Episode Title: Lest the Truth Be Known
Season 05, Episode 18
Episode 093 of 344
Written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman
Directed by Larry Elikann
Original Airdate: Thursday,
February 2nd, 1984
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Ray comes to the
ranch and sweet talks Cathy. They sleep together and decide to leave the next
day. Cathy says goodbye to Gary and cries about messing everything up. Then Ray
decides he wants her to stay and get a piece of
Gary's fortune. Cathy tells Gary she was in jail for murder and he hugs her.
Ben asks Val to go to El Salvador with him, but she says no as she's pregnant.
Mack follows Laura and demands to know about Apolune. Laura says it's Mark St.
Claire's company. St. Claire calls Laura and says to sever her ties with Mack
and threatens her children. Laura starts to get a lot of hang up calls and
becomes very paranoid. Finally Laura tells Mack that she'll tell him what she
knows if he'll help her. Laura tells him that Apolune is Abby's company.
When we last left off in Second Chances, Mack and Eric had
cleverly planted a package for the Apolune company at The Beverly Hills
Building and all Mack had to do was wear his cool ‘80s sunglasses (the ones
that are hiding his swollen, beat up face at the moment) and wait to see who
was gonna come and pick up the package.
The revelation that the mail recipient was, in fact, Laura, provided the
cliffhanger for the end of our last show, and we pick up Lest the Truth Be Known at that exact same moment, even replaying
the last couple of seconds with Laura walking out of the building and Mack
saying, “Laura” to himself. This is a
fabulous way to get started, almost making it feel like you could meld both eps
together and create your own two-hour experience of KL joy. From there, we go to a nice
overhead helicopter shot of the city freeway as Mack and Laura drive along, and
our episode credits play over those, and I have two things I wish to note. The first is that one of my favorite KL directors, Larry Elikann, is in the
director’s chair this week (his last contribution to the saga was Marital Privileges near the start of the
season) and I’m excited to see him. The
second is the writers of this particular ep (as well as the next two in a row)
are Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman (pictured below). These
names jumped out at me as these are the two guys (I am pretty sure they are a
gay partnered writing team) who created the Showtime American version of Queer as Folk. If I haven’t mentioned it before, I am a big
fan of that series (I am, after all, a queer, and I try to support my people)
and I think it was a fabulously acted and rather addictive series that felt
very nighttime soap most of the time, but with a lot of penises and man-on-man
sex scenes thrown in for good measure (that improves everything, of
course). Anyway, I don’t know if these
two were, like, officially on the writing staff for the season or if they just
got hired on to do these three eps in a row, but I noted their names in the
opening and was pretty excited to see them.
Okay, so what happens after Mack
trails Laura’s car for awhile? Well, it
turns out that Laura is on her way to an afternoon delight with Gregory Sumner,
the man for the ‘80s. She arrives at his
fancy hotel and comes into the room and the two start making out, getting busy,
clearly ready to get naked and commit male-on-female sexual intercourse. The only problem is that Mack decides to be a
boner-killer by bursting angrily into the room and shouting and demanding
information, something he enjoys doing quite a lot at this juncture in the
series. He starts demanding to know
about who Apolune really is and why Laura’s the one picking up the mail and
how it connects to the Wolfbridge organization, all that exciting stuff.
Way way back in season one (I
can’t believe I actually remember this, but it was in my writeup for episode
five, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?),
I talked about my love of KL’s
ability to be both wildly gripping and incredibly well written while also often
quite campy, and I even specifically said something like, “In a few seasons
we’ll talk about my beloved Kevin Dobson and his ability to go from being a
great actor to a master of camp, sometimes all within the same scene.” Well, that’s all nicely on display in this
very sequence, in which The Dobsonator (who, I remind you, is playing probably
my third favorite character in the entire run of the series) really gets the
chance to ham it up. He’s still rocking
those hilariously large 1984 sunglasses, and then he gets all up close to Laura
and he’s like, “Who are these people, Lauuuuuuuurrrrrrra? I’ve lost everything, Lauuuuuuuuuura, my job,
I might be disbarred. They’ve beaten the
hell out of me, Lauuuuuuuuura,” and with that third bizarrely elongated
“Laura,” he also pulls off his big sunglasses to show how beat up and ugly his
face is, and good makeup, by the way, because his left eye really does look
like it’s swollen shut and is pretty nasty to look at. But anyway, it’s a fabulously campy bit of
acting and I love him for it.
Devane gets to do some pretty
solid acting in this scene and also gets the chance to do some yelling of his
own. Obviously he’s pretty irritated
with Mack not just for throwing accusations out at him that may or may not be
founded in truth, but also for killing his afternoon delight. He was just seconds away from sliding into
Laura’s moist, warm vagina when Mack came in to start screaming and scaring
people with his Elephant Man face, and I’d be damn mad, too, if I was
blue-balled in such a fashion. But
Sumner also says how Mack needs to keep a cooler head and, in general, not just
run around bursting into rooms and screaming things, how he’s gonna have to
trust him to work this situation out, shit like that. Again I stress how interesting it is that
Devane has only been on the show since the fourth episode of the season, yet
already he feels like such a core, established member of the cast and I just
can’t imagine the show without him.
Laura spends the rest of the
episode in a bit of a paranoid manic mode, and Elikann does a good job of
making this feel like a horror movie or a thriller for the majority of the 48
minutes, specifically with the brilliant way that he uses darkness, light, and
shadow to make familiar sets look scary and ominous and the way he frames the
telephone to seem like a frightening weapon of some sort. What do I mean by this? Well, early in the ep Laura and Abs are at
the palace office, working on whatever, when the phone rings. Abs answers it and it’s St. Claire (the campy
James Bond villain guy, you all remember), but he’s not interested in speaking
with Abs; he wants to talk to Laura.
Elikann really loves his Wayne’s World-style extreme close-ups of faces, and he gets kicked off right here with
one of Laura as she answers the phone.
If I recall correctly, St. Claire is sitting in that evil, dark room of
his that he enjoys spending so much time in, and in his fabulously droll and wicked
way, he just sorta casually asks, “How old are your children now, Mrs.
Avery?” At first I thought the
implication here was that the Wolfbridge group was gonna come to rape and
murder Daniel and Jason 3, but then St. Claire says something along the lines
of, “It would be hard for them to grow up without their mother,” or something,
so I think really he’s threatening Laura’s life and not the lives of the
children, although I could be misreading that.
In any case, this little
conversation sends Laura into a paranoid free-fall that causes her to poop her
pants every single time the phone rings.
There’s a scene near the middle of the episode in which Lilimae has
presumably been babysitting the kids for awhile, because we begin the scene on
her standing in the Avery living room (a set that I feel like we haven’t seen
in a good long while, maybe not since Richard was still part of the cast) as
the phone starts ringing. She answers,
there’s nobody there, she hangs up, and then Laura enters after a busy day of
work helping Abs be evil. Lilimae says
something casual about how the phone kept ringing but it must have been kids
doing prankcalls, but Laura looks rather panicked and Lilimae asks her if
everything is okay. To set the stage for
this fabulous scene, let me just say that Elikann frames it in such a way that
the big scary old-fashioned corded phone is set up in the foreground, basically
center frame, in complete focus, while Lilimae and Laura are kinda out-of-focus
and in the background. This is what I
mean about how he turns the phone into this scary entity this week, and every
time it rings we, along with Laura, are like, “Oh shit.” I also remind you (I brought this up way way
back in The Constant Companion) of my
deep love affair with old rotary dial corded phones and I think they are just
much creepier for scary phone calls.
Among the many things cell phones have ruined in the last twenty years
is the creepy phone call, because it was scary to hear that rotary dial phone
ring and not know who could be on the other end, but now our stupid cell
phones just, you know, buzz and it’s
simply not the same effect at all.
Last thing on Laura for a little
while, but we get a little scene of her and Jason 3 this week in which she asks
him to always stay around an adult, like his teachers, and not to go off
playing alone or anything like that.
Jason 3 (pictured below, and who, due to all his morphing, appears to be the only kid on the
cul-de-sac who isn’t aging naturally the way Michael or Olivia are aging; he
seems kinda locked in the same perpetual age since around season two or three)
is put-off by all this and tries to ask his mom what’s going on, but of course
Laura keeps hush hush and doesn’t say, “There’s an evil mafia-type organization
that I’ve sorta accidentally gotten into bed with and they called yesterday to
make vague threats about your life and mine.”
Instead, she just says she wants him safe and that’s it.
Meanwhile, in the nearby house
of Val + Lilimae, we officially see that Val and Ben are back together. This was a bit vexing to me at first, since
that’s not how I interpreted the conclusion of their big porch talk last
week. If you’ll recall, they spoke about
all the drama involving Val growing Gary’s baby/babies in her belly and the
scene ended with them sorta hugging and crying and what have you, but I didn’t
realize that was supposed to mean “back together.” However, we begin this scene with Ben very
casually hanging around the living room and then when Val comes in, he gives
her a nice kiss on the lips and everything is cool, so we can infer that they
are back together again. Ben is still
prepping for this trip to El Salvador and my least favorite storyline going on
currently. Make no mistake, this isn’t
bad stuff at all; it’s not like the early Kenny/Ginger stuff that was so
completely uninteresting as well as isolated from the rest of the cast; it’s
just that so much excitement is going on at this point and Ben’s little trip to
El Salvaor (which I think winds up taking up, like, two or three episodes) is just
kinda blah. The big conflict here is not
just whether he is going to go, but also if Val is going to accompany him. Personally I’d call it a poor choice for a
pregnant woman to go visit some dangerous area of the world, but it’s Val’s
choice and not mine (I’m so stupid when it comes to geography and have never
taken the time to look at a globe and, therefore, have no actual idea where El
Salvador is, but it sounds far away and scary, so let’s just assume it’s
bad).
Lilimae is starting to mellow
out a bit and become the Lilimae that we all know and love (well, My Beloved
Grammy still doesn’t love her, but
she does always say that Julie Harris plays her perfectly; she just has a
distaste for the character inherently).
In this ep, she gets a lovely little scene in private with Ben in which
she subtly (subtly by Lilimae standards) tries to discourage him from going to
El Salvador. She says how, yes, she had
lots of cool, sexy, exciting adventures back in her youth, but that “I’m living
the best part of my life right now.” She
explains how, at a certain point, a person needs to settle down and be able to
look at someone in the eyes and “know that they know you.” I think her little speech gets to Ben, but he
still winds up going on his little trip a few eps down the line, so I guess it
doesn’t work too well on him.
Oh yeah, one last little bit
related to Ben that I want to talk about, just because it shows thought for the
past histories of the characters and it made me happy. There’s a scene near the middle of the
episode in the MacKenzie kitchen between Karen and Val in which Val is
discussing how great Ben is, but how she still finds herself thinking of Gary and
doing comparisons. Karen, who is now
clean and sober and pill-free and back to being a good friend, casually says
how that’s not a big deal and how she still finds herself comparing Mack to
Sid. Yay for Sid callbacks! Doing a little bit of looking at episode
numbers, I realize that Sid has now been dead for sixty episodes (he died back in episode 33, Critical Condition), and it would be so easy for the writers to
just stop mentioning him or thinking about him at this point, but they don’t do
that. He was Karen’s husband for like nineteen
years, and just because she’s now married to a wonderful new man does not mean
she has to stop mentioning her wonderful first husband. I’ll be curious to see if/when we stop
getting references to Sid, but at the moment I’m pleased that he’s not
forgotten; he continues to cast a shadow over proceedings even as we nearly
finish up the fifth season of the series.
Meanwhile, the drama is heating
up over at Westfork with the arrival to the ranch of Ray. Who is Ray?
Well, we know that, whoever he is, he’s here because Abs called him in
our last ep (you’ll remember it was after she told Cathy to take a hike and
Cathy refused to do so, then we finished the scene with Abs picking up her
phone and speaking to an off-screen Ray).
Anyway, he arrives in a nice convertible while Cathy is enjoying a ride
on a horse, and when she sees him she tries to get away, but we are then
treated to a very long and epic chase scene with Ray on wheels and Cathy on
hooves. Seriously, this goes on forever
with him speeding along, trying to catch up with her, even plowing right
through a fence at one point to continue the pursuit. I get the feeling that Cathy doesn’t want to
see this guy, but I guess Ray doesn’t get the message or he’s just too evil to
care, and he does finally catch up with her and get her to chill out a
bit.
Cut to a little bit later, and
we see that Ray is staying at some shitty motel in which Cathy comes to visit
him. I may be misremembering my scenes,
but I believe he’s shirtless in this part and I really wish he wasn’t. This is one very hairy man, the kind of man
who strips completely naked and you think he’s still wearing a sweater. When did we men evolve out of this phase? It seems like if you were a man in the ‘80s,
you were hairy, damn it, and that’s just the way men were made, but I feel like
we’re not like that anymore. Do I just
do a better job of picking and choosing my men to get naked with? Did we become hairless as a natural evolutionary
progression like the way we slowly turned from apes into humans? In any case, the disgustingly hairy Austin
Powers chest hair is one of the only aspects of the ‘80s that I don’t
absolutely love, and this guy is rocking chest hair that brings me vivid
Vietnam-esque flashbacks to shirtless Mark Graison in the shower (ew).
But enough about his chest hair,
what’s the deal with the actual character?
Well, he starts lecherously kissing Cathy like "President" Trump kissing any unsuspecting and unwilling women who makes the mistake of crossing his path and talking about how he’ll
never let her go again and then he drops the bomb, “You are my wife, after
all.” Ah, so now another Cathy secret
emerges for us to ponder over. Why/how
did she get married to this shitty, ugly guy, and how long has she been away
from him? I don’t think it takes a
genius to figure out that Ray is the one who actually killed whoever the hell
got killed and that Cathy took the fall and went to prison for his crime. That little plot twist is not revealed in
this ep, but I think in the next one, and I don’t even consider that a spoiler
since I called it the moment this guy
showed up onscreen. We also get an uncomfortable
scene of the two characters in bed at the motel which helps us to understand
who this guy is and where he comes from.
It looks like the two just had a shag (and you can tell because Cathy
has some serious rub-burn all over her entire body), and now Ray is getting
ponderous, reflecting on how they met and how they got married and all
that. He asks, “How old were you when we
first met?” and Cathy answers, “Thirteen,” and at first I said, “Ew,” but then I
realized that the two are probably the same age or at least close to it so,
presumably, they didn’t hook up when she was 13 and Ray was 30 or something
like that (I mean, right?). During this scene, Ray looks
really happy in a creepy and lecherous way while Cathy is gazing off screen and
looking super duper sad. Clearly the
reentry into of this man her life (and her vagina) was not something she was
hoping would occur, and now that he’s here, she’s not exactly thrilled about
it.
A real fast update on the very
hairy man who is playing Ray. When he
came onscreen, I was convinced I’d seen him before, even theorizing that he may
have been a Transmorpher, but I was mistaken in both regards. The actor’s name is Bruce Fairbairn (pictured below) and he’s
in some stuff (though nothing after the year 2000, I note), but nothing that
really jumped out at me, nothing that I recognized. I imagine if I was him, this multi-episode
guest spot on KL would be the
highlight of my career (but if I was any actor
in the world and I wound up in a few eps of KL,
it would be the highlight of my career).
Okay, moving on.
Obviously Gary is having some
trouble with trusting Cathy now. After
all, in the last few weeks he has learned that she’s been receiving checks from
Abs since before he ever met her, that she has lied about where in the world
she comes from, and that she spent time in prison for second degree
murder. All in all, not a good rap
sheet, and because of the way things are unfolding, Gary can’t just come out
and ask her what the deal is. Instead he
acts grumpy and annoyed whenever she is onscreen with him, beginning with a
wonderful scene in which a shirtless Gary (you could grate cheese on his
muscles at this point) violently working out his aggression on a punching bag
all to the tune of, um, classical music on vinyl. Boy, what was a surprising choice. I love seeing the vinyl player and the record
spinning around as Gary works, but classical?
Who works out to classical? And this
isn’t even that big, booming, exciting classical, but rather the mellow kind
that you put on over a fancy dinner where you sip red wine and sample some fine
appetizers. In any case, Cathy walks in
on Gary in the middle of his Rocky IV moment
and tries to make chit chat with him, but he’s being short with her and it’s
clear that something is up.
Back to Laura and all that
drama, which leads us to our exciting conclusion, begging to see more eps as
soon as possible. The next time we see
Laura and Abs together at the palace office, Abs happily announces that they
are now the proud owners of Lotus Point, “Everything except the apartment that
started it all.” Abs wants to bust out
the champagne and celebrate their great fortune, but Laura is not so enthused,
mostly because she’s afraid somebody is going to cut the brakes on her car or
something and she’ll wind up suffering the same fate as poor Sid so long
ago. Personally, I also think Abs is
getting nervous and uncomfortable about these shady people they’re dealing
with, but she’s trying to act super happy and like everything is totally normal
and fine.
Greg and Laura meet up a little
later in his hotel room and discuss all these developments. She says how she’s scared, how she’s been
getting these weird calls, how she doesn’t know what to do, and Greg says, “I
personally guarantee your safety,” to which she smartly responds, “You mean the
way you personally guaranteed Mack’s safety?”
Yeah, that’s a good burn considering the savage beating Mack incurred in
our last ep. After this, she marches out
of the hotel room and we get a fantastic bit of business that absolutely had to be improvised. See, she goes walking off and leaves the door
open, and there’s this guard posted outside, obviously one of the dudes whose
job it is to follow Greg around and keep him protected. Well, when he awkwardly stares into the hotel
room, Greg just unleashes this fury at him and is like, “What’s the matter; are
you a little confused? Forget what your
job is? I’ll tell you what your job is;
your job is to close the door!” The
reason I declare that this had to be improvised is because it’s totally
unnecessary (in a good way, of course) and the scene could have easily ended
with Laura’s little “Mack’s safety” retort and her storming out of the room,
but instead it continues for ten or twenty seconds so that Greg can give this
little speech. Also, it just feels like improv because of the way Devane
plays it and the confused look on the guard’s face. I do know that Devane was notorious for
improvising all the time and the actors had to work to keep up with his energy,
and to me, there’s just no doubt that this is an example of that, and a
fabulous one, to boot.
The episode concludes with Laura
finally having enough. Too many scary
rotary-dial phone calls and threats towards her children have put her over the
edge, so she marches on over to the MacKenzie house and asks Karen and Mack if
she can speak with them. They are ready
to listen and she starts to go on about how she’s sorry for what she’s done,
she’s sorry she didn’t come to them sooner, but she’s ready to tell the truth
now and she hopes that they will help her.
Mack promises to help her and we end the ep with Abs confessing that Apolune
is Abby’s company, and boom, “Executive Producers: Michael Filerman and David Jacobs,” and we conclude the wickedly exciting Lest the Truth Be Known.
Hell yeah, that was a killer
episode. This disk moved in an ascending
order of brilliance, starting with a weaker episode, Reconcilable Differences before moving on to a far-improved Second Chances and now the best of the
batch so far. This one is fabulously
tense and exciting and also scary, as
I tried to illustrate with those fantastic phone shots and generally dark,
almost film-noir lighting. Plus, the
acting remains top notch and that improvised bit with Devane was just killer. Overall, yeah, pretty damn good start to
finish, a fine example of the series working at the top of its game, which, of
course, you could say about pretty much this entire fifth season.
Next up, it’s time for Abs to
finally face the consequences of all her evil and wicked behavior throughout
the year, as an absolutely epic shit-storm starts to rain down upon her with …So Shall You Reap.
Devane is the shit, after all.
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