and make up whatever he wanted and the rest of the cast had to play
along. I’m a big fan of this style of acting, by the way, and if I was a director,
I would encourage improvisation and spontaneity in my cast to keep things
feeling fresh and real. My question is:
Do you think this little ‘bon soire’ line was improvised? It just has a ring of freshness to it that
makes me wonder if it was in the script.
I’m willing to bet that if one took a gander at the shooting script for
this ep, it would say something like, “Greg enters and looks apologetic.” In fact, I’m willing to bet that even the
rose was improvised, that Devane just found a rose somewhere and decided to use
it in the scene. I have no way of
confirming this aside from hopefully meeting Devane one day (Bill, shoot me an
E-mail), but it’s definitely the sense I get.
You know, looking over my notes
one last time, I think that oughta just about do it for this ep, but I do wanna
discuss one more thing, and that’s the absence of Diana. Diana sits out this episode, the next one,
and the one after that. For all I know,
she sits out even more eps after that, but I’ll have to wait until My Beloved
Grammy and I power through our next disk to find out. Where is Diana? In the case of this episode, we don’t find
out; she’s just sorta not around. I
wonder if this is just the way the show was being written or if it has to do
with any behind the scenes turmoil with Claudia Lonow and her fondness for nose
candy. In any case, I confess I didn’t
miss her. While I have grown to
appreciate Lonow’s acting more as we’ve gone through the series and I think
she’s really improved, Diana is just not the kind of character I’m gonna love
having to watch. Indeed, she’s going to disappear
next season and I know that I really won’t be missing her, and I doubt My
Beloved Grammy will either (she has repeatedly stated that Diana is her least
favorite character on the show), so I don’t particularly care that she’s absent
from this one. It’s just kinda
interesting to note that she got bumped into the opening credits this year and
her character was really getting a shit-ton of focus for that first batch of
eps, but now I feel like she is beginning to be phased out. I’m gonna pay strict attention to see when
she shows up again on the series and exactly how the writers wind up finishing
up her time on the series, because we really don’t have that much longer until
she goes away forever.
By this point, I am saying this
with every episode, but this was another great one. So much happened that it’s almost hard to
remember everything. We’ve got Val and
her pregnancy, Karen and her pills, Greg and Jane, Abs continuing to fall for
Greg, and of course Cathy and Gary and that big plot twist that’s so
exciting. It’s a packed 48 minutes and I
continue to admire the way the writers can juggle all these stories without
ever losing focus of any of them; such skill this must take! While we’re up to 1983-1984 and the other
nighttime soaps are already starting to wane in their popularity and quality (I
will actually say that this year gave us my favorite season of Dallas ever, but it’s within the very
next season that we start to see signs of a shark fin approaching Southfork), KL is just getting better and better,
and while I’ve never done a full-on James From London week-by-week breakdown of each episode of each nighttime soap, I feel pretty comfortable saying KL has to be the best one on TV at this
point, just presenting us with top quality entertainment every single week.
Great recap. I'm watching S14 and an just about to witness the (brief) return of Diana. Lonow was the EP on "Sean Saves the World" last season (or the season before?)
ReplyDeleteI remember Diana being a lot more tolerable in S14. I think getting away from the cul-de-sac was a good thing for her...and the viewers!
ReplyDeleteDoes it ever get explained how Abby found Cathy in the first place? Did she put an ad in the paper or something?
ReplyDeleteI just found this blog and I'm really enjoying it! I was a 11 when Knots started and was already hooked on Dallas. In the end, Knots was my favorite. Dallas was very good for several years, but all the things you point out on your blog--the subtle artistry, great writing and interesting storylines, and terrific acting of the cast--made Knots my top pick. I grew up on the East Coast, and Knots came on at 10:00 pm on Thursdays. My family knew if anyone called me during Knots, they were to take a message!
ReplyDeleteReading your summaries takes me back. I absolutely hated the character of Diana. I pined for years to see Gary and Val get back together. I remember Ted Shackelford on some talk show once said he thought the show needed to keep the two apart as they were more interesting that way, much as you have stated. But it killed me back in the day.
Like other posters, I did like Cathy, but not as much as I liked Ciji. I think the producers responded to the outcry of fans and brought Lisa Hartman back, but then they weren't really sure what to do with her half the time, although these earlier storylines were good.
Looking forward to working through more of your blog!
Even though she does not appear, Diana is mentioned in this ep. Cathy sorta relents to do more of Abby's dirty work in distracting Gary, but asks her if she do something about Diana. Cathy doesn't deserve another tongue lashing from Diana like the one she received last episode, but Abby says she can't just throw her niece out. So we must presume she's still living at the ranch...
ReplyDeleteHey, if Abs found Cathy, is she also the one who named her? Cathy Geary. C.G. Ciji. After all, Gary's pretty dense. Maybe he needed the name as a hint. 🤣🤣🤣