Episode Title: A Plan of Action
Season 08, Episode 20
Episode 180 of 344
Written by Lawrence Kasha
Directed by Kate Tilley
Original Airdate: Thursday, February 5th,
1987
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Paige accepts a job at Lotus Point. Anne asks Karen to
arrange for her to live at Lotus Point. Greg and Laura disagree about her
having the baby, so she moves back to the cul-de-sac. Abby opens a
nightclub at Lotus Point. Peter asks Abby to the opening, but tells Paige it is
only for PR purposes. Ben refuses to kill Greg, and Jean says she'll kill his
family. After someone tries to run Val off the road, Ben tells her that he was
part of a subversive group that bombed a building and an innocent man was
killed. Ben says they want him to kill Greg. Ben and Val decide to run away.
Val won't tell Lilimae what is up. Ben is being followed, and steals a car to
lose them. Val, Lilimae, and the kids follow Ben's plan to meet him secretly.
As they drive away, Jean pulls up next to them in her car.
Welcome to the last ep on a disk
of eps viewed by both My Beloved Grammy and myself. I remind my readers one more time that I’ve
actually gotten behind and, once I’m done writing about this ep, I will need to
write about five more, a whole entire extra disk of eps, before My Beloved
Grammy and I gather again for the final disk of the season. I’ll try not to get behind like this again,
mostly because I know myself and I know how lazy I am and I know that, the more
I let the eps pile up, the longer it will take for me to start writing about
them. Also, I remind you of this just so
you’ll cut me some slack if I forget details or just seem a little blasé. Of course, I might just seem a little blasé
because this season is severely underwhelming me as I go through it a second
time. Okay, let’s go ahead and discuss A Plan of Action.
I’m going to spend a lot of time
bitching because most of this ep is about stupid Hackney, so let’s try to
get started on a positive note by talking about some characters I do not
despise, starting with Paige and Anne.
On the Paige front, she gets a new job and, I think, a new hairdo within
the confines of this ep. In fact, I’m
gonna take a very unnecessary pause just to discuss how fucking good Paige
looks. I’m starting to think that if I
leaned closer towards the heterosexual lifestyle, I would probably be one of
those gentlemen-prefer-blondes types, because I think Abs is the most beautiful
woman in the world and I’m also feeling a slight stiffness coming on whenever
Paige is on the scene, especially in this ep.
She looks fucking fabulous, very much like she somehow stepped out of
the ‘50s and then melded with the ‘80s to create some sort of wonderful,
fantastic new look. Her hair and makeup
look ‘50s as can be, but her outfit is this sorta blue jacket thing with super
long sleeves and all in all she looks great.
Anyway, enough about shallow shit like what the woman looks like; let’s
catch up with her story. When we first
see Paige, she’s taking a little stroll around Lotus Point with Olivia and, at
some point in the ep, we also learn that she is going to start working
there. Now there’s a detail that slipped
my mind; how long does Paige wind up working for Lotus Point? Whenever I think of the words “Paige” and
“working,” I generally picture her working in Sumner’s gigantic skyscraper
office with, I think, The Sumner Group, somewhere closer to seasons ten and
eleven time. Whether anything of note is
going to come out of her employment at Lotus Point, I can not tell you because
I do not remember.
The icy relationship between
Karen and Paige is starting to thaw, I notice.
Right now, Paige is living with Peter in an effort to avoid her mother,
who’s been staying at Karen and Mack’s.
Early in this ep, Karen reissues her invitation to Paige, telling her
she can move back in with them, to which Paige asks her if her mother is still
at the house. Karen tells her that Anne
has gone to a hotel and then we get an interesting bit of business in which
Paige says how now Karen is trying to get on her side since they both have a
common enemy. This seems like kinda a
bitchy thing to say, but Karen takes it in stride and just assures Paige that
Anne is not her enemy. See what I
mean? A few eps ago, Karen was
overacting and screaming at Paige, “WHAT
COLOR IS THIS?!”, but now she’s extending an invitation for her to come
live with them and, even though Paige is kinda bitchy, it seems like the two
are starting to get along better, a development which pleases me.
When it comes to this whole
triangle of Karen/Mack/Anne, I don’t remember too much happening in this ep;
it’s more a lot of hints and insinuations for future events. Anne doesn’t directly try to seduce Mack
within the confines of this ep, but we can tell that she wants to, and we also
get several more scenes demonstrating the worlds of difference between Karen
and Anne. In fact, there’s a small
exchange between the two that I found endlessly thought provoking, although
probably nobody else besides me would hone in on such small details and then
obsess over them. Anyway, it’s right
near the end of the ep, and Anne pays Karen a visit at the house. It’s just the two of them together and the
exchange goes like this:
Karen: Well, can I get you a cup of coffee or, um…
Anne: A drink would be fine.
Karen: Oh, diet or regular?
Anne: Scotch.
Karen seems a little surprised
by this request, but quickly goes to work preparing Anne her drink (and Anne
takes it neat, by the way), and then when she hands her the drink, Anne asks if
Karen will be joining her and Karen says, “No, I don’t drink.” It’s that line right there that I really want
to focus on; is this new information?
And if so, when did Karen join Gary in ditching the alcohol in exchange
for a nice club soda? I can’t flash
through the previous 179 eps in my brain and immediately remember if we ever
saw Karen drink (although I am suddenly having a flashback all the way back to
season one and Let Me Count the Ways,
when she drank some red wine with the teacher she almost shagged, as well as at
least one of the two Hitchhike eps
from season two, in which we saw her nursing a gin and tonic), but I’m sure
we’ve seen her have a drink a time or two in the past. Okay, so when did she stop drinking? My Beloved Grammy said, very matter of
factly, as if this was something we had already seen clearly on the series in
the past, that Karen doesn’t drink anymore because of her pill popping problems
circa season five. I said I thought that
just meant she had to stop popping pills, but she could keep drinking if she
wanted to, but My Beloved Grammy said no, that part of the sobriety meant not
drinking, either. What a headache this
is giving me, because I feel almost certain that, somewhere in the gap of eps
between when Karen stopped popping pills and the ep we are discussing right
here today, I feel we surely must have
seen her drink some alcohol, am I wrong?
Anyone with more information should feel welcome to leave a comment or
write into me to explain what’s going on with Karen and alcohol.
While on the subject of alcohol,
I also noted the casual way that Anne requests scotch, as if of course every
single house in the world comes with a full bar. When I think of old movies and TV (like circa
the ‘50s and ‘60s), I always think of every house having a fully stocked bar
and every adult character drinking like a fish and being very casual about
it. By 1987, was this still
standard? Would you walk into someone’s
house and just assume they have a full liquor cabinet the way you just assume
that everyone has a coffee maker or a TV in their house? Or does this request for scotch actually
serve to underline the differences between the two women? I think that might be what the writers are
going for, that Anne is a rich snooty WASP from a family of rich snooty WASPs
who are afraid of any all people who are not heterosexual Caucasians, and when
I think of rich snooty WASPs (or any Republicans), I generally think of people
who are drunk all day. So perhaps the
writers are showing us that Karen is a person that’s like, “Yeah, we’ve got
some liquor in the house, but we don’t just sit around and drink all day,”
while Anne is a person that’s like, “Yeah, I’m a rich white woman and I have
nothing better to do with my life except drink
all day.” Anyway, aside from my
obsession with Anne’s scotch and the etiquette of assuming all houses come
packed to the gills with booze, there’s not much going on with Anne this
week. Based on my memory, I’m sure
there’s a flirtation between her and Mack and all that, but that’s part of a
bigger storyline that’s building around us, so let’s discuss all that drama in
more detail a little further down the road.
Meanwhile, over at Sumner’s
ranch, he and Laura finally have a much needed talk, the results of which are
Laura deciding she’d best return to the cul-de-sac. There’s a chance that I might wind up calling
this whole development bad writing, but that’s why we should all be very
grateful for the skilled acting of Constance and Devane. See, we first catch up with them in an
exchange that I actually quite enjoyed.
Laura is sitting and reading the newspaper (with her Librarian Glasses
on, of course) and she says how there’s some woman in the world who prints a
newspaper with only good news and she’s planning to get a subscription, but
then Greg says, “It doesn’t change the facts,” and when Laura wonders how they
can keep all the terrible news about the world away from the children, Greg
says, “You don’t, it’s reality, they learn to live with it.” Just for the record, I’m with Greg on this
point. Children need to know that the
world is a dark and horrible place, and the sooner they know it, the
better. Also, deliberately publishing a
paper that only reports good news is just stupid; you might as well not report
the news at all.
Anyway, the scene then develops
into Laura challenging Greg about some deal he made and how a bunch of people
are going to lose their jobs now. She
says how Greg has all this money and no red tape and he could work out a deal
to save those people’s jobs, she says something about “What happened to that
guy with all the dreams?”, and then she concludes with, “I never know who you
are anymore,” to which we get a rather shocking reply from Greg when he says,
“Maybe you should go back to the cul-de-sac.”
Laura asks if that’s what he really wants and he answers, “What does it
matter what I want? Did you ask me if I
want to be a parent?” Clearly this whole
baby thing is not sitting well with Greg, although I do want to take a brief
moment to point out that Greg already is a
parent. We haven’t seen her in a long
time, but Mary Frances is still out there in the world somewhere, probably
hanging out with Jane, so the idea that Greg doesn’t “want to be a parent”
doesn’t really make much sense, since he already has a kid. Even so, I get his point; he doesn’t want to
have a kid with Laura and risk bringing another male from the Galveston
bloodline into the universe. Even so, I
think this might be bad writing, just a temporary roadblock needed to keep
Laura and Greg apart for somewhere around four or five eps before putting them
back together, but that’s why I take special note of these two actors. Even when the writing is forcing them to do
things out of sheer necessity for drama, both Constance and Devane keep it
feeling real. I especially like the way
Devane elongates “cul-de-sac,” and really emphasizes all the syllables in the
word; it’s almost like he wants to say it sorta silly so it doesn’t sting Laura
as much, yet at the same time it’s almost like he wants to sound blasé about it
in order to be extra hurtful.
I think I’ll also take some time
to insult more things about what’s going on within the show’s stories right
now. I will say that I remember Laura’s
pregnancy relating to some absolutely fantastic storylines down the line, like
years down the line, but I have to say that, as of right now, as of this
moment, only taking into account what we are seeing in front of us as we move
through season eight, this story isn’t doing much for me. Laura just sorta announced out of the blue
that she was pregnant a few eps back, Greg was upset about it, and that’s
pretty much where we still are. Also,
Laura is so hidden in the background by this point in the series that, I kid
you not, I will actually forget she’s pregnant for a long space of time until
she brings it up again in the dialogue.
Aside from being pregnant, Laura is really not doing much at all on the
series right now. She seems to be only
allowed to exist if she’s in the same scene as Greg, and usually she’s just
sorta sitting around or listening to him explain whatever it is that he’s
doing, but she never gets to singularly command the screen nowadays. This is a real shame considering our time
with Laura is so limited (she’ll be gone before we hit the halfway mark of season
nine) and it also keeps me from being able to focus my attentions on her
pregnancy and how it affects her feelings.
Alright, let’s move over to the
mondo turd sandwich that is the Hackneyed storyline. Oh boy, do things really rev up and head
towards the even-more-absurd as we watch this ep. Okay, I remind you that this is episode twenty of the season and Hackey was
introduced way at the start of the season in the very first ep. She’s been hanging around a lot and taking up a lot of the screentime and absolutely anyone and everyone watching
this season should have been able to tell, from her very first seconds
onscreen, that she was up to no good.
However, it’s not until this ep, when Ben says how Hackney will have to
kill him and she answers, “It’s not just you we’ll kill, Daddy,” that Ben
finally puts the pieces together and a lightbulb goes off in his head and he
says, “My God, you’re not CIA at all, are you?”
I almost peed my pants when we finally got to this line, because while
I’m sure it’s supposed to be this BIG EPIC REALIZATION, I found it absurd that
this storyline has drawn out this long without Ben figuring it out. Once again, I can see the bad writing
infecting my beloved and much cherished characters and making them behave
stupidly for the sake of the plot. At no
point in the last three years have I ever thought Ben was stupid; I’ve always
thought he was really sharp and had a good eye for details and truth. The man is a reporter and he’s been all over
the world and dealt with all kinds of people, yet with this ridiculous, vamping
femme fatale wannabe, it takes him an agonizing twenty eps to finally realize,
“Hey, wait a minute, CIA operatives don’t usually threaten to murder small
children!”
Now that Ben’s brain has
suddenly grown back into his skull after twenty eps in which it was taking a
hiatus, he snaps into action and decides to tell Val the truth about
everything, in a series of scenes that, well, I just don’t know what to make of
them. When I think of the L&L period
of the series, I usually think of a more humor-infused style of writing, and
that makes me wonder if we are supposed to get a humorous tone out of these
scenes or if they are just more bad scenes that are turning funny because of
how campy everything is. See, when Ben
finally spills the details to Val about Hackney and this whole sordid mess, the
scene takes place in an outdoor park while they eat popsicles and Ben orders
Val to keep smiling and nodding, as he can’t be sure they’re not being watched. Then the scene ends with him saying how he’s
been ordered to kill Greg, and we just cut to a quick shot of Val smiling while
looking in horrible pain at the same time, and then the scene cuts there. Okay, so are we supposed to be amused by
Val’s face here? Are we supposed to be
amused by the SUPER SERIOUS DIALOGUE being played out while the actors munch on
popsicles? Or is this actually supposed
to be totally serious and it’s just becoming unintentionally funny because of
how campy everything is? Honest to God,
I don’t know, so someone please write in and tell me what you think, because I want to believe this is intentional
humor, but I just don’t know.
Let’s just go ahead and speed
through the proceedings here, because they are dumb and I don’t want to discuss
them at any great length. Basically, Ben
tells Val how they need to gather the kids and Lilimae and all the money they
have and hit the road, but they have to do it with secrecy. Oh yeah, he also tells Val they’re going to
have to empty Lilimae’s savings account, to which I wrote in my notes, “Does
Lilimae even have a savings
account?” When we got caught up with
Lilimae in early season three, she was a homeless shopping cart lady sneaking
out of hotels she’d been living in without paying the bill, and then she moved
into Val’s house. Since then, she’s just
been living with Val, not doing anything that could earn her a paycheck. Where is this savings account suddenly coming
from? Or has she always had money
stashed away and she was just weird and chose not to ever dip into it,
preferring instead to be homeless and pushing a shopping cart around? Well anyway, emptying Lilimae’s savings
account is one of the items on Val’s agenda, along with getting the twins some
special vitamins they need. Ugh, these
vitamins. I’m sure the kids are going to
just die if they don’t have their stupid little vitamins for one day, and I’m
also sure that these vitamins are so rare and so special and so unique that
only one drug store in the entire universe has them, and that would be the drug
store Val goes to regularly. When Lilimae
tells her how the drug store was out of the vitamins (I was a Flintstones
Vitamins kid myself), Val acts like it’s this big deal and, guess what, spoiler
alert, it’s not. The kids will be just
fine, the vitamins are not important, can we all talk about something else?
I guess we can talk about how
annoying Lilimae is right now. Just like
Laura, Lilimae’s days on the show are numbered, and just like Laura, the
writers are giving her fucking nothing to do in her last full year on the
series, so really she’s just here to be an extra body and make a lot of noise
as Val tries to get the whole family out of town. Seriously, I’m surprised Julie didn’t pipe in
with the writers and be like, “Guys, does Lilimae really have to be sooooooooooo annoying in this ep?” Everywhere they go, Lilimae has something to
say, something to complain about, some form of bitching that must be expressed,
and it annoys Val and it annoyed me and it annoyed My Beloved Grammy, too. They all embark on this big epic operation to
try and sneak through the drug store and out the backdoor, where they meet Ben,
driving a car that he stole, and then they hop in and start speeding away, only
for, GASP, you guessed it, Hackney to come driving up beside them, looking
wicked and stupid, looking every inch the incredibly lame character that she
is. She honks at them and they stop the
car so she can deliver a really bloated, bad line of dialogue in which she
says, “You know, I know a store that’s having a sale on vitamins.” My God, she’s just so wicked and just so knowledgeable
about everything going on in the universe that knows not only that Ben and Val
are trying to blow town, but that they weren’t able to get the kids their
vitamins!
So this ep was hardly one of the
best ever, and the truly agonizing thing is that, as it comes to its
conclusion, we viewers must face the fact that we still have Hackney for a
whopping five more episodes. This story already feels hopelessly dragged
out, going on way, way, way, way, way too long, and yet we’re still not
done. Hackey is going to pollute our
entire next disk of eps! This story
should have wrapped up at least ten eps ago, but instead it’s gone completely
contrary and extended so far beyond its sell-by date that it honestly feels
like a story that will never end. Again,
I marvel at the fact that I watched this entire season once before and hardly
even thought twice about Hackney. Before
doing this blog, if you had asked me to tell you about season eight, I would
have told you it was of course brilliant and genius and that I can’t figure out
why all the fans hate this Hackney character so much. Now I see clearly, and there’s no denying
that Hackney deserves most of the blame for the lame-ification of the series at
this point; she pollutes everything around her and evilly weaves her way
insidiously into the very fabric of the series.
Okay, now that we’re done
discussing this ep, we’ve only got, um, ten eps left to go in the season
(Jesus…..), so let’s just move right along to a new disk, starting with Survival of the Fittest.
Your increasing frustration with this season is understandable and very funny.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Joshua left Lillimae some money in his will? He probably made a lot of money at that TV station and never lived on his own. Surely there was some money left? And as far as Karen's drinking...I don't think it was ever discussed before her revelation in this episode. It was lazy writing, which was becoming more frequent in this season.
ReplyDeleteWas Laura pregnant in real life at the time, and was it written in? Is that the reason we aren't seeing very much of her? All Lillimae does is drag those children around. Seems I'm watching the eps almost concurrently with you right now, as I just started season 9. The entire Jean Hackney storyline is a debacle and I am so glad Ben is leaving right along with her! Christopher https://subpoenacolada.livejournal.com/
ReplyDeleteLaura/ Constance was VERY pregnant in this ep. as evidenced in the scene opposite Karen in which Laura returns to the cul-de-sac. Laura is wearing green and she is huuuuge!
ReplyDelete