Episode Title: Brothers and Mothers
Season 08, Episode 09
Episode 169 of 344
Written by Diana Kopald Marcus
Directed by Robert Becker
Original Airdate: Thursday, November 6th,
1986
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Peter continues to add extra pills to Sylvia's medical dish.
Peter tells the pharmacist he needs more pills because Sylvia dropped them down
the sink. Then Peter feels guilty and flushes the extra pills. A
studio options "Capricorn Crude" and wants Val to write the
script. Eric walks in on Paige and Sexy Michael sleeping together. He's furious
about what that would do to Mack and Karen. He and Sexy Michael have a physical fight
and trash the room, but they won't tell Karen what it's about. Paige can't pay
her hotel bill and moves in with the MacKenzies. The hotel calls and says
Paige's check bounced and Karen wonders why she pretends to have a lot of
money. Ben tells Val he doesn't like Jean and not to be friends with her. Jean
tells her lover that Ben's real assignment is to kill Greg.
Welcome
to Brothers and Mothers, another
title that I just think is inherently good; it has a nice ring to it, just like
a few eps back with All Over but the Shouting. In this case, I like the
title because it’s so gloriously simple; this ep will be all about brothers and
mothers, so why not just title it Brothers
and Mothers? Also, I wish to provide
a little context for my writing, which I sometimes like to do in order to give
my beautiful and amazing readers a little peek into my life and the process of
creating this blog. In this case, I want
you all to know that I am writing this essay sans notes, and let me tell you
why. I certainly have notes; in fact, at
this exact moment in time, I am almost finished with my second little notebook
full of KL ep notes jotted down as My
Beloved Grammy and I watch and soon I will need to spend the 70 cents to
purchase a new notebook. However, I woke
up today bright and early, before the sun was out, to head to work, and then I
went to work, I did my work, I did it well, everybody loved me, and then I
clocked out from work at precisely 1:30PM.
Before leaving for work, I had put my computer into the trunk of my car
so that I could drive right away to the cute little coffee shop by my house and
get started writing immediately. I
arrived at the coffee shop, I ordered a large coffee with a little room
for cream and sugar, I plugged in my computer and got it started up and was all
ready to write when I realized, damn it all to Hell, that I had forgotten my
notes at home. But I am here, I am
sitting comfortably, I have my coffee beside me, I’ve got my computer set up,
and I am not packing all my shit up just
to drive a mile or two back to my house, get my notes, and then turn around and
drive a mile or two back to this coffee shop.
If I miss a cigar for the Sumner Cigar Counter, fear not, for I shall go
and check my notes later and I’ll make sure to get us back up to date before I
start adding more cigars to the counter. Also, I think this will be an
interesting experiment because it will be my very first time writing about an
ep without my handy notes present, plus I also don’t have the ep pulled up in
front of me the way I’ve been doing lately. If this essay suffers because of these
problems, at least you know why and you know that it’s a temporary problem that
won’t plague future eps. Anyway, with
all those pesky details out of the way, let us get started discussing Brothers and Mothers.
Okay,
I’m going strictly off of my memory now, so here we go. This ep concerns two things primarily, one of
which is the continuing affair between Paige and Sexy Michael and the other of
which is the continuing attempted poisoning of Sylvia via Peter. Those are the two main stories that take up
most of our time this week, but we’ve also got a few smaller details that I
think I’d like to cover first, starting with the continuing offensive
abomination that is Hackney and this Hackneyed storyline that’s plaguing us
this year. If you thought things were
stupid in the premiere of the season when this character was first introduced,
that’s nothing compared to where we are now and it’s nothing compared to where
we’re heading. Let me think, what was
Hackney up to this week…. Well, we get a
scene between Ben and Val that takes place at, um, their house, if I’m
remembering correctly, and Val is going on about Hackney and saying something
or other about her and then Ben tells Val, “You know, I don’t really like Jean
that much and I don’t really like this storyline that much.” If I remember
correctly, Val acts kinda surprised about that and I act kinda annoyed as I
have to sit and watch this. This goes
back to the thing I was saying before about how this storyline is requiring characters
I love to act stupid. Val has known Ben
for three years and has been married to him for about one year, and I feel she
should know him and understand him very well.
The same goes for Lilimae, who has also known Ben for three years and
has been living in the same house as him for about one year. Last ep, we saw the two of them act
positively overjoyed by this strange, mysterious woman who showed up out of the
blue wearing a stupid hat and declaring herself to be an old friend of Ben’s,
and then neither character seemed to notice Ben squirming with discomfort as if
he’s been suffering from diarrhea all day and is wondering how much longer he
can hold it in before it all starts to just ooze out all icky and green,
courtesy of a dangerous shart. Speaking
of dangerous sharts, that’s what this storyline is. Much like a shart, you think you can kinda
sneak it out and it won’t be that bad, that it might be a bit smelly but the
smell will quickly clear out of the room, but then you release the shart and
you realize, oh shit, and I do mean it quite literally as “Oh, shit.” Yup, that’s what this storyline is.
Hackney
gets the final scene of this ep, once again helping me put my finger on why the
ratings continued to sag down this year.
Look, I know that all the nighttime soaps were slowly beginning their
journey to unpopularity and eventual cancellation by this point. For some context, Dallas dropped from #6 to #11 this year, while Dynasty dropped from #7 to #25 (yikes!) and Falcon Crest dropped from…oh wait.
Actually, Falcon Crest finished
this year at #23 while its previous season had been #24, however, I want to
point out that it was still technically lower rated than its previous season,
as this year had 15.1 million viewers while the previous year had 15.6 million.
This is similar to how season six of KL finished
at #9 in the ratings while season five had finished at #11, but technically
season five still had a smidge more viewers.
Anyway, my point is that all the nighttime soaps were kinda on the
decline at this point, and I know most of that is simply attributable to the
fact that they had all been on for some time now, through the entire first half
of the ‘80s. New things come along,
people start to be into those new things, and the older things start to lose
interest for viewers and that’s only natural.
However, I still blame the sagging KL
ratings on a few things, one of which is that the latter portion of season
seven suffered from storyline flaws, the other of which is that season eight
unveiled an absolutely appalling and God-awful version of the theme song that
no person in the world could possibly enjoy listening to, and the third thing
is this Hackney business and how much time it’s taking up. It’s one thing if she’s just mildly polluting
a few minutes of the eps here and there, but in the case of this ep, she gets
the final scene. Imagine you’re a
viewer, you’re watching this, and the very final scene you see in the ep is
Hackney and her dumb storyline. Would you be eager to tune in next
Thursday? I’m gonna go ahead and say
no. Contrast that with the greatest
season of television ever made, season six of KL, and think of how every single ep would end with some stunningly
brilliant bit of drama and excitement that no human could possibly watch and
then not tune in the next
Thursday.
Anyway,
our final scene of the ep is Hackney lying in her bed with, oh, someone. I don’t even remember if we see this person’s
face and I honestly don’t think it matters.
It’s just some dude she’s currently shagging and I think he’s also,
like, a spy or whatever, so she’s spouting exposition at him about how she’s
got Ben on the case to, like, spy on Sumner or, you know, whatever. She says how Ben is not too happy about this
assignment but he’s currently doing what she says to do, and then she unveils
the final, very stupid, line of the ep, in which she says something like,
“Imagine how Ben’s going to feel when he finds out his mission is to kill Sumner.” I think this is crosscut
with Ben lying in bed with Val and I think we even get a freeze frame ending
here, which is also a grave error. The
show has generally been very good about saving its freeze frame endings for
those really special moments (remember Abs saying to creepy ‘80s Rapist Beard
Scott Easton how there was nothing she could do about Val’s babies and Easton
declaring, “You never know” and walking off to leave Abs with her own freeze
frame ending?), but this is not one of those moments. This scene should have been buried somewhere
near the middle of the ep so that we could forget about it by the time the ep
was over and the ep could have ended with, say, a freeze frame image of Sexy
Michael’s erect penis, 100% guaranteeing that the asses would be back in the
seats next Thursday and the ratings would begin a stunning upward trend. Instead, we freeze frame on this lame, lame,
lame, very lame final scene of this lame, lame, lame, very lame storyline.
But
there’s a better storyline going on in this ep, a storyline I like a lot even
though I’m fairly confident it leads nowhere and is quietly forgotten about and
retired to the place in the sky where forgotten storylines go, that place in
the sky currently inhabited by Sid’s engine, Michael’s A.D.H.D., and Gary and
Abby’s quest to start a methanol business.
In this instance, Val received a very excited message from “Ramilar
Studios” (and I laughed out loud when I heard that name and realized how
oh-so-clever the writers were being with this little bit of business) saying
they would like to option Capricorn Crude
for a movie deal or a TV show deal or, you know, something like that. I can’t remember if they want to make this a
movie movie, a gigantic big screen epic directed by James Cameron, or if they
are preferring to keep it on the small screen in the vein of something like Roots or the surprisingly brilliant Dallas: The Early Years. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter; all that
matters is that a studio has contacted Val and they’re interested in her
book. This continues a nice ascension in
celebrity status for Val that has been going on since we first started the
series. I think I’ve said this before,
but one of the many things I love about KL
is that the characters grow and change and their lives are different at the
end of the series from where they were at the start of the series. Already, both Gary and Val are so different
from their season one selves, with Gary now behaving as quite the noble and
upstanding man versus the drunken coward and wimp that he was in season
one. With Val, she started off the
series as something of a dumb and simple country girl (from outward appearances, you understand; I
have never thought Val was a dumb and simple country girl), but then she
started to go to night school and writing classes to seek adult education, and
then that blossomed into her writing a book, and then her book got published
and became a big success, and then she wrote a second book (can’t remember the
status on the success of that one, however) and now her first book is being
optioned to be a movie. This growth and
change has been nicely slow and organic over the course of the last seven years
and I appreciate it greatly.
Okay,
let’s move on to Peter and Sylvia. Last
ep, the helpful pharmacist delivered helpful exposition to Peter about how he
could easily poison Sylvia by giving her too many blood pressure pills. In the closing moments of the ep, Peter
figured what the hell and decided to start poisoning Sylvia and she declared,
with unknowing irony, “Now you’re acting like a real son.” Well, the poisoning continues this week, with
Peter accelerating on the same path of putting more pills into her dish and
saying, “Oh, you silly old woman, you forgot to take your pills again!” I do wonder how long this little ruse could
go on before Sylvia would start to think, “Gee, I know I’m not forgetting to
take my pills and yet every day Peter claims I’ve forgotten to take my pills!” In this ep, Peter cleverly manages to get a
whole fresh bottle of pills by using the tried-and-true lie of, “She
accidentally knocked them down the sink!”
I’m currently on my last refill of sleeping pills (I take Trazadone) and
I’ve been greatly enjoying sleeping nearly every night and not being an
insomniac and I’m terrified of returning to sleepless nights, so I myself have
considered calling up the pharmacy and saying, “Oh, gee, I knocked them down
the sink!” However, I think by this
point in time, pharmacists have wised up to this little lie. But that’s because I live in the year 2018 while my beloved KL characters live
(at least at this exact point) in the year 1986 and it might be easier to fool
the pharmacist with this fib than it would be today.
Now,
if I’m remembering correctly, Peter does have a little change of heart in this
ep and decide to stop poisoning Sylvia.
This was a surprise to me because, once again, if you had asked me to
tell you about this storyline based on my memories, I would have told you it
spanned nearly half a season with Peter slowly poisoning Sylvia, but it turns
out it’s barely even a full ep. Since I
don’t have my notes with me, I can’t remember the exact reason why Peter has a
change of heart, but I remember that he does have one. I like this, by the way, because it keeps
Peter interesting and neither good nor evil.
He’s been doing an evil thing, but then we see that he does have a conscience
and it kicks in strong and tells him to stop poisoning Sylvia, no matter how
annoying she might be or how much she’s inconveniencing his life.
Let’s
move on to the best part of the ep, which is the continuing shagging of Paige
and Sexy Michael and the shocking discovery of said shagging by Eric. See, Paige and Sexy Michael appear to be
enjoying afternoon delights regularly, and why not? This is the point in the day when the house
is totally empty, as both Eric and Karen are working at Lotus Point and Mack is
also out at the office, busting bad guys.
They’ve got the whole house to themselves, so why not strip and have a
solid shag or two? In this instance,
they’re enjoying their shag, or at least getting prepared to enjoy their shag,
when Eric enters the house for some reason or other. I believe he leaves work early simply because
there’s not that much to do at Lotus Point this day, although I could be
misremembering. Maybe he’s sick and
decides to go home early, I dunno. In
any case, he comes home early and he makes the mistake of pretty much barging
right into Sexy Michael’s room with barely a knock and he catches Paige and
Sexy Michael about to get it on. A
little later, we get the best scene of the ep when Paige leaves the house and
Eric has a moment alone with Sexy Michael.
He confronts him on what he just witnessed and says how he shouldn’t be
shagging Paige, that’s she’s kinda sorta his sister, in a way, that this could
do terrible things to Karen and Mack if they discovered it, and then the two
boys begin to have this epic fight in the middle of the living room and I start
to slowly stroke myself. Why oh why is
this scene sooooooooooooo sexy? It’s something about the brothers fighting,
it’s something about the raw seething testosterone in the air, it’s something
about the fact that Eric is getting the divine pleasure of putting his hands on
Sexy Michael.
You
know, that oughta do it for Brothers and
Mothers. I’m kinda glancing back over
my essay and, wouldn’t you know it, maybe I should write sans notes more often,
because for some reason the words just flowed out of my fingertips and I wrote
like a fiend and managed to cover all the bases. With this discovery, I think I will be bold and
continue this tradition by moving right along to our next ep and continuing
this new habit of not using any notes.
Let us move right along to discuss our final ep of this disk, Over the Edge.
"Imagine you’re a viewer, you’re watching this, and the very final scene you see in the ep is Hackney and her dumb storyline. Would you be eager to tune in next Thursday? I’m gonna go ahead and say no."
ReplyDeleteNailed it.
Hackneyed. So easy and so awesome...and so apt!
ReplyDeleteDoes it make any sense that Eric wants to beat the crap out of Michael because of Paige? Is it because he's jealous?
ReplyDeleteI didn't like the brothers fighting. I don't have any brothers do I can't relate. But it seemed super over the top. Breaking the coffee table? Jeez.
ReplyDeleteOh, and Val's dialogue and performance in this episode is awkward. He'll, this whole ep. felt a bit awkward. Then again, I accidentally watched out of order so...
ReplyDelete