Episode Title: Yesterday It Rained
Season 05, Episode 24
Episode 099 of 344
Written by Joel J. Feigenbaum
Directed by Bill Duke
Original Airdate: Thursday, March
22nd, 1984
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Ben comes home and Val cries
with joy. The hitman actually shot Ray, not Gary. Cathy calls Ray's mom to tell
her, and Laura overhears. Laura tells Greg, who asks Karen why none of the
Ewings came to Gary's funeral, and tells St. Claire that he thinks Gary is
still alive. Abby mourns for Gary. Greg tells Abby to sell Lotus Point to
Wolfbridge, but she won't. Greg tells St. Claire that he is through dealing
with him, and calls Abby to tell her Gary's alive. Ben figures out what Mack is
doing, and is furious with him because Val could have lost her babies. Ben
punches Mack. Abby goes to the MacKenzies and tells Karen that Gary's alive and
Mack is using him to get to Wolfbridge. Karen feels very betrayed and confronts
Mack. She's upset at all the pain he has caused and tells him their marriage is
over, and gives him her wedding ring back.
Welcome to our 99th
episode of KL, the last double digit
episode before we jump gloriously into the triple digits with our next episode,
Negotiations. But wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,
for the ep up for discussion today is not Negotiations;
it’s Yesterday, It Rained. Now, before I get started, I wanna remind the
readers that I consumed a bit of alcohol during this visit of KL eps, and I’d say that healthy buzz
was comfortably settling in by this episode (for I had enjoyed two beers during
the first two episodes and then we opened the champagne during the third
episode and were still working on the bottle during this ep). I bring this up because this may well end up
being my foggiest writeup. In fact,
rather hilariously, I was reading through that TV.com plot summary before I
started writing and there are a few things I clear don’t even remember happening
in this ep, such as Ben punching Mack.
That happened? That sounds like a
very good, dramatic little scene, and yet sitting here, I have no recollection
of it. I have no doubt that it occurred;
I’m not saying my copy of the ep was missing the scene, mostly it’s just a
reflection on the state of my brain.
Before moving on, just in case I’m starting to sound like a Gary-level
drunk, I wanna remind the readers that I wasn’t plastered or slurring my speech
or throwing up on the carpet or anything of that sort. Let’s think, it was two beers and about three
glasses of champagne, so I was pretty much in the land of a happy buzz for most
of the time, but a little bit more alcohol might have turned me into a “WE’RE
RUINING LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES” level drunk, and nobody needs to see me in such a
state, least of all My Beloved Grammy.
Okay, so where did we leave
off? Well, the last few seconds of Finishing Touches allowed us all to
breathe a healthy sigh of relief as we realized that Gary was, indeed,
alive. Yes, it looks like he’s being
kept in a really boring white room in the police headquarters or
something. In fact, let’s talk about how
fucking boring this all looks.
I know it’s 1984 and we didn’t have cell phones and all that stuff to
allow us the instant gratification of 24 hour entertainment (I would actually
argue this was a better world because the majority of human beings, you know, looked at each other or talked to each
other or looked at the beautiful world around them rather than spending their
entire days staring at a tiny little cell phone screen just to get constant
updates about what their friends had for lunch or whatever people like to look
at on the internet these days), but I feel kinda sorry for Gary cuz he’s got nothing to do in this little white
room. You’d think they’d wheel in a
shitty little antenna TV for him so he could watch Dynasty or Falcon Crest
or at least throw a few paperbacks his way, but no, Gary is just sitting in
this little room, staring blankly at the wall in front of him, doing literally
nothing. Pretending to be dead turns out
to be pretty dull, doesn’t it?
Let’s all be grateful that
Detective Morrison is back, because this week he approaches a candy/gum
dispensing machine and boldly opines, “I want some gum; I got a bad taste in my
mouth.” Who would deliver dialogue like
this if Detective Morrison wasn’t on the show?
This is obviously a fantastic terrible line of dialogue, but I think my
favorite scene of Morrison spouting off bad dialogue is still contained within
the beginning of the season (Marital Privileges) when he was interrogating Chip on the murder of Ciji and
declared, “You killed her and then you cleaned up like your mother was coming
to visit.” So yeah, the whole gum/bad
taste line is deliciously terrible and campy, but I think it still falls
somewhat short of his recounting of poor Ciji’s death. Why does Detective Morrison have
a bad taste in his mouth? Well,
presumably it’s because of this whole Gary fake death thing, but wait, now
we’re hitting our first example of my alcohol-related stupidity. I suddenly can’t remember if Morrison is
aware of this subterfuge or not. Surely
he must be, right? After all, Gary is
hanging out at the police station, and presumably Morrison would be aware of
this, because otherwise who was able to get Gary safely stashed away? I also imagine Morrison, for all his
corniness, is still a professional policeman and would be able to keep this
secret safe, understanding that Mack is trying to catch a bigger fish with this
whole lie that he’s got going on right now.
But anyway, even though I may
seem a bit obsessed with him and his choice of dialogue, in all honesty
Morrison is not an important character and we’re never going to see him again
after season five, so let’s move on to more important people, like Val and
Ben. Val may be pretty bummed out about
Gary’s death, but at least there’s some light in her world when Ben returns to
her, which he does in just the same way I would do it if I were ever presumed
dead in El Salvador: By simply rolling on up to the cul-de-sac in a taxi cab
and walking up to Val’s house. My
Beloved Grammy pointed out how she found it odd that he would fly all the way
back to California and land at the airport and get a taxicab home and never
call Val to alert her to what’s up, but I dig it. He probably reached that point where he was
at the El Salvador airport and was like, “Do I call Val now or later?” I like the element of surprise, so I can understand
why he’d rather just show up at her doorstep and see her face light up with
joy.
Of course, we the viewers know
that while Val is happy to see Ben, he would probably be a little more reticent
to return to her life had he seen her reaction to Gary’s “death” last
week. That scream of anguish told us all
we need to know about who Val’s true soul mate is. However, and I’ve said this before and I’ll
say it again, I don’t think there are any rules in place saying that you can
only love one person in your whole life.
I think Val does love Ben, just in a different way from Gary. Ben is good and decent and treats her right;
she loves him for all those things and just for the simple fact that he’s a
good person. However, she doesn’t have
that past history with him, they aren’t kindred spirits, and they aren’t soul
mates the way she and Gary are. It’s
love, but just a different kind of love.
It’s a lot like the love I’ve felt for the myriad of cats that have been
a part of my life since I was born.
First there was Gorilla, the cat who was alive before me and was already
well established in the family when I was born.
She died when I was eight and she’ll always have special love in my
heart because she was the first, you see.
But then there were lots of other cats and, to this day, the best of
those cats was Rosie, the sweetest and most loving creature you could ever hope
to meet. Now I live with Connie, and
Connie brings such joy and pleasures to my life every day just by her very
existence, and so I love her, as well, but deep down, my soul-mate will always
be Rosie.
At risk of turning this into a
blog all about cats (and we all know that if there’s one thing people just love, it’s listening to gay guys discuss all
their different cats), I say we return to the main stories of the show and
leave the cat topic for another day.
Okay, so Ben is back, and what’s different? Well, he’s sporting a little bit of a beard,
which helps to sell the idea that he’s been gone for a little while. It’s not a full on Grisly
Adams/John-Lennon-at-the-height-of-his-coked-out-phase beard, but it’s a nice
healthy beard that I actually kinda like and want him to keep for longer (I
feel like it vanishes in season six).
I’m not alone, either, because My Beloved Grammy said how she likes the
way Ben looks with a beard much more.
She’s of a whole different generation than me, of course, a generation
that believed men should be as furry as possible. I’m more of a fan of nicely shaved and
virtually hairless men, and I can’t imagine I could ever date a man with a
moustache, but My Beloved Grammy loves them (and my late Grampy, rest in peace,
had a pretty killer moustache, by the way).
So anyway, despite my general preference for clean-shaven men, I think
the beard look works pretty well for Ben.
It makes him look tougher, actually, and heck, maybe it sticks around
for longer than I remembered, or maybe it comes back randomly throughout the
next three years.
Bill “Cooke” Duke is back in the
director’s chair this week, and as usual I noticed him bringing some cool
cinematic style to proceedings. One shot
that I jotted down in my notes (but without any context for where it occurs
within the confines of the episode, making it hard to point out the exact
minute and second of this cool shot) involves a very sexy dissolve from Gary to
Abs that actually reminded me of an early shot in Blue Velvet. Do you all
remember in that movie (which everyone in the world needs to see and if you
haven’t seen it yet, run out and find it immediately, or preferably wait for it
to be playing in an art-house cinema somewhere so you can see it the way it was
intended to be seen; it will be showing right near me in Seattle on Sunday, April 23rd, 2017) an early scene in which we fade completely to black and
then Kyle MacLachlan opens a door in the center of the screen, effectively
lighting the new shot himself as he descends from the top of a staircase to the
bottom? It’s a hard thing to describe,
but if you’ve seen the shot, you know what I’m talking about it, and we get a
similar shot here. We dissolve from a
shot of Gary’s face to complete pitch blackness, and then that blackness is
interrupted when Abs opens a door in the middle of the screen and, well you get
the idea. I say this a lot, but how many
other shows would just be like, “Okay, let’s cut from the scene of Gary to a
scene of Abs; throw in a stock shot of her office or her house or
whatever.” Instead, this transition is
done in a really cool way that organically links the scenes together very
artistically, so you don’t even feel like you’re leaving one scene and entering
a new one.
But speaking of Abs, it doesn’t
take her too long to figure out what’s really going on here. It’s done in a sorta circuitous way in which
we do not necessarily get to see all the stuff happening, if that makes
sense. Oh yeah, and also, the TV.com
episode summary is not quite right, as it states that Greg is the person to
deliver the news of Gary’s non-death to Abs, but actually it’s St. Claire. See, St. Claire is hanging out with his evil
friends and he says to a faceless aide to, “Get Mrs. Ewing on the phone,” and
the next thing we see is Abs damn mad about it and rushing to Karen’s
house to deliver the news. Oh yeah, but wait just a minute,
because I almost forgot to mention something that I find very important, and that is a quick scene of Abs crying in bed
alone at night. See, it’s the shit like
this that really makes Abs come alive and be such a unique and fascinating
character. On another show, the writers
would very likely be content with keeping Abs as a snarling villainous who
lives to deliver pain and break up marriages and have affairs, twirling a figurative
moustache the whole time. Instead, KL has always taken great pains to show
her as fully fledged and three dimensional, and they never stop doing that
(wait until we get to season eight!). In
this case, yeah, Abs has been spending the last year lying to Gary and having
an affair with Sumner and using Gary’s inheritance money to spin her own wicked
webs, but in this private moment, in which it is just her and her alone, lying
on her bed, she cries over losing Gary.
Let’s also take a moment to reflect
on the fact that, really, Gary could die and Abs could still get everything she
“wants.” I put “wants” in quotation
marks because I think it’d be easy for many viewers to think that all Abs ever
cared about or really wanted out of Gary was his money. Well, unless there’s some legal loophole that
would stop Abs from getting the money since Gary was in the process of trying
to divorce her, I’m assuming that she would still be entitled to his entire
fortune upon his death, right? So, with
Gary dead, Abs could take the money and run, or really go to town running her
own business and doing whatever the hell she wants with all that money. My point?
Abs is not crying because of the loss of money or power or anything like
that; she is simply crying over the loss of Gary. She misses him and she did love him in her
own twisted way and, thinking that he is dead and gone forever, she cries for
him. Awesome awesome character stuff on
display right here.
But anyway, the news of Gary’s
non-death quickly starts to have ripple effects throughout the neighborhood,
but the bulk of the drama comes from Karen’s discovery of his
resurrection. With the revelation, Karen
realizes the full extent of Mack’s obsession with bringing the Wolfbridge group
to justice, and she’s mad. Now, whether
or not she’s justified in her anger is a matter up for individual debate with
each and every KL viewer. While My Beloved Grammy has said that Karen
is her favorite character (we agree!), she thought she was being a bit extreme
in this instance. Why? Well, when Karen confronts Mack on the truth
about Gary, the scene concludes with her saying that she can’t trust him
anymore and removing her wedding ring and returning it to him.
Okay, so it’s another testament
to the series’ brilliant writing team that I am completely able to understand
both of these characters and I don’t really take a side with either of them; I
love them both and I understand them both.
On one hand, Mack made Karen a promise that he would drop the Wolfbridge
stuff in the interest of his own safety as well as the safety of Karen and the
kids, and now that promise has been broken.
Also, and I think it’s very important to remember this, but Karen lost
her first husband when he took it upon himself to go after some very bad guys
and bring them to justice. Can you
imagine how it would hurt to lose a husband like that and then, miraculously,
manage to find a new husband who is just as great as the first one (or, as I
would argue, even better), only for that second husband to also die in his pursuit of justice for some very bad dudes? Finally, and also significantly, I think
Karen is mad to see pregnant Val put under such stresses all for a blatant lie.
So I understand Karen fully, but
I also understand Mack. Looking at it
from his point of view, he has been nothing but a great husband since he and
Karen took their vows in Vegas a little over a year ago. Indeed, as soon as he entered the family,
suddenly the cul-de-sac became embroiled in a murder mystery that heavily
involved his new wife’s crazy daughter (Diana; you all remember her? The character who is still in the opening
credits but hardly ever shows up anymore?).
After all that murder stuff was wrapped up, he immediately had to deal
with his new wife spiraling into a prescription pills addiction, finally having
to force her into a rehab center to seek some help. Through all of that, he has been patient and
gentle and understanding and loving with her, when so many other men would have
gone through a year of marriage like that and decided to take a walk and never
see the woman again. Instead, Mack has
persevered and been loyal. Yeah, okay,
he told Karen a lie when he said he was done with Wolfbridge, but can you not
understand his motives? He’s not lying
about some sort of a coke problem or an addiction to sex with prostitutes or whether he colluded with the Russians to hack the election; he
was lying about something that is being done in the name of justice and that
has to be kept on the hush-hush because of that. So, in conclusion, I love both characters so
much and I can see their points of views; I judge neither of them, but only
watch and hope they can work out this little obstacle in their relationship.
Remember how Laura and Cathy
were getting so cozy in our last ep?
Well, it continues this week, making me wonder if the writers were
flirting with another lesbian storyline for the two. I suppose it’s possible, but if it was an
idea and then they chose to ditch the idea, I’m pretty much fine with it. That subversive “Are they or aren’t they?”
story from season four was so delicious for me and also so bold for network TV
at that time, that on the one hand I’d rather just leave it at that and enjoy
the Laura/Ciji relationship for what it was.
Also, I feel it might be a bridge too far to bring Cathy into the series
as the exact double of Ciji and then also
give her an abusive boyfriend and then also
have her be a terrific singer and then also
have her become a lesbian with Laura, so it’s probably for the best that
the writers don’t go there.
However, it’s during a scene of
the two lovely ladies hanging out that we get official confirmation of what we
probably already suspected, that Ray is the one who got shot, not Gary. This kinda leads me to more questions than
answers, but again this might be my own stupid brain and not the fault of the
writers. The part I can’t quite figure
out is: Was Ray really shot by pure accident?
Did the Wolfbridge group send someone out to Westfork to terminate Gary
and then this dumb person just got confused and shot the first white guy to
come into his vicinity? Or, rather, was
this meant as some sort of warning for Gary?
Also, how do we deal with the fact that we now have a dead Ray on our
hands? Okay, nobody cares about this character
and probably nobody besides me would ask what’s going to happen with his body,
but I still have those questions. We get
a quick scene of Cathy talking to an off-screen mother of Ray’s, and that helps
a little bit, but still. When all this
is done, what’s going to happen to his body?
Will it just be flown back to wherever it came from? Does anyone care about the fact that this guy
was actually on the ranch to kill Gary himself?
In fact, irony or all ironies, if the Wolfbridge group had just sat still
for another fifteen minutes, wouldn’t Ray have carried out the mission for them
anyway? The goal was to have Gary dead,
and Ray would have accomplished that if he hadn’t been shot to death first.
I mentioned this little
storytelling aspect in my last writeup, but it bears repeating here. In this ep, Sumner shows up at Karen’s house
and starts to ask questions about Gary’s death.
It’s in this scene that he says something like, “Boy, I’ll bet the
entire family flew in from Texas.” At
this point, Karen tells him that the show isn’t doing crossovers with the
parent series anymore and Sumner is like, “Oh yeah, I guess that makes sense;
after a certain point it’s important for the spinoff to be able to stand on its
own two feet,” but then he goes on a bit to say how darn strange that is. Gary was, after all, one of the Ewing men,
and even if he was the black sheep of that family and not too terribly welcome
at Southfork, you’d think the family would still show up to his funeral,
right? I stress that I appreciate the
writers pointing this out at all when they could have easily glossed over it
entirely and just hoped the viewers wouldn’t question it; instead, they use
this plot flaw to sorta build the storyline up and help other characters put
the clues together. So while it’s still
a bit inherently hard to swallow that none of the Texas Ewings would show up
for this funeral, I’ll give it a pass because of the way the writers deal with
it.
You remember how I said I
couldn’t remember Ben punching Mack? Well,
I still can’t, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that I probably remember all the other parts of this scene very well,
because I remember a Ben/Mack confrontation in which Ben picks up where Greg
left off and starts to point out all the plot flaws in this supposed
death. He rattles off quite a laundry
list and unfortunately my pen wasn’t fast enough to get them all compiled into
a list in my notes, so I only remember a few.
Basically, he says it’s odd how damn fast the funeral was, something
like two days after the actual shooting, a bizarrely fast turnaround for
funeral arrangements. Then he points out
how Gary was buried on Westfork property and not in a regular funeral home and
Mack yells something about, “special provisions” or whatever. Ben might even mention the glaring absence of
the Texas Ewings; I can’t really remember.
In any case, it’s a good little scene and I’m particularly enjoying the
way that all these different characters are starting to put the pieces together
themselves; the writers aren’t just having one character figure it all out at
once, but rather everyone is kinda in on it together.
Now might also be a good time to
point out how smart these characters are and how much I enjoy that. Have I brought this up before? I feel like this is the first time I’m
mentioning it, but yeah, I love watching shows with smart people on them. I think as a culture we tend to celebrate
stupidity and extravagance and really worthless people who just happen to have
a lot of money. I’d rather watch a show
in which the characters are smart and sharp and able to figure stuff out for
themselves, and I’d say pretty much everyone on this series is pretty
smart. Ben is a reporter and he’s smart
about uncovering mysteries and questioning people, while Mack is smart (if a
little obsessed at this juncture in the saga) about his job and even characters
like Lilimae and Val, who might seem somewhat backwoods and inbred, are
actually very deceptively smart; they tend to have a deeper wisdom about them
and their life philosophies are rather intelligent, as well, even if they
sometimes come off as a bit naïve. So
yeah, smart characters, they’re always better than morons.
Hmmm, let’s see if there are any
big story beats I’m missing here. Well,
Gary vanishes from the police station at one point, which is, um, odd. The detectives just sorta go into his room at
one point and he’s just kinda gone, at which point everyone flips and starts
acting like he’s been kidnapped by the Wolfbridge group, but I’m kinda like,
“Really?” Who’s to say Gary couldn’t
just walk out of the police station whenever he felt like it? After all, he’s in a little white room and
all, but it doesn’t appear to be particularly well guarded or anything like
that; I can’t even recall seeing one inept guard stationed at his door. I’m pretty sure if he wanted to leave, he
could just get up and do so. But anyway,
for the time being Gary is missing and now everybody is damn worried about
that.
And that just about does it for Yesterday, It Rained. Clearly this was a solid episode, although I
feel like all the episodes are solid at this point in the series. I will say this was probably not my very
favorite Bill Duke episode, mostly because, aside from that blackout/door shot,
I didn’t see quite as much of his little touches as I usually see. I also think this episode sorta feels like
the penultimate one of the season; it’s not quite the season finale, but it’s
building towards it, so it’s not quite as exciting as our next episode is bound
to be.
Oh yeah, and what is our next
episode, by the way? I’m glad you asked,
because next up we have not only our season five finale, but also our landmark
100th episode of KL, Negotiations.
The next one is really, really really good.
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