Episode Title: Finishing Touches
Season 05, Episode 23
Episode 098 of 344
Written by Peter Dunne
Directed by David Jacobs
Original Airdate: Thursday, March
8th, 1984
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Gary is
murdered, and Val flips out. Abby is in shock. Cathy decides to leave the ranch
and Laura invites her to stay with her. Cathy tells Laura she never murdered
anyone and took the blame for Ray. Detective Morrison
tells Abby that she is a suspect in Gary's murder, and he wants to know about
Wolfbridge. Ben is alive, but badly injured and delirious, and is being taken
care of by nuns in a mission. At Gary's funeral, Abby tells Val that she is
Gary's widow, not Val. Laura tells Val that when she and Gary were seeing each
other, Gary only married Abby so that Val would go on with her life. So he
married Abby because he loved Val, not Abby. As the funeral begins, Morrison
asks Cathy to come downtown for questioning. At the police station, Cathy goes
into a room and Gary's there - ALIVE - and they start to kiss.
When we last left off, we had
been told via Mack towards Karen that Gary had just been shot and killed, an
exciting and thrilling cliffhanger that, if I were watching this in 1984, I
would be very eager to see followed up on.
Now, I have stated that I can’t properly wash my brain out from all my
retroactive knowledge, so it’s hard for me to even be able to play along with
the “Is Gary dead or not?” story, but if you were watching in 1984, who
knows? As I have said before, the fact
that Sid Fairgate died permanently in episode 33 of the series has forever set
a tone to linger over the rest of the series, a tone that nobody is ever truly
safe. If they can kill Sid, who, for all
intents and purposes, was arguably the main character of those first two
seasons, then who’s to say they won’t kill off Gary? Just because the saga of Gary and Val has
been central to the series since before the series even started, since they
were originally introduced in those long-ago Dallas episodes, does not mean it’s not a possibility to kill off
Gary at some point in the series, like perhaps now.
Anyway, while I think this is a
good episode and I’m eager to break it down, I do think it’s affected
negatively by the fact that I just can’t quite get into that 1984 mindset and
really believe that Gary is
dead. This whole episode is basically
about characters thinking Gary is dead, and it’s only in the last five seconds
of the episode that we get confirmation that he is, indeed, alive. If I really believed Gary was dead and never
coming back, maybe this episode would have jumped out at me more, perhaps
affected my emotions more strongly. In
any case, let’s explore.
We actually open the episode
with the return of a character that, personally, I was ready to say goodbye to
quite some time ago, the wonderfully corny Detective Morrison, played, as
always, by Richard Donner’s cousin. Yes,
ladies and gentlemen, I thought this character had been retired from the series
after the conclusion of all the Diana/Chip shenanigans, but I was mistaken, for
now he’s back. I peeked at his IMDb one
more time to see if he’d be surprising us with any more appearances, and
there’s only one, our season five finale, Negotiations. After that, Detective Morrison can disappear
into the sky along with Uncle Joe and so many other characters that have played
prominently during a particular season or two before being retired. We open the ep with Morrison walking around
Westfork and making some comment like, “Something told me I’d be back on this
ranch one day,” something similar to that.
Looks like he’s been called in to investigate this sudden and shocking
death of Gary.
Meanwhile, if you’ll recall the
culminating moments from our last show, you’ll remember that Val was on her way
up to the ranch to have a nice chat with Gary about all her problems. Needless to say, she’s not too pleased when
she arrives at the ranch and finds out he’s dead. This is a pretty great moment, by the way,
and while I would understand someone if they were critical of this scene for
being over-the-top, I think it rings pretty true. See, when Val hears that Gary is dead, she
just starts screaming and freaking and yelling, “NOOOOOOOOO!” over and over
again, all epic-like. I actually have
about a million things to say about this reaction, but I’ll start by just trying
to get into Val’s brain. Poor Val (POOR VAL!) is just not
having a great time lately, is she?
Let’s go down the roster of what’s been up in her life as of late. First off, after moving on from her painful
separation and divorce from Gary and managing to find a nice, good, decent, and
stable person in the form of Ben, she is now going through a whole process of
worrying that perhaps Ben is dead in Central America somewhere. So, angst-ridden and worried about this
possible death, she sought comfort in Gary’s company, accepted his invitation
to come up to Westfork and talk with him, only to find out that he’s been
killed. So, basically, the two most
important men in her life are now both dead, one of them only potentially dead
(Ben) and one for-sure dead (Gary; although of course this is all part of some
elaborate manipulation, but neither we nor Val are aware of this at this
time). Naturally this could lead to an
angry reaction, no?
But I think it’s more important
to note her different reactions to the two situations. Okay, to be fair, nobody has told Val
directly that Ben is, in fact, dead and gone, so it’s a kinda different
situation. But, what I find worth noting
is that, while Val has been fretting and making herself crazy about Ben’s
disappearance in El Salvador, she hasn’t just flipped and started yelling and screaming about it, you know? However, the second someone tells her that
Gary is dead, that’s her reaction; she screams like a wounded animal and just
keeps saying, “No,” over and over again, as if that word said enough times can
bring him back from the dead. You see
what I’m getting at? The potential death
of Ben has left her upset and out-of-sorts, but her reaction to Gary’s death is
an immediate and primal anger, and why?
Because he’s her one true love and true soul mate, duh! It doesn’t matter that they’ve been separated
for nearly two years and officially divorced for the majority of this season;
her heart belongs to him and always will, and when she hears that he is dead,
she just can’t handle it.
The rest of the ep is pretty
much everyone else dealing with the news.
Let’s note that the genius Peter Dunne is handling the writing this week
while series creator and show runner/creator David Jacobs is doing the directing,
lending a feeling of weight to proceedings.
It’s easy to see why these two are handling the writing/directing this
week, as this is a heavily character driven episode about the entire cast
reacting to Gary’s, um, death. You bring
out the big guys to handle material like this, no? Anyway, let’s go down the list;
how does everyone deal with this news?
Well, perhaps most importantly of all, we have the grand return of Ernie Sabella as the coroner! Okay, I can hear
the crickets coming from the internet world as everyone reading this tries to
figure out what the hell I’m talking about, so let me elaborate. Ernie Sabella is Pumbaa from The Lion King, right? He’s a big fat character actor who has
appeared in a ton of stuff, including an episode of Seinfeld, and we last saw him playing the coroner and dealing with
the death of Ciji back in Loss of Innocence. Well, now he’s back to
handle the death of Gary, and I applaud the continuity of the series for
this. They could have gotten any old
actor to play the role of a coroner; what viewer in 1984 is gonna give a shit
if he’s played by an actor we’ve already seen before? But the fact that they get the same actor to
show up playing the same character over a year later, well, I think that’s
pretty majorly cool, and it’s a small detail that I appreciated about this
episode.
His scene is worth noting,
however, because we never see a body in the scene, and I think that’s a
significant clue to the viewers at home that Gary is alive. We see Pumbaa sorta hovering over a table and
talking about a body that is, presumably, lying down in front of him, but the
camera never shows us the body. He talks
to someone (I think it’s Mack) about the details of the death and how the
bullet entered directly from behind in the center of the head, basically a
perfect shot to kill someone. It was
actually at this exact moment that My Beloved Grammy announced that she didn’t
think Gary was really dead and, instead, she thought the body lying on Pumbaa’s
table was actually that of the lovely Ray, the abusive husband of Cathy. Well, spoiler alert, My Beloved Grammy was
very right, and she deserves some kudos for calling it this early in the ep
(especially since I, the one who has actually seen the entire series start to finish before, couldn’t remember
any of these developments at all).
Olivia and Abs share probably my
least favorite scene of the episode, but I’m eager to hear some other opinions
on this subject. You all know that I’m a
big fan of both characters and the actresses who portray them. Donna Mills is always fabulous and, for the
most part, plays Abs perfectly all the way from 1980 to 1989 (the only imperfect moment in all nine of those years is her "Noooooooooo" moaning sound from back when Olivia and Brian got kidnapped by their Transmorpher father), and I think Tonya Crowe is a rather overlooked little child actress who, as the years go on,
blossoms into a rather fantastic young adult actress. However, this scene didn’t do it for me, and
I don’t know exactly what the problem is.
Is it the actresses? Is it the
dialogue? Is it the general over-the-top
nature of the proceedings? Follow me
along here.
Abs finds Olivia sitting in a
row boat out on the lake by Westfork, looking all sad. I do enjoy the fabulously naked emotions that
are on display from Abs towards Olivia in this scene, because she just looks
like a wreck, really and truly upset about Gary’s death, and then she tells
Olivia that she needs her to come and be with her. I like that Abs is being genuine here,
reminding us that for all her lies and cheating and wicked behavior, she is a
person and she feels true emotions and true pains like any other person (this
reminded me a bit of that amazing two-second scene of her crying over Gary way
back in season three’s China Dolls). What I don’t
like in the scene, however, is when a crying Olivia starts to just moan,
“Oh Gary, Gary, Gary,” over and over again all while dramatically rocking her
boat, eventually standing up in it against the vocal protests of Abs, only to,
of course, fall into the lake. Abs dives
in after her and grabs her and drags her back to land and then the two, like,
dramatically hug while the music swells all around them and Olivia continues
her little “Gary” mantra.
Eh, I dunno, am I being too
harsh on this scene? It’s not that it’s
even bad in any way at all (nothing
during this era of KL can be so
easily dismissed as “bad” because, well, nothing during this era actually is bad), but that I just found it to be
a bit much. I think while Tonya is a
talented little kid actress, this just isn’t her finest moment; her crying
seems a bit much and the dialogue and, eh, I just don’t know. It was my least favorite scene in this
episode, and while I think that there’s definitely some sort of deep subtext
that I’m probably missing to the fact that Olivia falls into water and Abs has
to rescue her and the two are, together, embracing and wet at the end of the
scene, I still didn’t like this scene all too much, but I’m not gonna harp on
it, so let’s move on.
There’s one very interesting
development this week that I didn’t remember at all and that I’m gonna pay
attention to in order to see if it continues or leads anywhere. You all remember how Laura and Ciji became
hardcore lesbian lovers and performed oral sex on each other constantly? Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite that directly
stated, but it’s my personal belief
based on the writing and the subtext and the way their relationship unfolded
throughout season four. Well, since poor
Ciji went up to Heaven, it seems that Laura has lost her lesbianic desires
(which is too bad, because now that she’s become a powerful 1980’s
businesswoman working with Abs, she would really make a perfect power lesbian), but this week we see her and Cathy suddenly
becoming awful chummy with each other.
Seriously, what is this about and where did it come from? I feel like the two have barely even shared
screentime during season five aside from the unforgettable scene back in Homecoming in which Laura caught Gary
pulling a Vertigo on Cathy, and I
think a few other scenes where Laura and Cathy discussed the latter’s startling
resemblance to a recently departed young singer.
This week, however, we have a
quick scene of the two of them talking near the start of the episode, and then
before you know it, we cut to a scene at the Avery household in which the two
are hanging out like old friends, having dinner and playing with the boys (both of Laura’s sons are present at the
dinner table in this ep, including the generally-absent Daniel). My question would be: Is Laura heating up to become
a lesbian again? Or is this just a
simple friendship? Really, now that I’m
reflecting on it, it’s rather odd that Laura hasn’t become obsessed with Cathy
the way that Gary was, because she clearly had strong feelings for Ciji, as
well, and now Ciji’s exact twin is hanging around and getting stories, so
shouldn’t that stir up some old feelings in Laura? I’m gonna go ahead and present my own theory
that, yes, Laura is having lesbian thoughts again and is hoping to partake in
some muff-diving with Cathy. To the best
of my knowledge, we don’t get a whole lot of Cathy and Laura together during
the next two seasons, but perhaps I’ve forgotten something and I’ll keep my
eyes open to see.
There’s one last thing about
Cathy that I’ve been meaning to bring up all season and I keep forgetting to,
so now here it is. Does anyone else get
a really huge whiff of Laura Palmer from basically all of the Ciji/Cathy
shenanigans? Follow me along, here, but
Ciji was a young girl who was murdered by an abusive and violent man who then
threw her corpse into a large body of water, only for it to float to shore,
right? Well, the same thing of course
happened to Laura Palmer. Even the very
shot of Ciji’s dead face on the beach from Celebration
makes me think of that iconic and unforgettable shot of Laura Palmer’s dead
face from the opening moments of the Twin Peaks pilot. But, after a couple of
episodes went by, we then had Ciji reincarnated as the new character of Cathy,
an exact dead ringer. This also happened with Laura Palmer, who was
reincarnated as her lookalike cousin, Madelyn.
Now, it’s important to note that Twin Peaks is still a few years into the future (it started during the second
half of the 1989-1990 season, when KL was
celebrating its eleventh season), and I’m not saying David Lynch or Mark Frost
were intentionally paying an homage to KL
since, taking a wild guess here, I’m willing to bet that David Lynch never
watched KL (as he was probably too
busy being a genius and making incredible art films and dissecting dead rats
and chain-smoking and whatever else he likes to do in his spare time), but maybe Mark Frost watched it, who knows?
I don’t think these similarities were intentional, but I just find it
bizarrely coincidental that so much of the Ciji/Cathy arc is somewhat repeated
years down the line on a different TV show with a different character. What are your opinions on this?
This alleged death of Gary
clearly has an effect on Karen, by the way, because we have a positively lovely
scene that I simply adored near the middle of the ep in which she and Mack are
preparing for bed. They’re just talking
about whatever and then, clear out of the blue and obviously said with complete
sincerity, Karen says, “I love you.”
Maybe just having it typed out like that doesn’t really demonstrate how
sweet this moment is, but it’s the sincerity combined with the unexpected way
it comes out. It tells me a lot about
what Karen is thinking, that she’s got Gary’s death on her mind, but I imagine
she also has Sid’s death on her mind.
She’s probably thinking of how she lost a great husband but has been
lucky enough to find another great husband, and perhaps she’s thinking about
how her life would be if Mack died, too.
Perhaps she’s seeing the obvious love that Val has for Gary and
realizing that, if she lost Mack, she would be as devastated as Val is at this
moment. Whatever’s going through her mind,
it’s a wonderful little scene. It also
functions well to remind us that there be trouble on the horizons, that Mack is
still ardently continuing his pursuit of the evil Wolfbridge organization
against Karen’s wishes and even her very knowledge. This is a moment of unfiltered true love
being expressed from Karen towards Mack, but what will happen if/when Karen
finds out the truth about what Mack is currently up to?
Back to Val, she gets two more
significant and excellent scenes in this ep, the first of which occurs early
when she expresses her love for Gary to Lilimae. Both actresses are great in this scene, but I
think it’s worth noting how Julie Harris is so good that she can manage to make
sitting and listening and not speaking into something super interesting to
watch. See, it’s Val that gets to do all
the talking in this scene, while Lilimae just listens, but the look in her eyes
speaks volumes for the character and is a tremendous feat of acting. Val’s speech is very moving, as well, because
she talks about how she remembers throwing Gary out of the house after finding
him with Abby, then says how she tried to rearrange the furniture in the house
to be different and keep her from thinking about him, but then she says, “This
house has never been without him because I’ve
never been without him.” Yes, truer
words have never been spoken, for we viewers also know that, even in that big
dark gap from 1962 to 1978 (the gap that shall one day be filled by the prequel
series, Gary and Val: The Lost Years,
the one that I’m currently cooking up in my head and that I think David Jacobs
should write the pilot for pronto), Gary was always with her. Ever since she first met him at age fifteen,
he’s been with her, even if there were many years in which she didn’t ever see
him.
Through
the whole scene, Lilimae just listens with wide eyes that are glistening with
tears that never fall. I found myself
wondering what Lilimae is thinking in this scene, and actually I think this
might be the moment where she truly realizes the depth of her daughter’s love
for Gary. She spent most of the fourth
season talking shitty about Gary because of how he cheated on Val and broke her
heart, and she’s mellowed on him this season but, I think, still doesn’t
particularly like him. With this scene,
however, I think she realizes truly for the first time how deeply ingrained
into Valene’s very soul Gary Ewing is, ingrained in a way that no other man
(sorry, Ben) could ever possibly be.
The
other scene is an amazingly awkward meeting between Val and Abs in which Abs
gets especially nasty. You know, this
might be her nastiest moment up to this point, and I’m tempted to let it slide
since I know she’s going through her own grief process, but it’s still pretty
awful. We’ve seen many moments in the
past of Val being the bigger person during the whole sordid triangle of
Val/Gary/Abs, such as in Abby’s Choice when
Abs was giving her kidney to Diana and Val told Olivia that her mother was a
hero, or an episode earlier this season (blanking on the name) when Val paid
Gary a visit at Westfork and, as she was leaving, said, “Say hi to Abby for
me.” There have been so many moments in
which Val has been decent and good to this person who has, really, kinda ruined
her life. In this ep, she pays Abs a
visit and is being good and decent and saying how she is sorry for what she’s
going through, and Abs just unleashes on her and gives this speech about how
she, Abs, is the one who is widowed, not Val, and she concludes with, “You were
nothing to him, absolutely nothing.”
Honestly, I don’t think Abs actually believes these words that she’s
saying to Val; I think she’s just trying to strike below the belt and be as
hurtful as possible; anyone can see that Gary’s heart truly belongs to Val just
as much as her heart belongs to Gary.
Abs knows this and has probably known it for quite some time, perhaps
not immediately, not the moment she first moved onto the cul-de-sac and set her sights on him, but
probably pretty soon after she had finally attained him.
Because
of the possibility that Ben is a dead, lifeless corpse lying in El Salvador
somewhere, he didn’t put in an appearance last week, but we see him this week
and get official confirmation that he is not dead after all. Nope, instead he’s being held in what appears
to be a broom closet in El Salvador. Oh,
did I say “broom closet?” I actually
meant a, um, hospital. I guess they just
couldn’t afford a hospital set, so they redressed the broom closet set
instead. Or hell, maybe this is what
hospitals look like in Central America; I’m just a stupid white guy who has
barely travelled outside of the country and is afraid of anything and
everything that is different from my way of life. Anyway, broom closet or not, this is an important
scene for establishing that Ben is, indeed, alive. Okay, so we think Gary is dead (or at least
we are supposed to think he is) but now we know Ben’s alive. What will happen when he makes it back to
California? I suppose we have to wait
and find out.
Oh
yeah, one last thing on the list before we move on to Gary’s “funeral” is a
fabulously wicked little scene in which Abs receives some flowers from Mark St.
Claire with a note that’s like, “Sorry about Gary’s death.” Oh, this is so nasty, is it not? This is the man who is essentially responsible
for Gary’s death, and he’s so damn calculating and evil that he actually goes
out of his way to send flowers to the widow and rub it in her face. You have to love the pure evil that is Mark
St. Claire and his fabulous ‘80s glasses and general yuppie-white-guy business
attire that he wears while he’s doing his evil stuff.
Now
let’s get to the “funeral,” and I feel I must use those quotation marks, for I
suppose I do have a bit of a problem with this scene. Eh, or maybe I don’t. One problem (not my main problem, but a
smaller one that I noticed) is that all of this is happening so damn fast it’s
kinda hard to believe it’s actually real.
Even if I am a 1984 viewer and I truly believe Gary is dead just like
Saint Sid before him, and I’m watching this and I’m like, “Wow, I can’t believe
they killed off such an important character,” I still think I would question
the fact that this funeral is taking place, what, five minutes after he got
shot? Seriously, this is a fast
turnaround; is this the very next day? Also, he is being buried on
the Westfork property, which seems askew (although Bobby was allowed to be
buried on Southfork under his “beloved treehouse” during the dream season, so
who the hell knows about these things).
My main problem, however, is the complete lack of Texas Ewings at this
funeral.
It’s
been very interesting to watch through the show and see the series go from being
so heavily linked with Dallas to
slowly but surely jettisoning off to become its own wonderful thing that hardly
ever mentions Dallas or the
characters from over on that series at all anymore. Okay, we’ve still got two solid seasons of Dallas and KL existing in the same universe together (this is completely
shattered at the very beginning of the 1986-1987 season, when Dallas is in its tenth season and KL its eighth), but by this point in the
saga, I’m not thinking of Dallas at
all; KL has officially become its own
wonderful, independent creation and I just want to bask in the love and warmth
of my KL characters from now until
the end of time.
My
point? Well, I’m pretty much fine with
the fact that we never get another crossover from Dallas characters over to KL,
kinda fine with the fact that the double whammy of Jock’s Will and New Beginnings served as the ending of those crossovers, at least from parent
series to spinoff series (remember that we still have two more Brief Dallas Interludes looming in our future,
one in 1985 and one in 1991). So, I’m
having this contradictory feeling where I kinda don’t want to see any Dallas characters showing up, but then I
have to acknowledge that it’s sorta ridiculous and straining credibility that
absolutely nobody from over in Texas
shows up to Gary’s funeral, especially not a character like Bobby who has
crossed over before and who has expressed his love for his black sheep brother
on many occasions. Or hell, how about
Miss Ellie, who spent so many Dallas eps
whining about how Gary was her favorite child (“He was always more of a
Southworth than a Ewing; he loved the laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand”)? You’re gonna tell me that Gary could be
allegedly shot to death and Miss Ellie isn’t gonna haul her old ass over to
California to see his funeral?
Okay,
but it only gets more hard to decide on whether this is a good thing or a bad
thing when we reach our next episode.
I’ll go ahead and mention one development from our next show that I
think pertains heavily to this particular complaint. In our next ep (Yesterday, It Rained), Sumner actually points out the fact that
none of Gary’s Texas relatives showed up to the funeral and he uses it to say
that he thinks there’s something fishy about this whole death thing. So, while I find it unbelievable that none of
them show up to the funeral, I do appreciate that the KL writers go out of their way to acknowledge it and even use it as
a means to keep the plots moving along.
However, is this a situation of a bit of bad writing and then the
writers simply try to cover up the bad writing by acknowledging the plot
flaw? Perhaps it is, but in any case,
the whole thing is rather vexing, and I suppose if there was one KL ep to come after New Beginnings that deserved a Dallas
crossover, it was this one. It’s
just way too hard to believe that nobody in Texas would hear about this death
or care about it enough to show up and see the funeral.
We’re
coming up to the final moments of the episode, and the priest guy is giving a
big speech about Gary’s life and death and we are cutting to shots of the
mourners at the funeral listening (including Brian, who I feel like we haven’t
seen in eons), and then we start to flashcut to a shot of Gary just sorta
standing in front of a wall. At first,
the viewer might be tempted to write these little flashcuts off as, oh I dunno,
just random footage of Gary being used to sorta remind us of him. However, the flashcuts keep coming at us, and
then we get to another shot of his face and the camera sorta twirls around him
to reveal that he’s sitting in some depressing white room, presumably a part of
the police station. The door pops open
and Cathy comes running in, all eager to see him, and the two embrace in a big
kiss as we get out “Executive Producers” credits and the show ends. Shocking
plot twist? Um, again, I have to say maybe, and I think a plot twist that
might only work upon first viewing. You
know what, maybe I’m wrong here; if you are a person who discovered KL after it went off the air and you
watched this little series of episodes and you genuinely believed that Gary was
dead, then please write in and tell me so, because I’d be very curious to know
what in particular led you to believe that.
I
would say this episode was much more of a character study than an action
episode. We’ve had lots of eps with
exciting dramatic soapy developments throughout the season, and while this ep
still has plenty of that, it also just sorta takes a pause to examine how
characters react to this news of Gary’s death, and I like that. I keep saying that on KL, character always comes first, and I think this is a good
example of that. At the same time, I
feel like I’m not over-the-moon on this ep, and I’m not entirely sure why. Am I just getting fidgety to reach the
absolutely brilliant sixth season that I’ve been eager to get to since My
Beloved Grammy and I first sat down to start this series? Perhaps, but for whatever reason, something
just sorta kept me at a distance from this ep, not able to fully appreciate it
the way that I’ve appreciated so many eps in the past. Maybe it boils down to something as simple as
my problems believing the whole “Gary is dead” thing. Perhaps if I truly believed that were the
case, I would get more enjoyment out of this one? See, the thing is that I’m having one of
those weird situations where I’m like, “Eh, I kinda didn’t love that one as
much as usual,” but I’m not able to particularly articulate why, since aside
from the Abs/Olivia scene, every scene and development in the ep was perfectly
good. Maybe it’s the fact that this is a Peter Dunne/David Jacobs combination and I expect a little bit more when those
two are heavily involved in an ep; I expect it to be one of the best episodes
ever made.
In
any case, make no mistake, for this ep is still perfectly good, it’s just not
one of my favorites from this season overall, you know? But whatever, we’ve got two more eps left to
go and then we’ll be officially done with season five, so let us proceed onward
to Yesterday, It Rained.
Ooohh I love that rowboat scene. I especially love how at the last second they cut away from Abby and when they cut back it's CLEARLY now the stunt woman who gets to do a bit of silent miming of "Oh no, look what has happened, she fell in the water," before jumping into the lake. Go back and watch. You'll have a new appreciation for it.
ReplyDelete😂😂😂😂
DeleteAgree with you TFAD. The rowboat scene was AWESOME! I loved the over-the-top acting that would come about every once in awhile in the series (NO....., WHAT IS AN APB????....., WE'RE DESTROYING LIVES, etc.) This series is so well-acted, that those moments jump out in comparison.
ReplyDeleteI feel that Gary is more obessed with Abby. There is love there, but in this juncture of the series, he's getting a clear head and is beginning to see right through her, since Abby's ambitions is getting ahead of what is right and what is wrong.
ReplyDeleteDoes Abby realize Val is pregnant in this episode? I don't remember her finding out in any earlier episodes. And during their heated discussion in this episode prior to the funeral, there is a very specific shot when Val stands up and her belly is in the foreground and Abby's face is in the background. Abby is clearly disturbed by the baby bump.
ReplyDeleteYes....!!! Caught that. I'm sure her wheels are spinning.
DeleteThis ep. didn't work for me. Naturally, I knew Gary wasn't dead, but the problem is the writers did not do enough to make even a first-time viewer believe it was real. Sid dies over the course of four episodes from accident to funeral, and then his death is felt throughout season 3. This whole Gary's dead thing is rushed wayyy too quickly, and with Gary's own daughter not showing up to funeral, it just feels all sorta limp... like just going through the motions because we all know he can't be dead. Cathy's "oh, Ray" back at the motel and Ray's sudden disappearance coupled with Mack's fairly cool nonchalance during all of these proceedings basically tell the viewer, Gary ain't dead... so watching Abs and Val and Olivia go through all of the tears just feels a bit hollow. 😕
ReplyDeleteI get where writers are going with this plot point, but think it might have worked better earlier in season where they could have stretched it out a bit more to seem more realistic and more weighted with importance/ significance.
Laura wears the same weird blue/black pearled crustacean-design turtleneck sweater that Abby wore only two episodes ago. Who knew that in between scheming to keep Gary occupied with Cathy while funneling his money into projects he'd never approve of - and sleeping with up-and-coming state politicians, Abby and Laura also liked to swap fancy sweater fashions?
ReplyDeleteWhy wasn't Lucy and the other Dallas Ewings at Gary's fake funeral.
ReplyDeleteLatest example at this point of Dallas and Knots Landing having little or no continuity between them.
The Dallas episode that came before this And The Winner Is... had the Ewings going on with their lives as normal and completely oblivious to Gary's so-called death.
A Part of me wish the Dallas Ewings or just JR had shown up for Gary's funeral because JR would have known that as Gary's widow Abby wouild probably inherit Gary's 10% of Ewing Oil and so i could have seen JR scheming to get those shares away from Abby.Plus knowing JR i could have seen him scheming to make it look like Abby had Gary killed.Plus right before this episode aired on Dallas Bobby had the won the battle for Ewing Oil but had agreed to share Ewing Oil with JR with each of them getting 35% of Ewing Oil.So with Gary supposedly dead JR may have wanted to get his 10% which could give him 40%.
ReplyDelete