Scream Queen

I have been re-immersing myself in one of my most guilty pleasures recently. It's called, uhm... Dallas. Now I am sure you don't need to be told that Dallas was several leagues above stupendous back in the 80s but, before you rudely interrupt by saying, "yes but it's all horribly dated now innit?", let me retort with a stroppy sounding, "NO! You better believe it is still every bit as amazing today."

For whatever reason, I decided to jump in at the start of Season 7 (Season 8 if you're watching on DVD) for my viewing adventures and, just so you know, it's completely brilliant from start to finish. Honest.

So what kinda crazy shit happens? Well ::deep breath:: Bobby goes blind for a few episodes, after being shot by raving mentalist Katherine Wentworth. Pam thinks Mark Graison is still alive and goes on a world-wide wild goose chase to find him. Miss Ellie is played by Donna Reed for the entire season and is not even nearly as terrible as I remember her being first time around. Sue-Ellen is sober for most (but not all) of the episodes, looks like a drag queen and wears shoulder pads that would have made Krystle Carrington run for her life. Jamie Ewing comes to town, nearly brings down Ewing Oil [well someone has to try, after all] and then marries Cliff Barnes. J.R. shacks up with Cliff's cast-off, Mandy Winger. And, of course, Bobby nearly marries Jenna umpteen times but never quite gets around to it, whilst Jenna's insipid daughter Charlie gets kidnapped and whines a lot. Oh and then Bobby dies.

To fully explain the magnitude of this one, I need to give you some awful horrendous backstory. Bobby and Pam were the greatest soap couple in all of the known universe but several million episodes previously, one particularly nasty-assed character from hell tried to split them up. And it worked. Viewers all over the world were then forced to mourn the passing of this great relationship for, I dunno, aeons whilst Pam buggered about with Mark and Bobby farted around with Jenna. But, make no mistake, both of these relationships were FALSE. Clearly, Bobby and Pam *needed* to be together in order to restore universal equilibrium. And by the end of this particular season, in spite of all the odds stacked against them, it looked like Pam and Bobby would finally reunite. That is, until Katherine Wentworth returned, wearing a rather fetching blonde wig, and ran Bobby over. To the point that he actually ceased to be alive.

Now I have spent most of today wondering whether there is another moment in the entire history of primetime soap which is more jaw-droppingly shocking, tragic and downright horrifying than this one. There isn't. And I don't know if Victoria Principal ever received an Emmy for her work on Dallas, but if she didn't then this next scene alone proves that this was an injustice of legendary proportions.


I read somewhere that this scene was unscripted and mostly improvised. The tears are real. The scream is frighteningly authentic. That makes it, quite simply, awesome to the extremes. Victoria Principal is one of my greatest soap heroines for very good reasons. Look at how she crawls on her hands and knees, at lightning speed, like something out of The Exorcist! I totally heart her completely.

I also read that somebody somewhere committed suicide over this scene and the resulting death of Bobby Ewing. That sounds a bit like an urban legend but, if it's true, it's more than a bit tragic. Especially since, yes of course, it turns out that this (and all of the following season of Dallas) is nothing but an elaborate dream sequence.

Nobody knew it would all be a dream at the time it was filmed, of course. Patrick Duffy was leaving the show, never to return. But when the ratings nose-dived following his exit - and Patrick never quite made it big anywhere else - the producers worked desperately to find a way to bring him back from the dead which made sense.

And let's face it, there really was no way it was ever going to make sense, was there? At the time, loads of theories were circulating as to how they would pull it off, storywise. Most of them were preposterous, involving evil twins, parallel dimensions and cryogenics, for example. Nowadays the dream season idea is almost universally ridiculed but, when you think about it, it was the simplest and most sensible solution of all. The producers, in effect, just let us know that Bobby's death didn't actually happen. And neither did anything we had witnessed for the past 30 or so weeks, either. With hindsight, and forgetting the slap in the face it undeniably gave to the audience, it is utter genius for its sheer simplicity.

I am currently mid-way through the dream season of Dallas as we speak and, damn, even knowing that it's all just a figment of Pam's overactive imagination, it's still a lot of fun. In fact, Bobby's reappearance in Pam's shower is still fifteen or so episodes away and what's weirder is somehow I can't help wishing it had all been real after all.