Episode Title: Rise and Fall
Season 07, Episode 10
Episode 140 of 344
Written by Parke Perine
Directed by Robert Becker
Original Airdate: Thursday, December 5th,
1985
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Elliot's
widow tells Gary that Elliot was there because he was dissatisfied with how things
were going at Empire Valley. Gary tells Mack. Val and Lilimae are really
worried about Joshua. They find him preaching in the mission district. Val
offers to take him to a psychiatrist. Joshua tells Lilimae he's come up with a
plan for Cathy and him to be together forever. As Cathy drives home from the
station, Joshua pops up from the backseat. Holding a knife to her neck, he
instructs her to drive to the mission district. He takes her to the roof of a
building. He tells her he's going to throw her over and kill himself, so
they'll always be together. Laura calls Val, worried that Cathy isn't home.
Lilimae drives to the mission district where she saw Joshua preach, and seeing
Cathy's car, follows them to the building. Lilimae reaches the roof and yells
at Joshua to let Cathy go. She screams that Joshua is cruel and a liar. Joshua
puts Cathy down, and starts backing up as Lilimae yells that he's a monster,
and that she is no longer his mother. He continues backing up, and then trips
over the edge of the building, and falls to the ground. Dead.
“Cathy’s not going to be in our lives very much longer,” sayeth Joshua to Linda
(the random waitress he’s currently shagging) in the closing moments of our
previous episode, Until Parted by Death. This cryptic and scary
line serves as the central plotline of the episode up for discussion right here
and right now, Rise and Fall, an immortal, unforgettable, and very
important episode in the grand KL canon. Fuck,
KL is so stylish and cinematic. I said that way back in the very
first episode; in my Pilot dissertation I said, “I always found KL to
be a more interesting show visually than Dallas,” and I stick to that
original opinion, which has only increased as we have entered the golden years
starting with season four. In the case of Rise and Fall, after the
thirty second preview and opening credits (which, I’d like to note, suddenly
have a version of the theme that sounds a bit different than what we’ve had for
the previous nine eps; don’t know what that is about), we are
immediately grabbed by the balls and assaulted with the most stylish, most
amazing, most visual, and most dazzling opening scene in any KL ep
ever. There’s nary a gap between the conclusion of the opening theme and
the beginning of this great great Cathy song, a most fabulous cover of Dancing in the Street, obviously sung better than anyone else has ever sung it,
all played over this fantastic music video montage of Cathy singing intercut
with footage of Joshua pathetically preaching on street corners. Oh God,
yes, my words can’t describe it or do it justice; you just gotta see it.
I don’t just love this opening because of the song and the music video style
cutting, but also the way it’s able to use visual storytelling to help us
understand the plot, all without dialogue; Brian De Palma would be very pleased
with this. For instance, we start out on this gigantic billboard of Cathy
with an ad for her show, “Cathy Geary Rush: A Better Tomorrow,” and then
we cut to the footage of Joshua preaching. In addition to the
crosscutting from one character to the other, we get lots of footage of Cathy
applying makeup, walking around the set of Pacific Cable Whatever, getting
ready to film footage, singing her fabulous song with her fabulous band and a
fabulous smoke machine going crazy all around her, and we even get some clever
use of recycled footage from our previous ep in a super fast clip of her
signing autographs for some fans while Joshua glares from elsewhere. This
is done so fast it’s almost subliminal, but I immediately recognized it as a
scene from our last ep (a scene I neglected to mention because I am lazy and
worthless) in which we thought Joshua was going to assault Cathy and throw her
into a pile of garbage in the parking lot, but Cathy was blessedly saved at the
last minute by a whole mob of fans demanding autographs. Last thing I’ll say about this fabulous first three minutes is that I’m also glad they don’t run the
episode credits over this footage. You know what I mean, the title of the
ep, the guest stars, the director, all that stuff; they are smart enough to not
play that stuff until after the fantastic music video has concluded, so
our eyes don’t get distracted by text on the screen when we should be strictly
focused on Cathy and her song. So yes, in conclusion I am declaring this
the greatest opening sequence in all of KL history, and I’m gonna get
bold and say right now that I mean in the entire history of the show,
not just up to this point, but for all 344 eps in total. If, somewhere
down the line, we are somehow given the most fabulous gift of an opening
sequence that’s even better than this one, I will note that and then bump this
one to the number two spot, but I highly doubt that will occur, since there’s
simply no way to top the brilliance of this first three minutes.
By the way, since I can’t seem to rest comfortably until I take a big shit on Dallas every time I do one of these write-ups, I
feel I must point out that there was never anything this good over on
the parent series, not in 357 eps spanning over fourteen (well, thirteen)
years. Nope, never gonna happen. In fact, having just concluded
watching the 1985-1986 season of that show (I will be doing a small writeup on
it at some point in the future, so stay tuned), I can confirm that the show
looked like total ass that year, washed out and ugly and visually drab, with
really horribly staged scenes and awkward action scenes that seem to be
directed by people who have never held a camera in their life. So please,
for the love of God, I beg you, all those crazy people out there who continue
to proclaim Dallas as superior to KL, all you have to do is watch
one scene from the 1985-1986 season of Dallas and then compare it
to one scene from the 1985-1986 season of KL and then you know
you would not possibly be able to look me straight in the eyes and still
claim that Dallas is better.
Most of this ep is focused strictly and 100% on Joshua, and I don’t think
it’s a spoiler to say that this is his last ep on the series. Despite
knowing that most of my loyal and devoted readers are hardcore fans who have
seen all 344 eps at least once before, I still try to stay sorta spoiler free
here just in case there is someone out there on the planet who is doing what I
originally envisioned could be and should be done when I started this blog, and
that is watching an ep, reading my thoughts on the ep, and then proceeding
onward to the next ep, all the way from the first ep to the last. If you
are one of those people, and you are reading this right now, then I don’t
believe I’m spoiling it to say Joshua dies in this ep since, you know, you just
fucking watched it. So yeah, anyway, this is going to be our last 48
minutes with Joshua and I think it’s appropriate that we spend most of that 48
minutes focused on him, but we still got stuff from our other characters that
I’d like to discuss first. Let’s get started with Abs and Sumner.
In our last ep, we saw The Most Interesting Man in the World make the very poor
choice of climbing down underneath that secret James Bond underground lair
thing that’s being built at Empire Valley for, um, some reason. Then big
scary flashing red lights came on and we cut to a new scene, but later found
out that The Most Interesting Man in the World had been killed. Who
killed him and how? Well, I think I can tell you who, but I’m not so sure
I can tell you how, mostly because I don’t remember. I think he got
crushed to death or, um, something. In any case, he’s dead now and so the
characters are dealing with the fallout from this.
Near the middle of the ep, Abs and Gary pay a visit to The Most Interesting Man
in the World’s widow (The Most Interesting Woman in the World?) to talk about
his death. This woman (Leigh French, who I note was in Halloween II as
“Gary’s Mother” and I think that means she’s the mother of the boy who
swallowed the razor blade and is trying to get medical care at the hospital)
really seems to be taking The Most Interesting Man in the World’s death pretty
well. Like, she seems kinda sad about it, but she also seems remarkably
calm and very courteous to both Gary and Abs. We learn that she got a
really really huge batch of money right after her husband’s death, so maybe
that’s why she’s not too upset. Or hell, maybe she wasn’t all that happy
in the marriage? We know that The Most Interesting Man in the World’s son
got in trouble with drugs somewhere in the past, so perhaps that’s just one of
my many family secrets harbored and kept private throughout The Most
Interesting Family in the World; who can say? In any case, this is yet
another example of a very small, not-even-that-important character showing up
and yet feeling fully realized and very interesting to watch. Classic KL
on display right here. Anyway, probably the most important part of
this scene is that the widow says how The Most Interesting Man in the World was
highly dissatisfied with how things were going over at Empire Valley and that’s
probably why he was snooping around there late at night.
As Abs and Gary leave the home of The Most Interesting Family in the World,
Gary talks about how the settlement seemed like a lot of money, but he’s also
not upset about it and he says how the family deserves that money.
However, the words that the widow said to him echo in his brain and he wonders
why The Most Interesting Man in the World was unhappy and why he never spoke up
to him about it. After all, whenever Gary would speak to him, The Most
Interesting Man in the World would tell him things were running like a dream
over at Empire Valley, nothing to worry about, boss. This contradiction
leads Gary to Mack, whom he expresses his concerns to. Uh oh, is Mack
gonna be on the case? This would not be good news for either Abs or Greg,
since Mack is a sharp investigator and could get to the bottom of this and
figure out what is going on and then helpfully explain what is going on to the confused
viewers sitting at home in 1985-1986.
We get a pretty killer Greg scene in this ep when he’s visited in his sexy high
rise office building by Cheesy British Guy. There’s no cigar in this
scene for us to add to the Sumner Cigar Counter (damn!), but it’s still a cool
scene because Greg leads Cheesy British Guy out onto the balcony and is like,
“Let’s take a look at the view,” all while Cheesy British Guy poops in his
pants and says, “I don’t really like heights.” Way to keep your cool,
Cheesy British Guy. Anyway, after Greg finds out that Cheesy British Guy
is aware of the death of The Most Interesting Man in the World and that he even
orchestrated it himself, more or less, Greg dangles him over the edge of the
balcony and threatens to drop him like Arnold dropped Jerry Horne in Commando
(my God, it was the same year! Do you think Greg went and saw Commando
and decided to steal this move from Arnold?). However, he doesn’t
wind up dropping Cheesy British Guy; he just scares him a little bit and then
tells him that when he signed up for this operation, he did not plan on getting
involved with murder and that this will never happen again. Good strong
Greg scene, acted well by Devane and Madison Mason (that’s Cheesy British Guy,
in case you didn’t know).
Honestly, that’s about it for our non-Joshua stuff this ep, so let’s move back
to him. At this point, his life is complete shit, but it’s hard to feel
too sorry for him. When you systematically lie to your family and abuse
your wife and throw her into a pile of garbage, your family is justified in
cutting you out of their life. Oh yeah, and let’s not forget that he’s
also carrying on with another woman by shagging Linda on the side, despite all
his religious preaching about sin. At the same time, I feel kinda sorry
for Joshua and that’s due to many factors, but the two key ingredients are the
writing and the acting. After that phenomenal Emmy worthy scene between
him and Lilimae last ep, we now better understand what has shaped Joshua to
become the man he is right now. Knowing that Jonathan would simultaneously
attack him with Bible-gibberish and fill his head with notions of original sin
while also beating and abusing him, we now have more backstory on Joshua.
Everyone knows that the cycle of abuse tends to repeat itself unless someone is
strong enough to break that cycle in their own life. Usually, however,
the abused child grows up to be the abusive adult, and that’s what has happened
here with Joshua.
This episode gives us many memorable Joshua moments, but I think my favorite
occurs around the midway point, and that’s Joshua and the dolls. This
scene has stuck with me forever and I actually misremembered and thought it
took place in our previous ep. Basically, Joshua is at the apartment of
Linda The Waitress and she comes in and, like, bumps a desk or something and
causes the little wedding cake figurines of the bride and groom from Joshua and
Cathy’s wedding to fall to the ground and shatter. Joshua gets mad and
yells at her about what she’s done, scaring her a little, at which point she
vacates the room. Then Joshua picks up the dolls and starts to, like,
talk in their voices, sorta Norman Bates style. Ominous music comes up as
Joshua talks to the dolls and then knocks the little Cathy doll off the table
and says, “Goodbye, Cathy” and then does the same to the Joshua doll and says,
“Goodbye, Joshua.” Yikes, why do I smell a ritualistic murder/suicide in
the near future?
Real
fast, since I’m obsessed with picking minor characters and creating elaborate
backstories and character motivations for them, let’s discuss Linda The
Waitress (pictured below). Do you think she yet realizes that Joshua is sick and
dangerous? Or, do you think she’s so used to asshole boyfriends after all
her years with Arthur Fonzarelli that she doesn’t even notice she’s traded one
asshole for another one? I get the feeling that Arthur Fonzarelli was
just 100% asshole all the time, whereas Joshua tends to switch back and forth
and is pretty good at appearing gentle and caring when he wants to. So,
when Joshua snaps at her for breaking the dolls, do you think she sees hints of
his evil or do you think she just dismisses this as a guy getting mad because
she broke something he cared about? Also, what do you think could
possibly happen to Linda if Joshua didn’t die at the end of this
ep? Would he marry her and then continue the cycle of abuse on her
instead of Cathy? Or does Joshua even care at all about this woman?
I kinda get the feeling he’s just using her as a tool so he has a place to live
at and a woman to shag, but I don’t know if he really particularly cares about
her or even views her as a full person. What do you think?
As I mentioned, Joshua has now been reduced to preaching on street corners, and
he is spotted by Val and Lilimae while they are out doing their grocery
shopping. Val tells Lilimae to stay away from him, but Lilimae can’t
resist going up to him and trying to speak with him. She tells him how
they need to get him some help, get him to a doctor, Bob Loblaw, but Joshua is
really far gone by this point, and it’s these small little touches that Baldwin
brings to his performance that really help to demonstrate how crazy Joshua is
at this point. He almost seems stoned in this scene, talking all slow and
mellow, spouting nonsense about having some sort of vision from God, shit like
that. Another series might just portray Joshua as a raving lunatic,
constantly screaming and breaking things. On KL, we see the
physical abuse and him yelling and being scary, but we also see him being
sincere and crying and talking about his past, we also see him acting stoned
and weird and faraway, and we see these weird moments where he seems to sober
up and act like a decent person for a couple of seconds. It’s all very
fascinating to watch and acted to perfection by Baldwin.
Somewhere near the middle of the ep, we have a scene of Joshua alone, climbing
up to the roof of this big tall building, the big tall building with the
gigantic poster of Cathy behind it, and looking down and sorta grinning.
Uh oh, I think we all know where this is going to lead us, and we don’t have to
wait long to see Joshua’s plan in action as he kidnaps Cathy and forces her to
come to this big tall building with him. By the way, remember how I went
on and on about our last ep being a 48 horror movie? While I don’t think
this ep is as frightening as Until Parted by Death, I definitely think
it continues along that same horror movie vein in many ways, and this sequence
is a good example. See, Cathy leaves the station, she asks the security
guard to keep an eye on her while she walks to her car, she gets in the car,
and then Joshua pops up from behind while she’s driving. This didn’t
really surprise me because, well, I remembered it happening from my previous
viewing, but I don’t think it surprised me on first viewing either, and I blame
that more on my deep love affair with horror movies that started at a very
early age (you could say I lost my horror movie virginity when I was five years
old and first watched the original Halloween). Anyone who’s seen
one horror movie knows the trope of the bad guy randomly popping up from the
back seat when someone is driving, and this might even go as far back as the
original urban legend about the woman driving her car and the car following her
and flashing the lights at her.
Anyway, as Joshua leads Cathy to the big tall building, we also have Lilimae
searching for him right around the same area. Only problem is that she
drives away from the big tall building two seconds before Joshua and Cathy
arrive at it, but then she sees their car passing her and pulls a Frank Drebin
and crashes into some random trashcans on the side of the road. This
crash renders her car inoperable, I guess, so she goes running back to the big
tall building to find Joshua. Talk about your suspense, by the way,
because we keep cutting from Lilimae running to Joshua dragging Cathy up the
stairs, holding a knife to her throat. Fuck, this is intense, and we even
get good action and suspense when Cathy briefly manages to get away only to be
intercepted by Joshua, who returns the knife to her throat and successfully
gets her up on the roof.
Here, though, we get another great scene where, instead of just having Joshua
rave and be scary, he sits down and gets all quiet and reflective and starts to
talk about the disintegration of their relationship and why it occurred.
This only goes on for a smidge of time, and then he returns to trying to throw
Cathy off the roof (where, you know, she could very possibly land in a pile of
garbage). He is interrupted at the zero hour by Lilimae, who screams at
him to let Cathy go and stop being such a psycho. Then we get another
just-give-her-an-Emmy scene from Lilimae where she just goes crazy on Joshua
and starts screaming about how she is not his mother, how she could never have
a son as cold and cruel as Joshua. Ugh, it’s all so good, and she plays
the scene so perfectly. She says, “I don’t care anymore, I don’t care
that I was a bad mother, or that Jonathan beat you; I only care that you have
become a monster and you trample on everybody, you devour everything you
touch. Don’t call me Mama; I’m not your mama!” Oh Jesus,
such strong words, and just look at the pain in Joshua’s face as she
screams these things at him, at the tears in his eyes, omigod. As Lilimae
screams at him (and as I scream at the Emmy voters for the season for not
giving her an Emmy and instead giving it to, you know, some random bitch I
don’t even care enough about to look up), Joshua starts to back up, getting
perilously closer to the edge of the roof, and we all know what’s going to
happen here. My Beloved Grammy even said right here, “I think we’ve seen
the last of Joshua,” and then a few seconds later he falls off the roof and he
dies. As Lilimae and Cathy scream and cry in horror, the camera pans up
and goes into a closeup of that “Cathy Geary Rush” sign that was our first image
in the ep, a fantastic stylistic bookend to a fantastic episode.
Oh God, I have so much to say and I don’t even know where to begin.
Clearly this episode was a work of profound genius and clearly it was a
brilliant final episode for Alec Baldwin as Joshua. It also serves as a
great little mini-finale, if that makes sense. This particular disk of
eps we watched (it spanned from A Question of Trust through Rise and
Fall) is really probably my favorite disk we’ve watched, because it was so
unbelievably exciting and yet also rich with amazing character moments.
It was so good it felt like it’s own little five-episode miniseries of
joy. Ugh, I just wanted to hug myself as I watched through these five
eps. Since this is Baldwin’s last hour, we definitely need to take some time to
reflect on how perfectly he played this character over the course of roughly 40
eps (give or take a few; I think when you add it all up he actually appears in
something like 36 eps). I heard an interview with Baldwin where he said
that, when he was hired, they told him he would be killed off in about a year,
which is fascinating information to have, because it makes me wonder how far in
advance the KL team generally plotted their stories. When Joshua
first comes to the door in Calculated Risks, do you think the writers
already knew everything that was going to happen with this character? Or
do you think they had some general basic outline and they knew the character
would be killed in the near future, but they connected all the dots as they
proceeded along through his time on the series? Such questions I
have. In any case, though, I think this is Baldwin’s best work of his
entire career and I think it immediately shows that he had star power and charisma
to spare, because he’s only like 26 or 27 years old at this point, yet Joshua
feels so complex and fully realized. I also think Baldwin brought out the
best material from Julie Harris that we have ever seen; whenever they had big
emotional scenes together, it was absolutely gripping television.
Before I wrap up my thoughts for the ep, I also wanna do a quick summation of
how I’m feeling about season seven thus far. I’m starting to realize that
a lot of fans don’t like this season, and so far I have no idea why. In
fact, I’m gonna get bold and say that, so long as you can get over the
silliness of the Empire Valley stuff and not let it bother you too much, I
think these first ten eps of season seven have been just as good as season six,
and really I feel like these first ten eps fuse really well with season six and
kinda feel like they are all part of the same season, if that makes
sense. I’ve been focusing really hard to see if David Paulsen brings a
more Dallas flavor to proceedings, and while I think he does do that, I
also feel like it never stops being KL in all its glory and
beauty. However, I will pay strict attention as we move through the next
twenty eps of the season, because I think that’s where a lot of fans start
having problems with the year. I don’t remember having any problems with
it, but I remind you that the first time I watched through the series, I
seriously binged and would devour about five eps per day and get through an
entire season in about a week cuz I was so obsessed. Now, holding a
microscope to each ep, will the latter 2/3 of the season be as strong as I
remembered? Well, that’s what we’re going to find out as we move right
along to our next ep, To Sing His Praise.
The opening of this episode had the same feel as the episode when Ciji was killed. It started off with a full Lisa Hartman song ["New Romance (It's A Mystery)" vs. "Dancing In The Street"], and it focuses on a character who will be dead by episode's end. I love that they reused this technique because it was brilliant! Whenever I exercise and listen to "Letterock" through my headphones, I always start with this track because of that episode!
ReplyDeleteYes, I noticed this repeat of a leit-motif as well, and when you think about it, upon first airing devoted fans of the series likely thought it meant Cathy would die, just as Ciji had in S4, particularly when Joshua plays with the cake toppers. (I like "New Romance" better though, and felt its inclusion in that episode felt more connected to Ciji as a character than the cover song used here.)
DeleteLOL at “I think we’ve seen the last of Joshua,” I happen to be binge-watching 30 Rock and seeing Baldwin on that, and remembering his work here, really, he's just quite astonishing as an actor. And always was, apparently. I generally resent people that talented.
ReplyDeleteBonnie Bartlett won the supporting actress in a drama series that year. Sharon Gless got lead actress.
ReplyDeleteWow, Alec Baldwin just so well into the role. Its a shame that this is the few good bits of season 7, since half of the season gets a little lackluster but this was an overall good storyline that couldve been better than it was afterward.
ReplyDeleteA searing monologue by Julie Harris. (Where was her Emmy nomination?!) If only they had given this great actress more to do during the run of the series.
ReplyDeleteWhile Alec Baldwin was great at instantly shifting emotions and allowing us to feel pity for Joshua, I too was ready for this storyline to end. For me, it was one of the weakest in KL’s history because it seemed born of plot rather than character. And, unfortunately, it continues for several more episodes because of this senseless lie between Cathy and Lillimae. I still don’t know why they feel they need to cover up the real facts of Joshua’s fall. Perhaps if Cathy had pushed him over the ledge accidentally in self-defense I might understand it – but both women were completely innocent of his death.
Lisa Hartman’s voice is flawless. Usually when singers perform full musical numbers in dramas, it drags down the action – but not with Lisa. Every performance is worth watching. And those 80s hits don’t hurt either. lol.
Frank Elliott died at Empire Valley because he was electrocuted. 🤤😫
ReplyDeleteDidja all notice the further foreshadowing of the episode's climax in the scene with Greg and the cheesey British guy? Greg shoves him right to the edge of the terrace - and the camera looms over the street below. It's only a matter of time before someone takes a fall...
I felt the opening montage was typical of the way TV drama is made today. It was a technique that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Wentworth, It’s A Sin, Years & Years etc. As such, in 1985 it was well ahead of its time!
ReplyDelete