Soap: Episode 71

Soap: Episode 71
ABC
November 19, 1980
Dramedy
DVD
C+

This Harris/Silver/Clair/ McMahon episode is a bit of an improvement.  There's still some unfunny stuff with Jessica's suitors, but at least she tells them that she doesn't want to marry any of them.  Her scene with Corinne saying goodbye before moving to California is pretty good.  (Canova was going on to her own series, I'm a Big Girl Now, which I watched, although I had not yet seen Soap.  I later also watched Canova's series Throb.)  Wendy being kidnapped adds some drama to the end of the episode, although logistically I'm not sure how this would work.  (When Elaine was kidnapped from the second floor, it was at least night time and some of the family were asleep.)

I want to talk about Danny in his own couple paragraphs because I feel like how his character is handled in the fourth season has a lot to do with how I feel about the season.  Other things will go wrong (El Puerco for instance), but this episode shows how Danny's decline as a character is linked to the decline in the show.  Danny was never a bright guy but, as with Chrissy on Three's Company, his intelligence was Flanderized, to the point that Burt now makes remarks about it, like Jack would on 3'sC.  Unfortunately, while Somers could take the dumb blonde stereotype to places it had never been before, Ted Wass isn't able to do anything similar for Danny.

So in this episode, Polly realizes she loves Danny but isn't in love with him.  It seems a bit late to come to this realization, considering they bought a house together, but OK, fine, she was in mourning for her late husband and she now recognizes that she rushed into things with Danny.  She not only refuses his offer of marriage, but she breaks up with him.  And he can't react to her, he can barely say goodbye.  Then later he is depressed, and there are jokes about him contemplating suicide, mixed in with jokes about his idiocy!  I didn't find the Danny & Polly relationship the romance of the century, but they were sweet together, and this resolution of it feels awkward and contrived.  (Plus I didn't like Danny's fourth season girlfriends, but that's a later discussion.)  Maybe there was nowhere else to go with the Polly thread, but, while the Elaine thread started as badly as possible (with rape), it managed a moving ending.  This resolution leaves us with less than nothing.

The Major, Billy, Eunice, Dutch, and Saunders are absent.