Episode Title: Out of the Past
Season 06, Episode 16
Episode 116 of 344
Written by Neal Bell
Directed by Bill Duke
Original Airdate: Thursday,
January 24th, 1985
The Plot (Courtesy of
TV.Com): Abby decides to lengthen Joshua's segment. She threatens
Cathy not to date Joshua anymore, or she will tell him about her affair with
Gary and that she murdered someone. Mack can't get a Judge to grant him a warrant for Galveston Industries, so Greg gets Mack the
warrant he needs. Karen unwittingly gives Galveston information on the investigation.
Gary goes to Val's diner, and recalls how he met her in a diner by helping her
out when it was really busy. He tries to talk to Val, who doesn't recognize him
and thinks he's crazy. Parker and his friends beat Gary up and tell him to get
out of town. Val's confused as to why two people have thought she was Val
Ewing. Gary goes back to the diner and helps Val like he did when they first
met. For just an instant she recognizes him and says "Gary," but then,
confused, runs out, and Gary follows. She insists she's Verna and has never
seen him before. She tells Parker she wants to get married right away.
Oh thank heavens we are
back. It might be hard for my amazing
and loving and devoted readers to get a sense of how timing works out for My
Beloved Grammy and I to watch KL eps
since I try to put up my essays like clockwork at the same time every
week. In real time, however, the gap
between our last disk of eps and this particular disk of eps (spanning Out of the Past through The Emperor’s Clothes) was quite
possibly the longest ever since we first started doing our KL nights. It took over a
month for us to get back together, and let me tell you that it was
agonizing. My hands began to shake, I
started to wake up in cold sweats, screaming the names of Gary and Val, and my
life became a barren, empty wasteland of misery in which all I could think
about was one day returning to my friends on the cul-de-sac. Happily
enough, just as I was putting a pistol in my mouth and preparing to pull the
trigger, My Beloved Grammy called me up randomly out of the blue and asked if
I’d like to come over that exact night for another batch of eps, so I of course
immediately rushed over, speeding my car and running all the red lights and
mowing down a few innocent people in my mad dash to get back into the magical,
intoxicating world of KL. I only bring this up in order to point out that we may
have lost a smidge of forward
momentum when it comes to all the storylines going on, but KL is obviously so good that as soon as we got started again, we
were able to remember everything that was going on and slip right back into
things. So anyway, let’s go ahead and
talk about the first ep on that disk, which is Out of the Past.
As
I think I’ve been saying incessantly, my favorite storyline going on at this
exact juncture is that of Val/Verna and her adventures in Shula,
Tennessee. That story takes up a good
majority of the time this week, but I’d like to start with some of the other
characters and what they’re up to and then finish by talking about Val/Verna,
so why don’t we go ahead and begin by catching up with Joshua and Cathy. What’s going on with them this week? Well, we are beginning to see an unfortunate
metamorphosis in Joshua’s personality, no doubt accelerated by his quick rise
to fame over at Pacific World Whatever along with Abby’s gentle
manipulations. Joshua was introduced
onto the series in the second episode of the season, Calculated Risks, and he was gentle and quiet and wide eyed and
innocent, but already that Joshua is starting to seem like some distant
memory. Now that he’s got that popular
segment preaching on Reverend Kathryn’s show, the power is starting to get to
his head and it’s negatively affecting his relationship with Cathy. Indeed, we already saw a little storyline
that I think I neglected to mention when it was going on (sorry about that) in
which Cathy was gonna go off on tour with her band and Joshua said they would
have to break up if she did so.
Well,
this week Joshua is giving one of his sermons on the show, but he sorta cuts it
in half and makes it a much brisker affair, which Abs doesn’t like. Honestly, I think I wouldn’t like that
either, since I’m fairly certain when you’re dealing with time slots and
commercials and all of that, if someone suddenly decides to take something
that’s supposed to take up, say, ten minutes, and cuts it down to just five,
doesn’t that fuck up your whole day? Now
you need to go to commercial five minutes early or move the next program up by
five minutes or whatever, right? In any
case, Abs speaks to Joshua about it and he says something about how he just
wanted to be brisk, but then Abs starts to give this speech about how, when you
get some power, there will be people in your life who want to take that power
away, or something like that. Clearly
she’s talking about Cathy, although it takes a minute for her to finally just
say that, at which point she tells Joshua, “Don’t let Cathy ruin your career.” Honestly, I’m having a smidge of trouble
understanding exactly why this is a concern to Abs; does this simply lie in the
base fact that she doesn’t like Cathy?
Most of the time, her manipulations seem to have some motivation which
is easy to track, but in this case it sorta seems like she’s just rocking the
boat for the sake of rocking the boat.
Am I missing something here?
In
any case, this leads to a nice little one-on-one between Abs and Cathy at Lotus
Point in which Abs tells her to stay away from Joshua and Cathy gets a nice
line of, “Have you ever loved anyone?” On paper that might not read, or it might
even sound corny, but the way Lisa delivers that line makes it pretty funny,
and I like that Cathy is not deterred by Abby’s threats here and is able to
dish it out equally well, because when Abs threatens to tell Joshua that Cathy
did time for murder and that she was fooling around with Gary while he was
married, Cathy just points out that she could tell Joshua it was Abs who hired
her to distract Gary in the first place. It
doesn’t take long for Cathy to do just that.
She’s having a chat with Joshua when he brings up what Abs said to him
back at Pacific World Whatever, how maybe he needs to cut Cathy out of his
life. At this point, Cathy tells Joshua
about her season five shenanigans, before he was on the show. Joshua doesn’t appear to believe her, or at
the very least he’s a bit confused, asking why Abs would purposefully hire
another woman for her husband to fall in love with. Clearly this relationship is on dangerously
thin ice since Joshua basically refuses to believe anything Cathy, the woman
who loves him, is saying to him.
Meanwhile,
Mack is still deeply committed to his investigation of the Tidal Basin murders,
a storyline that I’m really beginning to follow along with and understand much
better than during my first trip through the KL experience. In this ep,
Mack is trying to get a warrant to investigate Galveston Industries. I kinda forgot the exact details of what the
warrant is for, but I think it’s just to investigate the entire company,
generally, to be allowed to snoop around and find some incriminating
evidence. However, the judge tells Mack
he doesn’t have enough evidence in the first place to warrant getting a, um,
warrant, so he turns him down. Mack is
upset, but then help arrives in the form of a certain Mr. Gregory Sumner, who
shows up at Mack’s and Karen’s to inform them that they now have their warrant;
he pulled some strings and used his powers and voila. Karen is a bit suspicious about what his
interest in all this is, why he’s being so helpful, and Sumner is like, “Hey,
you wanted your warrant, you got your warrant.”
There’s
also a quick scene this week between Paul Galveston and Karen that I probably
should have paid a bit more attention to, only because I’m having a little bit
of trouble understanding the exact contents of the scene. Basically Karen goes to pay him a visit and
he’s sipping on a gigantic snifter of brandy (which he always seems to be drinking;
brandy must be Galveston’s drink of choice just like J.R.’s was a bourbon and
branch) and she says something about how Mack is doing an investigation into
the Tidal Basin murders. Honestly, I
couldn’t figure out if Karen was being threatening to Galveston in that sorta
nice way, where you smile and are chit chatty but you are also saying, “Watch
out,” or if she was really just making polite conversation and she sorta let
this information slip out. In any case,
Galveston’s ears seem to perk up at this and I take it to mean that, prior to
this, he didn’t recognize how serious Mack’s investigations were, but now he
sees that he’s gonna have to start doing something clever to distract Mack.
Honestly,
that’s about it for the non-Val/Verna stuff this week, which is interesting to
note. Generally, even if an episode is
focusing pretty heavily on one character, there’s still a ton going on with the
rest of the cast, but in this ep, they’re not given as much to do since we
focus so heavily on the Shula adventures.
To be clear, I ain’t complaining; Val/Verna has been in Tennessee for
five eps now, and this remains my favorite story going on right now and the one
that I remember most from the season.
I’m sure I’ve said this already, but I love how Val/Verna essentially
seems to wander off into another series for a good chunk of eps, and whenever
we cut away to her we get to be part of this other series about the lives of a
bunch of friendly folks in a small town in Tennessee. Because of the gloriously huge episode count
of the season, it really gives us time to live and breathe with her in Shula
rather than just having her drop by for an episode or two. Nope, instead we really get the sense that
she is comfortably established here and that, if Abs hadn’t figured out where
she was and told Gary about it, she could probably stay living here
forever. However,
even though Val/Verna is popular amongst the town folks and is a good waitress
and gets along with her boss and has a nice apartment, things aren’t all
completely sunny, since we’ve got a snake in the grass known as Parker
Winslow. You’ll all recall that in our
last ep, Parker did a bit of research at the library and discovered who
Val/Verna really is. After that, he
proposed marriage to her and she accepted, which brings us to where we are now,
with the two eagerly planning their wedding ceremony. Now, real fast I do wanna talk about Parker’s
motivations. Parker is obviously a
sleaze, but I also get the feeling that he’s not entirely motivated by greed in this instance. He was
dating Val/Verna before he found out she was a famous author and he did seem to genuinely like her. Still, it was about two seconds after he
found that “L.A. Author Val Ewing Missing” newspaper that he went and proposed
to her, so I’m assuming that he thinks marrying her will somehow get him a
slice of her money, but I just wanna point out that I don’t believe that’s the
reason he started up with her in the first place. I’m not saying this as a defense to the
character, who I think is slime, but just merely an observation.
Fortunately,
Gary is on the scene pretty quickly as we start this ep to try and rescue
Val/Verna. Unfortunately, he has a
little recreation of the memorable scene between Abs and Val/Verna from our
last show. In similar style, he comes
walking into the diner and sees Val/Verna working like a busy bee, and when she
gets to his table there’s no glint of recognition in her eyes or nothing like
that. Instead, she just takes his order
and asks if he’d like some coffee and when Gary says how he believes they know
each other, she tells him that’s not so, but get this, she also says something
about how, “I’d remember a face as handsome as yours,” which I totally
loved. Even in the depths of this
bizarre amnesia thing she’s got going on, somewhere deep down inside, within
the very core of her soul, Val/Verna is still inherently immediately attracted
to Gary even though she doesn’t remember him. By
the way, I would be absolutely remiss in my duty if I neglected to mention what
happens right before Gary walks into the diner.
See, he comes pulling up in the parking lot and then we go into a scene
which I’ve never forgotten, and that is a glorious flashback to the first time
Gary and Val ever met. This has been a
major part of their past history ever since their very, very first appearances
way back on Dallas with Reunion: Part One, when Val told Lucy
the story of how she saw Gary for the first time and, “He was just about the
prettiest thing I’d ever seen.” Oh God,
yes, and how I’ve been waiting for the day to come when we would finally get to
see this first meeting acted out right before our very eyes, and now that day
has arrived.
In
the flashback, we see a young Gary come walking into whatever diner it was that
fifteen year old Valene was working in.
She’s overworked, the diner is a madhouse, there’s a thousand things
going on at once, too many people to keep track of, and her boss is giving her
a hard time. She has her back turned to
Gary and is sorta yelling at her boss while holding two plates, but then Gary
comes up behind her and gently takes the two plates out of her hands. She spins around, their eyes lock, my thighs
melt, and we witness what true love at first sight really looks like. From there, Gary starts to go to work helping
her out with her tables and then we return to 1985 and leave that flashback
behind, but don’t forget about it, cuz it’s gonna be pretty darned important
for a scene later in the ep.
I
love the flashback for a multitude of reasons.
First off, I love physically seeing this first meeting that we have
heard about as a part of Gary and Val’s core histories since day one. I feel like the fact that we are allowed to
take a minute and go back in time also adds a feeling of scope and grandeur to
the series, really emphasizing the feeling that these characters are real and
that their pasts are real, as well.
Also, I think it’s just, you know, cool. I think other shows might be content with
just telling us about Gary and Val’s first meeting and then leaving it at that,
but actually seeing it is so much richer.
Finally, it really helps to demonstrate the theme of this episode that’s
right there in the title, Out of the Past. In this case, we are seeing something from
Gary and Val’s past, and it’s going to be important to see how that past event
can affect events within the present day.
However, just to show that I’m not a complete groveling sycophant for
the show, I do have one small flaw, and that would be the casting of young
Gary. Young Val is pretty okay; I can
buy that she’s a young J.V.A. (and she’s also a Transmorpher since she appeared
during The Dark Years of Dallas as
some boring girlfriend of Bobby’s or something), but young Gary doesn’t look
much like Shack to me at all, and My Beloved Grammy agreed. This guy’s name is Andrew Fielder and this is
his only credit ever. This forces me to wonder if he was actually a
real actor or if he was just some friend of someone who worked on KL.
Perhaps some Lorimar suit was like, “Can you throw my kid into one of
your eps? He really wants to be on
TV!” Anyway, I have no idea who he is
and no way of knowing where he came from or where he’s gone, but my little
micro-criticism of this scene is that he just doesn’t look much like a young
Gary. Aside from that, however, the
scene is gold.
Val/Verna
doesn’t remember Gary and doesn’t understand why he’s hanging around and
bothering her. To the other observers in
this little drama, it looks like Gary is kinda a weirdo for showing up to
bother the nice waitress and claim that they used to be married. Also, Gary tries to get the boss at the diner
to believe him, but he’s not really having any of it, and the doctor he talks
to says that Val/Verna seems perfectly fine and happy and he can’t force some
sort of psychiatric evaluation on her on the word of one stranger in
town. Now, you all know I love this
storyline and think it’s amazing, but that doesn’t mean I can’t point out some
logic holes. All the best works of art
have their little flaws, and KL is no
exception. The main flaw here is that I
don’t know that Val/Verna has any form of I.D. or a social security number or
nothing to even prove who she is. I
could buy that she’d show up at a little diner and ask for work and the boss
would hire her without seeing a social security; I’m willing to believe that he
might be paying her under the table for her services. However, now wedding bells are in the air and
I’m pretty sure people can’t just show up to get married without having proof
of who they are and where they came from and that they are, in fact, who they
say they are. So in this case, I’m
wondering why nobody is like, “Say, let’s just ask Verna for a picture I.D. to
prove who she really is.” If that
happened, wouldn’t Gary be able to prove he’s telling the truth? Also,
Gary really didn’t come too prepared, did he?
He found out Val was here and he just sorta rushed over, but now he’s
finding it hard to get anyone to believe him as he goes around claiming that he
used to be married to her for years and that they have a daughter in
Texas. Why didn’t he grab a quick copy
of one of her books to show to people and say, “Look, there’s a picture of her
with the name ‘Val Ewing’ underneath it.”
Why not bring some pictures of him and her together? Why not bring some reinforcements in the
forms of, say, Lilimae or Karen, people who can back up his claim and confirm
that Verna is really Val? So yeah, there
are certain aspects of this storyline that are becoming a little hard to
swallow, but I’m still swallowing it fine because it simply tastes so damn
good.
Later,
we start to see some wheels turning in Val’s/Verna’s head during a scene in
which Parker is giving her a foot massage.
Seriously, ick, I’m just not a foot guy and it feels like, for this one
scene, Quentin Tarantino suddenly stepped in as guest director and brought his
little foot fetish along with him, because not only does Parker massage her
feet, but as they discuss their wedding, he even kisses her feet. Oh barf, I
am gonna tell you right here and now that, no matter how deeply in love I might
be with someone, I would never ever ever kiss their fucking feet. But anyway, I’m focusing on a small detail of
the scene instead of the big stuff, and that is the fact that Val/Verna is
sorta talking out loud to herself and she’s like, “Isn’t it funny that that man
called me ‘Valene’ and that’s what that pretty lady called me?” She’s obviously referring to Abby’s little
visit to town last episode (“Boy, you’re sure pretty”), and she then ends the
scene with the little question, “Who on earth is Val Ewing?” Just
to prove that Parker is a complete sleaze and a worthless piece of crap (“A
piece of crap! I find him extremely
ugly! He emits a foul and unpleasant
odor! I loathe him!”), he and his two goons pay Gary a little visit with a bunch of big,
like, wooden oars or something. Oh God,
did I hate this, and what cowardice it is to watch three guys beat up one
guy. Gary still manages to get a few
good swings in, but it’s just not a fair fight and he gets beat up a bit with
those big oars and then Parker kneels down next to him and grabs him by the
shirt collar and says, “Hands off my fiancé!”
Oh boy, things just aren’t going too well in Gary’s world lately, are
they?
The
best scene of the ep comes right near the end, in which Gary pays Val/Verna another
visit at the diner and finds her in a very similar situation as she was the
very first time he saw her. As before,
the diner is a madhouse and people are screaming at her and her boss is getting
sassy. The scene is pretty much exactly
the same, and at this point My Beloved Grammy said, “He should come up behind
her and take the plates like he did before,” and that is of course what
happens. When Gary takes the plates out
of her hands, she spins around and they lock eyes and Bill “Cooke” Duke kicks
in with some of his trademark brilliance and visual flair as we get these
little subliminal flash cuts to the young Gary and Val again. The music swells, Val’s/Verna’s eyes get
kinda big, and then she whispers, “Gary,” and we see that, for this one moment,
she is remembering. My heart is beating
and pounding as if I’ve been doing hours and hours of serious cardio and not
just sitting on my ass drinking beer and watching TV, but then the moment
shifts when she goes storming out of the diner, returning to her claim that
she’s never seen Gary before. Gary
follows after her and says how, for a moment there, she was remembering, but
she refuses to acknowledge it and asks him to leave her alone. I
find it easy to understand Val’s/Verna’s mental anguish in this instance. Somewhere, buried deep down inside of her
very soul, she can remember everything about her real life and her true soul
mate, but if she allows her mind to remember Gary, that means having to allow
her mind to remember all the other details, all the horrible things that have
happened to her, the babies that she had and lost, and I think if that happens,
she just won’t be able to handle it. So
it’s sorta an all-or-nothing thing, and the reason her mind snaps back into
Verna mode so quickly is because she’s not ready to take on all those other
memories yet; it would just be too painful.
Thusly, our final scene of the ep is Val/Verna returning to meet up with
Parker and declaring that they need to get married right away.
So
that was Out of the Past and
obviously it was great, but of course I’m a broken record lately because every
fucking episode of this season is great.
I didn’t think about it until I looked it up, but this actually our
first Duke episode of the season and I’d almost forgotten how much I enjoy his
eps and the style he brings. I may have
neglected to mention those sorts of directorial details in my writeup, but I
noticed lots of cool mirror shots in this one, people speaking to each other
while sitting in front of mirrors, for instance, and also those cool shots
where someone is sitting in the background and a prominent figure looms in the
foreground, like an early shot of Sumner sitting in an office while some guy
stands in front of him and holds a file folder.
I also liked the use of dissolves that take us from 1985 back to the
past when Gary was seventeen and Val was fifteen. Duke always comes through like a champion and
I’m deeply saddened to note that we only have three more episodes from him in
our future. If this ep has a flaw, it’s
just some of those logical holes I brought up, but I love the series so much
and this season so much and this storyline so much that it’s not too hard for
me to just sorta go along with it.
Next
up, we’ll see if Parker Winslow successfully manages to trap Val/Verna into a
marriage as we explore Lead Me to the Altar.
Think about it; the Val/Verna storyline couldn't work today at all. Gary would just show up at the diner, pull out his phone, and show her pictures of them together. He would then pull up his e-book copy of "Nashville Junction" and showed her the Verna Ellers character. I am glad Knots came out when it did!
ReplyDeleteAll these holes in the plot - very true, but I never notice them because I am totally buying the story line.
ReplyDeleteI remember hating Parker when I first watched this season. But now I didn't feel he was as creepy until he got his thugs involved. I thought the opposite about our young lovers - Young Gary looked a little like old Gary but young Val did not look anything like older Val. I totally understand her break with reality. Her babies were born alive and everyone around her told her that her reality was a horrific lie. No one believes you and you can't trust your own mind.
ReplyDeleteThere's a tiny yet important scene where Galveston receives confirmation of the twins' whereabouts. He very specifically asks if the babies are healthy and well cared for. Once satisfied, he then ends the phone conversation. It's an important scene because it tells the audience that the babies are indeed fine (and that we shouldn't worry about their safety) and that Galveston has a heart (albeit small). As long as the babies are fine, he's happy to leave them where they are until he has need of them in the future. Pawns they may be, but Galveston wants to make sure they are fine. A nice touch to the character.
ReplyDeleteI think Partner's rush to marry Verna after seeing the news about Val's disappearance is not motivated by money. He's rushing simply because he's afraid he'll lose her if more of her friends/ family find out where she is.
ReplyDeleteYeah, GARY!!! Why didn't you bring photographs?