Who lives, who dies?
The wedding day massacre that ended the latest series of “Dynasty” not only stunned millions of viewers around the world, but left the cast with a bit of a cliffhanger — would their character live to scheme another day? Who will come and who will go is anyone’s guess, but DUO writer Gabrielle Donnelly looks for clues and comes up with some answers of her own ...
They all looked so dead. They looked elegant, however. They had all managed to fall with their mouths shut and their knees toAnd if you were g for any of that nasty, messy business usually associated with massacres, the very worst you would find would be the odd trickle of blood falling carefully down the side of a face.
I am talking, of course, about the television event which brought the United States to its knees. The shock bloodbath ending the last episode of the latest series of "Dynasty." Oh, it did give us all a turn. There they were: Amanda, all in white, very Princess Diana, at last marrying dashing Prince Michael; there was Alexis,
looking fabulous; Dominique, looking sultry; Krystle, looking noble and Blake, well, just being Blake. It was a glorious summers day. The birds were singing, the church was full of flowers, Amanda was just that second framing the words “I do” when suddenly, and for no particular reason that anyone has yet established, in burst a group of terrorists spraying the guests with machine gun fire! 45
“Amanda! My Baby!” cried Alexis, tigress to the last. “They’re going to kill us all!” cried Krystle (the girl was always quick on the uptake). Lady Ashley, ever the professional photographer, grabbed her camera and began clicking furiously until Jeff pulled her away. And then there
was a lot of noise, a lot of confusion, and there they all were. Dead.
Now, of course they are not really dead, not all of them. Television executives are a strange breed, but even they are unlikely to kill off the entire cast of a show that has spawned everything from its own magazine, to its own design label, to its own perfume, to a whole new social ritual.
But the question of exactly who dies, and who lives to plot, scheme, and sweep in and out of magnificent rooms wearing ridiculous hats another day, is one that has provided more speculation than anything since the great summer of who shot J.R.
The answer is about to be revealed when the new season begins this (North American) autumn. Meanwhile, here are some guesses based on what is happening both on and off
the screen. And if you really thought “Dynasty” plotting, sub-plotting and sub-sub-plotting only went on in front of the cameras, you were wrong.
Now, of course, our old friend, Alexis, is not about to die. In fact, if she found herself in a round of fire my sympathy would be with the bullet. Alexis is indestructible. She was never a child, she will never be an old woman. She was bom 40 and fabulous, and will continue to be 40 and fabulous. However, you can say what you like about Joan Collins — and many people have said exactly what they liked about her — but there is one thing no-one is about to deny. She does, as the song says, work hard for the money. Fanatically hard. And as for what she has done for “Dynasty,” well, put it this way, do you remember the season before she joined the show? No?
Neither does anyone else.
Someone else we are unlikely to be shedding tears over when the new season starts is the woman proudly hailed as the “first black bitch on prime television time,” Dominique Devereaux. (A clue is that Diahann Carroll has just had her contract renewed.) Of course, Linda Evans will be back on the show. Apart from anything else, with shoulders like she has, no-one would tangle with her at all, let alone not renew her contract!
Linda Evans will definitely be back, but the question is, will Krystle? One person who will not be back is Ali McGraw, who was hired, amid much publicity, halfway through the season to play Lady Ashley Mitchell, and whose contract, when the season ended, was simply not renewed.
What went wrong? The inside story is that both Joan Collins and Linda Evans were furious that Ali McGraw at $50,000 per episode, was making $lO,OOO per episode more than them.
Whether it was the tension over money, whether it was that Ali McGraw never really hit it off with the rest of the cast, or whether it was that with the appearance of a new Fallon, Jeff Colby’s affair with Lady Ashley simply became too complicated, one thing is
certain, Lady Ashley has clicked her last shutter. Less mystery surrounds the death of the other definite corpse, Luke Fuller, Steven Carrington’s gay lover. The actor, Oliver Campbell, quit the show because he did not want to be typecast as a homosexual.
However, it is all very well for him to lie on the floor bleeding elegantly from the temple; what he does not appear to realise is that he has left the show with a big problem. "Dynasty” is, in the United States’ gay community, not so much popular as required viewing. The big attraction of the show is Alexis, but on the other hand, it certainly does not hurt to have a rare, sym-
pathetic portrayal of a gay character in Steven. In fact, when Steven decided he was not gay and married Claudia, there was a major outcry. So the writers wrote in Luke.
Now that Luke has gone, Steven, if he survives, presumably goes back to Claudia.
There are no guarantees, but it is highly unlikely that Amanda will have kicked the bucket It is becoming more apparent that someone high up in the “Dynasty” authorities is the most frightful snob, and would not fire an actress who is second cousin to Prince Charles. There are two members of the cast who will definitely survive, simply because they were not there when the shots rang out. Sammy Jo was in New York, still gasping at the extraordinary resemblance between Rita and Krystle. And Fallon, who turns out not to have been killed in that crash at all, was wandering around California in an amnesiac daze, wondering just who she was.
Fallon has to survive, however, and so does Jeff. They are both signed on for a new “Dynasty” spin-off, “The Colbys of California,” about which the only thing anyone can say is that it features Jeff and Fallon, and that it happened in California.—DUO Copyright.