So... Alright - I Know Who Shot JR

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

This week Geoff goes down a rabbit hole on the night time soap opera "Dallas", the history of the cliffhanger, who shot Mr Burns, and who shot JR. It might have taken 8 months to resolve the storyline... but you can learn all about it on this week's So... Alright. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 So I was hanging out with some friends the other day and we were talking about The Simpsons and I think somebody made a reference to the Who Shot Mr. Burns story arc which got me thinking about Who Shot JR which if you're not familiar in uh oh I don't know but like the late 70s to the early 90s there was an extremely popular television show on in America. It was actually on through most of the world. I know I have a friend from Hungary who said that it was huge in Hungary. Like they followed it religiously. Anyway, there was this really big nighttime kind of soap opera called Dallas. Actually, there were a bunch.
Starting point is 00:00:42 There was Falcon Crest. There were a few others. called Dallas. Actually, there were a bunch. There was Falcon Crest. There were a few others. Dallas was such a popular show that it spawned a bunch of imitators, as most popular things do. Pretty quickly, I want to say it ran for somewhere between 11 and 13 years. It was quite a part of the cultural zeitgeist in America during that period, especially earlier on. I think I think 78. Yeah, 78 to 91, maybe is when the show aired. And then there was a I found out through my research here, there was a revival in 2012, which I guess I knew about, but I chose to forget
Starting point is 00:01:15 sort of an incomplete or sort of a where are they now catching up? I don't know how well it performed. Anyway, I'm getting off track. Who shot Mr. Burns was a spoof off of Who Shot J.R., which was a huge cliffhanger between seasons for Dallas. character of this this nighttime soap opera dallas that was about this uh family that lived in dallas that was into oil and ranching and uh they were they were just kind of like a wealthy politically connected uh texas family that was embroiled in all kinds of scandal and nonsense and jr was kind of the i learned a new phrase uh when when reading about him he was the anti-villain which is something we can talk about in a minute i'm trying to go 32 different directions at once right here so i'm gonna i'm gonna i apologize in advance uh that's the the unfortunate thing about my brain is that i i can't stay focused on one track and so i have to bounce around, which I guess is kind of the point of this podcast.
Starting point is 00:02:27 So I guess it's working as intended. Anyway, who shot J.R. was this huge, huge cliffhanger that left off, I think, between 1979 and 1980, between season three and season four. JR, the main character, the anti-villain, which is basically an anti-villain is a character who has heroic personality traits or goals, but is ultimately the bad guy in their story. So Thanos would be a really good version of an anti-villain. Maybe Danny DeVito's Penguin. And I only say that because there's a picture next to it.
Starting point is 00:03:06 Oh, yeah, the Magneto. Why was it all going to be video comic book related? Are there any other anti villains in the world? Oh, yeah. Tywin Lannister. There you go. I guess he's an anti villain. Anyway, J.R. was incredibly popular. It was played by this guy named Larry Hagman, who was one of the top billed television stars for his run on Dallas. I don't really know what else he did, but he was a big damn deal. As a matter of fact, this was such a big deal, this cliffhanger. You know what? Let me actually, let me take it back just a step, because I got kind of into the idea of cliffhangers in general. The whole reason I'm having this conversation with you is because it got me thinking, what was the first cliffhanger? And to arrive at that,
Starting point is 00:03:50 I figure we should look at what a cliffhanger is by definition. A cliffhanger is a plot device in which a component of a story ends unresolved, usually in a suspenseful or shocking way in order to compel audiences to turn the page and return to the story in the next installment. A cliffhanger can end the chapter of a novel, a television episode, a scene in a film, or a serialized story, book, or movie. Now, obviously, cliffhangers have existed for a very long time in literature. For instance, Charles Dickens used them. He actually, this is interesting, Charles Dickens popularized cliffhangers with serialized novels. I don't know if you guys knew. I know the Charles Dickens that I've read. I didn't know that he released serialized novels. So in the early 19th century, he had a novel called
Starting point is 00:04:36 The Old Curiosity Shop, which I've not only not read, I've never heard of. It was published in weekly installments. And so one installment ended with the character Little Nell, I guess that's probably a main character in the Curiosity Shop, on a precarious state of health, which prompted fans to get so worked up that they actually gathered outside the harbor in New York City to wait for the ship that transported the copies over from, I guess, the UK to America
Starting point is 00:05:04 so they could get their hands on it. This is like when you and your friends or your kids or whoever, your older sister, would stand in line in a cloak at 11 p.m. for the Harry Potter midnight launch, or probably get in line at like 3 or 4 p.m. This is like when Gus and I stood in line for two days at a movie theater and camped in the parking lot of the movie theater just to get tickets to a very disappointing Star Wars episode one.
Starting point is 00:05:34 But I think way more impressive. This is at a time when people were used to waiting for shit. I was reading this other story. You get a chance to read the book, The Lost City of Z, it's really fascinating. And there's some stuff
Starting point is 00:05:48 I want to talk about in there someday around this Fawcett dude and how information was disseminated in the past. But I'm not going to get us too off track. Just speaking of this specific instance, you have to think about these.
Starting point is 00:05:59 These come out probably monthly in newspapers or maybe they're just released kind of like the green mile was released initially the stephen king book where you bought it in seven small micro books i think it was seven and like every month or six weeks or whatever a new one would come out and you'd have to go to the store and get it and something along those lines but this is at a time when people were really really really used to waiting for information. They did not live in the world that we live in at the turn of the century, or even up until, you know, honestly,
Starting point is 00:06:31 the 1980s. They did not live in the world of the 24-hour news cycle. They did not live in a world of instant gratification. They lived in a world where if you wanted news from your friend or a loved one or something across the world that information had to basically manually transmit itself to you so uh i mean there were telegrams and shit right but people were very used to waiting so the idea that people were so invested in this story of the old curiosity shop that they took a horse, I assume, or walked all the fucking way down from whatever borough they were living in to a harbor in New York to wait outside for the boat to land. And I'm assuming this giant ship pulls up from the UK full of all kinds of, you know, tea and commemorative spoons. What do they sell in England? Those bowler hats, nice clothes, top hats, that kind of stuff.
Starting point is 00:07:29 I assume that the boat doesn't just pull up and then a dude stands outside and goes like, who wants the old curiosity shop next? I imagine it gets offloaded in some sort of palletized way and then disseminated to all the bookstores and I I guess, newspaper stands around town. So the very idea that people would queue up all the way at the harbor, when just getting to the harbor alone in a pre-industrialized or very early industrialized age, was probably a pretty annoying task. People were used to shit being annoying and slow. I guess that's my long-winded point, is that it must have been a good book.
Starting point is 00:08:06 Maybe I'll read it someday, find out what happened to Little Nell, because it definitely captured the attention, the fervent attention of a bunch of people at that time. And in reading about that, I couldn't figure out where the cliffhanger was invented or where it was born. It's been around for a very long time. It's a pretty obvious idea. But I did discover that in television and film, the very first cliffhanger appears to be, which is funny. So let's take it back a second. Dallas is a nighttime soap opera. It takes itself very seriously. It launched in 1978. Also in 1978,
Starting point is 00:08:48 a comedy television show called Soap Hit. It was a spoof of soap operas. It had a very young Billy Crystal in it. It had a lot of incredibly talented people in it. It had the spinoff Benson, which I watched religiously when I was a kid, and I absolutely adored. It was back in the era when shows spun off shows, spun off shows, and I actually would like to dive into that a little bit someday. Anyway, in 1978,
Starting point is 00:09:13 the same year that Dallas hit the airwaves, Soap ended their season on a cliffhanger about an affair between two characters. I really don't know what the resolution was or even which the two characters were. It's not super important to this story. It's just interesting that the first time a cliffhanger appears on television,
Starting point is 00:09:31 it's in 1978 in a spoof of a soap opera. That same year, Dallas Airs becomes very popular. It is a non-spoof of a soap opera. It takes itself very seriously. They then, between seasons three and four, left off on this who shot J.R. storyline. Basically, J.R., I mentioned him earlier, Larry Hagman, the anti-villain,
Starting point is 00:09:56 he gets mysteriously shot. He's clinging on to dear life, and everybody on the show has a reason to shoot him. Even though he's a beloved character, he's still a villain, and he's one of those guys that does the wrong things for the right reasons, I guess. But everybody on the show had a legit reason to kill him.
Starting point is 00:10:16 It's kind of like the Clue movie where everybody in the room, everybody at the table had a reason to kill Mr. Body, right? Very similar. But then they went on summer break and it was eight months before they resolved it. As a matter of fact, they didn't just resolve it. They had this cliffhanger at the end of the season and then they didn't resolve it until episode four of the next season, which is kind of extra fucked up if you think about it. Like,
Starting point is 00:10:42 you're just waiting like, oh my God, I can't wait for the new season. The new season of Dallas to air. And then it airs, and you watch the first episode, just on pins and needles, and you don't find out. And then you watch the second episode, and you don't find out. Man, talk about, like, edging. Jesus Christ. I would have felt really fucked with if I were a fan back then. And I was, this was 1980. So I was six years old.
Starting point is 00:11:06 I, or five years old, five or six, depending on when it was in the eighties. So I was five or six years old. And I remember who shot JR being a part of the fabric of my childhood. I don't specifically think I ever watched an episode of Dallas. I've seen certain clips of it online at times, but I have no fucking clue if I was aware that this was happening at the time or if I just have, I just remember it through, I guess, pop culture references throughout my childhood and people talking about it. Because I doubt at five or six years old, I was conscious enough to remember it, but I remember it so well. What I don't remember is who actually shot JR, which is kind of why I started this whole thing in the first place. And then I got off on the sidetrack about cliffhangers and the history of cliffhangers. And I'm going to get to who shot
Starting point is 00:11:53 JR first. But there's some really interesting stuff about this episode, this whole cultural phenomenon that was who shot JR. Let me go into it in a little bit of detail. So in the final scene of the season, JR hears like a noise outside of his office. So he walks out to look and he gets shot twice. He gets bipped, double bipped by an unseen assailant. The episode was called The House Divided and it was broadcast in March 21st, 1980. It wasn't until I said eight months later,
Starting point is 00:12:22 November 21st, episode four, that they reveal who the shooter was. And we will get into that in a second. But what's really, really impressive is that when that show aired, 350 million people around the world, I told you Dallas was a kind of a global phenomenon at that point. Way harder for television and media to travel back then too. 350 million people around the world tuned in to watch and find out who shot JR. Now, let's put that into context now. It is 2023 in America. I think there's about 350, somewhere between 330 and 350 million people in America now. So the equivalent of the entirety of 2023 America tuned in around the world in 1980 to find out who shot JR. That alone kind of blows your mind, right? That got me thinking, was that the biggest television event? It certainly couldn't have been. So I started looking into that. Now I'm going to back it off to back it off to just America because things get when you start taking all the countries globally into consideration, it's really hard to figure out. And it's very confusing. But that got me wondering what the most viewed event in American television of all time is. And it turns tuned in to watch the Apollo moon landing,
Starting point is 00:13:48 which happened in 1969. It was July 20th, 1969. So if there's roughly 350 million people in America now, that's a major chunk of America. But there couldn't have been nearly that many in America back then. I looked it up. And in 1969, there were 202 million people living in America. So if you err on the high side there, which we're going to do because it's more fun, 150 million out of 202 million people in America tuned in to watch the moon
Starting point is 00:14:21 landing. That's basically everyone. That's like damn near, you're not counting newborns at that point, probably. And, and people that are like on death's door in the hospital, maybe people in comas, you're counting, you're not counting newborns and comas.
Starting point is 00:14:39 That's basically the rest of the country tuned in to watch the moon landing, which is fucking wild. If you think about it. And that's back when, like, by the way, that episode of Dallas in 1980 in America, I said 350 million people around the world watch it which is insane about 80 million people i think 89 million people in america watched it so uh you know you figure there were probably 200 i didn't look it up but they're probably 200 somewhere between 275
Starting point is 00:14:56 million and maybe 300 million people and 89 million people tuned in to watch it that's like a third of america or more somewhere between like 30 and 40 percent of the nation tuned in to watch it. That's like a third of America or more, somewhere between like 30 and 40% of the nation tuned in to watch Who Shot J.R., which is not nearly as impressive as almost all of America tuning in to watch The Moon Landing until you take into consideration
Starting point is 00:15:17 that The Moon Landing is a thing that, unless you're a conspiracy theorist, happened and mattered and was real and changed the course of human history. Who Shot J.R. was a soap opera, but a soap opera that so captured the cultural zeitgeist. Apparently, even Queen Elizabeth was tuned in and excited to hear about it. Like it was it permeated all of America and much of the globe, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. This episode is brought to you by Peloton.
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Starting point is 00:16:53 It doesn't care when you invest, trade, or save. Do it on weekends, or at 5 a.m., or on Christmas Day, at 5 a.m. Crypto is finance for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Kraken, see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. Kraken's registration details at kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer. Interestingly enough, on this list, if you look at the top 30 most watched broadcasts in America, on this list, if you look at the top 30 most watched broadcasts in America, you'll discover that almost all of them are the Super Bowl, which doesn't surprise me in the least. The Super Bowl, if you're not from America, it's a big damn deal in America. It's probably a big deal
Starting point is 00:17:35 if you're at least in an English-speaking country somewhere, probably a decently big deal where you are. But it's the biggest event of the year in America. What I find even more interesting is that for the last five or six years, we've been going through this kind of a cultural war in our country A lot of sports, professional sports did for at least being, see just being woke or too progressive because they let, well, first off they didn't let players protest and then they did. It's a whole thing. But anyway, I've heard around a lot of parts, a lot of like, I know a lot of conservatives have said that they're not going to support the NFL anymore because of their progressive views.
Starting point is 00:18:21 Right. And then the rest of most of the rest of the country is like, what progressive views? It's just, you know. Anyway, I'm not making a value judgment here. Either way, I'm just pointing out that
Starting point is 00:18:32 despite all that controversy, the number two most watched broadcast of all time in America at 115.1 million viewers was this year. It was on February 12th. It was Super Bowl LVII. LVII stands for...
Starting point is 00:18:54 I've talked about it before, but when I was in third grade, I got moved into advanced math the week they learned Roman numerals in normal math. I spent a week in advanced math. They realized they made a terrible mistake putting me in advanced math. They bumped me back down to normal math where I belonged the next week, and I just missed Roman numerals. I used to carry a laminated Roman numeral card in my wallet just to help me out because I just I can't learn Roman numerals. 57. Okay, Super Bowl 57 between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. Obviously, the Chiefs won that game and 115 million people tuned in to see it. So that's pretty wild that the number two most viewed event of all time. You would think as well, like if there's more people in the world, there's going to be more eyeballs, but there's also so many more options. They're used to in the time of the moon landing or, you know, some of the other
Starting point is 00:19:42 events on here, the, thewell of MASH, which got one hundred and five million roots, got one hundred million people. The police pursuit of O.J. Simpson got ninety five million. Those were times when Disneyland's grand opening in nineteen fifty five got ninety million people. That's about half of America right there tuned in to watch Disneyland's grand opening. That alone is insane. And we should dissect at some point. But the point being back then, you didn't have a lot of options. TV was appointment viewing and there were three or four options that you could tune into at the best of times. Now, with streaming services and with social media and all the million different ways you
Starting point is 00:20:20 can consume content, the fact that 115 million people all tuned into the same thing to watch it is pretty wild. I can't remember. We're talking about shows like MASH or Dallas getting 80 to 90 million views for a specific episode. A television show today is successful if it gets 2 million views sustained. The era of shows bringing in even 20 million views consistently is long gone. And I don't know that we'll ever get back to that. So I guess that must mean
Starting point is 00:20:54 that the NFL and the Super Bowl are in a pretty healthy place because they're still packing in numbers. By the way, they're also number 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 on the list. Richard Nixon's resignation speech is number 10. And then they just continue to dominate the list. It's basically like there have been 57 Super Bowls. And I imagine out of the top 65, they're probably all in there. So coming back around to who shot J.R., the whole point of this
Starting point is 00:21:21 is that my entire life I have known about Dallas and the who shot J.R. cultural phenomenon. I have made references to it and jokes about it, and I have no fucking clue who shot J.R. I don't know who the characters in the show are. I know there was Bobby and J.R. and well, I don't know a few others. Right. So I looked it up. And so spoiler alert, if you don't want to know few others, right? So I looked it up. And so, spoiler alert, if you don't want to know who killed, or why do I keep saying killed?
Starting point is 00:21:48 If you don't want to know who shot JR way back in 1980, maybe tune out right here. But I think it's probably been enough time. I think we can probably handle learning about this information together. It was his mistress. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:22:03 Kristen Shepard, who was played by Mary Crosbyby she's the one who pulled the trigger and she did it because she was mad at him because she was having an affair with him yeah she was his this is extra fucked up she was his sister-in-law she was his wife's sister i guess she still is his wife's sister so he was having an affair with his wife's sister. I guess she still is his wife's sister. So he was having an affair with his wife's sister. She shot him in a fit of anger. And then when it was unveiled, he didn't press charges because she was pregnant with his child. And then I think she exited the show or went off somewhere on her own.
Starting point is 00:22:43 However, so she ended up getting away with it because she was pregnant with this kid at the time she shot him. So let that be a lesson to you. Don't don't sleep around, especially with your wife's sister. So there you go. If you ever wondered who shot J.R., you're probably going to forget this after this podcast. I will probably forget this in three or four days. So if it ever comes up on Geeks Who Drink or you want to impress somebody with your knowledge of the 80s, Kristen Shepard, JR's mistress' sister-in-law, was the one who shot him twice. And he
Starting point is 00:23:11 survived. Another funny thing that came out of this, as I was reading, there was such a, like I said, it was such a cultural zeitgeisty moment that you could buy Who Shot JR shirts, like at the mall and shit. They sold I Shot JR.R. shirts. Apparently, Republicans released pins
Starting point is 00:23:29 at some point that said the Democrats shot J.R. To give you an idea what the political landscape was like in 1980, I guess. Oh, and I should revise this number. I think I said 89 million people watched it. I got that a little wrong. It's 83 million people, unless you know of 6 million people I didn't count.
Starting point is 00:23:47 I think it was 83 million people who tuned in, which was the record until it got beaten by MASH with, I think, 95 million people tuned in to watch that show. That's another show that I grew up with, I was well aware of, but I was far too young to understand. At five, six, seven years old, I wasn't understanding the intricacies and entanglements and embroilments of Dallas political intrigue and oil money. And I certainly didn't understand the particulars of the Korean War.
Starting point is 00:24:20 Those shows were just lost on me as a kid, unfortunately. I was just a little bit too young to understand. All right. So after I recorded this podcast, it struck me that I was being incredibly stupid by not actually sitting down and watching those two episodes of Dallas. So I did. and watching those two episodes of Dallas. So I did.
Starting point is 00:24:45 And, uh, huh. First off, I have got to say, a few initial, uh, I'd never seen an episode of Dallas before, at least not that I remembered. So a few initial observations. One, the intro is fascinating. It shows Dallas as it was in, like,
Starting point is 00:25:02 the 70s and the 80s. And it's just, like, a mud pit with a bunch of buildings in the middle of it and everywhere they go is like a dirt the entire city of dallas was under construction i'm assuming from like 1970 until like 1985 because it was like it was insane it really fascinating i just went there this last weekend for my birthday to go to medieval times and and to do some horse racing and i I go to the Dallas airport a lot. I don't go to Dallas a lot. Never considered myself a fan. Not for any reason, really, other than most people... If you don't live in Texas, you may not know this, but most people in Austin
Starting point is 00:25:34 hate people from Dallas and hate people from Houston. We like San Antonio, but we don't... For some reason, and I don't know why. I'm not from Texas. I've just been living here forever. But Dallas was lovely, and I really enjoyed it. And it is a stark contrast to see the city that I went to last weekend in summer of 2023 contrasted to, I just said contrast twice. That was dumb. Anyway, contrasted, that's three times,
Starting point is 00:25:59 to the, I have to say it one more time, don't I? Contrasted with the intro filmed in the 70s. That was brutal to get out. The next thing I noticed was everybody in 1980 had bad hair across the board. Men, women, young, old. It was brutal. And I know that if I had lived in that era, I mean, I guess I did. If I had lived at an age where I was conscious of such things in that era, that probably would have all seemed very
Starting point is 00:26:30 appropriate and cool to me for and of the time. But man, looking back on it, it's like, it's brutal. So I sat down to watch it. Like I said, it was episode, it was the final episode of season three. It was episode 25. They had 25 episode seasons back then which is insane by the way uh and i gotta say i get why people hated jr ewing that guy was a fucking prick i would have probably honestly i would have probably wanted to kill him too if i'm being completely honest and basically everybody in his universe wanted to kill him he was fucking over everybody in his family he was fucking over everybody in his family. He was fucking over all of his business partners.
Starting point is 00:27:07 They did this thing where supposedly, I guess, the the country nationalized the oil wells and that somehow made contracts on them less valuable. And he had known that ahead of time and sold all of their or 75 percent of their stakes to friends and coworkers or business partners that they had great relationships with and then basically screwed them all over. And so half of Dallas wanted to kill that dude. And honestly, you can see why. One interesting thing that happened is I navigated, oh, by the way, it's on Amazon.
Starting point is 00:27:41 It's free on Amazon if you want to watch it. And I think it's free with commercials. So I picked the episode, season three, episode 25, and I sat down to watch it, hit play, got about 15 minutes into it, paused to get up to go to the bathroom, came back and realized where it was paused. It had the episode title and number,
Starting point is 00:27:58 and it was showing episode two of season one. So I don't know why, but somehow it defaulted to season two, episode one, when I actually played episode 25 of season three. So they tricked me into watching an extra 15 minutes, which made a lot of sense because from what I could tell in that first 15 minutes, nobody wanted to kill JR at all. So anyway, then I had to switch over and I start watching the actual episode. Things became clear very quickly. He's much more of a prick in season three and in this episode. And then I got up and I, I don't know,
Starting point is 00:28:27 I went to go run an errand or something. And then when I came back and I sat down and I hit play again, from where I paused it, I got about seven minutes into the video again, into the episode again. And I thought, man, they're just really all over the place with stories. They keep, there's like an A story, a B story,
Starting point is 00:28:43 a C story, a D story. And then I realized it was playing episode one of season two again. Every time I pause it, for some reason, it defaults back to that. So that was fucking annoying. And then it tricked my brain because I already knew the first 15 minutes of episode
Starting point is 00:28:57 one of season two. So I just defaulted back into those storylines and I was just a little confused for a second. And then I was into it. And then I realized again, wait a minute a minute wait a minute we've gone completely off the rails anyway I get all the way through it oh man that's another thing they mix floral patterns in their like in their houses their pillows their beds their curtains their sofas they mix floral patterns so fucking much I don't understand how anybody thought that was a good idea at any point in history leading up to JR getting shot and he was was mysteriously shot in a hallway while he was
Starting point is 00:29:28 working late, one of his business partners who he screwed over in the oil leasing thing, he actually said, I'll get you for this if it's the last thing I do, which is very Scooby-Doo. It's one of the things you always see kind of spoofed, but it was cool to see it in the last thing I do, which is a very Scooby-Doo. It's one of the things you always see kind of spoofed, but it was cool to see it in the wild in a serious manner. So then, uh, then JR gets shot and, uh, it does like that hard freeze, 70s freeze, and then it's over. They're just out. Like it was a hard cut and then it was out. So then I fast forwarded over to, I wasn't going to watch the first three episodes because remember, they don't resolve it until season four, episode four, for some reason. I guess they had a they they wanted to continue. I know the reason they wanted to continue the suspense because now
Starting point is 00:30:14 everybody looks like a suspect and they go through the first three episodes. From what I surmise, they go through the first three episodes trying to figure out who's to blame. And all the blame, by the way, goes ends up on Sue Ellen, which is, uh, J.R. Ewing's wife because she's a drunk and she got hammered and can't remember what she did. Uh, but she definitely, the gun used was like his gun that she had and her fingerprints were on it. So it was looking pretty rough for Sue Ellen. Uh, although, you know, we read, so we knew it wasn't Sue Ellen. It was actually Kristen. Anyway, J.R. was a real prick to Sue Ellen. The whole family was.
Starting point is 00:30:48 I felt really bad for her. I mean, sure, they thought she shot J.R., but, you know, she's still a nice lady. Anyway, I felt kind of bad for Sue Ellen because she was getting really fucked over. They didn't want to post her bail. J.R. was pretty convinced that she did it, and he didn't like her anyway. It was an unhappy marriage, from what I can tell. So anyway, we watched the whole episode, and it's basically Sue Ellen trying to figure out, because she was hammered and blacked out because she was an alcoholic,
Starting point is 00:31:13 trying to figure out if she actually did it or not. And then she goes through and gets hypnotized. And through that process, she discovers that she isn't the one who shot him. It was actually Kristen, her sister, who was secretly having an affair. Not that she didn't know this, but it was secretly having an affair with J.R. So she goes to confront Kristen, who was at J.R.'s house getting some clothing and shit for her. Kristen's, by the way, about to let her sister hang for this. She's evil.
Starting point is 00:31:39 She's like J.R. level evil. But she's like playing nice and trying to support her sister. But she obviously is like trying to deflect the blame onto her. Anyway, so there's a big confrontation between the three. J.R. calls the police. There's a bat call police. And then he thinks Sue Ellen's come to finish him off. And then it comes out in the moment that Kristen actually shot him.
Starting point is 00:31:59 And then J.R.'s like, you're going to I'm going to get you for this. And then she's like, no, you won't because your kid will be born in jail. And he's like, what? And then she's like, I'm pregnant. And then that's the moment that Sue Ellen finds out that her sister is having an affair with JR. And it's just a triangle of hatred from that point on. And then the episode ends.
Starting point is 00:32:18 I'm glad I watched it. I have to say, didn't intend to watch two and a half episodes. They tricked me on season two, episode one, a couple of times. But now that I'm, I hate to say, didn't intend to watch two and a half episodes. They tricked me on season two, episode one a couple times. But now that I'm, I hate to say it, but I kind of want to see what happens next. So I think I might be watching Dallas now. All right.

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