KNOTS BLOGGING UPDATE: I HAVE BEEN POSTING TWO EPS PER WEEK SINCE I STARTED DISCUSSING SEASON THREE. STARTING WITH THE SEASON SEVEN PREMIERE, I WILL BE RETURNING TO JUST ONE POST PER WEEK, EVERY THURSDAY. THIS IS MOSTLY DUE TO ME BEING BUSY AND NOT HAVING ENOUGH TIME TO DO TWO PER WEEK, BUT WHEN WE HIT SEASON EIGHT, I WILL MOST LIKELY SWITCH BACK. I HOPE MY ADORING FANS WON'T BE TOO UPSET BY THIS.
Episode Title: Vulnerable
Episode Title: Vulnerable
Season 06, Episode 29
Episode 129 of 344
Written by Parke Perine
Directed by Nick Havinga
Original Airdate: Thursday, May
16th, 1985
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Ruth tells Abby that she'll
only give her the notebook papers if Abby will help her get rid of Laura. Laura
goes to Greg's one morning, and Abby is there in her robe, so Laura leaves.
Abby and Ruth congratulate themselves. Greg tells Coblenz he wants Gary out of
Empire Valley. Coblenz also tries to placate Gary, who says he refuses to spy
anymore. Karen, Mack, and Ben are working on the case so much that Val feels
neglected. Joshua tells her that she scares her friends away because she makes
them feel uncomfortable. Ben comes over with flowers for Val, and she
apologizes to him and tells him about her conversation with Joshua. Ben storms
up to Josh's room, tells him off and punches him. Nurse Wilson finally comes
forward and tells Mack that Ackerman had something on her and blackmailed her
into doing it. Mack, Karen, and Wilson go to the bridge tournament where
Ackerman is. Ackerman runs out and gets into his car. Karen hits him with her
truck. Mack tells Ackerman that it's over. Ackerman pulls a gun out of his
glove compartment and shoots himself in the head.
Welcome
to the penultimate episode of season six.
By this point, we are nearly finished with what has been a truly
breathtaking year, with 28 eps down out of thirty. Vulnerable
will speed us along ever closer to our season finale and I think it proves
to be a very memorable and wonderful episode all on its own, courtesy of a
director who is rising in my esteem, Nick Havinga, giving us his fifth
directorial effort on the series after The Forest for the Trees. Let us explore
everything that happens in Vulnerable.
Who
to start with? Well, I’m deeply saddened
to announce that this ep marks Ava’s final appearance on the series, and that’s
a real shame. If I’m not mistaken, I
believe the producers and creative team were all very happy with Ava and would
have liked to have her back, but I think she had a stroke in 1986 (actually, I
just did my research and it said she had two
strokes in 1986) which prevented her from further acting, and then she died
in early 1990. What a shame all that is,
because what fabulous life and wit Ava brought to the screen inhabiting this
fabulous character of Ruth Galveston, and I have to wonder why I don’t remember
taking much note of it upon first viewing.
I remember that Ava showed up and I was like, “Cool, some old famous
movie star, whatever,” but I don’t remember enjoying her banter with Laura and
Greg nearly as much as I do now, when I’m positively drooling over it. I would have been very happy to see Ava
return again and again and continue to bring this fabulous energy and old
Hollywood class to proceedings, but it wasn’t meant to be.
Ava
is busy this ep doing wicked things before she takes off to Africa and leaves
the show forever. The basic gist of her
story in Vulnerable is that Abs still
desperately wants those secret papers from Galveston’s files, the ones that
will tell her the location of Val’s babies.
Ava agrees to share these papers with Abs on one condition, and that is
that she help her get Laura out of Greg’s life.
Together the two cook up a scheme that seems, well, seems like it has a
huge potential for failure, but it ends up working, so good for them. Basically, it’s early one morning and Laura
comes by the ranch to visit Greg, but when she goes inside the house, into his
office or whatever, in walks Abs wearing nothing except a simple robe, acting
all embarrassed and being like, “Laura, my goodness, have you seen my underwear
lying around anywhere?” I dunno, I’d
think Laura would be smart enough to see through this little deception, but
instead she runs off and hops in her car and speeds away, missing Greg, who
comes walking out into the morning air just as Laura’s car is disappearing over
the horizon. He asks if that was Laura
who just left and both Ava and Abs feign innocence.
Now,
I don’t believe for a minute that Greg doesn’t see through this ruse, and I am
correct. I like the fact that the
writers are smart enough not to draw this stuff out, for in our very next
episode, we shall see Greg declaring to Laura that this was all a trick and
that he sent Ava packing right afterwards.
I like the fact that this doesn’t go on forever the way it would on Dallas
and that, yeah, Greg can figure out what’s going on. After all, let’s say you wake up one morning,
you come outside to find your evil mother and the duplicitous girl you used to
shag enjoying coffee together, while at that precise moment the woman you
actually love is angrily speeding away like the whole place is about to
explode. Not too hard to put two and two
together, no? This could have easily
been played as, “How long will it take Greg to discover the truth?” Instead, the writers do the smart thing and
trust in the intelligence of the character and let him figure it all out right
and quick.
I
have a few more things to note on this story beat, and then we shall move
on. The first is that I think Abs and
Ava are taking a pretty big risk, here.
They are planning for Laura to see Abs in her underwear and get mad and
dump Greg, but they don’t seem to account for potential word of mouth, for
rumors getting spread about what Abs was doing up at Greg’s ranch one
morning. What if Laura decided to go
ahead and tell Gary what she saw? Let’s
not forget, Abs and Gary are married
at this point and have been married since early season five. What if a super angry and bitter Laura went
to visit Gary at Lotus Point or Empire Valley and was like, “Oh Gary, you’ll
never believe who I saw in their underwear this morning”? Would Gary divorce Abs and throw her out of
the house? Or has he just sorta accepted
that Abs is a village bicycle and a nymphomaniac and she’s probably going to
step out on him more than once throughout their marriage? So much to think about!
Also,
I wanna take note that Greg and Abs have shagged
at least once this season, and it came and it went and it was gloriously
inauspicious, so inauspicious
that I can’t even remember the episode it took place in, but it’s somewhere
right smack dab in the middle of the season, like I think in that episode
fifteen through twenty block of eps, and it was when Abs came to visit Greg at
his hotel room home and he shoved her against the wall and started to
passionately make out with her (a shot that’s going to make its way into the
scrolling squares next season). Okay, we
didn’t physically see the shagging;
we didn’t have a full on penetration shot as Greg entered her violently, but I
think we can all infer what happened after he shoved her against that wall,
no? When that happened, I was like,
“Hmmmm, I don’t remember this at all,” and that’s because it’s pretty much
forgotten and never mentioned again, and I actually like that. You could argue that this is a flaw in the
writing; why have Greg and Abs shag in one ep out of nowhere and then never
mention it again? I don’t consider it a
flaw, though, I think it’s this fabulously isolated sexual incident, it comes
and it goes, it’s forgotten. To me, that
feels very realistic to how life is (which might reflect poorly on my own life
and how I view sex, but those are my own issues). I only bring it up here because it’s kinda
funny to think that Abs and Greg had a shag somewhere in mid-season six and, so
far as I can recall, it’ll never be brought up again and no other character
will find out about it, yet now here we are in late season six and Greg is
being tricked by having Abs planted at his place at just the exact right time
to send Laura flying out the door.
Meanwhile,
there’s really fabulous linkage with pretty much everyone else in the cast
going on this ep, with pretty much every character being directly involved in
the continuing Val’s babies quest. The
episode title is Vulnerable and My
Beloved Grammy and I were talking about what that title could mean when we got
started. At first, I said I think it’s
referring to Dr. Ackerman, that he is becoming vulnerable as more and more
people start to look for the truth, but about halfway through the ep, we
realized the title refers to poor Val (POOR VAL!), who is feeling kinda sad and
alone, abandoned by her friends, but it’s all a great big misunderstanding. See,
basically Ben, Mack, Karen, the whole gang, they’re all getting so busy
researching Dr. Ackerman and adoption agencies and what have you, they keep
kinda forgetting about stuff they’re supposed to be doing with Val. Karen is supposed to go out, like, shopping
with Val, or something (the details are foggy in my brain), but she never shows
up and it hurts Val’s feelings. However,
it’s not really that she’s abandoning her friend, which is how it seems to Val,
but that she is busy helping her
friend, trying to get her babies back.
It reminds me of an early Brady Bunch ep in which Marcia wants Mike to win some sort of Father of the Year
trophy or something, but in attempting to get him said trophy, she keeps
getting in trouble because Mike thinks she’s being naughty and
disobedient. Due to all the misunderstandings, the episode climaxes with Mike putting Marcia across his knee and whipping her with a stingray tail like the bad guy from Licence to Kill.
We
actually open Vulnerable in the
shitty trailer park that Nurse Wilson lives in.
She is still reticent and scared to speak with Karen about anything, and
at the start of the ep, she is ordering Ben and Karen to get out of here, to
leave her alone. Then they call Mack to
come and give them some muscle, but by the time he shows up with a cop, the
trailer has been abandoned. Her
groceries are still sitting in their bags, but they can tell someone packed a
suitcase real fast and hit the road. How
are they going to find Nurse Wilson now?
Surprisingly,
Nurse Wilson winds up coming to them. There’s a really terrific scene right before
we go to commercial in which Val is over at the MacKenzie house (or should I be
referring to is as the Fairgate MacKenzie house?) and she’s just getting up to
leave and as she opens the front door, there stands Nurse Wilson, her hand up
in the air, clearly about to knock on the door.
The music swells, we wonder if Val will recognize this lady from her
horrifying delivery back in November, and then we cut to commercial. When we come back, we get confirmation that
Val doesn’t recognize this lady, as she’s just like, “Oh hey, how you doing?”
and then she leaves the house. Nurse
Wilson stays and finally spills the beans to Mack and Karen, confirming that
Dr. Ackerman is a really evil man who stole Val’s babies and sent them away
someplace. We also find out that Dr.
Ackerman has some sort of dirt on Nurse Wilson, that he got her to participate
in this baby theft because he threatened to expose whatever this secret
is. One thing I really appreciate is
that we don’t actually find out what Nurse Wilson’s big secret is; she’s about
to tell Karen and Mack and seems embarrassed and then Karen sorta says how it
doesn’t matter, what matters is finding the babies. I like the mystery of this as well as the
fact that the writers are saying yeah, it doesn’t matter. Whatever Nurse Wilson did, it’s something she
regrets and Dr. Ackerman is using it to manipulate her. It makes me wonder precisely what the big secret is, and I just like
that little aura of mystery.
In
fact, I really like Nurse Wilson. Again,
I had kinda forgotten about this character, yet she’s another beautiful example
of KL’s ability to turn every single
character interesting. For all intents
and purposes, Nurse Wilson could be treated as just a plot function, here to
help the characters find the babies.
Instead, she comes alive and seems real, and I feel like there’s this
whole other person with this whole other life here, and we are just briefly
getting a glimpse into her life at this precise moment in time. I also like the fact that this character is
never presented as bad and that we get a real sense of her life in this
scene. She talks about how hard it was
to put herself through nursing school, yet she managed to do it. Honestly, I just marvel at this stuff,
because there’s really no reason that we need
to know this stuff; a lazier writing staff could just have Nurse Wilson
show up to provide exposition and then ship her right back out of there, but
the KL writers take the time to give
us a little information on her back story and her character history, and it
makes everything all the more richer because of it.
Joshua
is on a real roll of evil this ep, by the way, and he’s certainly not helping
Val to feel any less vulnerable or any less depressed about the state of her
life. By this point, I’m officially
ready to declare Joshua as evil. I can’t
put my finger on the precise moment when it happened, as everything has been
done so well and so subtly that it was almost hard to notice him changing from
good to evil, but I feel now he has arrived at evil. He’s not just egotistical, he doesn’t just
have a big head, he isn’t just kinda socially weird; he’s very calculating in
the way he manages to degrade Val and hurt her.
For instance, in this ep when Karen fails to show up as Val expected her
to, Joshua goes on about how all of Val’s friends abandon her, and he lists
Karen and Gary and Ben and all these people, and he says how the only real
friends Val has are her family, Lilimae and himself. This scene takes place right in front of both
Cathy and Lilimae, by the way, and while Cathy speaks up and tells him not to
speak to Val in that way (much the way that Val appears to be the only one
sticking up for Cathy when Joshua degrades her), Lilimae remains conspicuously
silent. I still love Lilimae and always
have and always will, but I’m having a hard time liking her as much at this juncture because of the way she stays
silent about Joshua and lets him be a tyrant.
There’s
a fabulous scene later in the ep involving Joshua and Ben, and I do mean
fabulous. This scene was so great it
made both My Beloved Grammy as well as myself clap and cheer. See, Ben comes over to visit Val and gets
word of all the nasty stuff Joshua’s been saying to her and filling her head
with. He gets damn mad and marches
upstairs and right into Joshua and Cathy’s bedroom (the room where they don’t
ever have sex because, you know, Cathy mentioned how she’s not ready to start
popping out babies immediately and so
now Joshua refuses to touch her, in the grand spirit of all religious fanatics
worldwide) to have it out with Joshua.
He asks Cathy to leave them alone for a minute and then he totally
confronts Joshua and I love it. Again, I
wish I had transcribed this speech down word for word so that I could share it
with you right now, but I was too stunned and enraptured by watching this amazingness
unfold before me, so I just stared and drooled and wrote nothing in my
notes. The basic gist of it is that Ben
calls him on his bullshit and he says, “I’ve seen the way you work,” and how
Joshua manipulates people to get what he wants, all that good stuff. Then Joshua says something mean to Ben (I
think it’s something about running out on his responsibilities, how he knocked
Val up and then left her all alone) and Ben punches him. We’ve all been waiting to see Joshua get
punched for a good long while now, and I found it very satisfying even if it
does look a smidge too stagey, but why nitpick when you are being given such a
wonderful gift as this scene?
Before
I move on to other business, I want to make sure and note real fast that while
I’m starting to hate the character of Joshua, in no way does this reflect on
Baldwin’s performance, which is frankly quite stunning considering this is one
of his first acting gigs ever. Also, I
hate the character in a good way, if that makes sense. It’s not the way I hated Kenny and Ginger for
being so useless (and, if we’ll flashback to their departure at the end of
season four, I believe I declared that I had graduated to not hating them
anymore, which was a big deal for me) and it’s not the way I hate, say, um, Friends or Family Guy or those awful seven and a half hour superhero movies
that just keep coming out every two seconds; this is the kind of hatred where
the audience is supposed to hate the
character. Joshua is evil and nasty and
treats people I love very badly, and that’s why I hate him, but this is fully
intentional on the part of the writers and Baldwin is playing the part just
precisely right.
The
big quest to find Dr. Ackerman is the central thrust of this ep, and it’s
unbelievably compelling and delivers us directly into one of the most exciting
and memorable episode endings of the entire series run, at least in my
opinion. There have been so many truly
wonderful episode endings (with probably the first GREAT ep ending being Laura
getting her cigarette lit in The Lie),
but this is definitely top ten material right here. In fact, I actually thought we were gonna get
this episode a few eps back, when Joshua and Cathy were getting married and
Karen tracked Dr. Ackerman down to Vegas.
Nope, I was wrong, it was this episode
I was thinking of. Basically,
after speaking with Nurse Wilson at some length, Karen is doing some
brainstorming and she realizes that, whether he’s supposed to be on the run or
not, Dr. Ackerman can’t not go to the
upcoming bridge tournament. She sorta
narrates out loud to Mack and says how people who are addicted to gambling
really can’t stop, no matter what’s going on in their lives, so she thinks even
though he probably knows logically that he should lay low and keep a low
profile, he won’t be able to resist going to play bridge. This is confirmed when we see Dr. Ackerman
packing up a bag and getting ready to, I guess, blow town, when his friend
calls and leaves a message on his machine saying how he’d better be at the tournament
and that they should play together, or whatever. We see Dr. Ackerman stare sorta thoughtfully
at the phone, the wheels spinning in his head, and we realize Karen is right;
Dr. Ackerman can’t resist the lure of a bridge tournament any more than I can
resist the lure of a naked Korean spa packed to the gills with hot young
men.
Karen,
Mack, and Nurse Wilson all successfully manage to track Dr. Ackerman down at,
oh, someplace. It’s not really really
far away like Vegas this time, but it’s kinda sorta far away. I’m sure they tell us directly at some point
where the characters are heading, but suffice it to say that I have forgotten
the details and let’s just say it’s kinda sorta far away from where they live,
but not too far, like maybe an hour away.
Anyway, who cares about that, anyway?
Let’s talk about this incredible sequence that leads to this incredible
ending. Basically the trio burst in on
Dr. Ackerman when he’s right in the middle of some big important hand and when
he looks up and sees them glaring at him, he gets pretty scared. He immediately makes some sort of weird,
inadequate bet (I don’t know my bridge, so I’m not really sure what he does
that’s inappropriate) and then the people around him are all like, “Hey, you
can’t do that,” and then he loses his cool big time and is like, “Those people
are distracting me!” Then he makes a run
for it and manages to make it out to the parking lot. Mack tells Karen to get in the car and cut
him off so he can’t drive away, and they crash real good when Karen backs her
car right into him. Then, as Karen and
Mack loom in front of him and Mack yells, “It’ s over, Ackerman!”, we go into
super slow motion (that sorta choppy type of slow motion) as Dr. Ackerman pulls
a gun out of his glove box and blows himself away. Obviously this isn’t Boardwalk Empire, so we don’t actually see him pull the trigger and
blow his own brains out, but the message is clear and we end on a nice shot of
Mack and Karen looking rather horrified right after he pulls the trigger. I actually got real morbid during this
sequence and started to wonder what it would really look like and feel like to
watch someone shoot themselves in the head, what a hard image that would be to
shake off after you’ve seen it.
Anyway,
what an ending, right? A lot of times
I’ll declare a KL ep ending as so
good and so exciting that it could function well as a season cliffhanger, and I
feel this one qualifies (I believe I also declared that earlier this season
with the ending of Lead Me to the Altar). Really, if this was a season finale cliffhanger, it would be pretty terrific, no? You’d still have lots of dangling threads
left to tidy up next season and this would remain a very memorable final scene
that people could think about all through the summer.
But thank God this is not the
season finale, for we still have one more glorious episode in this most
glorious sixth season, a season so good I’m seriously tempted to call it the
greatest season of television ever made.
Let’s move right along to our season six finale, the aptly titled The Long and Winding Road.
Unless I am confusing this with something else (Which is always possible), I think that Kevin Dobson got hurt during the chase scene when he flipped over the luggage cart. Also, he has a fantastic stunt double that runs on the car.
ReplyDeleteThe building plot that leads to the Fisher's house is so brilliant that this episode really could have been paired with the finale for a 2 hour episode. Ackerman's demise was so shocking upon my first viewing of the series that it is one of the scenes I picture in my mind when thinking about Knots. This show was definitely at its peak!
ReplyDeleteThey were really twisting the knife making their viewers wait an enter week to see what would follow that ending. This is one of my favorite episodes.
ReplyDeleteI watched this episode for the first time a few years ago and remember being genuinely shocked by the ending. I think it's a real testament to the writing that despite the dated cloths and hair that the stories still hold up today.
ReplyDeleteA bang up episode!
ReplyDeleteI love how the writer’s decided not to reveal Nurse Wilson’s motives for aiding Dr. Ackerman. He was clearly blackmailing her but it was left up to each viewer to decide what her original crime was.
I wish they had given Ruth/Ava a better send off. Knowing it was her last scene, it seemed anticlimactic.
You’re right about Abby being reckless with her tricky deception with Laura. At this point, Abby and Gary’s marriage seems pretty solid; Abby actually seems content. All it would take to destroy it is for Laura to go straight to Gary and tell him about this “affair”.
Did anyone catch the quick reference from Greg to Coblenz about Coblenz suffering bruises during a rough flight? Were the writer’s coming up with a quick solution to explain the actor’s very clear (and real life) facial bruises? What was that about?
I am sick to death with this Empire Valley storyline. Cannot wait for the big boom.
By the way – has anyone else noticed that the Supervising Producer’s name is Mitch Ackerman? Check out the end credits. lol
I think producers imagined Ava Gardner might come back at some point which is why she has no big send-off.
ReplyDeleteThis episode is a doozy. We just watched this (again) back to back with S6 finale, and it still holds up as riveting as ever.