John Ross and Pamela
So, these two are flying back from Vegas, basking in the glow of the $2 ring he bought her at a gift shop. Cliff calls and Pam has to fake like she was just there doing business, but then they make out some more and Pam asks how much time they have left before they land, and John Ross is like, "Hmm, let's check," and whips out his ALL-NEW MICROSOFT SURFACE TABLET and takes an inordinate amount of time to EASILY SWIPE ON HIS CONVENIENT ALL-NEW MICROSOFT SURFACE TABLET to display the GPS map of the flight, because you can do these things mid-air on an ALL-NEW MICROSOFT SURFACE TABLET.
ALL-NEW MICROSOFT SURFACE TABLET
So John Ross also decides to poke around the flight manifest, which apparently is also available on the all-blah blahsoft surface blah. And GUESS WHOSE PLANE went to Nuevo Laredo on the day of JR's murder? Yep. Although nothing says who was ON the plane. But everyone assumes it was Cliff. I feel like... if you popped down south to murder someone, wouldn't you find a way to erase the manifest? Are you telling me people can't erase things and/or sabotage data on the marginally new Microsoft Surface Tablet?
Ann and Bobby
While Cliff packs up the Ewing Energies offices -- I'm so sure -- he tosses Bobby and Ann's Honeymoon photo into a box, and we all need to revel in how gloriously stupid it is. What is Ann even doing? Bobby is all, "God damn I need a drink," and she looks like she was told this was a promotional poster for a screwball comedy about a sorority den mother.
Emma
Emma agrees to go to rehab, so Ann gets her home on a detox program. But she runs out and plays the "Daddy, the Ewings treat me like a CRIMINAL" card, so Harris lets her move back home so that she can get her hands on more drugs. This character went from being fiercely boring to completely confusing and interesting -- I never have any idea what she truly wants out of anyone or how she actually feels about anything, which is often a problem, but here it makes her such a wild card that she ends up being great TV.
Sue Ellen and Lee Majors
Sue Ellen tracks down Lee Majors in the tropics and tells him that she knows all about the leverage that Governor Steven Weber McConaughey has on him. And if he gives her evidence that the methane sabotage was buried, she'll protect him. If he doesn't, she'll bust him herself. Then she quotes JR and says that if you can't convince a person to do the right thing, give them no other choice. I want to read HIS version of The Art of War. Also, the same two or three extras march behind them in every close-up, which is hilarious -- like, y'all aren't sucking down your mai tais THAT fast.
Sue Ellen and Wings
Wings McConaughey is not thrilled about this turn of events, so he stresses out while Sue Ellen grins at him. Apparently she's totally not going to protect Lee Majors at all. She just wanted the leverage. And when Steven Weber realizes how ruthless she is willing to be, he agrees to call off the chokehold on the Henderson land that Ewing Energies needs to drill for its cash flow, and now he's under Sue Ellen's thumb. Which is a very nice place to be, I suspect, as she is the bomb. He also calls her a drunk and she's like, "Yep, but not today." I love her.
Elena
Elena is in Zurich, if you can't tell by the expansive CGI background they plopped behind the set windows. She fishes her burner cell out of the suitcase and calls Drew to blah-blah about some blah, which is totally dumb -- she should have left the phone with her mother, although maybe she knew her mother wouldn't be able to resist calling it twenty times a day. But that's still better than bringing it specifically so Christopher can find it, no? Also, way to go on getting a burner phone that has good roaming plans.
Christopher
By the way, guess what? Christopher finds the phone while he's looking for a power cable (incidentally, we saw Elena put the phone in her suitcase in one scene, and then here he finds it in her briefcase. Why would she move it? Leave it in the thing he is LEAST likely to root through, lady). And so he calls the last number dialed, and it's Drew, who hangs up on him and snaps the phone in half. Elena tries to justify it by saying Drew was manipulated, her life was threatened, he didn't know there would e people on the rig, but Chris is enraged and kicks her out. Elena's mother rightly tells Elena that Drew had PLENTY of other options than succumbing to blackmail and that they shouldn't have lied to Christopher about where Drew was and what he was doing. So E tries to apologize; he flounces around like he's never done anything wrong before and twists his tantrum pants into a gnarly wad. They don't make up.
Drew
Meanwhile, Drew is still planning to bust Henchman, while also spraying the purloined shoes from his ill-fated cargo (he either ganked a pair while getting arrested, which is some sleight of hand indeed, or he somehow got his hands on it when they searched another shipment) with some chemicals that he knew exactly how to purloin because he's an ex-military bomb expert oil driller with a rough past. It turns out the shoes are... something to do with pressurized cocaine... you guys, science go boom. I don't know. Somehow spraying the shoes reveals a bunch of cocaine. They're coke shoes.
Drew
Let's cut to the chase: Drew goes to Henchman's favorite bar, where serve MILLER LITE: AMERICA'S FAVORITE REVENGE DRINK. He knows the barkeep will alert Henchman to his whereabouts, which lures Henchman into a trap: While he tries to sneak into Drew's hotel room, Drew plants the coke shoes in Henchman's truck, then lures him into a high-speed chase. When the cops catch them, Henchman is like, "That's DREW RAMOS UP THERE, he's WANTED," but BOOM, it's a switcheroo and actually it's a blonde spy from the bar whom Drew paid to start the chase. And Henchman gets arrested for having the Coke Shoes and Drew is off scot-free to Mexico. MILLER LITE: FOR WHEN YOU WANT TO GET AWAY WITH IT.
Bernard
Christopher has tracked Pam's doctor to this address in Zurich. But he's very upset when Bernard tells him that he left Pam on a strange island where she got locked in a hatch with a bunch of old records and a computer, ate some very suspicious off-brand baked beans from a can, then was consumed by a smoke monster and possibly became a new Jesus.
Christopher
Actually, there are several fakeouts involving this woman -- will she be Pam? NO, she is just an old lady who used to be Pam's nurse -- and it leads to: Pam is dead. She died of cancer. She chose never to see Christopher again after her body-scarring car accident, which hurts him, but which he could have dealt with much earlier in life if he had just searched for "Pamela Barnes Ewing" on Wikipedia. Anyway, after she died, Cliff paid for her husband/doctor Bernard and this lady to live a lavish life away from America in exchange for shutting up about Pam's death, so that her Barnes Global shares never got to Christopher and thus to the Ewings. The nurse hands Christopher a leather-bound copy of Pam's will to take to Dallas with him, which makes me realize that without a leather-bound copy of all my important documents I am REALLY living my life wrong.
Christopher
"DOH, I AB DOT CRYINK, ITSTH JUST ALLERGIETH. THERE IS LOTH OF POLLEN IN SWITZTHERLAND, YOU GOT DAT?"
Cliff
Bobby trots out the woman who saw JR the night he died, and she identifies Cliff as having been at the bar, which is all to convince Pamela that Cliff did indeed shoot JR. I love that Cliff has a casual snapshot of himself in black, standing in front of a fancy staircase. I bet it was his holiday card.
John Ross
John Ross turns the full bug-eyes onto Bobby to get him to FINALLY reveal JR's master plan. Bobby tells him there is way too much time left in the episode and he should know better than to ask those questions before at least act four.
John Ross and Pamela
Pamela is having sort of a hard time with all this Cliff Is A Murderer stuff, even though he did kill her babies, though she still thinks he didn't know she was on the rig. John Ross tenderly tells her that they'll handle everything together, and they kiss and canoodle in JR's old bedroom in a way that is probably making the old man curdle in his grave.
Henchman
Cliff is afraid Henchman will blab, so to prove his loyalty, Harris has him killed in prison -- but not before he confidentially tells Pamela that Cliff knew she was on the rig and blew it up anyway. Because he's a grandfather, see, so he has Feelings about things. And sadly for him those feelings are now spilling all over a dirty prison floor. The hired-goon death toll here, by the way, is now two: Hot Frank and then this dude. You just can't find help that's easy to keep alive these days.
The Ewings
Everyone is very sad that Henchman is dead and can't testify, so Bobby finally decides it's time to reveal JR's plan. He calls in Bum and Bum tells them that he got wind of Cliff's assassination attempt but got there too late to stop it. And as JR lay dying, he rattled off a really long list of assignments for Bum's homework journal -- things like paying Carlos del Sol and a lot of other people to make sure the investigation hit a dead end, and whatnot, so that Cliff would think he was off scot-free.
The buckle
One such assignment is to plant this belt buckle in Cliff Barnes' safety deposit box, as if to imply that he stole it off JR's person as a sort of hunting trophy. John Ross and Pamela do the honors, which is also where they find a copy of Pam's death certificate, to prove Cliff is dastardly. This, I buy Cliff doing. That's just squirrelly stuff. But killing and indirect killing, I'm not so sure. Cliff always struck me as the dude who didn't have the stones to be ruthless, which is why he was always a weak second fiddle to JR. MAYBE he'd close his eyes and tell someone to push the button, but growling deadly threats... he's just not that guy, to me.
Pamela
Anyway, the next phase involves Pamela tricking Cliff back to Mexico so that he'll be arrested there. The gun JR left John Ross was Cliff's, and it was the weapon used to kill him. Pamela plants it in Cliff's car, and then we see the authorities: uncovering the buckle in the safety-deposit box (wouldn't the bank have been like, 'Yeah, Pamela Barnes was in here with John Ross Ewing yesterday, actually'?); EXHUMING JR'S BODY TO GET BULLETS OUT OF IT (why was that not done as part of the investigation before?!?); matching them to Cliff's gun (in a fancy ballistics segment they already used once on this show); and then concluding that Cliff is guilty. GUILTY OF DUMB. IN THE FIRST DEGREE. Like, if you killed someone in Mexico, maybe don't go back there. Just in case.
Emma
Meanwhile, Emma has led us all to think she's on a drug hunt, but she actually just wants to drug Harris and then steal all his incriminating financial statements so she can present them to Ann and announce she's sick of Harris pulling all the strings. Dude, first rule of having a daughter: When you recently blackmailed her by beating up her bed-buddy and forcing her to watch him writhe around in bloody pain, you should not eat the pancakes.
Cops
The Dallas PD guys are like, "Mom! I finally get to arrest somebody! It's in the script!"
A conclave of Ewings
The Ewings then trap Cliff in his hotel room and confront them with all they know. And Ken Kercheval, bless him, slips RIGHT back into the Cliff Barnes we all remember. His voice skips up a key or three. He becomes plaintive and whiny. He insists he didn't do anything. He looks and sounds like the weak and ineffectual plotter Cliff Barnes always seemed to be.
The fuzz
Guys, it's a bit much with the masks. Cliff is old, sure, but I don't think he has THAT much of a flatulence problem.
Cliff and Bobby
So, Bobby tells Cliff that if he takes responsibility for the Ewing rig explosion and all that, he'll help him get off on murder charges and make sure he's brought back to the US. "And trade a Mexican prison for an American one?" Cliff snipes. Um, YES, Cliff. I think that sounds just fine. This scene ends with Cliff asking Bobby who really shot JR, and Bobby awesomely telling him NOTHING. So ZING. It wasn't Cliff. And it never made sense for it to be Cliff, for two reasons: Cliff would never, or else he'd have done it already, and also this show would NEVER allow JR Ewing/Larry Hagman to fall at the hands of Cliff Barnes for all eternity. Just would not happen.
JR Ewing
The only thing that would make this better would be a giant head shot of JR, just like on One Tree Hill when Dan Scott designed his own grave.
John Ross and Christopher
These two finally demand the truth from Bobby -- they sense a piece of the puzzle is missing. Bobby opens up the letter JR wrote him and reads that JR had cancer, and he knew he was dying. So he orchestrated it so that it would look like Cliff Barnes shot him, thus bringing down Barnes and Ryland forever. When you get right down to it, that is a hideous thing to do, because J.R. had no way of knowing Cliff was also going to be a baby-killer. He just thought Cliff was annoying and vindictive. It MIGHT give Cliff a little too much credit? But JR may have sensed that Harris Ryland was giving Cliff the nads to be ruthless. Let's assume that's true. Anyway, John Ross brokenly chokes out the question of who ACTUALLY shot his father...
Bum
... and Bum pipes up, "I shot J.R." Apparently JR had him steal Cliff's gun and crash in on him and shoot him (did it have to be while he was on the phone with John Ross, dude?), to set the stage for Cliff's downfall. Bum, to his credit, seems upset about this, not least because it's possible John Ross will stop wanting to pay him for things. His hair is also doing a magnificent job of ratcheting up the emotional scope.
Patrick Duffy
John Ross, then, concludes what we all knew had to be true: Nobody could take down JR Ewing but JR Ewing. He shakes Bum's hand. Bobby loses his cool and can't finish reading the brotherly memories in the letter, so Christopher does the honors, and then Bobby gives it to John Ross (who puts it in his pocket -- will that be important, because Pamela could find it and learn the truth?) and then breaks down and it is so touching because Bobby has been stoic all season and Patrick Duffy is SO GOOD and you can feel the grief crashing down on him as he realizes it's finally over. This last piece of the plan being done means that he doesn't have to act like JR, true, but it also means... no more JR.
Elena and her mom
Elena tells her mother that their father's land IS totally barren, after all - which means not only did it ruin their father's life, but Drew's, because everything he did was in service of the original goal of buying it back and drilling. Conveniently, this is when she is delivered all kinds of schematics and official documents, with a letter asking her to come to Mexico to see Cliff. Because Elena has learned no lessons from ANYTHING ANYONE HAS EVER DONE, she tells nobody about this and instead jets off to Mexico. Granted, telling people wouldn't have changed the facts as they are about to be revealed, but still. It's Cliff Barnes. ALWAYS GO TO BOBBY.
Emma
Emma goes to visit Harris in prison, and then tells him that she's her father's daughter before sashaying out with an UP YOURS gleam in her eye. Ann pops in and Harris asks if she enjoyed that. "No, because I'm not a sick, sadistic prick, like you," she says with the perfect amount of firepower. I love Ann. It's too bad Emma is playing her like a harp.
Christopher
MILLER LITE: For when you just solved your uncle's murder and found out your sciency doo-dad doesn't suck after all, just in time to lose your fiance because she was lying to you about her dumb gunpowdery brother. Pamela comes by and tells Christopher that it's no use -- he loves Elena, he always will, and he should talk it out and make it right. She smiles that she's excited to start her new life at Southfork with John Ross, and Christopher peacefully cradles his MILLER LITE: The Official Beverage of Getting Sound Advice From The Ex-Wife Who Used To Be A Con-Artist And Also Killed A Dude But Let's Not Worry About That Right Now.
Pam
Christopher also is reading a letter Pam wrote to him (he got it in Zurich), although by all appearances she didn't write it as much as dictate it to a local fourth-grader.
Cliff and Elena
Cliff tells Elena that JR conned her father and pulled a switcheroo -- the parcel of land Mr. Ramos THOUGHT he was buying was actually Southfork, and the parcel JR was supposed to buy was the dried-up stuff, and he bribed someone at the records office to swap them so that JR ended up with the rich acreage. Cliff tells Elena not to let the Ewings ruin another Ramos life, and she listens to him because... well, look, he's not WRONG. But he is also Cliff Barnes.
Elena
This leads an angry, sniffling Elena to the heavily armed compound of Joaquin, the childhood friend with whom Drew was supposed to hide when he got to Mexico. Two things are certain: If there is a season three, Joaquin will be super hot, and BOOTY.
WHAT
At Ewing Energies, they honor a new portrait of JR, which is positively ghastly. It looks like someone bashed his face in with a frying pan.
Awesome extras
All the Ewing Energies employees are clearly thinking, "This is the last time I will ever even come close to making eye contact with that thing. I think it's haunted."
John Ross
John Ross tells Sue Ellen he's excited to sit back and take a breath and enjoy co-ownership of Southfork. Sue Ellen tells him to treat his bride well. "What do you think I am, some sort of scoundrel?" he says, whipping out the douchebrow.
John Ross
So John Ross scoops up a bottle of champagne and some flowers, takes them to a fancy hotel room where a pair of panties greets him upon arrival, and walks into the bedroom...
Emma
... to see EMMA lying in wait for him. She brought him a suitcase out of Harris's safe, and he greasily purrs, "Don't tell my WIFE," and they get naughty.
This is a GOOD TWIST. SHENANIGANS! We knew they'd hooked up, but assumed that got dropped because he was in love with Pamela. But when did they hook up on the MASTERPLAN side of things as well? How long has it been happening, what is the end game, and will it turn out that John Ross is just sleeping with her to keep her doing his bidding and actually loves Pamela (and is thus JR's son through and through), or just that he's an inveterate philanderer (and is thus JR's son through and through)? Oh, DALLAS. This was a really groovy, good ending, and I hope season three gets picked up so we can see where it was going. Emma turned out to be a doozy of a character, even if she was confusingly drawn at times; I wonder if this was a twist they came up with late in the game and can therefore spend the off-season retrofitting, or if it was always in the plan. Regardless, let's hope for a season three so that everything can threaten to hit the fan. DALLAS.