Episode Title: Rough Edges
Season 06, Episode 19
Episode 119 of 344
Written by Richard Gollance
Directed by Nicholas Sgarro
Original Airdate: Thursday, February
14th, 1985
The Plot (Courtesy of
TV.Com): Joshua apologizes to Cathy and says he's making a lot of
mistakes as he's never had a girlfriend before, but he's unhappy without her.
Galveston's men contact Greg and want to transfer power to him, but he refuses.
Meanwhile, Gary's frustrated he can't get in to see Galveston and is told he's
away on business. Abby finds Scott Easton's notebook, but the pertinent pages
about Val's babies are ripped out. Val starts therapy with Dr. Michaels, but
misses a lot of sessions and Karen tries to convince her to go. She hears
Lilimae and Ben talking about having her committed, so she yells at Lilimae for
abandoning her and calls her a tramp. She hears Lilimae crying, but is
unconcerned. Finally Val opens up to her doctor and then feels bad about
attacking Lilimae. Ben gives Val a ride home, and she suddenly remembers his
beach house and orchids. He is overjoyed.
Val
disappeared to Shula and turned into Verna for such a good long stretch of
episodes that one can easily assume it won’t be a completely smooth
reintegration into her normal life, and that’s what the majority of the story
for Rough Edges is about. Interestingly, the writers and directors
choose to start this episode out in a rather unusual way, with Val back at her
little Shula apartment, walking around and seeming happy as a clam. This caused some brief whiplash for me, as we
just watched Fly Away Home in which
Val, well, flew away home, so to then start this episode and have her back in
Shula was a bit off-putting and I could see this opening sequence confusing
viewers way back in 1985. However,
it’s actually a rather brief scene and then we sorta get out of Shula to reveal
that Val is back in California and is talking about her adventures over the
past few months with a new psychiatrist, Dr. Michaels. Now, as soon as My Beloved Grammy and I both
saw this doctor, we knew we recognized him but we didn’t know why. Well, after a glance at his IMDb page, I’m
still not entirely sure what it is I
recognize him from so strongly, but my conclusion is that this actor, Charles Aidman (pictured below), has just been in five thousand movies and TV shows, so it must be
buried in the back of my unconscious somewhere that I have seen him in
something once before, like perhaps two eps of Dallas (Ray’s Trial and The Oil Baron’s Ball, both from 1983) as
Judge Emmett Brocks.
Okay,
I’ll say right off the bat that my favorite scenes from this ep all occur
between Val and her doctor, and I am pleased to note that he will be returning
one more time a little later this season in A Piece of the Pie. I’ll be curious to
see how the Val/Dr. Michaels scenes are filmed when we get to that ep, because
here in Rough Edges, they are
actually filmed in a rather interesting way.
Essentially, Dr. Michaels hardly speaks, so we get to see Val go off on
a lot of long speeches about her life, about her time in Shula, about her
relationship with Gary, stuff like that.
I liked the way the camera would generally just stay on Val’s face as
she speaks and we didn’t really see or hear much from Dr. Michaels, who
just listens patiently. Even without
speaking or doing too much, I do get a sense that I like this doctor; he just
seems pleasant and sweet, like he really cares about his patients, and of
course it goes without saying that J.V.A is exceptional in these scenes, just
as she’s exceptional throughout the entire length of the sixth season. I think some of the hardest acting a person
ever has to do is when they are just sitting and talking, not really getting
another actor to bounce off of, just having to carry the material all by
themselves, and I think J.V.A does a fine job of that here. Mind
you, this is all just the first damn scene of the ep; I may be getting a little
ahead of myself, but I’m just trying to stress that I liked the unorthodox way
this ep started. As we are working our
way through this monumental sixth season, I’m noticing that the entire creative
team is really having no problem with trying out new things, new styles, with
starting episodes in strange or unconventional ways, with having surreal dream
sequences thrown in every now and again (not just the start of this ep right
here, but also Val flying the kite with Gary back in Message in a Bottle or that awesome dance sequence the two of them
shared back in Lead Me to the Altar). To me, this symbolizes that the show has reached
a point where, six seasons deep and with more than 100 episodes under their
belt, the creative team is feeling the freedom to experiment and kinda do
whatever they want with each episode; there’s a rich feeling of possibilities
and exciting ideas floating around in a way that I frankly never really felt
over on Dallas.
Honestly,
my notes on this ep are very sparse, and that’s not because I was drinking and
got dumb or anything like that, but because in many ways this is a rather
simple ep with one thing it’s focusing heavily on: Val. The vast majority of this ep is Val with her
doctor or something else occurring with Val that forces her to examine her own
character. However, there are still of
course other stories going on, so let’s focus on those for a few moments,
starting with the saga of Gary and Galveston and all that. If you’ll recall our last ep, we ended on a
pretty great cliffhanger with Galveston having what appeared to be a stroke,
asking Abs to call his doctor for him only for her to respond with, “Call him
yourself, Cookie.” Now, I don’t mean to
get into spoilers here, but I am fairly certain that we have seen the last of
Galveston now, that Fly Away Home represented
his last appearance on the series (with the exception of just one more surprise appearance in a 1990
ep entitled My Bullet, an ep I
remember being very arty and
interesting). However, even if we don’t
get to physically see Howard Duff the actor in this ep or the next one, the
character isn’t dead yet. This was a surprise to me, because after the
ending of our last ep, my memory was that Galveston just died. Nope, instead we have a scene of a bunch of
his lackeys gathering around to discuss the state of affairs and helpfully
telling the audience that Galveston had a cerebral hemorrhage and is very near
death. We are told he could die pretty
much any minute but that he could also last, at the very most, one month before
he dies. So in any case, the man is at
death’s door, and whether it happens right this second or a month from now,
it’s inevitably going to happen. Meanwhile,
Gary is having a hell of a time trying to get in contact with Galveston. He stops by the ranch, he makes calls, he
tries all he can just to go see him, but he keeps getting the runaround from the
henchmen, who tell him that Galveston had to fly off somewhere to do something
related to business, that eventually he’ll be back. Gary is starting to get suspicious; after
all, he and Galveston were getting pretty tight (I believe in this ep, Gary
declares that he now sees Galveston as a good personal friend), so for him to
suddenly just vanish like this doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, does
it?
I’ll
confess that some of these plot points continue to fly over my head, but I also
must stress that this is not the fault of the show, but rather the way that my
own stupid brain works. Actually, I’m
doing a lot better when it comes to
following storylines and plot convolutions upon this viewing versus my previous
viewing back in college. Back in
college, all the stuff with Mack
investigating Wolfbridge and then the Tidal Basin murders and how this shit
connected up with Galveston Industries, that all went flying over my head and
didn’t register at all, since I was probably too busy making another martini. Now I’m following it a lot better, but I
still get a little confused with this whole Galveston-in-a-coma-or-whatever
thing and how it relates to Greg. See,
in this ep, the henchmen are trying to convince Greg that he should take on the
power with Galveston about to expire, I guess meaning that he should sorta step
in to fill his old daddy’s shoes now, but Greg’s not interested. In fact, there’s some rather fabulous dark
humor going around at this juncture with the sheer delight Greg seems to feel
towards Galveston’s impending death.
Seriously, there’s some funny stuff here displaying how Greg does not
care one bit that his father is about to die; he cracks jokes and seems to take
such relish in this inevitability. Greg
has been with us for roughly a year and a half now, and he’s feeling
comfortably established as part of the core cast, but we are also starting to
unwrap those different layers of his character, to find out all the different
complexities brewing inside. Thanks to
the great writing and Devane’s brilliant acting, Greg is quickly elevating up
to become one of the most interesting characters on the entire series.
Meanwhile,
Joshua and Cathy I think get back
together in this ep, and the reason I say “I think” is because in looking at my
notes, I begin the next episode (The Emperor’s Clothes) by scribbling, “Joshua + Cathy +romantic picnic/are they
back together now?” So, based on that, I
do believe they get back together in this
ep after a nice little speech from Joshua about how he’s never had a girlfriend
and this is all new to him. At this
juncture, I’m supporting Cathy and not liking Joshua too terribly much. I think Cathy is sweet and wonderful and I
love listening to her sing; she could easily do better than some preacher’s son
with a ton of religious guilt and repression issues. I believe it was only our previous ep in
which Joshua basically said that singing at Isadora’s made Cathy evil, and
those are pretty strong words, so I think I’d rather see Cathy dump him and get
with a boy who is more on her wavelength, maybe another musician or
something, maybe a member of KISS, perhaps?
Joshua’s
true colors are really starting to
come out in this ep, by the way. It’s
kinda amazing to think that he was only introduced to the series at the start
of this season, that he seemed like a sweet, innocent, wide-eyed young man, and
now he’s making his metamorphosis into darkness and evil, yet none of it feels
rushed. Somehow, the way storylines
unfold over the course of the season and the way Joshua makes his transition
from sweet to nasty all feels very organic, not too fast or too slow. On another series, I do think this would feel
a bit accelerated, but here it all seems to be occurring in a very natural
way. Anyway, the true colors scene that
I’m referring to actually occurs not between Joshua and Cathy, but rather
Joshua and Val. See, Val is up late in
the kitchen, getting herself a midnight snack or whatever, and Joshua comes
down to, presumably, do the same thing.
I wish I had transcribed his entire speech to her down, because sitting
here now I can’t entirely remember the exact things he says, but basically he
starts out by seeming sweet and listening to her talk about her problems, but
then he starts to get sorta creepy.
Basically, it starts to seem like Joshua wants to hurt Val, that he wants to bring up all her traumas and
life problems just to grind some salt into her wounds. The one thing he doesn’t bring up, and it’s
very fortunate, is Val’s babies. You get
the sense that any second he’s gonna be like, “So Val, do you remember how you
had those babies and the doctors stole them away from you and said they were
dead?” He never gets that far, but he
does bring up some other things, and he seems to be getting some sort of pleasure
out of Val’s pain, yet it’s all draped in this act of, “I’m here to listen to
you and be your friend.” However, after
he’s done, he leaves her all alone in the kitchen and turns the lights off,
which is sorta odd, but definitely creates a spooky effect as we see poor Val
(POOR VAL!) sitting all alone in the dark.
One
of the most painful emotional scenes in this ep takes place between Val and
Lilimae. When Val gets the idea that
people are conspiring against her to get her sent to some sort of mental
institution (and it’s more than an idea; the other characters actually are discussing putting her in a
sanitarium or whatever), she flips out on Lilimae and attacks her in the living
room, saying really horrible and nasty things to her. She says she’s a tramp, a bad mother, that
she should be ashamed of herself, stuff like that. While Lilimae certainly wasn’t mother of the
year when Val was a young girl, it seemed the two had reached a peace with
eachother by this point that was rather lovely to see, so it’s painful to see
Val attack her mother and hurt her feelings here. Julie Harris always does a brilliant job of
conveying her emotions with her eyes, and this was a good one, since as Val
attacks her, we can see the tears start to form in her eyes. When we get to the next scene, Lilimae is in
her bedroom, crying real loud, and we see Val sorta stop by the door, listening
to her crying, clearly thinking about going inside to apologize, but she
chooses not to.
Why
doesn’t Val go inside and comfort her mother?
My conclusion here is that she is still having too much trouble
remembering exactly who she is and what her life is like. She’s confused by her own relationships with
people she only has vague memories of.
She’s starting to have flashes of memory thanks to her psychiatric
sessions, so perhaps one of those flashes is of something shitty that Lilimae
did when Val was small. Because of this,
she gets angry and attacks Lilimae, and I do believe she feels bad about it
just a few minutes later, but I think she doesn’t have enough memory of events
to know how to properly speak to her mother and apologize, at least not
yet. I’m trying to view this as if Val
is a real person (the way I try to view all the characters) and I’m trying to
understand what’s going through her mind, but I also try to see it through the
fresh eyes of some first time 1985 viewer who has no idea what lies in the
future. Perhaps it would seem like Val
is simply going crazier and crazier?
Sure, she’s not claiming to be Verna anymore, but she seems to be having
a hard time controlling her emotions and she’s acting, well, a smidge odd. Watching this scene, My Beloved Grammy
declared that she thinks Val is going to turn really mean and nasty all the
time, after all these years in which she was good and kind to everyone. It doesn’t quite work out that way, but it is
interesting to see how My Beloved Grammy predicts what might occur in the
future.
I’m
kinda sad that we never get an official apology scene between Val and Lilimae,
because I would have liked to see that, mostly since I feel so damn sad for
Lilimae, but we do get a real great scene of Karen and Val visiting that I
greatly enjoyed. In this scene, Karen is
being all encouraging and telling Val how things will work out okay, that she’s
gonna start to get her memories back and feel more like herself, and then we
get a fabulous callback to Karen’s pill popping a season ago. See, she’s talking to Val about the act of
burying your problems, trying to ignore them and hope they will go away, and
then she says, “I had a drug problem,” and Val looks all surprised, her eyes
get all wide, and she’s like, “You did?” It’s kinda a cute reaction, because not only
is it just kinda funny that Val has forgotten these details from season five,
but also because we get the sense that, in her eyes, Karen is the last person
in the world who would have a drug problem.
I also love the upfront way that Karen speaks about it, she just nods
and is like, “Yes, I had a drug problem.”
It’s a good thing to bring up, though, because she is able to make the
point that she faced her problems, got over her drug problem, and now
everything is okay, showing that we can all persevere. I also like this scene just because I like
when past history is brought up on the show.
I love how the writers never seem to have a bunch of drama happen and
then immediately forget about it and never mention it again. Instead, everything the characters do and
experience is added on to their life story and can be brought up again and again
in the future. Karen’s pill popping
problem was a part of her life and now it’s part of her past, but she’s not
gonna just forget about it like it never happened; it’s always gonna be
something that shapes her.
Okay,
to the last scene of the ep. Val returns
to the caring Dr. Michaels and has one of those real breakthrough
sessions. I hope Dr. Michaels didn’t
have any other appointments scheduled for the day, because Val seems to take up
quite a bit of his time. I’m making that
assumption mostly because we have a lot of dissolves in this scene, parts where
Val is telling some story and then the frame dissolves and she’s sitting in
some new position, telling some new story.
Heck, perhaps all of this could occur
in fifty minutes, but I feel fairly comfortable saying the dissolves are meant to
indicate a large passage of time. So
what does Val talk about? She discusses
how she went off on Lilimae the other night, how she hurt her feelings and made
her cry, how she doesn’t really know why she did it or why she said what she
did. My Beloved Grammy’s prediction
about Val turning evil is already proving to be not entirely accurate, because
we see that Val still has a good heart and she feels bad about hurting her
mother. Then she starts to tell stories
about Christmas when she was a kid, about stringing up popcorn on the tree with
Lilimae, stuff like that. As before,
most of this scene is just Val sorta talking into the camera, having to act all
by herself, and of course J.V.A delivers.
The
very very ending of the ep is actually sorta hopeful, one of the more happy
endings we’ve had in a good long time on the series. Val goes outside to meet Ben (and I get
confused about exactly how long this session lasted because he doesn’t say
anything like, “Why were you in there for seventeen days?”) and as she climbs
into the car, she says something like, “How are those orchids at your house
doing?” We see that Val’s memories of
things like Ben’s orchids are rapidly returning, and then if I recall
correctly, we actually get a freeze frame ending on Val’s smiling face,
indicating hope for the future.
Even
though my notes on this ep were sparse and I didn’t think I’d have all that
much to say about it, I continue to surprise myself. Sometimes the things that seem the most
simple actually have the most going on beneath the surface, and that might be
the case with Rough Edges. I found a lot to appreciate in this ep, not
the least of which was J.V.A’s great acting and long soliloquies. In addition to that, we had the creepy scene
of Val and Joshua in the kitchen, the super emotional scene of Val calling
Lilimae a tramp, the callback to Karen’s drug problems, all sorts of good
stuff. One other thing I forgot to note
elsewhere is the very look of this
ep. For whatever reason, this ep looked
especially bright and sunny, and the costumes and hair were especially out of
control here. Seriously, it felt like
every time we saw Abs, she was rocking a completely new outfit and a completely
new hairdo. Additionally, there was a
small scene in which Karen and Mack got dressed up to go to an, um, opera or
something, and they both looked rather fine in their nice clothes (prompting
sex pot Sexy Michael to walk in and tell Karen, “You look nice, like a lady in a
scotch ad”). So not only do you get good
emotional character stuff here, but also some fabulous costumes and bright
cinematography. Last of all, I like the
slow burn, which KL does so often and
so well. I like that the writers don’t
rush Val home to California and then immediately try to reset the status quo;
instead, we are allowed to slow down for awhile and explore Val’s memories
along with her as she tries to regain some semblance of normal life. Overall, quite satisfying.
Next
up is the last ep My Beloved Grammy and I watched on our most recent visit. After all this time with Verna and Shula and
now these psychiatric sessions and repressed memories coming back to the
forefront, it’s now time to get back into the main thrust of the season, that
being Val’s babies, with The Emperor’s Clothes.
It seems odd that a character as important as Galveston isn't fully prepared legally for when he kicks the bucket, yet all the syccophants are scrambling and scratching their heads.
ReplyDeleteThat is a really great point! The whole Galveston death panic was really strange. He knew he was going to die and said so many times. He took the little pill that kept him from kicking the bucket. You would think all of it would have gone off like clockwork.
ReplyDeleteJust watched this ep. myself for the first time since it first aired. I've been on a binge from the start and managed to watch up to this point in about 4 weeks. I think it's fair to say that Galveston was in the process of getting things in order, and probably believed he still had more time, hence his pleading with Greg to step in and grooming Gary as a potential backup plan. So much of this I can't remember at all so I largely feel like I'm watching it for the first time. One thing I remember is why I adored this show so much and why I still think it's the best "soap" of all time...and I'm only up to season 6. Joshua absolutely creeped me out in this episode, I'd forgotten what a hideous god-botherer he is, and I'm assuming it only gets worse. I'm reminded of how good Alec Baldwin is at playing the character...that is when I can get over how beautiful he is and take my eyes off that perfect furry chest OMG !
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