Episode Title: The Deluge
Season 06, Episode 21
Episode 121 of 344
Written by Joyce Keener
Directed by Bill Duke
Original Airdate: Thursday, February
28th, 1985
The Plot (Courtesy of
TV.Com): Joshua asks to open Reverend Kathryn's show, but then takes up
the whole thirty minutes. Reverend Kathryn is starting to become disgusted with
Josh's ego. Abby tells Joshua to come up with sermons, and if she thinks he can
sustain the show, she'll fire Kathryn. Joshua replies he doesn't need Abby to
check his sermons or he'll go elsewhere. Joshua also announces that Cathy will
sing on his show, even though she doesn't want to. Karen questions people about
the evening Val gave birth, and tells Gary she thinks the twins are alive. Abby
overhears. Galveston dies. The mystery woman comes in, and she is Greg's mother
Ruth. She tells Greg that she married Galveston and she wants him to take over
the company. An old friend comes to see Greg and tells him that Empire Valley
is the cover for an international communications center, and that they will
monitor and influence all government communications in every country in the
world. Greg's still resistant.
Here
we are with The Deluge, an ep that
served as the first of a whole glorious disk for My Beloved Grammy and I, a
disk that spanned from here through For Better, For Worse. I note this not
only because I like my readers to have sense of how many eps and which
particular eps we watch in a given visit, but also because this whole
five-eps-per-disk style that we’ve had going since we started season four seems
to consistently work very well, with the five eps always seeming to function as
their own mini-seasons within the greater season. In fact, I should say right now that My
Beloved Grammy doesn’t really pay much attention to precisely which season we
are in or how many eps a season has; I think she herself tends to think of
these disks as little mini-seasons, and they work surprisingly well in that
regard. For instance, while I’ll go
ahead and spoil my thoughts and say right away that I thought The Deluge was a perfectly good episode,
the way every episode of season six has been good, it’s also a bit on the
slower side and functions more for seed planting and less for any actual growth
or payoff, if that makes sense.
When
we last left off with the concluding moments of The Emperor’s Clothes, we could tell the search for Val’s babies
was returning to the forefront, as Karen was beginning to ask questions about
the delivery and do a bit of sleuthing, and we ended on her asking Mack, “What
if Val’s babies didn’t die?” That sets
the stage nicely for where we pick up this ep, which opens on Mack and Karen in
the kitchen, continuing their discussion of Val’s babies. In typically brilliant KL style, in which there are always a ton of storylines going on at
once, we also have Eric enter the scene to inform Karen that a strange
gentleman came by Knots Landing Motors (remember that business?) to inquire
about purchasing it. I guess he’s been
watching the last three seasons and has noticed that what was once a very
active setting that we saw in nearly all the eps has receded into the
background and basically been forgotten as Karen has become heavily involved in
Lotus Point adventures, so why the heck not ask about selling it? Now, if I’m remembering correctly, this early
scene with Eric and the mention of the interested buyer is all we get for this
story this week, but it’ll continue on for another ep or two and serve as a
nice little side story (more on that later).
Karen
schedules an appointment with Val’s lady doctor to get some answers about Val’s
babies and the delivery, but we don’t see her quite yet. Once again, it’s seeds being planted; we
shall see Karen talk to the lady doctor at a later date (I believe the very
next ep), but not quite yet; this week we just see her making some calls. Also, despite talking over her concerns with
Mack, Karen mostly keeps it hush hush throughout this ep, only bringing up her
concerns to Mack and, later, Gary, although of course Abs hears her talking to
Gary and is reminded that this is turning into a legit problem; if she can’t
find a way to get Val’s babies back and safely returned to Val, Karen is probably
going to uncover the truth of what happened and realize that Abs is kinda sorta
partially to blame.
Oh
yeah, and while we are on the subject of the lovely Fairgates, I must bring up
a much more important plot development that's mentioned here, and that is Sexy
Michael wearing a sexy outfit and heading out of the house saying how he’s
going to practice. Now, I’m not entirely
sure what practice he’s going to, but I think it’s basketball. I bring this up because this is 1985 and I’m
sure team showers and all the boys gallivanting around totally naked and
playing grab-ass in the locker room would still be common practice as part of
high school sports culture, and you can bet your ass that if I had been alive
in this era, I would absolutely have joined these sports purely for the
post-game locker room shenanigans. In my
notes I jotted, “Michael’s on his way to practice; this means that his team
mates probably get to see him naked in the showers!” This is obviously much more important than
stolen babies and elaborate Tidal Basin murders and conspiracies to cover up
water poisoning, wouldn’t you agree?
Somewhere off on the side, in a storyline we don’t get to physically see
playing out, Sexy Michael is being all athletic and sexy and sweaty and getting
a real work out with another group of young, able-bodied, red-blooded American
boys, and then afterwards all these boys get to retire to the happiest place in
the entire world, the men's locker room, to disrobe and shower together in their full
nudity just as God made them. This means
that Sexy Michael’s team mates get to see
Michael naked; can you understand the sheer importance of what I am
describing?! Can you imagine having the divine pleasure of
playing basketball or whatever with Sexy Michael and then getting to see him
naked every single day for however
long the sports season lasts? How could
one focus on doing anything else in their life when something this huge is
going on? The mind reels!
But
enough about Sexy Michael and how fucking smoking hot he must look when he’s
totally naked and wet (if only this
had been an HBO show and we could have seen full frontal from Michael week
after week), let’s focus on some of the less important plot developments going
on throughout The Deluge. While Karen is occupied with uncovering the
truth about Val’s babies, we’ve also got Gary and Ben having a bit of a
shouting match about Val and the babies and all that stuff. To the best of my remembrance, this is the
first fight or argument between Gary and Ben, and it aptly demonstrates what a
true gentleman Ben is and why he is so rapidly rising in my estimation in terms
of his character and his legacy for the show.
See, I can’t quite remember how the shouting match starts, but it boils
down to Gary kinda blaming Ben for all these recent problems with Val, saying
how he knocked her up and then ran out on his responsibility, effectively
abandoning her. This is painful to watch
(in a good way), because you just know how hard it must be for Ben to hold his
tongue during something like this. For
all intents and purposes, Ben has been a standup guy with Val and has been
nothing if not patient and understanding with her. We the audience know that Gary is the true
father of Val’s babies, as does Abs and a few other characters (Mack, if I
recall correctly), and Ben could easily just retort with, “You’re the one who knocked her up, asshole,” effectively blowing
Gary’s mind, but he keeps it in, holds in the truth because he knows this is
what Val wants. So basically Ben has to
let Gary take a big piss in his face and he says nothing, all out of respect
for Val; now that’s a good guy.
Interestingly,
I would say that Mr. Joshua Rush is actually getting the majority of the
material this week, as we get quite a lot of developments as far as he’s
concerned. For instance, we are seeing
his continued rise to power and his quick morph from nice, shy, quiet
preacher’s son to egotistical religious extremist jackass. In this ep, the delightful Reverend Kathryn
(and I’m not being facetious in any way; I actually really like this small side character and think he embodies all the
best aspects of a decent and honorable religious person, since a few of those people actually do exist) is nice enough to give
Joshua permission to go on before him and do a little sermon on the show at
Pacific World Whatever. The only problem
is that there’s a thirty minute time slot and Joshua, well, steals the entire
thirty minutes. He gives a great big
sermon that’s actually pretty good about how too many people try to find the
easy way out, and the general theme of his sermon is “Easy doesn’t do it.” I actually
agree with the sentiment, but it’s douchy of him and he completely steals the
entire show from Reverend Kathryn, the man who has been working at Pacific
World Whatever for something like twenty or thirty years. Now, the TV.com description that I copy and
pasted above says, “Reverend Kathryn is starting to become disgusted with
Joshua’s ego,” but I’m really not sure if that’s entirely true. We get some shots of Kathryn during this
sermon, and he looks concerned, and I think he’s sorta mad that Joshua steals
the half hour away from him, but I’m not sure if “Disgusted” is quite the right
word, and even after the show is over, he’s not mean to Joshua, but rather
gentle. He’s like, “That was a good
sermon, but you did sorta steal the
whole show away from me.”
Later,
Abs and Joshua have a little one-on-one and we can definitely see that Abs has
started to create a monster. By boosting
Joshua’s ego so consistently and always telling him how special and amazing he is,
she has allowed him to become somewhat out of control, and now he’s not wanting
to listen to anybody. For instance, she
offers to fire Reverend Kathryn (which truly hurts me; I don’t want to see this
nice man treated so badly), and Joshua is very cavalier and says something
about how he can handle these things himself; he doesn’t need the help from
Abs. I should take this moment to say
that things are playing out quite a bit differently than I remembered. I don’t know if this gets into SPOILER TERRITORY,
but whatever; in my mind, I sorta had a very even division where I thought of
“season six Joshua” as nice and sweet and “season seven Joshua” as nasty and
wicked, but it’s certainly not such a clear divide; you don’t start season
seven and suddenly the dude is pure evil.
Rather, we have spent the season seeing this change take over him, and I
again remind the reader how fucking much I relish the length of this
season. By having thirty episodes in the
season instead of, say, fifteen, the way a show would probably do it nowadays,
it really gives us the proper space to let storylines unfold organically. So even though Joshua arrived at the start of
the season looking fresh-faced and innocent and now he’s starting to turn into
a monster, it doesn’t feel inorganic; it feels like it’s a natural progression
of the character and really remarkably natural, not rushed at all.
This
parlays nicely into Joshua’s controlling and domineering relationship with
Cathy. In this ep, he tells Abs that
he’d like to have Cathy sing on his show (hymns, of course, no Journey or Rick Springfield covers
allowed on a religious program), although he doesn’t precisely ask; rather he sorta announces it. When he shares this with Cathy, she says she
doesn’t want to sing at Pacific World Whatever, that she’s perfectly happy
singing at Isadora’s and doesn’t want to change that. This is just another manifestation of
Joshua’s need to control her; in our last ep, we saw him keep her busy with a
picnic as a way of keeping her away from practice with her band, and now we see
him trying to move her away from the band and the world of Isadora’s in order
to sing on a show that he can monitor and control. It’s scary stuff, and personally I would
really like to see Cathy be a little more aggressive in her refusal, but she’s
still being sorta timid. I guess when
you’re in love with someone, it’s harder to stand up to them directly (I’ve
only been in love twice), so that’s probably the issue Cathy is having at this
moment. If it was me, of course, I’d
tell Joshua exactly where he can put his religious program, and then I’d leave
him and start sleeping with some barely legal Asian, but that’s me, and me and
Cathy are different people.
Perhaps
the most notable thing about this ep is the introduction of a new character
played by a gigantic movie star and icon, and that’s done very organically as
part of Sumner’s storyline. If you’ll
recall, we saw Paul Galveston suffer a stroke in the closing moments of Fly Away Home (“Call him yourself,
Cookie”), and then we spent Rough Edges and
The Emperor’s Clothes with Galveston
in a coma (which is helpful for pinching the pennies, as we just see the vague
outline of a body lying in a bed throughout these eps and the producers didn’t
have to pay Howard Duff for a guest star performance). Also, in The Emperor’s Clothes, we witnessed the arrival of some mysterious new woman in
town, a woman wearing big hats and dark clothes that worked very well for
hiding her face and, again, saving the producers from having to pay those big
guest star bucks. Later, we saw this
mysterious lady getting married to the incapacitated Galveston as he lay dying
in his hospital bed. Who is this lady
and why is she here and what does she want?
We start to get answers to all those questions this week.
See,
early in The Deluge, we see
Galveston’s little heart monitor beepy line thing start to beep and make
squiggly lines and then the lines turn straight and, since I have watched a lot
of ER, I am able to infer that he
is dead. Of course, I don’t have to
infer too long, because later on, one of Galveston’s little lackeys (My Beloved
Grammy and I just refer to him as “Mack-lookalike” because, well, he looks a
whole hell of a lot like Mack) tells Sumner that Galveston died. Of course, Sumner is hardly crying over it,
as we have seen that he has a, shall we say, fractured relationship with his
biological father. Later, Gary heads up
to Galveston’s ranch to try and find the guy (he doesn’t know he’s dead yet)
and is instead greeted by this mysterious woman, still draped in shadows. However, she quickly emerges out of the
shadows and introduces herself as Ruth Galveston, and we see that she is, GASP,
Special Guest Star Ava Gardner!
Now,
I’m gonna take a moment to reveal some things about myself. I talk a real big game when it comes to
movies, and I’m always sucking my own dick for being a pretentious film douche
who goes to see old movies in the cinema and Bob Loblaw, but there are
still tons of holes in my film douche research, and Ava Gardner here is a big
one. I confess that I know the name, I
know she’s a big deal, I know she was like this huge movie star, but I’ve never
seen a single Ava Gardner movie and I’m not entirely sure why she’s a big deal. Make
no mistake; I know that she is a big
deal, and I know that the KL folks
managing to get her for a handful of eps must have been quite a thing back in
1985, but I just don’t personally really know why she’s a big deal. This
reflects badly on me, not her, and certainly when she showed up onscreen, My
Beloved Grammy was like, “Wow, Ava Gardner, she must have been a big get for
the show.” My Beloved Grammy was born in
1935, so Ava Gardner would have been a movie star during all of her formative
years, but embarrassingly I had to look at her Wikipedia page to figure out
what her big, important movies were.
However,
right away I think she fits in well with the proceedings and brings a nice level of
sophistication and class to the show.
Let’s not forget that the ‘80s nighttime soaps would often attract the
talent of these real old-school ladies who had been working in Hollywood for
decades (Barbara Bel Geddes over on Dallas
and Jane Wyman on Falcon Crest as
just two examples that spring immediately to mind), so this seems to be molded
in the same style, although I certainly find Gardner much more appealing than
Bel Geddes (haven’t seen Falcon Crest yet
so can’t comment on Jane Wyman, although one day I’ll watch that whole series
and, probably, just wind up concluding that KL
is much better). I think Ava brings
a real Old Hollywood feeling to the scene; she has that classic, sexy, throaty
cocktails-and-cigarettes voice going on and it works very well. Plus, and I have no way of knowing how she
actually felt while she was filming this, but I don’t get the sense that she
thinks this is beneath her. She seems to
be game to be a part of proceedings, and she also interacts well with William Devane as Sumner.
Speaking
of which, the two are reunited when Sumner visits a funeral home to take one
last look at the body of his biological father.
He’s all alone in the funeral home, and then Ruth approaches from behind
and is like, “Hello, Gregory,” and we learn that she is, in fact, Sumner’s
mother, the one who was married to the pilot guy but was screwing Galveston on
the side and all that good stuff. Sumner
and Ruth spend the rest of the ep together, talking and catching up. It’s a rather fascinating dynamic, but then
Sumner is a rather fascinating character, and I particularly love the way we
are slowly revealing the different aspects of his life and backstory. All this drama with the truth of Galveston as
his father and his mother suddenly showing up in town to marry the man on his
deathbed could seem terribly trashy or sensationalistic, but in typical KL style, it still manages to feel
bizarrely grounded, and I still am not quite sure how they manage to do it, but
I must say it has to be these great actors and the styles they bring to
proceedings. I wish I could elaborate
better, but I guess it’s that combination of Old Hollywood class that Ava
provides combined with Devane’s wonderfully sarcastic and snarky way of
delivering most of his lines. The
basic gist of their talks is that Ruth wants Greg to recognize his birthright,
to seize full control of the Empire Valley project, that this is what Galveston
would have wanted, that Greg deserves this, Bob Loblaw. Greg is not swayed, reminding Ruth that, for
him, Galveston was just this asshole dude that his mom was shagging on the
side, desecrating the memory of the man he thought
was his father, the heroic pilot guy.
At this moment, Greg is not interested in his birthright; he’d rather
continue to do things his own way, do the senate thing, try to use his powers
in that capacity, and so on and so forth.
However,
things start to change in the concluding five minutes of the ep when Greg is
visited by this hilariously Cheesy British Guy named John Coblenz. First, let’s give a real fast shout out to
the actor playing Coblenz, Madison Mason.
It’s always fun when I’m just watching KL and a character shows up and I’m like “Cool, whatever,” and then
I later look up that actor’s resume and see how much stuff they’re really
in. In this case, Madison Mason is still
working to this day, with one of his most recent credits including an episode
of Girl Meets World (I didn’t say he
was working on good stuff; I just
said he was working). Looking through
his IMDb, there’s not a ton that jumps out at me, but there’s just a ton of,
you know, stuff. The guy just keeps busy. Let’s think what things do pop out at me. Well, he
was in a memorable X Files ep (the
season six ep called Triangle which
is shot like a Brian De Palma film with tons of long cuts and crazy split
screen action) as well as my fourth-favorite Omen movie, Omen IV: The Awakening. Anyway, the guy’s not a huge
movie star, but he’s a working character actor who keeps busy to this day, so
good on him.
This
character is hilarious, though. I love
whenever British people are randomly introduced into anything just to be
vaguely evil, and this guy’s perfect.
Thank God, however, that I’m watching this with My Beloved Grammy,
because she was very helpful after the conclusion of the ep with making me
understand the exact gist of this scene.
Basically, Greg’s hanging out in his hotel room that he lives in, and he explains that the Empire Valley project is much more than it appears
at first glance. At first, you’d think
it’s just a simple planned community, but really Galveston’s plan and dream for
it was to use to it as a cover to, like, basically keep an eye on what everyone
in the world is doing. Really, it’s some
sort of epic conspiracy in which they can all keep checking up on people and,
like, listening to their phonecalls and fucking with their credit ratings and,
well, basically it’s The Patriot Act, except about twenty years before that was
a real thing.
The
ending of this episode almost made me pee my pants, and it was one of those
endings that I’d forgotten about, but as soon as it popped up in front of me, I
remembered it vividly and started laughing.
The guy gives this great big speech to Greg about how he needs to
involved in this project because it’s a big fat deal and then he says,
“Everybody is depending on you,” and then there’s a small pause and he repeats,
“Everybody,” and then there’s another small
pause and, in a tight close-up of Greg’s ponderous face, we get an obvious bit
of A.D.R. in which they loop in a third,
“Everybody.” So that’s three
“Everybodys” in a row, and the fact that the third one is so obviously
re-looped, oh God I just love it so.
Make no mistake, I’m not laughing at
the show; I love the show deeply, down to my very core, but I’m just laughing
in a loving way at this obvious bit of dubbing and the over-dramatic way that
this cheesy British guy who wandered off the set of a Roger Moore Bond film is
saying, “Everybody” not once, not twice, but thrice. It only gets better
when he says it two more times at the
start of our very next episode! In any
case, the third “Everybody” also serves for our “Executive Producers” credit to
pop up on the screen and for The Deluge to
come to its conclusion.
Okay,
so what did I think of that ep? Well, it
was good, but I’m gonna say it was probably my least favorite of the season so
far, aside from maybe the premiere ep, Buying Time. Now, before you all gasp and
think I’m insulting the ep, let me clarify that season six of KL is so unbelievably brilliant that
saying an ep is the “worst” ep is really more like saying it’s the “least
good.” They’re all good at this point; we haven’t seen a bad ep in the
season. The only reason I’m putting this
one kinda low is cuz it’s just not as exciting as the last batch we’ve seen,
but that’s also okay. This one is
clearly planting seeds with Ruth Galveston, with Cheesy British Guy, with the
continuing developments involving Val’s babies, all that stuff, it’s just not
quite as immediately awe-inspiring as the other eps this season have been, you
know? However, it still has tons of
great qualities, including the assured direction of one Bill “Cooke” Duke (in
his penultimate episode! Can you believe
that after this, we only have one more Duke
episode left to watch? How shall I go
on?!) and the fine guest acting of Ava Gardner, not to mention those fabulous character moments between Joshua and Abs
and, of course, the shouting match between Gary and Ben. So yeah, still good, still solid, still a
show on the top of its game, but just a little less visceral and thrilling than
our past few eps have been, you know?
Things
should continue to escalate nicely as we continue to explore that whole
“Everybody” issue with our next ep, A Piece of the Pie.
Madison Mason: Breo commercial
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ispot.tv/ad/7GVM/breo-ellipta
Is this the episode where Ruth is going through slides of her wildlife photography, and while she and Greg are discussing birth rights there's an image of a lion behind them? If so, this is one of my favorites.
ReplyDeleteI have to add to the Ava Gardner conversation that it was in fact a MIRACLE that Knots managed to woo her out of a seclusion that she went into at some point... she had of course Elizabeth Taylor-sized scandals throughout her personal lifetime, and I've read part of her biography... basically she shut herself into a London (I believe) apartment with just a maid, and lived out her later years totally withdrawn and isolated... (Much in the way Richard Simmons had done for over 2 years)... So its really an enigmatic mystery JUST HOW they got her to do a 7 episode guest stint on Knots...
ReplyDelete"Everyone." The British dude is alluding to the President of the United States, I presume...
ReplyDelete