Vee

It always annoyed me. They resolved this finally in the mid-2000s with Sami and John IIRC, but then regressed it back later. I think they're on better terms again now.

This isn't even getting to the part where post-AW, JFP still considered Jensen a huge enough draw to pull her out of her guest stint as Vicky's ghost on ATWT mid-stream to get her onto GH as quickly as possible once she took over that show, leading to legal action from CBS/P&G when JB was airing on both shows at the same time. Buchanan's brief run on GH was one of the most unpopular forced new leads ever, and led to the downfall of both JFP and McTavish at that show.

I still don't know what period it was when they apparently floated recasting Vicky with Kelly Rutherford (Generations, later of Melrose Place). Cynthia Watros did a temp fill-in for Jensen late in the run, after GL. Anne Heche, who was a movie star at that point, wanted to do it as a favor to the show but her agents vetoed it. Meanwhile they kept rolling out the red carpet for Jensen.

They clearly adored her and it was a ridiculously OTT sendoff. She died because she wanted to, they'd have brought her back any time for more pointless stories.

Agreed. It also would never have worked because she's limited, but that's another discussion.

If the first 20 are just up like that, I'm willing to bet the rest will turn up commercially as well. It wouldn't shock me if Kanopy, the free nationwide public library streaming service, got them (though I haven't looked) as they did with Bill Gunn's wonderful avant-garde soap Personal Problems, which I think only went out to PBS affiliates in the early '80s (and then migrated to local radio).

I was doing some late night digging around about the '80s soaps and stumbled across this. Ralph Senensky is a living legend, one of the Golden Age of Television directors, doing a ton of work on everything from the original Star Trek to Dynasty. He chronicles his extensive experience on the Dynasty pilot and first season in the Dynasty section at the link. He's still going strong at 99, and this blog appears to have been written in the last couple years. You can also find extensive entries on the many, many other shows he worked on.

RTD confirms a Christmas special this year for Gatwa and Gibson.

I've said it before BTW but I'll say it again: Chad Brannon looked hot as hell when he showed up as Ghost Zander for Cam a while back. Whatever his stupid recent IRL politics I don't care; over half of daytime is right-wing fundies, most of them are wise enough to keep it out of our face or off the set. I would chalk Zander up to Witness Protection and bring him back to tempt Liz and rep for his boy in a hot minute. It cannot be worse than some of her pairings over the last decade.

I did like Roark Critchlow and Carrie together. The show was shít but that was to be expected for DAYS at that time. As I've said, the bones of the attempts at business stories under Sussman were good but the execution was so threadbare and half-assed, like they were afraid of doing anything that went in-depth or beyond the most basic dialogue. I still remember people roasting the daily eps dealing with this. I can't fault the audience for that, but I do think at least part of the blame goes to what not just Sussman but so many creatives have talked about in recent years: The intense higher-up micromanagement of any kind of mature or intelligent storytelling in lieu of lazy stunts, vanilla mediocrity and talking down to the audience as much as possible. Y&R today wants the illusion of 'people doing business' but there is no there there, just characters swapping titles at jobs we don't really see. So I can't put the issues with the Fenmore crisis, etc. entirely down to Sussman. I think the problem is institutional: Dumb this material down or keep it brief as much as possible, make it either lightweight or (in the case of Griffith and co.) invisible.

Episode 20 (The Emperor’s Clothes): Laura: Don't you feel anything? Greg: I feel great. This ep picks up directly with Ben and Val in his car again, I thought it wasn't the same day initially but it may well be Val's same re-modernized hair and wardrobe as the end of Ep 19. In any event, they make a very cute crimebusting couple here as they stumble off-road and find themselves inadvertently exploring Empire Valley. Gary turns up to be a third wheel, gabbing on about his Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced community planning dreams for the project (not unlike his vision for Lotus Point, Ben notes, though that seems to have gone off well so far). This leads to even more dovetailing of the ongoing storylines, as Val's minor injury on the property fence lead her and Ben to Tranquility, a tiny podunk not far from the Valley where it turns out that chemical runoff has poisoned the entire community and wildlife. This in turn ties back to the ever-present Tidal Basin murders, where it turns out one of the many dead women connected to Galveston Industries tried to expose what was being done to the town, supposedly deliberately (presumably to clear the way for the Empire Valley project). It's smart and tidy work, but the real grace note here is when Val delicately handles a local woman's baby in her arms and shows she's not quite all the way back: "I'm terrible with babies," she mumbles, handling the infant off quickly. Lord, it's a small world: Greg plans to move with Laura and her kids to Chevy Chase back east. As a former Maryland/D.C. resident born and raised I have no comment on this development. He’s looking at schools for the Avery boys but hilariously notes "I have no idea how old they are." It's a fair question at this point tbqh. Also hilarious: "I'm spending much too much time with my constituents," Greg complains to Laura. "I need to get back to where the action is." He smiles cavalierly as he tells her his father is either dead or dying, which leads to the weighted exchange up top in this post. Greg may be in love with Laura, may even be candid with her, but the emotional mask he uses is still something he controls very carefully. Joshua and Cathy are taking time out this ep to Make Out in Nature, all over each other in the park. This feels like a sudden shift from the prudish Joshua of recent days, which Cathy rightly points out as she accuses him of using sex and their relationship to keep her from focusing on her sinful career. Meanwhile, Joshua starts developing a fascination with the total profits of his collection money from his on-air donation drive as Abby bamboozles him re: ratings numbers with a spiel that I'm sure would make Tartikoff or Warren Littlefield proud. This is all backburner stuff this ep but it still percolates well. A mystery woman in a gigantic hat and black veil, shot almost entirely from behind, arrives at an airstrip! Flanked by men in black! Gee, who could it be? The primetime soaps didn't do anything halfway with their big guest stars back then. Suburban Daddy Mack (pun intended) on a rowing machine at the office grinding it out is a lot to take in, but I am not complaining. I love Ben's little Sherlock Holmes newsboy cap as he cruises around with life partner Mack looking for action, heading down to the little town of Tranquility and concluding that the Tidal Basin murders, the poison runoff, etc. are all for Empire Valley. This of course leads Mack and the ever-beleaguered Tom Jezik to yet another darkened warehouse (something Jezik takes note of, since he last got the crap beaten out of him one of these warehouses early in the season) for yet more clandestine meetings. It's interesting how Mack keeps flipping cons like Jezik and his new man out of prison, this time using one of these guys to kidnap the Galveston Industries men in the wind and put the heat on them. Jamison, the Scott Easton clone, finally comes clean on the murders: Galveston ordered them, presumably because all those poor secretaries knew too much about Empire Valley. Mack is going to need a Bowflex for this. It's a side note this ep but I do love more of Abby and Karen continuing to work well together at Lotus Point. Another nice beat comes though when Gary banishes Karen to the void as he needs Abby's private counsel about all the smoke surrounding Galveston's disappearance and the growing scandal: For some things, despite their seeing things differently, he trusts only her. That is the new functionality of their marriage post-Season 5 and it still works. I still wonder if she fucked Sumner again though. Speaking of Greg, wow: Galveston's men (including Evil Phantom Zone Mack) turn up in Laura's living room with Cathy and the kids, eager to turn up the heat on the prince of their dynasty. WTF! Just like last time this is pure Wolfbridge flashbacks for Laura which she wisely brings up to Greg, saying she won't go through that again. Greg as always tries to manage the situation and dismiss her concerns while in fact being deeply concerned. "The feeling runs very high," Evil Mack warns Greg re: his refusal to work with them, which is pure Wolfbridge/Mark St. Clair-speak, almost the exact same kind of bloodless yet threatening language they used to script for that character constantly if not the same dialogue. It gives you some insight into how Sumner kept trying to handle and manage the unmanageable with Wolfbridge if he'd been dealing with Galveston's people like this for years. The suburban arena returns in a big way both in this episode and the last one, which is great because it feels like the neighborhood's not been used for major action in awhile. First we get Laura and Karen just walking the street talking, something that haven't just done because in ages, with Laura being very candid about Greg and being torn between her excitement and lust for both him and his power and influence vs. her fear of recommitment and making a bad choice. Commitment vs. fun and profit is usually a man's concern on the '80s primetime soaps, but for someone like Laura it's the central dilemma. Suburbia disturbia: Dinner with Karen, Ben and the Ewings/Clements goes great until Val suddenly flashes back to her frightening labor ordeal in the middle of the living room. This gives us a second good ol' KL neighborhood chat in the same hour with Karen and Val out and about, as Val voices what everyone's been waiting for re: remembering her very much alive babies. Nice touch to see Eric and Michael finally back just in time for Karen to get her radar with them, asking a lot of questions about the night of Val went into labor - some viewers might have forgotten they were there (I almost did). Ben and Val have a very honest discussion by the fireplace that seems almost meta, talking about her recent struggles. "It'll always be over Gary," Ben admits. "Well, at least you know what to expect," Val says, trying to make light of it. It's an issue they seem eager to table for now, and the show deals with that head-on. "I don't want to be serious," Ben says, opting out of a deeper confrontation about the Gary of it all. "I just wanna be with you." The Bride Wore Black! I was not expecting Not Yet Ava Gardner Because This is Not Part of Her Guarantee to literally marry Galveston in an iron lung on his deathbed. Who is this woman? Is she Galveston's mistress? What a great, dark surprise. Finally, someone says it onscreen: "What if Val's babies didn't die?" This episode also marks the end of Block 2 and the second third of S6. Good times.

Alright, you people have suitably interested me in these last two eps despite the tiresome Our Heroines Are Dying No Really plotline. I may have a look. Prepare for tedious questions about the state of the show.

Let's not say things we can't take back! IMO Frank believes losing Roger Howarth so early in his run as EP at OLTL (according to Roger himself on a Slate podcast a year or two ago, he left in '03 because of an alleged storyline Michael Malone planned to do upon his return - probably the he said/she said rape story TSJ later played with Blair - and defected to ATWT within 3-4 months of Frank taking over) is one of the great losses of his career and he's clearly never gotten over it. Now, he compensates by just never letting him go. Oh, that little girl is even worse and more inexplicable than Charlotte. It's his magic daughter with Rebecca Budig. Who cares?? But people act like "Violet" is a fan favorite. I don't give a fùck!

Britt and Rocco was bad enough but the whole Charlotte thing with Valentin has always been disgusting. That little girl is obnoxious and Valentin is such a creep. I'd de-Spencer her, send her away and murder him in a minute. I'd forgotten the entire stupid "Claudette" plotline was just an excuse to get Bree Williamson on the show for about six minutes as idiot block of wood Nathan's Canadian ex-girlfriend, which fell apart quickly. It seemed like FV and Passanante badly wanted to make her stick, but she was gone remarkably fast (and IIRC killed offscreen).

Oh, definitely.

It's also exactly what happened! It's not like Joss committed some unspeakable sin either. However boring I find her and Dex, she is very young and she was consumed with guilt and broke up with her boyfriend immediately after. That's more than most people in her position do. But people act like she is either a whore or a saint, and the show suggests that she has to literally lie to the police about a serial killer to avoid the issue (finally ended the other day). There's no nuance and since the show sees Cam and any characters they don't want to focus on as B or C-players, they'll simply try to drag him down to prop the other two up in a situation that does not require that binary thinking.

I don't know of that claim at all. But while I still know much of the show like the back of my hand thanks to the old Sci-Fi Channel reruns, I haven't been active in DS fandom for decades. It could well be floating around. And yes, they were clearly just improvising wildly after a certain point in 1897. But most of it worked. I would never have been happy about them not going back. To me the present era was home for the show and even when it was poorly served it felt right. I actually think both Leviathans 1969 and the very spooky Summer of 1970 storyline with Gerard, the summer eclipse, etc. are underrated. There is a real pall of doom and dread hanging over the relatively short Summer '70 story starting with the terrifying 1995 interlude, and it does not let up and then delivers with the pirate zombie apocalypse at the end of the story. At least, that's how I felt when first seeing it over twenty years ago, so grain of salt.

In fairness, the Laura story was very early on in 1897. It's when it became a huge hit that they extended it for... I don't know, six to nine months? Long enough for Thayer David and KLS to have two separate characters. And actually, Don Briscoe and Chris stayed with the show for another year in the Leviathan and Parallel Time storylines until his offscreen LSD freakout.

Yes, I remember. Didn't Beth Chavez and/or Gabriel also go off Widows Hill? Like I said, that cliff turned into the town bus depot at the close of several storylines. I'd forgotten until Googling today that Joanna actually has several more scenes after being revealed as an undead revenant and killing Samantha, where she heads back to Collinwood to chat people up and help Daphne and Quentin like she's a regular person. Bizarre.

Episodes 17-19 (Lead Me to the Altar/Fly Away Home/Rough Edges): After his first beating by Parker Winslow and the Shula Neighborhood Watch, Gary is bunked down in a Tennessee motel with KFC and honestly that resembles many of my midweek days in the ongoing pandemic. Reduced to sending flowers and mash notes, Gary eventually tires of letting Parker and his cornpone goons show up and ineffectually threaten him more and starts turning up in the park to accost Val/Verna like a cheery and amiable stalker. There's a cute character beat as he tries to get Val back to jogging, one of her California passions, but Val shies away from those familiar touchstones as though she knows what they mean - until her close encounter that night with trippy Ghost Groom Gary in her living room mirror and their spectral matrimonial dance! This is an eerie scene that evokes shades of the ghost episode from Season 3, "The Three Sisters" and is allegedly Ted Shackelford's favorite scene in the series. When Gary and Val/Verna do finally have it out there's a great confrontation where he forces her to look at the book jacket photo on Nashville Junction. JVA pitches everything perfectly at Val's various stages of knowing, not-knowing and half-knowing herself. Ah, the Galveston Industries spa and showers! All white tile with blue racing stripes and beefy naked men of power plotting about the Empire Valley. That's more of Howard Duff than I ever expected to see on this show. Anyway, the heat is turning up for Galveston thanks to Mack's relentless Tidal Basin investigation and he's angered enough to barge in on Greg and Laura at Sumner's office, where the couple hangs about in matching chunky '80s glasses. I did love Greg's reply when his father demanded info on his connection to Mack: "We’re having an affair!" Speaking of the Tidal Basin saga, I don't blame Tom Jezik for pacing nonstop in Mack's office as his boss/pal interrogates the Galveston drones. He's clearly fearing for his life expectancy on this show, having lasted at least one season longer on the canvas than I'd ever expected. It's really fascinating what tertiary characters they seem to hold onto long-term. Joshua is running his sermons by Abby now, apparently. Abby in turn continues to fuel his worst impulses, ego and control, as she lies about Cathy while Joshua begins to hold forth to anyone who will listen (mostly poor Cathy and her mullet) about his growing power and influence at Pacific World Cable. He's even micromanaging his favorite pastor's sermons and coming down on Cathy about her singing again. Lisa Hartman's voice is still amazing BTW, but Joshua isn't into it. "I don't think it would be fitting for my viewers to see me in a saloon," Joshua sniffs, talking past her about "someone like herself" and the need for her to "mend her ways". Cathy should dump him and not look back, but if she does that there's no story. I can fanwank it as Cathy being desperate for the love of a good, uncomplicated man after the epic drama with Gary and the years with her abusive first husband Ray (whose controlling behavior had similarities) but still, what an ass. It's interesting that Laura once again sniffs out power and is unashamed of it - she pushes Greg to work the angle of being the Galveston heir, to use it to his advantage, which he is reluctant to do. Meanwhile, Greg remains outwardly cavalier about the risk to Mack as he flirts with Laura; only Laura openly takes it seriously. They fit together but they're either in sync or filling in the gaps in the other person. Late in this ep, Galveston pulls what must be one of the G moves of all time as he casually orders his underlings to sign Tidal Basin murder confessions over an outdoor public lunch. I guess the IRA and vacation time is just that good. Death hangs like a surreal pallor over this sunny tableau as old Galveston downs his (nitro?) pills and promises to keep their salaries and families cared for. It's well done and wild stuff. Mack has a mysterious parking lot confrontation with an unseen informant who tells him not to be fooled by the fake Tidal Basin confessions - who was in the car? Several eps later, I still don't get it. The cliffhanger for 17 is simple but solid: Gary arrives in the church for Val and Parker's ridiculous wedding and sidles into frame at the key moment of these insane vows and just says one special word: "Valene." It's so fraught with meaning for longtime fans and for Val that you already know what it means. Episode 18 (Fly Away Home) is Bill Duke Hours yet again! Val: We've always loved each other, haven't we? Gary: We had some good times. This one wastes absolutely zero time dispensing with Shula: Val is the runaway bride! Parker is exposed and dispatched with a single right cross (why didn't Gary just slug him to begin with?)! Gary walks Val out of there in her wedding dress awful fast, all in five minutes or your pizza's free. Val is in hysterics for reasons she doesn't understand, and the writing neatly plays with it as she describes her bifurcated personality as though she's "tuning in and out, between stations. I think I'm happy... why do I feel so lonely?" "Maybe Verna's going away and you know you'll miss her," Gary reasons, playing armchair shrink. "She got you through a pretty rough time." In any event, Valene ends their getaway curled up in his lap and Ted Shackelford does a pretty good job showing Gary as both uncomfortable and perhaps titillated. Greg and Laura seem to get cozier and cozier each time Galveston hustles in on them. Explaining that he's "doing business with some pretty nervous people" (i.e., the CIA/NSA, the Pentagon or both) who even he is clearly afraid of, Galveston offers Greg his Senate committees back if he can call Mack off. Galveston's fear of his military connections, the men above him he's in too deep with, has distinct echoes of Sumner's entrenched struggles with Wolfbridge and Mark St. Clair, and later on we'll see the show is aware of this and plays with the parallel in a smart way. Suitably tempted, Greg dabbles in his old ways and tries to deftly get Mack to throttle back on Galveston Industries. Mack, who like us can actually remember last season, wisely is not buying it. Next surprise: Laura actually visits Valene’s and joins the rest of the family and friends waiting on her return! When was Laura last in the Ewing house? JVA gives Karen, Lilimae, Joshua, Laura, etc. a great thousand-yard stare when she arrives home, processing them slowly and somewhat remotely. "You look just like my little sweetpea," Lilimae enthuses, a clear nod to how much Val's hair, wardrobe and style have regressed back to Season 1 and the further past. Val seems caught between recalling and not recalling, and gives us two huge oof moments: One, shaking the chagrined Ben's hand as a stranger, and two, clinging to Gary and talking about welcoming them all more "as soon as Gary and I get our life back together again." Everyone is clearly put off by the deeply uncomfortable situation and the show lets that discomfort breathe. But not long enough for Joshua to not mandate a kneeling prayer in the middle of the living room! What a guy. Poor Abby spends most of these last few eps doing a ton of brinkmanship between Karen, Mack and Galveston over her growing intel on the Tidal Basin murders while also trying to insulate herself from blowback over the Val mess, only semi-successfully. We're obviously meant to boo when she orders Gary to end his relationship with Val and make a clean break when they return from Shula - telling him to let Ben take over as the man in Val's life - but the thing is, she may be right that it's best for Val, and you sense that while the show is giving her the black hat they know there's a ring of truth to what she says about the codependency beyond her fear and jealousy (something echoed in Gary's guilty, deflecting quote to Val at this top of this discussion). Meanwhile, Galveston keeps antagonizing Abby, telling her he intends to "get Gary to his heirs". I still want to know how all this happened with the baby swap and Scott Easton apparently behind Galveston's back, and why it was done. Desperate for defense against Galveston's threats, Abby goes to Greg and tries to squeeze him with all she knows, begging for help. Turns out sex is back on the menu as they angrily make out! I was not expecting that with Greg and Abby again at this juncture, and I have no idea if they actually had a roll in the hay here or if it will come up again. Sure enough, Abby follows this up by going home to have sex with her husband. In fairness, Val did lie in his lap probably all the way home from Shula. "It's not the same," Joshua rationalizes about his career vs. Cathy's. "She's an entertainer and I'm a communicator. And look what happens to people in show business when they make it big. They go away. They leave the people who love them. And I don't want that to happen to me." "Again," Lilimae adds quietly, unable to look at him. Great little scene. Wendel Meldrum's P.K. Kelly returns! Curled up coyly in Ben’s convertible as he tries to get his mind off Val, they are still flirting heavily and get a convenient flat out in the country. Kelly flashes her legs to flag down some truckers in what initially appears to be an interminable comic sequence, but like most throwaway scenes on this show it has a cleverer purpose - as soon as Ben clocks a bunch of high-tech radio receivers ('for monitoring satellites') in the bed of the truck, destination Empire Valley. Nice work by the writers. I think this may be Kelly's last appearance, which is a shame as I was getting very used to her being one of the recurring repertory players like Tom Jezik or the dear inexplicably departed Jim Westmont. Meldrum has such a great voice. Val now seems to be going forward in time - "this is [Gary's] house!" she tells her baffled family. Gary breaks the bad news to her by the ocean shore which by now she remembers, so I'm guessing she's cycled up mentally to the first two seasons or so. And Lord, does she not take it well. We neatly get back to the cul-de-sac canvas for the first time in awhile as Ben goes to the MacKenzies about Empire Valley, only to get interrupted by Lilimae rushing across the street to ask the neighbors for help with Val going full Verna Mode, compulsively Cometing the kitchen floor. Mack becomes the talk-to as Val tries to disassociate back into Verna and he basically brute-forces her out of it, and they embrace. They've always had a neat relationship. I get why the baby theft story is so beloved, and it is great so far, but I also think some of these elements of Val's collapse and recurring mental breaks throughout this section of the story fundamentally weaken the character. Val has come such a long way since the early seasons of the show, and my concern is about the general opinion that she will evidently never quite recover all the way back to where she was as a character in S5 and early this season. The question remains, would she have fully reunified in a stronger way had most of the current creative team not quit? (That said, the following episode has some excellent therapy and character work for Val which is still promising for her future.) Episode 19 (Rough Edges) opens on what appears to be a huge setback for Val as we watch "Verna" in her apartment back in Shula, but it turns out to be a flashback or recollection of a dream instead of some hallucination, with Val narrating to her new therapist in voice-over. This is another Nicholas Sgarro and Richard Gollance episode, and it's apparently Gollance's last credited script for the show as he and many other longtime creatives vacated at the end of this season, allegedly owing to micromanagement by Michael Filerman. Losing Gollance, who wrote Val so well and waxed rhapsodic about giving JVA so many silent scenes of thoughtful repose, is likely to be a huge blow. This ep, his swan song, is very good. It is nice to see Ben back in the mix, and the return of the Ben/Mack ambiguously gay duo. Their friendship has always been great, but more on that in Ep 20 (another great episode). I got spoiled for Abby's Tracy Quartermaine moment at the end of Ep 18 - sneaking out in the night to raid Galveston's office for his evidence about the babies - but fortunately it's not quite the same. Yes, she does walk out on his request to call his doctor as he finally strokes out, but as he's not gasping for breath on the floor she clearly doesn't know how serious it is. By the next ep we're in "Weekend at Bernie's/Death of Stalin" territory, with the shadowy men of power all colluding in Galveston’s office as he is dying including the curious Mack doppelgänger "Nielsen", who I shall heretofore refer to as "Evil Mack". Sumner is approached by Evil Mack who gives him the news and requests a "transition of power" - they're really going with the king/royal parallels here and it is well done, grand opera and all. Greg of course continues to refuse it all, for reasons far deeper and more visceral to him than he's thus far been willing to admit to. Laura (to Greg): Why is it you always tell jokes when you're upset? […] All he wanted was for you to love him. Is that so terrible? Greg: Yes. Joshua sits in the darkened Ewing/Clements kitchen, feeding poison to a tense and fragile Val. He's like a coiled predator now, stirring up all her angst over her trauma and subtly mocking her need to confront her issues and forgive their mother. "Father was against psychiatry," he notes almost as an aside, but of course it's not an aside, it's his judgment. Alec Baldwin (and what a week to talk about him - what a mess that whole tragic case is) is wonderful here, with Joshua clearly using the damaged Val as a proxy for his own renewed anger at Lilimae - his newfound fame, fortune and power has loosed all his worst impulses and neuroses and allowed them to take full flight with the same ironclad conviction as his father's worst moments. Jonathan Rush, like Joshua, had a heart too and pathos which were revealed during his first appearance in his tender parting with Lilimae, but Joshua can't seem to see his way clear to that now which makes you wonder just how ugly Jonathan potentially got too. I personally don't feel the Joshua shift is rushed or out of nowhere; I think it's been baked into the character's neuroses and narrow worldview since his introduction and early months, when he innocently suggested Val was being punished by God with a miscarriage. I think fame and power is shifting him just enough, bit by bit and inch by inch (with Abby's influence at Pacific World), to start solidifying into his worst self and flexing his power, lording things over first Cathy then his family and household, and the viewing public. Anyway: Joshua manages to charm Cathy into somehow taking back thanks to his riding around on a scooter. K. Val keeps telling her shrink she is "strong as an ox," but it's clear none of us believe it. The dark thoughts Joshua has fed her make her regress to neat freak madness again, turning puritan and excoriating Lilimae with her hair pinned up and taking a page right out of her brother's gospel, calling her mother a tramp. Later she's regretful as she listens to Lilimae weeping behind closed doors. This leads to the centerpiece of the episode, and Richard Gollance's great finale: Val in an extended series of time-dissolved monologue-montages with her therapist, retelling the story of her past, her childhood and discussing life with and without Lilimae. There's a lot of slow pans in on JVA as Val goes from happiness to anguish to the golden moments with her mother as a small child, and back again, finally processing her feelings in a healthy and functional way as she tells a beautiful little story about connecting with Lilimae over their dreams, mother to child. This sequence (and the episode) cap off wonderfully by revealing Ben waiting on her outside the office - he took her to her appointment, not Gary - and Val (her more mature and fashionable hair and wardrobe restored) finally remembering him at the episode's close. After an extended absence from much of the middle portion of the season, Ben's primacy as a character is restored; he is clearly positioned here as the stalwart good man who has waited and suffered for Val to come around and is now being rewarded. This again suggests that the outgoing Peter Dunne team's commitment to Ben and Val was actually real (much like the beautifully recursive loop of the Gary/Abby marriage after it seemed doomed last season), no matter how hard they have pushed the Gary Ewing destiny angle lately. I believe it was Gollance among others who said that in these years they had no intention of actually reuniting Gary and Val. It's not that the heat between Shackelford and JVA is not still intense, because it is these last two seasons, more than ever before, and they were right to do this baby story and play the eternal triangle/quad. But it's also refreshing to see a soap - any soap - apparently commit to real, three-dimensional viable alternatives, which just generally does not happen today, on daytime or primetime. Anyway: Next time, Ben and Val go walkabout and Ava Gardner descends.

All I remember about Kim on Models Inc. (where I had never seen her before at that point) was a grim series of scenes in a restaurant or bar with the scuzzy boyfriend of Teresa Hill's character. I would love to see that interview.

These kids are stupid.

The living legend Anita Dobson will be on Doctor Who next series.

Oh my. @DRW50 From Russell's IG:

I didn't know Steve and Audrey were apart for eight years. Jeez.