10 Important Life Lessons That We Learned in the "Dallas" Season Finale

1. Accidentally kill someone that was really on your nerves? Apparently there’s an app for that.

  It seems you can just whip our your smart phone, dial a special number, and within seconds a squadron of men in black outfits will swarm into your house bearing cleaning supplies and body-transport laundry carts. This seems like so much more fun than just ordering pizza or Chinese.

2. Bobby Ewing is obviously immortal.

  We sort of knew this, what with that whole “dream season” back in the day, when Patrick Duffy apparently took a shower for an entire year. (And Victoria Principal took a really long nap, without mussing her hair even once.) Bobby’s super-powers, and his intricate hair, were in full evidence tonight as he fully recovered from an aneurism in about 4 minutes and then went right back to work arranging for the arrest of a sibling.

3. Larry Hagman’s eyebrows could inspire a new horror-movie franchise.

  I thought I would get used to it as the season progressed. I was wrong. You can’t get away from those things. They upstage everyone in every scene where they make an entrance. The camera zooms in for a facial close-up, J.R. starts to talk about something probably important, and all I can focus on is wondering how his forehead isn’t bleeding from the barbed-wire punctures.

4. The new offices of “Ewing Energies” are apparently going to be located in the same exact space as the offices from the original series.

  Yay! How touching! But wait. The view out the window is wrong, the football-field size of the space is wrong, and the lack of a fully-stocked bar is wrong. But the most important wrongness? The lack of the secretaries. I didn’t see Sly and her always-perfect hair arranging something dastardly for J.R., I didn’t see Phyllis and her always-questionable hair arranging something heroic for Bobby, and I didn’t see Kendall and her pointless hair sitting at her pointless little desk in the “pre-lobby” area that never made any sense. It’s okay that they didn’t include Jackie, though. That girl had about 47 different jobs throughout the original series and you never knew where she would pop up.

5. Ann Ewing rocks.

  When Bobby’s wife (Brenda Strong) marched into the office of evil Harris Ryland (Mitch Pileggi) and did that whole number with the fake torment and the eventual microphone reveal? Perfect scene, perfectly played. (I think I had a small orgasm.) Ann should be shooting to the top of that little “Rise To Power” competition on the TNT website, just sayin. Trivia note: Mitch Pileggi is better known for “X-Files”, but he also was in the original “Dallas” run, for a multi-episode bit, playing a mental patient who gets locked in the basement of a questionable sanitarium alongside J.R. (This was in the later seasons when the writers were so bored out of their minds that they wrote whatever they could to fill up the hour.)

6. Sue Ellen Ewing rocks even harder.

  Let’s face it: Linda Gray is nearly 72 years old. Seventy-two. But you sure as hell wouldn’t know it. Miss Thang has still got it and doesn’t look like she’s giving it up any time soon. (Seriously, look at the promo clips for the new show. They have the poor woman wrapped in what looks like vibrantly-orange Ace bandages, with questionable holes here and there, but she still has more allure and hotness than the youngsters who are playing the new Ewing women.)

  I will say that the first episodes of this season saddened me, when it came to Sue Ellen, because they had her adoring wicked John Ross just like she adored wicked J.R. back in the day, only without the high-velocity drinking, multiple vehicular mishaps, and a tendency to be rude to Miss Ellie, which one should never do if they have any hopes of ascending into Heaven. We like the Sue Ellen that finally put down the cocktails and took up the fight against J.R. But patience proved rewarding as Sue Ellen finally came to her senses in the last few episodes and morphed into Sue Ellen 2.0, thus straightening her crown that had become dangerously off-center.

7. You can get an engagement ring made to look like a glob of oil surrounded by precious stones.

  But why would you do that to someone you supposedly love? Why? And then John Ross twists the knife even more by saying to Elena something like “I thought sunshine reflecting off crude oil was the most beautiful thing ever until I saw you.” Really? You’re going to compare your beloved to a petroleum product? Elena, honey, go to Plan B.

8. Plan B’s can be very erotic.

  So Elena finds out some not-so-good intel about John Ross, then she finds out that Christopher still hearts her a whole bunch, and Christopher’s engagement ring is WAY more pretty and feminine than the not-all-that-bad-but-still-awkward chunk of fossil-fuel jewelry that John Ross proffered. So what’s a girl to do? Well, if you’re planning to have a healthy plot-line in Season 2, you race off to bump naughty bits with Christopher even though she’s technically engaged to someone else and he’s technically married to a woman with more secrets than Mitt Romney.

9. Apparently “the cloud” is something that makes it very hard for bad people to continue being bad.

  See, there was this now-dead character with an alias of Marta Del Sol who, when she wasn’t busy being crazy and obsessed, managed to upload all of her private business to “the cloud”. This cloud then allowed Bobby and Christopher to find interesting information that implicated J.R. and John Ross and Vincente “the guy who used to be on 24” Cano, making things very unpleasant for them. Note to self: Do not upload personal chit-chat to the international transponder. Unless I suspect that I’m about to be killed for being too clingy. Then I’m uploading everything.

10. Cliff Barnes just doesn’t give up.

  You’d think the man would have learned some social skills from the original series, where he managed to basically chase everyone out of his life that cared for him, especially the string of women who magically found him attractive only because the script said they should. But no, he’s still on his vindictive path, scheming and manipulating and ordering Chinese food, whatever it takes to destroy the Ewings. And then we have the huge reveal near the end of the show, with Rebecca Ewing (marriage hanging by a thread) proving that she has some very serious Daddy issues, which sets up an intriguing Cliff-hanger. And that’s classic “Dallas”. We’ll talk again in January…