Episode Title: Hanging Fire
Season 06, Episode 03
Episode 103 of 344
Written by Alan Goldfein
Directed by Alexander Singer
Original Airdate: Thursday, October
25th, 1984
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Greg tells the
police that he shot St. Claire because he had a gun and was about to shoot
Abby. Abby concurs. Greg asks Abby to make a public statement on his behalf.
Gary buys the cable station Ben works at.
Gary takes Abby back, but says he's taking control of the business, and it will
now be run honestly and fairly. He says he had Lotus Point redesigned to fit
into the environment and that Karen will be an equal partner. Gary tells Cathy
he loves Abby, but hopes they can remain friends. Val figures out that Lilimae
is Joshua's mother. Lilimae tells her that she was never married to Joshua's
father Jonathan. She stayed with him for a year after Joshua was born and tried
to be a good mother. She doesn't know how to tell Joshua that she is his
mother.
Our last episode, Calculated Risks, quite literally ended
with a bang as Greg Sumner finally decided to put a bullet in Mark St. Claire
and finish that character and that storyline.
As we pick up with Hanging Fire,
we can see that Greg is going to have to tread lightly when it comes to
handling this topic. After all, he’s
still a big shot political figure who wants to become a senator, and generally
people don’t look too kindly on their senators murdering people in cold blood on
boats. We pick up Hanging Fire about two seconds after Calculated Risks ended, opening on Greg and Abs getting off the
boat and Gary and Abs finally reuniting and joyfully hugging each other, which
I greatly enjoyed. However, I do find it
a little odd that Greg and Abs just sorta, you know, walk off the boat. Was St. Claire not surrounded by a bunch of
lackeys and henchmen who lived to serve his every need? Where did all those guys go? I know we didn’t get all that much boat
action last week, but whenever we did get over to St. Claire on the boat, there was
always at least one or two other people around with him, making sure Abs didn’t
get away. How, then, was Greg able to
kill St. Claire and just walk casually off the boat? Perhaps it’s the thing where, by cutting off
the snake’s head, you effectively kill the entire body, like St. Claire is the
head of the snake and all the henchmen are the body; now that their boss is
dead, they may very well have no interest in the affairs of Greg or Abs.
A little later into the episode,
we have a great camp scene that made both My Beloved Grammy and myself laugh
aloud, and that is Abs lying in bed, thrashing around and screaming out as if
she’s having the most terrifying nightmare of all time. Look, I know it sucks to be kidnapped in any
regard, but she was kidnapped for about five minutes, and during those five
minutes, she mostly spent her time sitting on a nice cushy sofa on a real nice
boat parked in a yacht. St. Claire
didn’t beat her or threaten her or rape her or anything like that; basically
she just hung out on the boat for awhile until she found that gun so carefully
stashed away in that drawer. The idea
that she is now experiencing P.T.S.D. flashbacks to this terrifying afternoon
on the boat is just hilarious to me. Even so, this whole kidnapping
incident provides the impetus for Gary and Abs to get back together, something
I didn’t entirely remember. See,
sometimes I can remember the incidents and storylines from the series clear as
day, and sometimes things sorta blur together.
In this instance, the exact length of time that Gary and Abs stay
together is still a blur to me; when we reached So Shall You Reap and he threw her off the ranch, I actually kinda
thought that was the real end of it, because I couldn’t remember if or when
Gary forgave her and took her back into his life. Well, turns out it’s right here, following
her terrifying ordeal on the boat.
It’d be easy to dismiss Gary as
a fool for allowing Abs back into his life, but we actually get some fabulous
stuff this week that makes it pretty clear that Gary’s no fool. See, after Abs has been safely rescued from
the boat, she and Gary are taking a walk around Westfork and discussing Lotus
Point and the future. Gary announces
that he’s going to be running things from now on and there’s going to be a
strict focus on environmental friendliness and all that good stuff. He says something about how what happened
before is partially his fault because he sat back and let Abs handle everything
when he should have been actively involved.
Next up, he delivers the real kick in the nuts to Abs, which comes when
he announces, “I want you to meet your new partner,” just as our lovely Karen
comes walking into the scene, right on cue to create drama between Gary and
Abs.
After Abs sees who she’s going
to have to be working with, she storms into the house and Gary follows her and
the two have a talk. This is the scene I
really wanted to discuss, in which we realize that Gary is definitely seeing
clearly by this point. See, Abs says
something like, “Shouldn’t you trust me?” and Gary laughs at her, which I found
delightful, and then says, “I love you; I don’t trust you.” That’s it, that’s the line, that shows us
that Gary is no longer a fool and he sees the woman he’s involved with for who
she is and he’s smart enough to know what she’ll do if he gives her the
power. I also just love the way he
laughs, because it’s not in a malicious way or like he’s trying to hurt her
feelings, but rather that he’s just amused by her question, amused by the very
idea that he could just blindly trust her.
And what of this ‘love’ business, by the way? Does Gary really love Abs? How can he love Abs when his true soul mate
is Valene? Well, I’ve gone on in the
past about how I think you can love more than one person, just the way that I
think Val loves both Gary and Ben. I
don’t think Gary loves Abs with the same soul-crushing intensity that his love
for Val brings out, but he does love her, just the same. I also want to make special
mention of this scene because I actually saw it on YouTube out of
context a long time ago and it’s what lead me to pursue finishing KL after watching the first two seasons
on DVD and being underwhelmed. I
remember watching this scene of Abs and Gary sorta fighting and, even without
any understanding of what was going on around them at this juncture, I saw this
and I thought, “Yes.” Everything looked
so much more exciting than those first two seasons, and Abby’s hair was obviously a big selling point
for me when I first saw this clip. So
excited was I by this brief little scene that, upon viewing it, I began to make
efforts to procure the post season two years of KL.
Even though Karen’s keeping busy
by going to work for Gary at Lotus Point, she’s still got plenty of other
things going on in her life, like the whole dying thing and the way it’s
ruining her relationship with her great husband, Mack. Oh, poor, poor Mack; I just want to climb
into the TV set and hug him and tell him everything is going to be okay. In this ep, we have a scene displaying both
characters sitting alone in bed (or “in couch,” in the case of Mack, who has
been spending his nights at Ben’s Plant House), clearly thinking about each
other. Mack picks up the phone and
decides to give Karen a call, prompting a scene that reminds me of all the
yearning we typically get from Gary and Val.
In this instance, I absolutely want both of these characters to work it
out with each other, to patch things up and make peace, but just as the writers
dangle a little carrot of hope in front of me, they then take it away. See, the two are having a nice conversation
on the phone, being pleasant, but after the ice has been broken a bit and Mack
says how he thinks they should go out for dinner the next night, Karen gets
stern and says, “No, the marriage is over.”
Oh God, it hurts.
Can I just take a pause to say
that these characters are soooooooo interesting? I feel like I might say that a lot, but damn,
is it not true? Even back in the early
years, when the eps were a little more inconsistent and you would be randomly
assaulted with eps like Land of the Free or Man of the Hour or Silver Shadows, the characters were
still super interesting. Now that the
show has officially morphed into the greatest artistic achievement in
television all around them, the characters have only gotten better. Also, and I feel like this might have something
to do with passing the 100 episode mark, but now I’m really starting to feel as
if I know these characters, as if they’re real people, as if they’re old
friends. This entire storyline with
Karen potentially dying and her relationship with Mack disintegrating could be
a boring snore; it could be like Mike and Susan on Desperate Housewives (remember them? No?
Exactly), where the writers are just trying to keep the couple apart and
we the viewers are supposed to want them together. However, this just all plays as so real, like
both characters are real people who I love and understand. Karen doesn’t want Mack to take her back only
for her to die within a year, while meanwhile Mack can’t completely understand
why his wife continues to shut him out all the time and it’s starting to eat
away at him. Yeah, it hurts to watch
because I love the characters so much, but it’s great drama and great writing
and really great acting.
Meanwhile, Cathy and Laura
continue to seem like they might become lesbians with each other, even though
I’m fairly positive no such thing ever happens.
Again, I’m sorry if I keep bringing it up, but it’s because I just have
no memory of this. I remember lesbian
undertones for Laura and Ciji, but not Laura and Cathy, and yet as we start Hanging Fire, the two are getting
especially cozy and now Cathy has moved into Laura’s house, something else that
completely slipped my memory. I bring
this up a lot because, realistically, I find it hard to believe that Laura could
have lesbian feelings for Ciji and then not
have those exact same feelings for Ciji’s exact freaking twin double,
Cathy. So maybe Cathy isn’t having any lesbian thoughts, but I just feel like those
thoughts are still creeping around in the back of Laura’s brain, especially
since, at this juncture, having chosen to split from Greg for the time being,
she is now a single woman, ready to mingle.
However, it doesn’t look like
there is going to be any muff diving this week on KL, mostly because all the evidence suggests to me that Cathy is a
fairly staunch heterosexual woman. In
this ep, she has some good scenes with both Gary, sorta ending a relationship,
and then Joshua, sorta beginning a new relationship. First she pays Gary a visit up at Westfork
and is a bit dismayed to see that Abs has returned to living on the ranch. Gary explains that he loves Abs and that
they’re going to try and make it work by living together again. Cathy gets rather naked here (emotionally
naked, not literally naked) and asks Gary, “What was I to you?” Gary answers with, “What I hope you still
are, a good friend.” I can respect his
answer; I actually think that, even when he and Cathy were actively sleeping
together (which was very brief in the grand scheme of things), she was his
friend first. I think Gary looked at her
as someone to ride horses and explore the land with; the fact that the two also
had sex a few times is almost secondary to the friendship part.
Later on, Cathy meets up with
Joshua, who is relaxing on the porch and looking out at a peaceful night on the
cul-de-sac. Ah, how wonderfully exciting
and cute it is to see these two interact for the first time. I don’t mean to immediately get into spoiler
territory, but based on the way things unfold over the next year, it’s easy to
forget how sweet and adorable Joshua and Cathy are upon first interacting with
each other. See, he’s making some sort
of cool duck sound with his hands, and then Cathy comes to sit with him and
asks him how he made that sound, and then the scene proceeds forward with the
two talking a bit about their lives, beginning a fascinating relationship that
we shall continue exploring well into the next season.
Joshua himself is not having the
best of days either, by the way. Can I
just say that I actually feel rather sorry for him right now? Even though Baldwin usually drips with a
certain slimy charm in all his roles, at this point Joshua is just so pure and
innocent and gentle; watching Lilimae tell him last ep that his mom was a tramp
who is better off dead really made me feel sorry for the poor guy, a feeling
which continues this week. After all,
Joshua only has three living relatives in the whole world, his papa (who likes
to beat him black and blue, as you’ll recall, so he’s hardly winning any father
of the year awards), Val, and Lilimae.
He has come out to California to try and forge some new connection with
these people, and while Val is being nice and sweet with him, Lilimae is having
none of it, and I imagine it would hurt to make all that effort to go out and
meet someone only to have them shut you out. So let’s just get right to the
point, shall we? Joshua is obviously
Lilimae’s son, and I feel like most viewers could probably call that plot
development well before it occurs, pretty much from the moment he shows up at Val’s
doorstep. For these first two eps
featuring Joshua, My Beloved Grammy has seemed convinced that he’s in California for some
sort of revenge against Val and/or Lilimae, that he has duplicitous
motives. This could be due to the fact
that the last random stranger to show up and start living with Val and Lilimae
was, well, Chip, so I understand My Beloved Grammy’s suspicions, but I also
think they softened throughout this ep as we get to learn more about him and
his true relation to Lilimae. I appreciate the fact that the
writers don’t draw out the surprise of Lilimae being Joshua’s mother for ten or
twenty episodes the way they would do it over on Dallas. Instead, we get
confirmation right here in this ep via a nice bit of superstitious back story. See, Val is all busy getting things prepped
and ready for the arrival of the babies, and she and Joshua wind up discussing
the topic of cribs. Joshua tells Val
that his mother had a superstition about cribs being bad luck for babies, so
little baby Joshua slept in a sink full of pillows. As soon as we hear this insight, it’s pretty
clear that it’s going to come back a little later in the ep to reveal a
shocking secret.
It may be a smidge of convenient
writing, but I’ll forgive it since I love KL
and since we are currently watching a show at the peak of its creative
powers and I’m not gonna complain about some slightly convenient writing, but
anyway, it just so happens that on the exact same day that Joshua brings up his
sleeping-in-a-sink-full-of-pillows memory, Val and Lilimae also get to talking
about cribs and Lilimae says, “It is my firm belief that cribs bring bad
luck.” Well, as soon as Val hears this
little insight, she is able to put two and two together and figure out what’s
really going on around here. I do have
to ask, however, if Lilimae also raised Val sleeping in a sink full of
pillows. This seems like the kind of
superstition you don’t just lose one day, so don’t you think she probably did
the same thing with Val? And if that’s
the case, wouldn’t Val have probably heard this story a time or two
beforehand?
In any case, Lilimae doesn’t
tell Joshua the truth until our next ep, but this ep does provide some helpful
backstory so that we understand exactly how Lilimae could wind up having
another kid. It helps that Lilimae’s
entire backstory is so draped in excitement and wild adventures. Since she was always travelling around from
place to place, it’s believable that there would be gaps in her past history or
different events that she doesn’t discuss with others. In the case of Joshua, we learn that she was
seeing some preacher guy named Jonathan way back when and she got pregnant out
of wedlock by this preacher (how scandalous!).
The two never officially got married, but they carried on as if they
were man and wife and she helped him run his congregation and then she had baby
Joshua. We learn that after a year of
trying to be a good mother, Lilimae simply couldn’t handle it and so she took
off and went on to whatever adventures lie in her future (in addition to Gary and Val: The Lost Years 1962-1978,
I’m also starting to really think that a Lilimae prequel series could make a
stunning TV show, and obviously the title of it would be Nashville Junction).
I’ve probably said something like
this before, but it’s a real testament to the inherent sweetness Julie Harris
brings to her character that Lilimae doesn’t just come off as reprehensible
most of the time. When you write out on
paper all the stuff Lilimae has done, she sounds like kind of a shitty
person. After all, we all remember the
early days when we first met Lilimae in a guest spot in Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
In that ep, we learned about how young mother Valene came running to
Lilimae for help with baby Lucy in her arms, J.R.’s good old boys hot on her
tail. When she found her mother and
begged her to protect the baby, Lilimae refused, citing the fact that some
(probably imaginary) big record producer was in the house visiting with her and
couldn’t know that she’s a grandma.
Thanks to Lilimae’s selfishness, baby Lucy was taken away from Val and
was raised as part of the cast of a less good show. So yeah, that was some pretty shitty
behavior, but now we learn that she also abandoned her pseudo-husband and her
new son after a year of trying to make it work.
However, there’s some indefinable special quality that Julie Harris
brings to proceedings which makes it hard or impossible to judge her because we
see her now as an older and wiser woman who has lived a long life and made some
decisions that she regrets. It’s hard
for me to imagine anyone else playing this character and making her work so
well and remain likable despite all we know about her past history (I’m
obviously speaking for myself right now; at this exact point My Beloved Grammy
is still not a Lilimae fan and I’m starting to doubt she ever will be).
Oh yeah, and even if the actors
aren’t always necessarily playing their real life ages when they play their
characters, I still like to know how old the actors are so I can use it to
gauge the characters. Alec Baldwin was
born on April 3rd, 1958, which would put him at 26 years old right
here (that’s how old I am, and I’m not on a hit show yet…) whereas Julie Harris
was born December 2nd, 1925, putting her at almost 59 years old
here, 33 years older than Baldwin. Of
course, the characters could be slightly different ages than the actors. I get the feeling that Joshua is supposed to
be a little younger than 26 (maybe 21 or 22?) and I also get the feeling that
Lilmae is meant to be a little younger than 59, like maybe 53 of 54. In any case, even though I don’t think the
exact ages are stated and we don’t know precisely how old Lilimae was when
Joshua was born, we can imagine that she was a young mother and that she was
probably unprepared for all the responsibilities.
Oh yeah, and one other thing to
note: It’s hard to feel too judgmental of Lilimae because, even before we meet
the character, we’re definitely getting the sense that this Jonathan guy was
something of a scary asshole. During the
entire first disk of season six, I was convinced we were going to meet this
character on this disk, but apparently I’ll have to wait until the next one,
because we don’t see him yet. However,
we get enough cryptic little mentions of his name, and we get Joshua’s “black
and blue” story, and a little later we hear a story from Lilimae about how
Jonathan humiliated the choir she was working with and made them feel
worthless, so we definitely get the sense that this isn’t exactly a great
dude. While I’m on the subject, I might
as well insult religion a little bit before I move on. Suffice it to say that, while I do believe in
a God above us, I am not a religious person and will probably never ever go to
church (us gays have a weird relationship with religion, don’t you know), I have always found churches tremendously creepy and as a child would never ever go inside of one, and I
tend to think of most religion as this scary and oppressive thing that sucks
all the joy out of life. Certainly, we
are already getting that sense from this off-screen Jonathan character, and we
get the feeling that he instilled a lot of fear and shame into Joshua,
something we are going to see further explored as we move along through the
season.
This episode ends on a more
mellow note than our last three or four eps.
Instead of ending on Karen getting shot or on a pronouncement from the
doctor that she’ll be dead within one year or on Mark St. Claire finally taking
a bullet in the chest, we instead end on a conversation between Greg and Abs,
who meet up at some parking lot somewhere to talk about the state of
affairs. See, Greg is walking a tight
rope now because he shot a man to death; he needs the public to believe he was
only doing it in the interest of protecting Abs from this evil man, so he needs
Abs to go along with the story and say that Greg is a hero. At first, Abs doesn’t want to do it, but Greg
manages to convince her that they’d be better off working together and helping
each other out and we end on a freeze frame (rare; I feel like it’s been awhile
since we’ve had the freeze frame ending) or Abby’s smirking face and that
concludes Hanging Fire.
Wow, I really found a lot to say
about this episode, a lot more than I would have originally expected. While I don’t think this was my favorite
episode of that entire disk we watched (which spans Buying Time through Ipso Facto), I think it was the best of the first three eps of the season and
really shows a ton of fascinating character stuff. I love how the show can introduce a new
character like Joshua and, after just two eps with him, I feel like he’s an
established part of the cast and an important part of the series and equally as
interesting as anyone else in the cast.
I also admire the skill of the writers who are able to always keep
things moving, to finish up the old stories before they can become boring and
to move in the new stories in a way that’s organic, making us feel like things
are always developing and changing right in front of us.
Continuing on from our episode
ending, we shall see Abs giving Greg that little help he needs in our next
episode, appropriate titled A Little Help.
Speaking of the Jonathan character, I'm trying to remember if there are any details of Valene's father ever given out on the show. I can't think of one mention of him ever. Am I forgetting something critical.
ReplyDeleteWe are approaching the "Snooping on Ben's computer" scene which I remember to be one of the moments that brought me back to watching the show after I had tuned out for a while. I could watch that scene over and over again.
There is a flashback scene somewhere. It might be when the character of Lillimae was first introduced. I
ReplyDeletem not sure. There's a scene with little girl Val and her dad. He was significantly older than Lillimae. Like in his 50's when Val was born. When Lillimae ran off, she left Val with him and when he died, I think Val went to live with an aunt.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI think we should all draft Brett to write the lost years story so that we can find out more about Val's father!
ReplyDeleteI remember Val mentions her dad dying in "One of a Kind." That's the patchwork quilt episode.
ReplyDeleteHow old was Lilimae when she had Val? 🤤🤤🤤
ReplyDeleteIndividuals in the Fire administration realize they are interesting and exceptional, regarded as legends by all. יועץ בטיחות ×‘×‘× ×™×”
ReplyDelete