General Hospital villain Peter August has met his long overdue demise. After dragging this story out for years, his ending wasn't the grand event that one would have expected. But it was an ending and at this point that's all that really matters.
"It doesn't lessen everything we lost." Liz's reaction to the news of Peter's death probably mirrors my feelings the most. While I'm glad that Peter is finally gone, I find myself with more of a feeling of numbness than joy. This awful character is no longer but the damage is still there.
Peter August was a character born out of weird fan fiction. When Anna confessed that she had Faison's baby, it was quite the shocker. I admit I was initially intrigued. How was that possible? Anna would never have sex with her stalker. Did some sort of bizarre experiment occur? I wanted to know.
Unfortunately, the explanation involved a series of disturbing rewrites that told the audience Faison's twisted obsession with Anna was based on a mixture of unrequited love and sexual assault, making Faison the victim. The set up rewrote the history of one of GH's iconic heroines, not only upsetting fans by destroying something they held sacred but disrespecting decades of work from cast and crew who built the character of Anna Devane.
Surprise offspring is nothing new to soaps and most of the time these stories are quite successful. The key is to find the wiggle room in the character's history where they could have had the child. Anna has missing years in which she could have had a baby but those years were not used. There is also the long theorized "Tanker Baby". Instead, we were told that Anna was not a virgin when she was with Robert and that she had drugged and raped Faison. Fans will go along with a story if it's good. This was not good. The writers did eventually correct this - saying that Anna was implanted with false memories and her evil twin sister was Peter's mother instead - but it took them awhile to do this.
Peter's romance didn't connect with the audience any better. His involvement in Nathan's death was always a bit suspect. A love affair with Nathan's widow could have been scandalous in a sexy way but Peter and Maxie's relationship never had the forbidden love feel to it. While she was initially resentful towards him regarding her husband's death, Maxie got over it pretty quickly. She defended him to anyone who dared to question his sketchy behavior but he never really had to work to earn her devotion.
The courtship between Peter and Maxie was also written very immaturely. Their first time making love occurred after playing board games and Laura and Curtis had "the talk" with them. Peter fell into the role of an innocent with Maxie introducing him to a series of first times. The son of Caesar Faison was never intended to be that way.
I was glad when GH stopped trying to make Peter the misunderstood hero and restored him to his original state of villainy. The constant rewriting was an obvious clue that the writers were aware that this character wasn't working. He didn't have the steamy chemistry with his leading lady to turn him into a romantic anti-hero. He wasn't interesting enough to be a charming boy next door. A villain that the audience could love to hate was really the only option to make this character work.
However, the majority of the audience didn't love to hate him so much as just hated him. Wes Ramsey's wild interpretation certainly didn't help but the writing was just insulting. If you want your villain to be brilliant and one step ahead of everyone, write a smart villain. Don't dumb down everyone else just so he can be smarter in comparison. Anna fans were already upset about what was done to her history. Making her an idiot wasn't going to help the matter.
In addition to what was done to the characters of Anna and Maxie, Peter killed off two of the show's most popular characters with very little fallout. After shooting Franco in the heart and leaving him to die, his family was given no justice. Liz was not allowed to grieve or follow through on any vengeance. The writers gave us the shocking moment of Franco's murder, permanently destroying a popular couple, only to give Peter more story. Jason's loved ones got a bit more from his death but his two most popular pairings - Sam and Liz - still didn't get much.
The news that Ramsey was out at GH broke in June of 2021 but it took nearly a year for his exit story to play out. During the time, it seemed like a lot of effort was being put into a murder mystery. Ms. Wu had Brad poison Peter at Sonny's request and then...nothing. Peter hired Martin to argue that he killed Franco in self-defense then Franco's family was never even told about it to have a reaction and the story was dropped. It was a surprise when in the end it was Felicia in Switzerland with the tire iron.
I'm okay with Felicia being the one to finally take down Peter. I wanted someone who is a hero to do it and she certain is that. Peter did harm her husband and daughter so she had motivation. She was also fairly removed for the story. Perhaps someone more neutral was what was needed considering the anger a lot of the fanbases have at this point.
Bad stories happen. Soap fans are aware that not everything will be a masterpiece but we also don't expect to have to suffer through major clunkers for years. We trust that the showrunners will cut their losses when a story fails. It's not an unreasonable expectation for the viewers to have. The fact that GH continued to spend so much time and resources on this disaster will remain one of the genre's greatest mysteries.
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