Santa Barbara Discussion Thread

[amybrickwallace]

 

Definitely. Louise Sorel will always have my undying respect for being willing to risk her job for speaking out.

[chrisml]

I agree with you there, but that storyline seems in keeping with daytime's obsession with turning rapists into anti-hero love interests. Although, the Dash storyline went overboard even for that. The Dash stuff was so unnecessary because Gibbs and Grahn had real chemistry. Why ruin it? It was so odd to me. I will never understand SB's obsession with rape storylines. While I'm glad Marcy Walker got her emmy, I could have done without the rape storyline. The identity of the rapist made it even more icky (being vague for those who may be watching the story on yt). Was there one female character on SB who was not raped?

[amybrickwallace]

 

As far as I know - Sophia, Augusta, and Santana off the top of my head.

[j swift]

I think we can add Kelly Capwell to the list of women who were never sexually assaulted in Santa Barbara.  She was kidnapped quite often, but never raped. 

 

Of course, given my Kelly-was-a-secret-serial-killer theory - i.e. most of the men she was coupled with (Nick, Pearl, Ric Castillo, Craig Hunt, and Justin Moore) "disappeared" from SB without a goodbye scene, she may have been more of a menace than a victim.

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by j swift

[amybrickwallace]

Actually, Kelly was forced into sex by her violent, delusional ex-fiance Peter Flint (aka the Carnation Killer). That was in early 1985 and he kidnapped her when she was on her honeymoon with Joe Perkins. Those scenes were very disturbing.

[j swift]

I beg to differ because she was "saved" prior to being raped and she was very specific about saying that in later scenes with Marcello. 

[amybrickwallace]

I'm pretty sure that she did have to sleep with him while he held her hostage, but I haven't seen those scenes in a long time (mostly I remember her hideous pink nightgown). @Wendy, do you remember?

[j swift]

I went and read the French Santa Barbara site and it clarified that Kelly was raped, but Eden who had also been kidnapped by Peter was not raped ( sorry for the confusion)

 

I still think Kelly was doing something to drive those other guys out of town never to be mentioned again....

[amybrickwallace]

No problem. Yes, I remember that Eden was kidnapped and left for dead by Peter. Cruz rescued her (I think that was the first of millions of times that he rescued her). 

[Wendy]

I'm murky on the details here myself, @amybrickwallace! Sorry!

[amybrickwallace]

That's OK! It seems like we got on the same page.

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[dc11786]

 

I think I've seen this before. This time something stood out. Doris Hursley died around the time "Santa Barbara" was beginning and there was all this animosity between the first family and the second family of Frank Hursley, a lot of it with Bridget Dobson at the center. Also, Frank dies in 1989, which I believe was during the big fight NBC over control of the series. I wonder how this effected the writing. I know Mason, the product of the first marriage, is treated very well by the Dobsons and that Bridget had half-siblings from both her mother and her father. I am curious how much of this drama bled itself into the show's writing. 

 

On a different note, I noticed Eric James (the actor best known for playing Jimmy Boswell on "Bright Promise") commented on the article. The Boswell family also seems to be a complicated. In the episode descriptions I've seen, Jimmy was also in love with Ann Boyd, the woman his father Tom was seeing. The daughter Marion sounds a little bit like a daddy's girl who seemed to capitalized on Jimmy's attraction to Ann in order to separate Tom and Ann. James has been vocal about his criticism of the series as the cast was promised it would be very relevant to then modern society, but it seems after some initial modern situations the show focused on complicated romantic and family entanglements.     

[pdm1974]

For those of you that remember the Dobson's brief return, what did you think of the stories they developed? I felt they started off pretty strong and reset a lot of stuff (Mason for example, Santana's return), but the stories didn't have the magic of the earlier ones for some reason. Still, there work is 100X better than what we're getting today on the last 4.

[Contessa Donatella]

http://babycutest.com/hd-santa-barbara-wins-their-1st-daytime-emmy_bUW9vAa6fTnU.html?fbclid=IwAR21bpJZp8McNO9klDC2uIjVfsLMKXZ9XSvswJFo6OXJxVyJzw1s1lyzO1c

 

 

Love how excited they were!

Edited October 19, 2019 by Donna B
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[j swift]

I think the Dobson's return was hampered by a loss of continuity, as well as the exit of Marcy Walker.  They made a point of saying in SOD upon their return that they had not watched the show because it was too painful.  As a result, the progress that characters had made in their absence was lost and it seemed like the story was going backward rather than forward.  For example, much has been made over the Capwell dinner party scenes.  It is a very well written and acted episode, but the plot comes out of left field. 

 

Mason decides to put CC on trial for his "crimes" against the family, and in turn brings back Pamela and eviscerates Sophia.  However, CC and Mason had resolved their differences in a scene the prior year.  In fact, for most of Terry Lester's Mason, (in the year prior to the Dobson's return), he and CC did not have a lot of interactions because he was being plagued by Gina and his alternate Sonny personality.  Gordon Thompson's Mason arrived two months before the Dobson's and did not have the history with CC to carry those dinner party scenes.    

 

Mason also knew that Pamela was a mortal threat to Kelly, but still brought her out of the asylum. So, it seemed like Mason had lost his memories of recent events, rather than plotting to have a family coup against CC.  I've always thought that by 1991 Gina deserved much more of Mason's wrath than CC.

 

Also, the month before their return at Christmas, Eden received a necklace/jewel from Robert Barr which began her memories of being a jewel thief and her eventual exit storyline.  However, none of this is referenced in the dinner party scenes, where Eden appears to revert back to her bratty/father's girl issues of before her wedding to Cruz.  There is a blink-and-you-missed it closeup of Eden with crazy eyes when Mason is going after Sophia, but it doesn't amount to much.  They also never explained why Robert Barr would want to revert Eden back to her jewel thief persona or why he would give her the necklace.

 

Even the dinner party table was new and had never been in that place on the set, before or after that episode.  And Kelly is inexplicably living in the Capwell mansion which she had moved out of months prior.  Finally, it defies logic that Mason would still be angry at CC after a year when both he and Eden had near-death experiences resulting in a Christmas episode about how happy they were to be reunited as a family.

 

So, their return, for me, seemed like a chance to produce the types of stories that they wanted to do before they were locked out, but ignored everything that had happened in the interim, which seemed to please them but was not necessarily in the service of the audience.  I think it is especially true of the time period, when fans were less informed of the behind the scenes changes and it probably came across as jarring, rather than a re-set.   

Edited October 20, 2019 by j swift