Episode Title: …So Shall You Reap
Season 05, Episode 19
Episode 094 of 344
Written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman
Directed by Alexander Singer
Original Airdate: Thursday,
February 9th, 1984
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Ben proposes to
Val and says he'll raise the baby as his own. She accepts. Cathy tells Gary that she killed a man in
self defense (but she really took the blame for a murder that Ray committed). She says Abby hired her to divert him from her
business dealings, but she fell in love with him. Laura tells the MacKenzies
about Apolune and Mark St. Claire. Mack barges into Abby's office, but she
denies knowing anything. She tells Westmont if Gary finds out and sues her she
would win. She can claim he's mentally unstable because he's been trying to
re-create Ciji, a dead girl. Greg gives a press conference saying Abby got the
variance and re-instates Mack. Gary confronts Abby, who feigns innocence. He loses it and starts trashing the room and
screams at her to get out of his life. Abby runs to Greg's, only to find him in
bed with Laura. Abby tries to talk to Gary, but he tells her to contact him
through his lawyer.
Back when I was still powering
through the early years of KL, the
season one through three era, even though ongoing soap opera-like storytelling
started to mix in with the foundation starting at season two, episodes were
still often pretty self-contained and had a story that would begin and grow and
end all within the course of the 48 minutes.
Looking back, I now realize that season three’s dreadful Silver Shadows truly marked the very end
of that type of storytelling, and since the passing of that episode, we’ve been
in the midst of an ongoing, continuous saga that you need to watch week-to-week
to truly keep up with. My point? Well, back in those days, I knew and expected
that eps would have their own sorta self-contained flavor and be distinct from
one to the other, and I feared that when we leapt into the glorious season
four, the episodes would start to blend together into a big mush of brilliance
and I would have a harder time remembering them and writing about that. Happily, however, I am discovering that all
the eps still manage to be distinctive and, even as they explore an ongoing,
growing storyline, the eps will individually have their own themes and arcs
within the 48 minutes.
This leads us straight into the
episode up for discussion today, …So
Shall You Reap. The title alone
gives us a sense of what this story will be about, someone having to deal with
the consequences of all their actions, having to reap what they’ve sewn, having
to explain their actions. It doesn’t
take a genius to figure out that the character in question is one Abby Fairgate
Cunningham Ewing Sumner (I like using that big, epic name of hers sometimes,
but I am of course getting a bit ahead of myself, as by this juncture in the
series she would be Abby Fairgate Cunningham Ewing). All season, Abs has been pulling strings,
manipulating people, lying to her husband about everything she’s doing the way a certain "President" lies to America about everything he is doing, and
generally being wicked in her official transformation into The Female J.R. So, the dominos have been set up very nicely
throughout the course of the year, and now we are going to see all of them
start to fall down at the same time.
Remember the glorious 1981 movie Body Heat, in which William Hurt said to Kathleen Turner, “Sometimes the shit
comes down so hard I feel like I should wear a hat?” Well, Abs had better go get herself some
fabulous 1984 hat this week, because the shit is about to come down.
Okay, so it’s obviously an
Abs-centric episode, but of course everyone in the cast has something to do
this week, because basically everybody has been effected by Abby’s behavior in
some way or other. We begin the episode
with another direct continuation from our last show’s ending, our second ep in
a row to do this. Now I realize you
could actually fuse an incredible trilogy
together if you were clever and knew how to edit out those pesky episode
credits that play at the start; you could fuse Second Chances with Lest the Truth Be Known with …So Shall You
Reap and have an incredible three hour block of television drama and it would probably play
brilliantly. Anyway, we start in the
MacKenzie house with Laura continuing to spill the beans to Mack and
Karen. She’s finally had enough after
all the scary phone harassment of last ep, so now she’s ready to tell it
all, and tell all she does. I don’t believe Laura leaves anything out of
her confession, for she is officially ready to wash her hands of Abs and all
the lying and cheating she’s been a party to since she first went to work at
Gary Ewing Enterprises. I want to take a
moment to discuss the character of Laura and why, inherently at her core, she
is still a good person and I don’t find myself judging her at all for getting
involved with Abs. This is the ep where
Laura gives her famous “piece of the pie” speech (is it actually famous or is
it just famous in my world in which everything I do or say or think about
somehow links back to KL?). To explain the piece-of-the-pie speech, it
basically takes place when Laura is sitting on Karen’s couch and has finally
confessed everything. We get the sense
that Laura and Karen are ready to have peace with each other and be friends
again. That’s another thing I had clear
forgotten about this season, by the way, that nearly the whole season is spent
with Karen and Laura, good friends all the way since Pilot, barely speaking or interacting with each other, basically
enemies for the year. It’s so good to
see them get back into the state that they are meant to be in, much like it’s
been refreshing to see Karen climb out of her pill-stupor and transform back
into the Karen we know and love.
Oh yeah, the speech. Well, we actually heard Laura give a
semblance of this speech to Abs many many eps ago, more near the start of the
season (blanking on the title). It boils
down to the fact that when Sid died, he left Karen with a thriving business,
when Gary and Val split up, Val was just two seconds away from becoming a very
successful published author and an independent and self-sustaining woman. Richard left Laura and what did she get? She says how he left her with a failing
restaurant that she had to sell and which she saw essentially no profit from,
and she concludes with, “I guess I just wanted my piece of the pie. I saw the chance to take it and I did.” Laura’s candor and ability to be frank about
her own feelings and actions is part of what I find so endearing about
her. None of us are perfect and we all
make mistakes and we’ve all done things we are ashamed of. Laura has not spent the season as a
moustache-twirling villainous intent on screwing over Gary after he handed her
a job; rather she just got sorta sucked into Abby’s wicked ways, and I think it
also helps that through the season, we have seen how uncomfortable so much of
Abby’s behavior has made her (remember when she asked Abs, “Don’t you feel bad
about the fact that people are going to lose their homes?”). It’s another key example of that skilled KL writing that Laura can do things that
are unethical and against her own friends, but we don’t judge her or hate her
for it, because she is a full-fledged character and on this show, nobody is black
or white; there are shades of grey in everyone on screen.
Speaking of shades of grey, now
would be a good time to catch up with Cathy and her adventures. Early in the ep, we have her riding horses
with Gary, and we get a bit of explanation on the man she killed. She says, “He tried to take what I didn’t
want to give,” and I think we can all infer the meaning in that little
statement, can’t we? I think I may have
gone on one of my perhaps controversial rants back when Lilimae ran over Chip
about how I didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with what she
did, and I’m gonna make a similarly bold and possibly controversial statement
now. I don’t believe it’s wrong to kill
a man who is trying to rape a woman. If
you’re walking along and you suddenly come upon some woman being viciously
sexually assaulted by a man, go ahead and kill the motherfucker, Charles Bronson-style; I don’t have any problem with that whatsoever. Don’t wanna get killed? Then don’t rape a woman. Case closed.
My rant is kinda pointless in
this instance, however, because I think we viewers all know that this is a lie,
that the truth is that Cathy took the fall for someone that her stupid freckled
husband, Ray, actually killed. I believe
this twist is revealed a little later in the ep, but I was able to call it
early on. Oh, and by the way, Ray is
still hanging around this episode, being generally evil and unpleasant. See, I think it was in our last episode that
Cathy and Ray were getting ready to leave together when Ray turned the car
around and sped back to Westfork and made some vague reference to going back to
take what they deserve. I’m not sure
what he means by this. Steal some of
Gary’s valuable stuff? Find his safe and
steal the money in there? Work up some sort
of blackmail? In any case, that’s the
reason Cathy is still hanging around, but we certainly get the sense that she
doesn’t want to be a part of whatever wicked plan Ray is hatching.
Val and Ben are now officially
back together, and we open on an incredibly cute scene that actually reminds me
of a real life story that I’m going to share in a moment. In fact, what the fuck, I’ll share the story
now. When my Grampy (rest in peace) and
My Beloved Grammy were first going out and living together (this would be the
late ‘80s, probably around season ten in the KL chronology, which is the way I try to track everything
throughout human history), one day early in the year of 1989 they were sitting
at the table, having breakfast, and my Grampy said, “You know what I’d like to
do this year?” My Beloved Grammy asked
him what would he like to do, and he said, “I’d like to get married. I wanna get married in the summer. I wanna get married outside. I wanna wear a white tux.” It was as casual as that, and My Beloved
Grammy agreed to all of his ideas and went off to work, and she says it was
only a little later in the day that she was like, “Wait, did he say that?” So she called him up and she asked if he was
serious and he said, “Hells yes, I was serious,” (he may not have actually
said, “Hells yes,” but I’m adding that part to make it a funnier story), and
that was that. They did indeed get
married that summer, it was indeed outside, and he did indeed wear a white tux
(and then one year later I came into the world).
This scene really reminds me of
that story, because Ben is eating a sandwich Val made for him, he takes a bite
of it, and then he says, “Marry me.” Val
is like, “What?” and Ben says, “This is the best bacon and avocado sandwich
I’ve ever eaten,” and says how he must be married to the woman who made it for
him. Val is reticent, and I understand
her feelings, mostly since Ben has not even been on the show for a full season
yet, but also because, as we all know, Gary and Val are true soul mates and Val
will always hold that special love for Gary.
Even so, everything about Val and Ben is working for me way better upon
this viewing, as I keep reiterating, and I’m starting to find their whole
relationship so unbelievably cute, and Ben is such a genuinely nice and good
person who treats her well, so I also kinda wanna see them get married cuz, you
know, they are cute together.
Fuck, this show is so well
written. Think of how easily this story
could have been completely boring and dumb.
Really, what the writers are doing is planting some obstacles to
continue and keep Gary and Val apart from each other, so Ben could have easily
just been a plot function and not a real character. The fact that I actually do care about both
characters and actually do see how Ben would make a great husband just shows
that the writers care, too. They’re not
gonna just have some guy come in to fill the suit of being Val’s
boyfriend/husband for a little while until they’re ready to get Gary and Val
together. Instead we have full
characters living full lives and we can understand all the different
relationships going on in all those lives.
It’s been awhile since I’ve
discussed The KL Rapid Cut (and when
I say “awhile,” I think that means I haven’t mentioned it since episode two, Community Spirit, just 92 short episodes
ago). You’ll recall that this is when
someone says something and then we immediately cut to someone else saying a similar
thing. Here, we’ve got Karen and Val
sitting at a table and discussing marriage while Ben and Mack do the exact same
thing at a different table, so you get to see how Val talks over her feelings
of whether or not she wants to marry Ben while Ben tells Mack about how he knew
proposing to Val was the right thing to do.
I remember there being some clever cross-cutting of dialogue here, but
unfortunately I forgot to jot any examples down in my notes (too damn gripped
by the characters and the dialogue), so I have no examples to give you at this
time. Please forgive me. Anyway, Ben officially proposes to Val
beyond a simple “Marry me” with a mouthful of sandwich a little bit later in
the episode, when he cleverly puts an engagement ring in a shoebox and then is like,
“I bought you a new pair of shoes; they’re Air Jordans since I know how much
you love to play basketball!” Val opens
the shoes, kinda like, “Oh, what a strange gift to get me,” and then she sees
the ring and her eyes light up and she accepts his proposal and it’s all very
romantic.
Meanwhile, Gary is still
continuing his research into exactly what’s been going down with Abs and all
that stuff. He knows that she hired
Cathy to distract him, but distract him from what? He gets the
information from Laura when he finally confronts her at her house and asks her
what exactly Abs has been up to. Laura
tells him how Abs has been using his money to start Lotus Point, essentially to
screw Karen out of her own monetary rights, and how they’ve gotten in bed with
Wolfbridge and how they are the ones running people out of their homes to start
a big development, even if it means burning old people’s houses to the
ground. Gary is horrified by the news
and, I would say, disgusted when he finds out why Laura betrayed him. He asks her how much she’s getting from this
little business venture and you can just see how ashamed Laura is when she has
to say, “5% of Lotus Point.” Gary gets
this very stern look on his face and says, “Thanks, I’ve always wondered what
friendship was worth.” Then he storms
out, and we definitely feel that it won’t be so easy for Laura to repair her
relationship with Gary as it was with Karen.
We really see Abs at arguably
her most wicked near the middle of the episode when she’s talking with Westmont
about how they should handle this situation if Gary decides to up and divorce
her. She’s worried about losing her
fortune, and so she tells Westmont how she’s gonna spin the story to make it
look like Gary is crazy and she had to take over business to compensate. She’ll use the whole Cathy thing as part of
her argument, how Gary became obsessed with trying to bring a dead girl back to
life in the form of Cathy, and then she really starts aiming low when she
brings up the whole alcoholic angle. If
worst comes to worst, she can just say that Gary’s a hardcore alcoholic and
can’t be trusted with anything. Oh man,
this is some of the nastiest and most below-the-belt stuff Abs has ever talked
about pulling and it definitely makes it hard for me to do my “Abs really does
love Gary” theory, although I do still stick to that belief. These characters are so complex that I often
feel like I can’t properly do them justice, really; I’m not a skilled enough
thinker or writer to fully examine the deep intricacies of all these
characters, of the way Abs can be so hell-bent on taking Gary’s money or
throwing him under the bus to serve her needs while still actually loving him
in some other part of her being.
Probably the biggest scene of
the whole episode comes right near the middle, when Gary finally loses it on
Abs. We know this is coming because we
see a hint of it in the thirty second preview and it looks exciting, so we’ve
been waiting for it. Basically, Gary
comes home to find Abs sitting in front of the fire. They make some idle chit chat until Gary asks
her, “What is Apolune?” and when Abs
feigns no knowledge of the subject, Gary flings everything off the table in
front of him and just starts freaking.
He says how Abs lies so damn well it’s scary, then he starts grabbing
her clothes and everything from out of the closet and shoving them into her
luggage, ordering her to get off the ranch.
He gets a good little speech about he wants to forget all about her, how
he wants to never see her again, and he concludes with, “I want to forget that
I ever loved you.” Ouch, man, and I must
confess that, despite it all, there’s something about Donna’s fabulous acting
that makes me already starting to feel sorry for her, right here in this scene
where the shit first starts to come down on her.
Next up, Abs gets a visit from
Ray while sitting on the couch of her palace office and trying to figure out
where to go from here. Honestly, I can’t
remember the exact contents of this scene, what precisely Ray is after or how
Abs is going to give it to him, but I do know that I definitely got a rapey
vibe from Ray throughout this scene.
Okay, so we know that Cathy never killed no guy who was trying to rape
her, that really this mysterious murder that she was incarcerated for was
actually committed by Ray. Even so, I’m
gonna declare that Cathy has been
raped, at least once, and that it was by this guy. I just don’t trust him or his over-freckled
body. I think whenever he and Cathy
first met, he got a little rapey on her and she was either too young or too dumb to
recognize it as such or, I dunno, but in any case I’m sticking to my
theory. There’s also a lot of vaguely
lecherous behavior in this scene as Abs and Ray talk, the way he sorta sniffs
around the place and admires all the expensive stuff, or the way he sips the
glass of red wine that Abs was enjoying.
Abs is dressed in only a night-skirt during this scene, which adds to a
certain rapey tension throughout.
Anyway, the next humiliation
occurs when Abs decides to pay Greg a visit at this hotel, and guess what, we
get another rose-in-the-teeth
moment. In this case, Greg answers the
door and Abs has the rose in her mouth and says, “Bonjour, baby.” She doesn’t do “bon soire,” but that’s
probably because it’s still daytime and Abs knows her French well enough to
know the proper words for how to greet someone that you’re hoping to shag. However, there is no shag for Abs in this
scene, as Greg at first gets sorta upset, saying how he is a married man working on his political campaign and he can’t
have her just randomly showing up at this hotel room whenever she feels like
it. He’s all like, “What if Jane were
here?” Of course, Jane’s not here, but
somebody else is, which Abs finds out very quickly when she opens the door to
the bedroom only to find a naked Laura lying in Greg’s bed, awake and alert and
giving her a rather sly look that almost says, “What are you gonna do about
it?” This is a truly hilarious moment
and My Beloved Grammy, who is not an Abs fan at all (she has said, “Abby is the
devil,” and whenever Abs comes onscreen to do something wicked, she’ll say,
“Ooooh, I just can’t stand her”), actually laughed and clapped at this
fantastic revelation, as yet one more facet of Abby’s life begins to crumble
down around her. Now she has lost her
husband as well as the man she was enjoying shagging on the side; how can
things possibly get worse?
Next up, we have a good scene
between Gary and Olivia. It’s good to
see Olivia again, because I feel like we had a stretch of eps without either
her or Brian, and just as you’re starting to wonder where they’ve gone, she’s
back to be a part of the story. Brian’s
nowhere in sight this week, but I think we can all agree that nobody really
cares about him, right? Gary has a good
relationship with both, but it’s he and Olivia that truly have that special
bond. Anyway, Gary comes upon her
sitting in front of the pond, feeding some ducks. They talk about how, when they moved into
Westfork, they named all the ducks and how the ducks have grown and gotten
bigger and what have you. Olivia
expresses her sadness at the idea of losing Gary from her life and the two hug
and, in my opinion, it’s this moment that makes you wonder if Gary will go back
on what he said to Abs. Yes, he has been
betrayed by her and he’s damn mad about it, but he also truly loves these kids
and, since he began shagging Abs, he’s been a rather decent father to them,
certainly better than he ever was to the poor, so-rarely-mentioned Lucy back on
Dallas. In this moment, I wondered if he might decide
to stick it out for the kids, especially for his love of Olivia. No such luck, because the next
time Abs comes up to the ranch, Gary is very curt and short with her, saying
how if she needs to contact him, she can do so through his lawyer. He orders her to get off the ranch and stay
off, and we see that even the love and sadness of Olivia was not enough to cool
Gary’s hot rage towards Abs.
The final blow for Abs comes in
the very last scene, and it’s a real painful one to watch. So far this ep, she has lost her little
partner in Laura, who has gone straight and chosen to tell the truth to
everyone on the show. She has lost her
afternoon delights with Greg, who would now rather shag Laura. She has lost her sexy ranch home at Westfork. She has lost the love and trust of her
husband, who now wants to be divorced from her.
Finally, she has lost half of her fortune, half of that amazing Gary
Ewing inheritance money. The only thing
she has left is her children, which is why the final scene is such a blow. See, Abs arrives at Westfork to finish
packing and clearing out her things.
She’s leaving the ranch, standing on the front porch, luggage in hand,
telling Olivia to get a move on, for it’s time for them to go. At this moment, a crying Olivia runs into
Gary’s arms and declares that she wants to stay here, living with Gary, that
she doesn’t want to go be with her mother.
Abs tries to convince her to come along, but Olivia flat refuses.
We
get the sense of a true rift forming between the two, and I’m getting some
strong hints for the future, for the next couple of seasons we’ve got looming
on the horizons, when Olivia gets a little older and her relationship with Abs
becomes so volatile. Am I mistaken to
say that stuff is all getting started here?
I get the feeling that this is not just Olivia being a brat, that it’s
not just a case of playing favorites by saying she’d rather stay with
Gary. She really loves Gary as a father
(especially since we haven’t seen her real
father since way back in the start of season three with The Surprise) and now she’s angered and
disgusted by her mother who has driven Gary to this breaking point. Finally,
Abs accepts what is happening and sorta asks Gary to keep an eye on Olivia and
take good care of her and Gary nods and agrees.
Our very final image is Abs, completely alone and degraded, having to
drive her car off of Westfork with nobody else in the vehicle with her. We follow the car as it begins to drive off
the property and into the distance and boom, that’s when we get our “Executive
Producer”s credits and the conclusion of a most fabulous 48 minutes of KL.
Pretty
damn good, huh? Like I said, this
episode has a distinctive theme of Abby’s world turning to shit, but what’s
also impressive is how well served everybody else in the cast is; it’s not just a
full on Abs-show. All the other stories
this week were equally gripping, yet they all seemed to revolve around this
central thesis of Abs getting what’s coming to her. The thing I found the very most impressive
about this ep, however, was Donna’s fabulous acting, which managed to make me
still feel some sympathy for Abs, despite all the wicked things she’s been
doing. Now that’s me, of course; when
the ep was over, I asked My Beloved Grammy if she felt even the smallest ounce
of sympathy for Abs, and she said no. My
Beloved Grammy says a wicked woman is one of the worst things in the world,
that Abs has been a liar and a traitor for too long and that she’s finally
getting what she deserves. While I
absolutely agree with that sentiment, because of the way Donna plays her, that
true vulnerability that we see coming out in this episode, the fact that I
still believe she feels love for Gary deep down in her heart, the fact that
everything goes wrong for her at exactly the same time managed to elicit an
empathetic response from me. Abs might
do evil things, but she still has feelings.
That final blow in which her own daughter wants nothing to do with her
was really when I felt the most sympathy.
I think for all of Abby’s faults, she’s never shown to be a bad or
neglectful mother and she does love
her children truthfully and genuinely, so you know to be abandoned by Olivia in
this way must just hurt so bad.
Overall,
a fabulous episode, and of the five eps watched by My Beloved Grammy and I upon
our last visit, I’d declare this one my favorite, for having a real running
theme going through its core and managing to weave that theme throughout every
character and story we see. I also think
this ep, of the five on that disk, is probably the best display of the great
acting from the entire cast, because not only do we get all the Abs stuff, but
also Laura’s great “piece of the pie” speech, which has always stuck with
me. Okay, so that about does it for …So Shall You Reap. Let us now move on to High Ideals.
"If I have to choose between love and money, money is going to win every time." I agree that Abby loves Gary, but this one statement to Sumner earlier in the season sums up Abby very nicely. Money is always going to be her number one motivator.
ReplyDeleteYeah, this episode is great. The scene of Mack exploding in on Abby's office and spelling out every detail of her secret plan, and Abby trying to hold on to a non-chalant face while her eyes seem to screaming "Oh shit!" is priceless. All happening in front of the little Lotus Point development model that looks like something Mike Brady would be carefully carrying around the house for fear of flattening it.
ReplyDelete"Mom always said 'Don't play ball in the house!'" :)
ReplyDeleteThat scene where Abby comes home to the ranch and Gary is sitting on the couch FUMING and Abby has no idea whats's about to hit her...so painfully tense!
ReplyDeleteImagine if Gary had known about the affair with Sumner - how much angrier would he have been with Abby? And then Sumner ... he is a great character but a little too over the top this season. But he gets a lot better as quiet and mysterious Sumner in later seasons.
ReplyDelete