KNOTS LANDING SEASON 9 (1987-1988)
THE CAST ROSTER:
WILLIAM DEVANE, KEVIN DOBSON, JULIE HARRIS, MICHELE LEE, CONSTANCE MCCASHIN, DONNA MILLS, TED SHACKELFORD, JOAN VAN ARK
Episode
Title: Missing Persons
Season
09, Episode 01
Episode
191 of 344
Written
by Lynn Marie Latham
Directed
by Joseph L. Scanlan
Original
Airdate: Thursday, September 24th, 1987
The
Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): After five weeks, no one can
find Peter. Val grieves over Ben, and makes up with Laura. Abby's really
worried about Olivia, who has been having nightmares, and has reverted to
infantile behavior. Mack becomes friendly with a man from his messenger
service, Al Baker. Paige goes to Greg, concerned about her paternity. He plants
a passionate kiss on her to prove he's not her father. Then Mack and Paige
discover that they are both allergic to cantaloupe, so he must be her father!
The crack at the Lotus Point playground gets worse. Workmen say it's
structural, and needs to come out. Abby just wants it patched, but Gary and
Karen out vote her. The workmen remove the cement and find Peter's body.
QUICK
NOTE: USUALLY I TRY TO AVOID SPOILERS FOR FUTURE EPS, BUT FOR THE PURPOSES OF
DISCUSSING SEASON NINE, I WILL BE SPOILING SOME FUTURE EVENTS THAT HAPPEN
AROUND THE 10TH AND 11TH EPS OF THE SEASON. IF YOU
HAVEN’T WATCHED THAT FAR, I HIGHLY SUGGEST GETTING THERE BEFORE YOU READ THESE
ESSAYS ON THE SEASON’S OPENING EPS
Welcome back to a brand new season of KL.
Here we are in late September of 1987 (a year MBG remembers as
one of the best years of her life; she was dating my Grampy, they moved into
their house together, I was less than three years away from coming into the universe, and
everyone was very happy) and I’m very excited to get started discussing a brand
new season. After my lukewarm response to season eight (“lukewarm” being
an understatement), I’m totally ready for a fresh new start with a fresh new
year. I’m ready to leave all my season eight problems in the past and
look onward towards the future, and I feel a high degree of confidence in
saying this season should be a vast improvement over our last one, and perhaps
even an improvement over season seven, as well. Let’s get started.
The first thing we see as we start Missing Persons is our usual thirty
second preview giving us a little taste of what’s to come. That’s all
fine, well, and good, but then we move into something completely different, and
that’s our brand new opening credits design, that of the painting, the design
that will span through all of seasons nine and ten before we get another new
opening in season eleven. This is pretty exciting because we’ve had the
same design for the opening all the way since season three when the glory of
the scrolling squares on black background was first unveiled. To me,
that’s the most classic and iconic opening design of the show, and it also
coincides with the best years of the show (seasons four through six), so it’s the opening my
brain always jumps to when I’m thinking of KL. Of course, the
style and sound of the musical theme got a little adjustment every year, but
the physical layout of the credits remained pretty much the same all the way
from The Vigil on November 12th, 1981 to Cement the Relationship on May 14th, 1987. That opening spanned six
years and 159 eps, so it’s definitely been some time since we got a
redesign. In fact, MBG was rather put off by this new
opening, asking why they felt the need to change it, and I reminded her that
they have already changed it once before, since the first two seasons had a
totally different style of opening, as well.
Okay, so what happens in this opening? Well, we start with a Rocky style
scroll of words across the screen (or a Cruising style scroll, if you prefer), the title of the series unfolding in
glorious cursive before our very eyes while a mellow bit of music plays.
Then we jump into the main thrust of the opening, which is the camera panning
up over this bizarre Jackson-Pollack-looking painting (I did my research and
found that this painting and this entire opening were designed by a man named
Sandy Dvore who also designed the opening credits for The Young and the Restless and, after giving those credits a quick look, I would say they
definitely have a similar flavor). Anyway, as the camera pans over the
painting, we get the actors shots in little circles that sorta appear in the
middle of the screen, and pretty much every cast member’s shot is a hysterical
laugh riot. In fact, the first time I hit this ep originally, I was very
upset to see this new opening and immediately yearned for my beautiful
scrolling squares. However, I quickly got over that issue and found
myself enjoying this opening as high camp, which is how it’s best viewed.
See, the theme song has been slowed down a ton (I believe J.V.A. referred to
this version of the theme as “a funeral dirge” and she's not exactly wrong) and so now we’re getting a more
mellow, more soothing arrangement of the theme versus the more bombastic and
exciting sounding themes of yore. While I don’t like this theme as much
as many from seasons past (although I would put this theme over the atrocious
season eight version), I have also come to appreciate the sounds of the opening
theme this year and next year. Once you listen to it a few times, it
becomes rather soothing and also manages to stick in your head. But
really, the piece da resistance of this opening is the hilariously campy
actors’ shots. Pretty much nobody escapes this opening unscathed, so
let’s just go down the list, In Alphabetical Order, as always. In fact,
I’ll even give a little commentary on what I think is running through the
brains of these actors as they pose for these ridiculous shots.
- William Devane: "I’m gonna start out looking straight ahead and then slowly turn my head to face the camera looking ever so perfectly masculine and serious."
- Kevin Dobson: "I will look sadly down at the ground while wearing a little half frown so as to show that I'm a sweet, sensitive kind of guy."
- Julie Harris: "Even though I look a little silly because this opening is a little silly, I’m probably the only cast member to manage to escape this with my dignity intact, plus I’m also the only one who bothers to put on a smile for the camera."
- Michele Lee: "I’m naked for some reason."
- Constance McCashin: "This opening is stupid and they’ve just fired me after being one of the best characters on the show all the way since the very first episode, so I’m doing my Constance McCashin Spin and I don’t give a shit if you like it or not."
- Donna Mills: "I guess I’m trying to look sexy, but for some reason this particular version of 'looking sexy' looks a hell of a lot more like Jack Nicholson in the last half hour of The Shining."
- Ted Shackelford: "I’m gonna do the opposite of Mack by starting out looking down ponderously and then slowly turning my head up to face the audience, and you know what, I’ll even throw in a little half smile but not a full one."
- Joan Van Ark: "Do you like my new Flock of Seagulls haircut?"
That pretty much takes care of our
cast, and then the opening finishes up by zooming out from the painting so we
can see the entirety of it and realize that it doesn’t look like anything
except a big glob of multicolored paint that someone flung onto a blank white
canvas. Finally, we see the full, epic title of the series presented before
us in cursive, and that pretty much ends our opening. However, before I
move on, I do want to note that The Constance McCashin Spin is a highlight of
the entire series for me. This is easily the silliest and campiest
looking screen credit of any actor in a television series, ever, but I like to
think Constance was doing that on purpose, that she saw how silly and
overly-serious this attempt-to-be-arty opening was and decided to just embrace
the camp and unveil The Constance McCashin Spin. Laura is not long for
the series, as we will be seeing her for the very final time in the eleventh ep
of the season, Noises Everywhere: Part Two, so make sure to soak up as
much of The Constance McCashin Spin as you can get before it goes away.
Anyway, like I said, this opening doesn’t rank up there with the peak openings
of seasons five through seven, but I’ve also come to love it over the years and now I embrace
it for the high camp, recognizing that it looks way more daytime soap opera
than our previous openings, but not really minding it all that much.
After the opening, we get something like five
minutes of recap from the concluding hours of our last season (indeed, we are
at the seven minute mark before we finally get to new footage from this
ep). How do fans feel about these long recaps? I’m obsessed with
watching the show properly, and that means watching the whole package, the
thirty second preview, the opening credits, the recaps, all of it; whatever is
presented before me must be watched. I’m a big fan of the gigantic recaps
that start out new seasons because, first of all, it helps to remind me of the
great big summer that has gone by and how long it’s been since a new KL ep
graced the screen. It’s very different to watch the show nowadays in the
way MBG and I are doing it, several eps in a row, consistently
getting together to keep watching. I like to try and pretend it’s the
1980s and imagine how it would feel to have a big cliffhanger like Cement the Relationship and then have to wait nearly five months to see the story
continue. I really don’t think I would cope well waiting all summer for
resolution; I feel I would become consumed and obsessed with the cliffhanger
and think about it all summer and be unable to enjoy any other aspects of my
life. I think I’m just allergic to watching shows the old fashioned way,
because when I have watched current series as they air, I would usually stock
up five or six eps before powering through them all in a marathon, versus
watching just one a week. I also think it would cause me to put a great
deal of stock in how the cliffhanger resolves itself, versus watching the
series more quickly and not caring quite so much about the resolutions.
The first new footage we get to see after our long
recap is positively fabulous, and that is a very surreal sequence of a bunch of
creepy kids walking around the playground like zombies and singing London
Bridge is Falling Down together. What a strange way to start the ep,
and I mean that in a complimentary way. I assume we are supposed to take
this footage at face value, that Abs is really hanging around the playground at
Lotus Point and watching these creepy ass kids chanting an old nursery rhyme
for some reason. However, I also like to hypothesize that this opening is
a dream or a vision from a paranoid Abs, who is obsessed with this playground
and the crack in the foundation. I like to think she’s just sorta
imagining this scene in her head, that it’s symbolic of her stress.
Opinions?
We’re gonna spend a lot of time with Abs and Olivia
this week, so let’s talk about them first. Abs is full of paranoia that
Peter’s body will be discovered while Olivia is racked with guilt about what’s
happened. One thing worth noting is that at no point do the two ladies
sit down and talk about what exactly happened. Instead, the two
are existing together in this strange state of uncertainty, Olivia assuming
that her mother killed Peter and Abs assuming that Olivia killed Peter.
The timeline in this ep is very confusing (more on that later), but I would
think that at some point since Abs tossed Peter’s body into the pit, the two
might have sat down and been like, “So, which one of us actually killed
him?” This is a bit of a silly plot flaw and I recognize it as such, but
I’m also willing to just go with it since I enjoy this story as a whole and all
the drama that it creates. Also, plenty of families keep plenty of
secrets or go about their lives not speaking about some deep dark secret or
other, so I suppose the same could be true of Abs and Olivia. Perhaps Abs
doesn’t even want to ask Olivia if she killed Peter because she can’t
handle the possibility of Olivia having to say out loud that she did it.
I pretty much love all the stuff with Abs and Olivia
this week. I love how they are always sticking close together, how we get
the sense that Olivia doesn’t want to leave her mother’s side, and I also love
seeing Abs in protective mother bear mode, doing whatever it takes to keep her
daughter safe, even if it means fucking up a crime scene and taking a dead body
and burying it in cement. Anyway, yeah, so we get a lot of scenes of them
together, shit like Olivia insisting on doing her homework right alongside her
mother or asking if she can sleep in Abs bed because she had a scary
nightmare. However, the highlight of the ep for me comes in a
fantastically campy sequence set at Lotus Point in which Olivia frantically
pulls Sexy Michael aside and asks if he’d like to dance with her, which he
agrees to. Some truly-horrible-yet-also-kinda-wonderful-at-the-same-time Public Domain Music starts blasting through the dance floor while Olivia and
Sexy Michael show off their pathetic dance moves. Saturday Night Fever
this ain't, as Olivia’s entire package of moves boils down to her spinning
in circles while kinda shrugging her arms up and down over and over
again. Sexy Michael isn’t much better, I hate to admit, and that actually
somewhat deflates my boner as far as Sexy Michael is concerned. Make no
mistake, I would still like to take Sexy Michael and show him what a real man can do, but he’s lost some points in my book
after acting like a 12 year old girl last season with all his “Paige, I love
you” nonsense and now these horrendous dance moves. If I took Sexy
Michael out on a date, obviously dancing would be the last thing on my mind,
but I’d still like to know that he would be capable of dancing with me
without looking like a complete loser, and now I’m not so sure that would be
the case. Of course, he is dancing with his cousin, so perhaps he
doesn’t waste the good moves on her. If he was dancing with someone he
was feeling romantic towards, perhaps he would do a better job.
Abs spends the whole ep fretting and worried about
that crack in the foundation at the playground, but for the majority of the ep,
nothing happens in that department. Abs argues that it’s just a settling
crack and they don’t need to rip the entire foundation up, but Karen and Gary
do not agree and decide to proceed with bringing in the bulldozers. This
was a small scene that I enjoyed because it had a healthy dose of strong,
masculine Gary. See, Karen and Abs are bickering about the cost of
construction, and then finally Gary is like “Hey!” all loud and then he says,
“Here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna hire Carre, he’s gonna fix it, and
if I have to, I’ll pay for it.” Then he walks off. I love how he
just swoops in and stops Karen and Abby’s bickering and is authoritative and
tough and I just love it. Anyway, his decision leads us to our final
scene of the ep, in which the construction guys dig down deep and say, “Gee, we
think we’ve found the dead body of a not-very-interesting character from the
last two seasons” and Abs making her face like she’s about to poop her
pants. As far as Abs and Olivia are concerned this week, I have no
complaints (aside from that little plot point which I addressed earlier).
Moving over to some other characters, let’s talk
about what Val is up to this week. Val is responsible for the majority of
my confusion over the timeline at this point, and let me tell you why. By
now, we should all be used to the weird way that summers just don’t seem to
exist in the land of television, that our cliffhanger can be in a mid-May and
then we can pick up in late September continuing right where we left off.
In the case of this premiere, however, rather than picking up a couple of
seconds after the concluding events of last season, we are actually told that
some time has passed. How much time, though? I get confused
because at some point, Val tells Lilimae that it’s been “months” of sitting by
the phone and waiting in vain for Ben to call. When I first heard that
line, I was like, “Oh, how interesting, they are actually directly addressing
that a whole summer has passed and it’s now September,” but then I just get
confused because later they say that Peter’s body has been missing for five
weeks. Okay, so which is it? Has it been five weeks or nearly five
months? How can Ben have been MIA for several months yet Peter’s body has
only been missing for five weeks? The only possible explanation I have is
that, since Ben actually blew town two eps before the finale of season eight,
perhaps the span of time in those two eps was way longer than it seemed and he
really has been missing for several months. In any case, it
confused me a bit but is not really such a big thing.
Anyway, the majority of Val’s material in this ep
deals with her coming to terms with the fact that Ben’s not coming back.
She was holding out hope for awhile, but now she’s seen the brand new opening
credits sequence and she’s noticed that Douglas Sheehan has been removed from
it, effectively signaling that he will never be coming back, barring some
unexpected event in the future. In this ep, Val accepts the loss of Ben
after making a trip to the bank, where I find myself questioning another plot
point. See, she comes walking in but then the way too chipper bank
lady comes up to her and is like, “Mrs. Gibson, your husband already came in
here to pay off the loan on your mortgage payment!” This information is
provided to help underline the fact that Ben is really gone, but I’m gonna call
bullshit on it real fast while also asking my fellow readers to call me out if
I am somehow mistaken. Okay, we’re flashing way way back in time now, not
to KL but rather to our backdoor pilot of KL, the Dallas ep
Return Engagements. In that ep, Miss Ellie bought Gary and Val
that house herself. She paid it in full, there was no mortgage, it was
over and done with and it was her wedding gift. Where did this mortgage
suddenly come from? The only explanation I can come up with is that,
somewhere buried in the previous 190 eps, someone took out a mortgage on the
house. I’m theorizing that it could have possibly been Gary in season three
during the abandoned methanol storyline or perhaps it could have been Ben last
season as part of the Hackney nonsense that I barely even bothered to pay
attention to. Did either of these things happen? I honestly can’t
remember except I’m having this weird little feeling that something like
that happened somewhere in the past. However, if it didn’t happen, then
this is a major plot flaw, a mortgage suddenly coming out of nowhere in the
ninth season even though the very foundation of this series’ existence was
based in Miss Ellie buying Gary and Val a house in full.
Honestly, that about does it for Val this ep (aside
from a cute little exchange between her and Lilimae in which Lilimae says, “I
read there’s a Harry Belafonte special on tonight; I love Harry Belafonte!”),
so let’s move over to Paige and the continuing mystery that nobody cares about
of, “Who is my real father?” Well, Sumner is not her father, and if you
think that’s a spoiler, it’s not because we have that confirmed this ep when
Sumner decides to make out with her. Oh, what a fabulous scene, a scene
that has burned its way into my memory for all time, a scene I was looking
forward to seeing again. See, Paige is hanging around at Sumner’s ranch
(which lately seems to be the only place that Sumner spends time; did Devane
work something out in his contract dictating that he’d get to hang around one
set wearing a Hawaiian shirt all the time?). Paige is going on and on
about how her mother was a whore and she has no idea who her real father is but
she thinks it might be Greg, and Greg decides the fastest way to deflate that
idea is to hop on top of her and suck face for several seconds. This is
all very amusing, but for me the very best part of the scene is that Laura
walks in on them in the middle of their makeout and isn’t upset at all.
After Greg finishes the make-out and gives Paige one last reassurance of, “I’m
not your father,” Paige goes running off and Greg and Laura are left alone, at
which point Greg says, “I couldn’t think of any other way to convince her,”
which makes both Laura and myself laugh. Ugh, I just love it. I
love how Laura isn’t even slightly upset by this, that it just amuses her, and
I again compliment the writers for not turning this into some BIG DRAMATIC STORY
when they don’t need to. I feel other writers would be like, “Let’s have
Laura walk in and throw a big hissy fit!” Instead, we see that Greg and
Laura have an understanding of each other, that something like this is no big
deal.
I love this scene for that, but I also love it for
the seeds being planted for the future, and I again warn that there be SPOILERS
here because I am going to continue discussing Laura’s fate well in advance
of it actually unfolding onscreen. Okay, here it comes: Laura is going to
die soon. This is the first ep of the season and we will be seeing Laura
for the very final time in the eleventh ep of the season, so we really don’t
have a whole lot more time with her. Watching this first disk of eps (it
spanned Missing Persons through There Are Smiles) with the
knowledge that Laura is going to die greatly enhanced my enjoyment and
understanding of her scenes and her behavior at this point in the saga. I
think Laura knows right here and right now that she’s going to die. She
doesn’t actually admit this out loud until the fifth ep of the season, but I
believe she knows it right now and it’s coloring her behavior. Perhaps
she doesn’t get upset by Greg and Paige’s little impromptu make out session because
she knows life is short and she knows her time is running out and she doesn’t
want her last days on earth to be marred by petty fights and squabbles with her
husband. At the same time, I know from my first viewing of the series
that a Paige/Sumner romance is going to be a major focus of the last six years
of the show, and I feel that’s beginning right here. This makeout is the
first time we’ve seen anything romantic or sexual at all between the two, and
it’s going to build to bigger and better things as we move further along
through the series. All in all, for one little scene in a great big ep,
there’s a whole lot going on here. Oh yeah, and also Laura and Val make up which was a nice moving sequence and also adds to my theory that Laura is planning for her fate and wants to make amends with friends she's had fights with.
Last on the list for this ep is Mack and a brand new
character played by special guest star Red Buttons. I enjoy Red Buttons
but also don’t know very much about him. In fact, it was only upon doing
a smidge of research on him for this essay that I learned he won an Oscar in
1958 for the movie Sayonara. When I think of Red Buttons, I
usually think of him the way he looks right here or maybe even a few years
later; the oldest thing I’ve ever seen with him in was The Poseidon Adventure. My mind usually automatically goes to him in two eps of Roseanne
in which he played a boyfriend of Roseanne’s mother as well as several eps
of season two ER, in which he had a very compelling storyline with Dr.
Carter. Anyway, Red Buttons, ladies and gentlemen, here he is, and he
will be with us until Flight of the Sunbirds, the ninth ep of the
season. Here, he’s playing a man named Al Baker and I confess I was a bit
confused about his function when I first watched this with MBG. However, when I watched these five eps again with Brother
(who was not able to join us for our viewing party, so I watched the eps
again with him separately), I got a better handle on Al Baker. I guess
he’s the messenger for Mack’s office, meaning he stops by once a day to deliver
mail or whatever. What’s odd is that one would assume delivering a bit of
mail should only take a minute or two, but Al appears to be sorta living in
Mack’s office, or at least spending an inordinate amount of time there.
He’s kinda always there, drinking the coffee and complaining to Peggy about how
it’s too weak. I have a theory that all coffee was probably shitty until
around 1991 or thereabouts, although of course I could be wrong. I’m
gonna go ahead and assume that Peggy’s coffee probably tastes like that
atrocious sewage they used to always have brewing at the bank when I was a kid,
that sad pot of coffee that’s been sitting there all day with a jug of
horrendous non-dairy creamer planted beside it. Anyway, Al Baker doesn’t
do too much in this ep, but he’s here and he’s gonna be pretty important for
our first block of eps, so pay attention to him.
You know, that oughta do it for our premiere of
season nine. How was it? Well, I was certainly very pleased and
enjoyed it very much, although I will say it suffers from the same thing pretty
much all the premieres suffer from, and that’s the whole business of getting
the audience up to speed with what’s been going on. So much time is spent
reminding us what went down in the concluding hours of last season that we
don’t have quite as much time for new developments, but that’s just something
that tends to happen with premieres. I enjoyed this ep for the fabulous
scene between Sumner and Paige, for Lilimae’s Harry Belafonte comment, for the
appearance of Red Buttons, for Gary’s strong masculine moment, and finally for
the great camp of Olivia and Sexy Michael on the dance floor. I’m already
feeling myself sinking into KL like a warm bath, ready to move on from
all the problems of season eight and see what joys season nine will bring
me.
Coming up next is the cleverly titled The Trouble With Peter.
Coming up next is the cleverly titled The Trouble With Peter.
If I'm not mistaken, when on Roseanne Red Buttons delivers the classic "Craftmatic Adjustable Bev" line
ReplyDeleteYou are absolutely correct. He also tells the memorable joke about the woman so in love with the priest that she followed him around the church and grabbed him by the organ.
DeleteI once saw the original painting used for the new S9 opening. It hangs at the Paley Center for TV in Beverly Hills. 😀
ReplyDeleteSandy Dvore also did the opening for the 2 North and South mini series'.
ReplyDeleteYour critique of the opening had me rolling. And I loved the Constance flip as week. It was her subtle way of flipping off the producers of the show. And the Joan mullet made me long for the days of the sweet Texas girl with the white gloves.
ReplyDelete