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Thanks to last season’s crazy pandemic production schedule, The CW had to get creative with its scheduling, and many of its series ran well into the summer and early fall, making it impossible for them to launch new seasons in October. So the network has managed a couple of stunts with The Flash and Riverdale, giving them five episode ‘event’ premieres. The network has also pulled a more low-key ‘event premiere’ with Dynasty, giving us two episodes timed especially to the holiday. Unlike those other shows, they didn’t bother to give us a promise of when the show will return, but as of now it looks like Dynasty will be back in its regular Friday time slot in March. Even though these two episodes are considered the start of Season 5, they very much wrap up or extend some Season 4 storylines. So …
Let’s Talk About ‘Let’s Start Over Again’:
- Fallon has died from her gunshot wound. Not really but that’s what social media thinks and none of the local news stations have bothered to confirm with the family. You know, because everything on social media is true.
- Alexis is still in jail. Amanda is certain it was Adam who pushed the doctor off Alexis’ balcony but Alexis won’t hear of it.
- Jeff is back on his meds, but he still believes there is something shady with Brady and Alexis … but Dominique won’t hear of it.
- A member of Fallon Unlimited’s Board reminds Fallon there is no line of succession and that’s making Wall Street nervous, so Fallon assures her she will announce a new VP at the holiday party. Even though she has no one lined up, and she’s in the hospital.
- Blake’s campaign is on shaky ground after Fallon’s shooting and Alexis’ arrest, so he stages a choking incident with Cristal that gets him back in the news … but Cristal is the one who becomes the focus of the story.
- With Sam’s help to make it look like she’s on a beach, Fallon tries to poach a female executive from another company but her efforts are rebuffed.
- Liam insists that he’s put the past behind him and they should just move forward as a couple, but Fallon can tell he’s stewing on the inside. Tabloid reports of their impending divorce don’t help.
- While Cristal believes her brother has left Atlanta, Sam brings her some shocking news that Beto may not be as far away as she thought.
- Sam poses as an orderly to sneak Fallon out of the hospital — as a corpse — so she can confront Eva in prison about the tabloid divorce story. Eva admist that she wasn’t trying to kill Fallon, she was aiming for Liam: ‘If I can’t have him, nobody can.’ And she’s not going to retract her story about the divorce.
- Blake and Cristal sit down for an interview to dispel the stories of ‘The Carrington Curse’ and get his campaign back on track. It works!
- Adam visits Alexis in prison but his motives are something other than a son worried about his mothers.
- Brady tries to sneak into Jeff’s hospital room to steal his laptop with the evidence of his dealings with Alexis, but gets caught red-handed. Plus, all that evidence has been backed up to the cloud. And Dom is also hiding, hoping to prove Jeff wrong … but she finally got the truth.
- Fallon and Liam try to put on a happy face at the holiday party, but Liam won’t even kiss her. Sam was supposed to bring a female German executive to the party to pose as the new VP candidate, but he shows up with an older woman in Lederhosen. Luckily Fallon’s original choice shows up to accept the position.
- Cristal summons Beto to the manor, threatens to send a picture of him holding a gun to the authorities if he doesn’t leave town and stay out of the family business.
- Alexis is denied bail after new DNA evidence shows her hair follicles under the dead man’s fingernails … thanks to Adam’s visit to the prison in which he easily pulled several strands of hair from her head. Do extensions carry DNA?! Alexis flips out and tries to escape but doesn’t get very far.
- Liam finally admits he’s not okay, he’s angry at Fallon for her affair, but he’s even more angry that he didn’t get to be angry because she got shot. She throws his relationship with Eva back at him, and reminds him that he believed Eva over his own wife, and as it looks like this really is the end for them, Fallon collapses.
- Beto happens to meet a woman in a bar who looks very familiar — she ridiculously looks exactly like his sister.
- Amanda believes she has some solid evidence to prove the 911 call about Alexis and Adam’s whereabouts at the time of said call don’t line up.
- Fallon is in a coma after an undetected nick in her intestine from the gunshot has contaminated her blood steam.
That Holiday Spirit
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Feeling guilty about the argument they had before Fallon collapsed, thinking that is what caused her to collapse, Liam is working overtime to make sure Fallon recovers and can get home in time for Christmas, her favorite holiday. Part of his plan involves scheduling family members to visit and talk about favorite holiday memories, hoping that Fallon can hear them and will feel loved when she finally wakes up. If she wakes up.
Meanwhile, Blake sits down for another interview and reveals there is a cabinet position awaiting him in DC after he’s elected but the reporter drops the bomb on him that there is no cabinet position, it’s already been promised to someone else, and she has the receipts to back that up. Blake later tells Cristal the news and she has to admit that she paid the reporter to tell him there was a position (at the press conference where he was going to drop out of the race) to keep him in the race, knowing he could win. But without any real advancement ahead of him politically, Blake decides it really is time to drop out of the race. And since he’s ahead in the polls, Cristal reminds him, he can probably get a much better deal on that land he wanted for his airport from his opponent. So it’s a win-win.
Dominique believes she’s done with Brady, but she gets a call from the people he owes money to, telling her that unless she pays up the half-million he owes, she’ll never see him again. She tells Jeff that Brady has been kidnapped and Jeff is more of the mind that it’s no longer her problem, but she won’t be able to live with herself if Brady is murdered so she agrees to meet with the kidnappers and hand over the money. The hand-off takes place in a very public area where the camera seems to keep focusing on two random men playing chess. After she gives Brady’s captors the money, she questions Jeff about his supposed plan. Why did he allow her to just give them all that money. Suddenly the chess players jump up and more FBI agents swarm the area. Jeff had it under control all along, the perps were arrested and Brady was advised to get lost if he knows what’s good for him.
Amanda is doing all she can to corner Adam to get an admission of guilt from him, but she doesn’t know how slippery her brother is. But when she reveals a detective will be at the hospital soon to question him, Adam starts trying to find an alibi from other doctors at the hospital who will confirm he was there at the time of the 911 call. Of course Amanda sees all of this and knows for sure he’s trying to bribe the staff, but when the detective arrives, and leaves without Adam in restraints, Adam reveals that his patient was his alibi … even though the woman earlier seemed to not be at 100% mentally. But Adam made sure her chart showed that she was. Back at Alexis’ apartment, Amanda spots a drone flying past the balcony, some kind of Peeping Tom building security has not been able to track down but it’s there every night at the same time. Amanda is very interested in finding out who this belongs too because it may have recorded the evidence she needs to pin the murder on Adam.
While family members continue to visit Fallon, including Blake who shares a story of when he and she went out to chop down their own Christmas tree (with comically disastrous results, the tree falling on Blake’s car) and Kirby revealing she swapped gifts with Fallon one year which gave her a blow out kit and Kirby got some fabulously expensive earrings, Sam and Culhane have been noticeably absent, neither of them emotionally prepared to see Fallon in a coma. So Sam tries to over-compensate by vomiting Christmas all over La Mirage and the new bar. He has to cajole Culhane into helping and the final results made Kirby dizzy. She finally convinced them to go to the hospital and they did, even though it was the most awkward visit imaginable with Sam ending his chat with ‘sweet dreams’ then wondering if that was appropriate to say to someone in a coma. Michael said it was not.
But Liam stayed steadfastly at Fallon’s side, and got the good news that the infection was cured. Unfortunately, the doctor did not know when the swelling in Fallon’s brain would decrease and she’d wake up. Blake was angry that the doctors in the hospital with a wing with his name on it couldn’t do anything but Cristal and Jeff and Liam assured him she was getting the best care possible. Liam sat with Fallon again and talked about Christmas, and Fallon began to dream about a Christmas in the future where they were wrapping presents for their own kids … and she wakes up. She heard everyone and everything that was said to her, and she and Adam are moving forward with their life together. Back at the manor, Fallon is home and happy, surprising Kirby by telling her it was okay she had the earrings because they were out of fashion now. And she gifted Liam with a bicycle that he was talking about while she was in the coma … and a dirt bike as well. This better not be a way to kill him off! In the end, Blake was happy that his whole family was together under one roof for Christmas.
But a storm is coming as Beto continues to coach fake Cristal on how to walk, talk and act like his sister. She appears to be a very quick study, dropping her Southern twang and nailing Cristal’s voice to a T.
So happy holidays from the Carrington family. We’ll be back with more in March!
What did you think of these episodes? Tell us in the comments section below!
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