Season 08, Episode 07
Episode 167 of 344
Original Airdate: Thursday, October 23rd,
1986
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Mack thinks Greg has something to do with Karen's
kidnapping. Greg puts Phil up in a motel until he can make arrangements to send
him to Hong Kong. They agree to meet the next morning. Phil orders a
pizza. The delivery boy recognizes Phil from TV and calls Mack. Sexy Michael is
uncomfortable with his attraction to Paige, but they begin to kiss. Jean
introduces herself to Val as an old college friend of Ben's, and Val invites
her to dinner. Ben tells Jean to leave him alone or he'll expose her on TV.
While grocery shopping, Ben loses Bobby and later finds him with Jean. Scared,
he goes along with her and supports Peter on TV. Abby is furious, but tells
Peter it was her idea. Peter wins the election.
Welcome back. When we last left off, Phil Harbert was
talking to Greg in his big skyscraper office that makes me think of the Ewing
Oil offices, things were getting heated between them, and then suddenly the
elevators in the hallway opened up and, wouldn’t you know it, Karen and Mack
came stepping out, intent on speaking with Greg right away. As we pick up now with All Over but the Shouting (a title I really like a lot), Greg is
explaining to the two of them why he called the police and why he named Phil as
the kidnapper. Of course, this is news
to Phil, who’s hiding behind the door and listening to everything. He knew that someone had named him because of
that whole pesky police sketch that he’s been dodging, but he didn’t know it
was his friend Greg. Phil is
understandably pissed, and after Karen and Mack evacuate the premises, he
confronts Greg about it, to which Greg says, “You didn’t give me much
choice.” I enjoy the way Greg speaks,
and as I’ve said time and time again, I always find myself wondering where
Devane improvised his lines. In this
scene, he says to Phil, “You kidnapped the poor woman, you almost caused her
death; that is not very nice.” I had to
laugh at the “not very nice” part and wonder if Devane made that part up, and
of course the best part is the way he just casually tosses it out like
that. Let’s reflect a bit and remember
that Phil locked Karen into that cozy little apartment and then lit the entire
house on fire, a rather slow and horrible way to kill someone. It’s one thing to march in there and put a
bullet in her brain; it’s quite another to leave her alone with the smoke and
flames billowing in, cremating her alive.
Yes, “not very nice,” indeed.
Even though Greg wants Phil out
of his life as soon as possible, for the time being he is somewhat stuck with
him, since Phil holds the threat over Greg about how Greg knew he kidnapped
Karen, even caught him being possessed by the spirit of Jack Torrance while
Karen was trapped in that barn, and yet all he did was tell him to take a
hike. Of course, Greg is smart and has
made sure to cross his T’s and dot his lower case j's by changing his tires, yet he still
helps Phil out by checking him into an exceptionally shitty little motel where
he is to remain isolated until he can get him to Hong Kong. Phil voices some opposition to this plan,
asking why he has to go to Hong Kong, to which I retort, “Why would anyone not want to go to Hong Kong?” If I had nearly murdered a person and my
punishment was to go live in Hong Kong, going to bathhouses with all those
supple young Asian boys for the rest of my life, I would certainly not be
complaining. Still, I can sympathize
with Phil being bored in the shitty motel, as he has nothing more exciting to
do than play solitaire and watch cartoons on a horrible 1986 TV (he’s just
lucky it’s a color TV).
Later in the ep, Phil orders a
pizza, and it’s only upon reflection that I realize how silly this scene is,
specifically the way it is shot and scored (but we’ve already covered that the
score is almost universally terrible throughout this season). See, Phil is hanging out all alone in the
motel, and then he slowly glares at the corded telephone and we get a closeup
of the phone and we’re thinking he’s gonna do something real wicked, like
perhaps call Karen and threaten her some more, but instead he picks it up and
orders a pizza. Look, I know it can
cause anxiety to order a pizza, trying to figure out the specials and the best
deals and just how many toppings you can get on there for the lowest price, but
why is the scene shot like a horror movie?
We really think he’s gonna do something awful, but all he’s doing his
clogging his arteries more than they’re already clogged. Anyway, when the pizza boy arrives, Phil only
opens the door as far as the chain goes and says how he just took a shower and
he’s all naked, so the boy had better just hand him the pizza. Now, if Phil was played by a more attractive
actor (my beloved Christopher Atkins, perhaps), I could see this type of scene
easily drifting into the soft-core gay porn territory in which Phil declares
he’s naked and the pizza boy says, “Oh, that’s no problem," and then the door opening and the
two boys exploring each other in the biblical sense. However, since Phil is obese and
unattractive, I’m glad that’s not what happens; instead, when Phil cracks the
door open a bit further to get his pizza (I wonder what kind he got; my
favorite is Canadian bacon and pineapple), the pizza boy spots his face in the
mirror on the wall, leading us to our final scene of the ep, in which the
heroic pizza boy calls the police and declares that he knows where this
kidnapper guy is staying. Uh oh, looks
like Phil’s in a bit of trouble!
That about does it for Phil this
week, a character I’m getting rather tired of discussing. Fortunately, and I suppose this is a spoiler,
but our next ep will mark his last appearance and then I won’t have to talk
about him or think about him anymore.
Anyway, let’s move over to a character I like more, Hackney. Oh no, wait, scratch that, I absolutely
misspoke, as I dislike Hackney even more than I dislike Phil. See, Phil is just sorta there; I don’t even think I necessarily dislike him, but Hackney is
already getting a special place in Hell, as far as I’m concerned. Fuck, how could I watch this whole season and
not see what a fucking joke this character is?
I remember powering through season eight just like I powered through the
previous seasons and having absolutely no problems with any of this, but now
I’m seeing vividly why all my fellow KL fans
recoil in horror at the very mention of Hackney’s name. Our last ep was so blissful without her, but
sadly she is back with a vengeance this week, starting off right near the
beginning of the ep. Sweet God, the
episode credits are still playing
when Hackney shows up; the powers that be couldn’t even give us a couple of
minutes of peace before unleashing her.
Okay, so Ben comes home one night and he’s happy to see Val, but he’s
feeling kinda tired and grumpy. Val says
how she’s got something special prepared because they have a special guest, and
Ben says, “I’m not really in the mood,” and Val grins all wide and says, “You
will be!” Then, who should emerge but
Hackney, dressed in white and purple and wearing a ridiculous purple party
hat. She’s smiling and looking stupid and
goes, “Hi, Ben, it’s me!” Ben looks
profoundly upset and you have to wonder how much of this is coming from the
character of Ben and how much of it is coming from the actor Douglas Sheehan staring at the scene being filmed and thinking, “I signed on to another year
for this?” Yup, I’m hoping the producers cut Doug a
mondo check to do this one extra season, because right about now I’m wishing he
had run off with Cathy and the two could be living happily ever after
somewhere, singing duets of fabulous ‘80s cover songs together.
Anyway, Hackney makes a stupid
face and goes, “Oh God, I’ll just die if you don’t remember me,” and there’s
this long pause as Ben glares at her before finally declaring, “Jean Hackney,”
and then she screams like a stupid little bitch and acts all giddy and runs
over and hugs him. From here, we learn
that she has presented herself to Val and Lilimae as an old college friend of
Ben’s who just moved out to California and saw him on the television and simply
had to look him up right away. There’s a
lot of atrocious dialogue in this scene in which Val says something about how,
“Jean has been telling us how Flash was
quite the ladies man,” and then Hackney says, “I only told them you broke
Sarah’s and Carol’s hearts,” and then Val says, “I’ll let Sarah go by, but I
will have some questions about Carol later.”
Then poor Julie Harris, who is probably just yearning to have a
storyline or something to do right
now has to take a big gulp and deliver the line, “Mr. B.M.O.C.; Big Man on
Campus,” and then everyone in the room laughs with delight as we finish up this
most horrible, horrible, horrible scene.
I can’t believe Hackney is
already this bad and this painful to watch this early in the season. If I remember correctly, she’s going to stick
around for pretty much the entire damn year (good God, I just looked it up and
she’s in 21 eps out of 30 and will make her final appearance in the fucking 25th
ep of the season; my sphincter is rapidly tightening up). If you thought that this awful, awful, awful
dinner scene was the only time we’d have to deal with her this week, think
again, because a little later in the ep, we cut to some scary grocery shopping
with Ben and Lilimae. The scene starts
with some bad exposition to establish why Ben is here, with Lilimae saying, “I
sure do appreciate you coming along with me,” one of those lines that reminds
me of that brilliant Simpsons joke
with Homer saying, “After all, we did agree to attend this self help seminar,”
and Lisa saying, “What an odd thing to say.”
In this case, both Ben and Lilimae know that Ben agreed to come shopping
with them, so why is the line only coming up right now, as we cut to the start
of the scene? Maybe I’m being an
annoying, pretentious prick (which is my nature) by pointing out these
micro-details and then bitching about them, but it’s lines like this that
really make me miss Peter Dunne bad.
Remember how brilliantly written the show was at every single fucking
moment when Peter was in charge?
Remember how organically we could flow from scene to scene and character
to character without ever feeling any awkwardness? How I yearn for some of that now.
Anyway, everything’s going fine
until Bobby mysteriously disappears. The
music gets all scary as both Ben and Lilimae start running frantically around
the store, looking for him. The bad
music blares for a little while, we get lots of shots of the camera flinging
around from aisle to aisle, and then Ben comes upon Hackney in the produce
aisle, Bobby hanging out in her arms just as cozy as could be. Ben yanks Bobby away and Hackney (dressed in
another absurd outfit) is all like, “Oh Ben, I didn’t know you shopped here;
what a coincidence!” When Lilimae sees
her, she’s all relieved and says, “He wandered off just like that; thank you
very much!” Another thing to detest
about this storyline is how it requires our beloved characters to act so
unbelievably stupid. Am I really
supposed to believe that both Val and Lilimae could spend an entire evening
with Hackney and not realizing how uncomfortable and horrified Ben is during
the whole thing? Am I really supposed to
believe that Lilimae would see Hackney at the grocery store and just think it’s
a remarkable coincidence that she’s holding Bobby? Lilimae is sharp and has her intuitions and
her psychic twinkles and I ain’t buying this; I think she would see right
through Hackney from the moment she waddled her bad-acting self into their
home.
What does Hackney even want at
this point, anyway? Well, in another bad
scene in which Ben pays her a visit at her stupid little dress shop, she says
how she’s receiving orders from her superiors and that they want to know what
Greg Sumner is really up to and, for some reason, they want Ben to endorse
Peter Hollister. Ben snorts and takes a
moment to think of how many more eps are in his contract before he can take the
money and run and then says how he’s a newsman and it’s unprofessional for him
to endorse a political candidate. Then
he overacts by grabbing Hackney and shoving her in front of the mirror and
saying how he’ll do a special news report on a certain CIA spy named Hackney or
some such nonsense. However, all this
happens before the scary grocery store scene, you see. After Hackney kinda sorta kidnaps Bobby in
the grocery store, Ben gets scared and decides to do what she says, so he goes
on his cable show and says how he officially endorses Peter Hollister for the
state senate. I remind you that this is
a pretty big deal because Peter’s opponent is, of course, Gary, and Gary’s wife
is, for the time being, Abs, and Abs owns the news station that Ben works at,
so she’s understandably pissed.
Anyway, Gary sadly loses the
election this ep, but he remains rather chipper about it, saying how he did the
best he could, he learned some stuff, he feels good, and he might run
again. Later, he and J.B. take a walk over
to Peter in the hotel lobby and Gary acts like the bigger man by congratulating
Peter on his win and telling him to give him a call if he ever needs any
help. Peter chooses to act like the
smaller man by pulling J.B. aside and saying, “J.B., if you ever want a job on
my staff, give me a call.” At this
moment, a man comes walking by with a big bowl of mashed potatoes and Gary simply can’t resist
taking a big scoop of potatoes off on a spoon and flinging it at Peter, a scene
that I found mildly amusing but I think could have been better. Even though a pie in the face is such an old
cliché, I think I would have greatly enjoyed seeing Gary shove a full pie in
Peter’s face. Somehow, one little smack of potato on his suit doesn’t have quite the same effect.
I gotta say I really wish this
storyline hadn’t wrapped up so quickly.
For these first seven eps of the season, Gary’s race for the senate has
been my favorite storyline going on. I
just found it all wonderfully entertaining and exciting, plus it gave us some
brilliantly funny moments like Gary cracking up while trying to film that
campaign commercial. I honestly think
all this senate business could have easily spanned the whole season, so why end
it here in episode seven? It feels
rather anticlimactic and returns us to a problem I had with latter season
seven, in which it felt like stories were created mostly to fill up a couple of
eps before being quietly retired (cough, Sonny, cough). I was just enjoying all this senate stuff so
much that I would have loved to see it go further, plus it also just feels
kinda fast in a real world sense. Didn’t
Gary announce wanting to run for senate, like, five minutes ago? And now the race is over and he’s lost? Do these things really tend to happen so
quickly? Anyway, moving on.
I feel like I’ve been kinda
whining about most of the stories this week, but if there’s one thing you won’t hear me complaining about
it, it’s the wildly sexy and erotic budding romance between Sexy Michael and
Paige. This has been kinda going on
since Paige first showed up in the last few moments of season seven, and I feel
I’ve been kinda ignoring it as I wrote about other stories. However, I shan’t ignore it in this ep,
because things really kick into high gear with the two of them this week. See, when we first catch up with the two hot
blondes, they are out clothes shopping and Sexy Michael is in one of those
changing booths. Anyway, Paige comes
walking over with some new outfit for him to try on and then she gets big and
bold by just climbing right into that changing booth with him. The sexiest, steamiest, most semen-gushingly
good line of the episode comes after Sexy Michael protests that he won’t even be
able to afford these outfits and Paige assures him that she is buying. Then she says, “It’s your choice; you can try
them on and get the size right or you can let me guess your size and probably
get it wrong.” If it sounds steamy
written out, that’s before I even tell you that she glances right down at his
lower regions before she says, “You can let me guess your size,” and she even
throws a little pause in there to make it sexier. We all know what she’s talking about; she’s
talking about his cock. She’s talking
about Sexy Michael’s sweet, perfect, pink, probably circumcised cock and I love
it. Mmmmm, what a yummy line and what a
yummy scene.
The yumminess continues a little
later when the two arrive at Paige’s hotel room and Sexy Michael declares how
he’d better get going. Paige asks why he
must always get going whenever they are alone together. Sexy Michael says how it’s sorta weird
because his mother and her father are married, but Paige helpfully reminds him
that they are not biologically related.
Then Sexy Michael goes on about how much he enjoys spending time with
her, how he feels he can talk to her about anything, to which she retorts,
“Sounds like you’re describing a very nice friendship,” and then Sexy Michael
gets all nervous and fidgety and says, “It’s not, because those good and
friendly feelings always turn into something else,” and Paige finishes the
thought with, “They turn sexy.” Ugh,
this is all so hot and I love it so much.
Then music that I actually don’t hate kicks into the soundtrack (it’s
this sorta acoustic guitar) and the two start to passionately kiss like Jack
and Rose flying on the bow of the Titanic and we end this most fabulous scene
of this most fabulous couple. Mmmmm, yum
yum yum yum yum yum yum.
That about does it for All Over but the Shouting. It clearly had its flaws, but it also had its
good points, with the highlights being Paige and Sexy Michael as well the Gary
senate storyline. The flaws are pretty
much flaws that are going to be haunting us throughout the season, I’m afraid,
so we’ll just have to get used to them for the time being, such as Hackney,
who is just absurd. Even so, I still
enjoyed watching this ep. I know I say
this a lot after spending an inordinate amount of time bitching about an ep,
but it’s still KL and I love KL and I would still rather watch this
than almost any other show in the world.
So anyway, let’s move right along to the conclusion of Phil Harbert’s
time with the show (thank Christ) with Pressure
Points.
On top of Wendy Fulton being a subpar actress and the overall terribleness of the story line, this plot was also a little out-of-character for Knots. I realize they left the comforts of the cul-de-sac in the later seasons, but international spying? Come on!
ReplyDeleteLucky girl that Paige.
ReplyDeleteThe day sappy Ben Gibson is ever considered a Big Man on Campus is the day every Playboy centerfold ever photographed begs to be my love slave.
ReplyDeleteHa! :)
DeleteUmmmm... for some reason, this Hackney storyline is not bothering me as much as the last time around. I'm sure it will though, and I do agree, she is absurd!!!
ReplyDeleteMichael meant to say "sexual" - not "sexy," but it was the 80s and he wasn't allowed.