Pacing is a common complaint among soap fans — specifically the argument that daytime dramas move too slowly in general. This is understandable, given that major storylines can take years to fully develop, and it's very easy to mock a show when you can lose track of it for weeks at a time, only to come back and feel like very little has changed. That being said, this complaint tends to ignore the fact that even a soap with a large cast is still basically focusing on a relatively small group of people in a series of confined spaces; if any head writer burned through plot at the pace some viewers claim to want, they'd run out of sensible plot points and character interactions in a couple of years, max. Frustrating as it can be, you really need storylines to dawdle on occasion.
All of which is to say that I'm mostly of the opinion that even when it feels like nothing is happening on one of these shows, there are still pleasures to be had in watching characters interact — and yet even for me, the last week of General Hospital was one that pretty much any viewer could safely skip. Some things happened, but they'll be remembered and relitigated for months to come. Maybe there's a real method to the writers' madness here, but at the moment, it feels like they screwed up by not having a major storyline waiting in the wings as soon as Victor was foiled in Greenland.
Well. While GH spins its wheels, let's look back at the little bit of ground it covered last week.
Queen Tracy
At one point last week, Tracy described herself as something like "simply a delight wherever I go," and truer words were never spoken. The GH canvas is currently heavy with hand-wringing mopes, which makes it even more of a breath of fresh air whenever Tracy breezes back to town — any given scene is a fantastic opportunity for her to hold a delightfully sarcastic mirror up to every other character in the room. She was far and away the biggest highlight of the week for me, even though I currently don't really care about any of the storylines she's involved in.
Tracy started the week by meeting Chase for an ostensibly pleasant lunch at the Metro Court, only to lay into him for breaking up with Brook Lynn — and when Gregory feebly tried to intervene, she put him in his place too. She spent the next several days holed up at the Quartermaine mansion, where she drolly observed Chase and Brook Lynn's reunion (complete with Finn hoisting a Say Anything-style speaker over his head to accompany Chase's serenade) and goaded a sputtering Ned as he continued to insist he didn't turn in Carly and Drew to the SEC.
Again, I don't really have anything invested in either of these storylines. Brook Lynn and Chase had a cute thing going back when they were playing house with "their" baby, but months of contrived obstacles have muted their once-sparkling chemistry for me. I suppose whatever Tracy wants Brook Lynn to do at Deception will be the next thing that threatens to come between these two? Whatever. Meanwhile, watching this SEC storyline play out is starting to feel even more painful than actually being investigated by the real SEC. No matter which angle we're shown on any given day — Ned protesting his innocence, Carly and Drew scheming, Nina fretting, Sonny thinking it's all about him — it all feels awfully pointless.
And this is what makes Tracy such a welcome addition to the mix, because if the audience thinks characters are behaving like morons, you can bet she will too — and she'll tell them to their faces. In theory, I'm extremely here for Tracy screwing with Deception and secretly engineering the SEC's investigation into the dumbest insider trading in the history of the world; in practice, I suspect both of these will play out in ways that leave something to be desired. Eventually, Tracy will have to do something besides swan around town snarking at people, but for the moment, it's a lot of fun to watch.
It's a Crewl Bummer
Despite our pleas for mercy, that silly SEC saga seems destined to hog the spotlight in the weeks to come. It's incredibly frustrating because from a certain point of view, this has all the makings of a solid umbrella storyline involving a nicely eclectic group of characters — but because it's all rooted in Carly buying a bunch of stock to help her Large Adult Son and dopily self-righteous boyfriend, it never had a chance.
Put another way, there wasn't any scheming here, just the inept bumbling of characters who are being written as inhumanly stupid. As people keep pointing out, Carly is absolutely guilty of insider trading, and this isn't even an example of a character doing the wrong thing for the right reasons — she just barged in and tried to help the soon-to-be-aborted Aurora/ELQ merger over Drew and Michael's objections. Unless you're a hardcore Carly fan, there's no reason to root for her here, and even less reason to care about what happens. The same goes for Sonny thinking this is all a DOJ ploy to get Carly to flip on him — we've seen this kind of thing before, and it never goes anywhere. And I'm all for more of Ned and Olivia, but they've been having the same conversation since all this started, and it wasn't remotely interesting or believable the first time. I'm a little more invested in witnessing the fallout from Sonny inevitably finding out that Nina's the one who dropped a dime on those two dumbos, but that's mainly because it'll mean the end of Nina fretting over her secret.
The sole glimmer of fleeting interest in all this is the hilarious thought of Carly and Drew trying to discredit Ned by digging up dirt on Tracy or blackmailing her or something. Even on their best day, Tracy would make a light snack of those two; as they're currently being written, they're even less of a threat. I'm sure this is going to play out in ways that'll piss me off and likely lead to Tracy leaving town again, but for the moment, I have my fingers crossed for at least a week or two of Tracy playing with her would-be blackmailers as a cat would play with a three-legged, brain-dead mouse.
Sasha Quiero Cody Bell
In a desperate attempt to get herself out from under her $85,000 debt to Selina, Gladys sashayed into Sonny's office to try and dig up information while making a show of asking him to invest in Deception. She came up empty on both counts, but she did spot Dex being handed an envelope full of cash — a tidbit that convinced Selina to knock a tiny amount off Gladys' total and give her an extra week to pay off the rest (with 30 percent interest, of course). Gladys' only option now is to siphon that money out of Sasha's accounts and hope she isn't caught.
Sasha, meanwhile, was suitably impressed by the news of Cody's chivalrous threat to streak across the studio in order to save her from the nefarious Haven de Havilland, which led to a sweet little nothing of a conversation between Sasha and Cody at Kelly's. She's still unwilling to believe that Gladys framed him for the attempted theft of the bracelet, but she wants to see where their friendship goes — which would seem to be nowhere in the short term, given that Sofia Mattsson appears to be a few weeks from maternity leave. Even still, there's some spark between these characters, and given the skeletons Cody has in his closet AND the deeply dumb grift he's in the midst of trying to pull on the WSB, there seems to be no shortage of star-crossed potential here.
Unfamiliar Faces at Alexis' House
As most GH viewers are very well aware, the show recently recast Kristina and Molly. I'm trying to restrict this column to the stuff we see onscreen, so I'm not going to talk at length about the reasons for these decisions — suffice it to say they let go of Lexi Ainsworth because they wanted to go in a different direction with the character, and we have a new Molly because Haley Pullos decided to go in a different direction on the freeway. The end result for viewers is that the new versions of both characters arrived pretty much back-to-back, which led to several big scenes for Alexis and her daughters in which two of them were being played by brand new actors.
This kind of thing is always a big ask, and all four of these actors deserve some credit — Kate Mansi and Holiday Mia Kriegel for diving in; Nancy Lee Grahn and Kelly Monaco for making the most of an admittedly tough sell. That being said, this was all a bit of a shrug for me; Kristina getting huffy in response to Sam's eminently reasonable advice felt strained, as did Molly's wailing reaction to Kristina having faith that her little sister would be able to handle her endometriosis. The redeeming moments were the quieter ones, like Alexis and Molly having a heart to heart on the front steps. It's going to be unavoidably weird to watch a couple of long-underserved fan favorite characters get increased screentime with new actors in the roles, but there's plenty of potential in Kristina's shelter project and Molly's diagnosis. I hope it ends up being tapped.
Stella!
While Molly sought comfort from her mother and sisters, poor TJ was left reeling at home. He's a doctor and enough of an evolved human being to know Molly's diagnosis is A) not life-threatening and B) not at all about him, but he still couldn't help but beat himself up for being blissfully unaware of her condition. If their conversation ends up being Pullos' last scene as Molly, she went out on a high note; I thought the dialogue was eminently believable and both performances were completely on point.
Also well-written and well-acted: the subsequent series of scenes that saw Aunt Stella arrive at Molly and TJ's apartment just in time to offer her great-nephew some advice. Action-heavy plots and location shoots are exciting and everything, but the most basic building block of any soap will always be simple everyday conversations, especially ones taking place across generations. Although Tajh Bellow hasn't been given a whole hell of a lot to do since taking over the role of TJ in 2021, he's certainly capable of carrying scenes when asked to do so, and Vernee Watson is great regardless of whether Stella's being written as a doddering old woman or a magical advice dispenser. This was all pretty perfect.
Curtis Comes Home
Elsewhere on the Ashford family tree, we saw Curtis and Jordan talking over their sudden smooch at the Savoy, coming to no immediate conclusions other than the obvious one: Curtis needs to figure out what he wants. After getting some advice from Drew during a workout at the constantly all-but-abandoned Volonino's Gym, Curtis decided he's willing to give things another shot with Portia and announced he'll be moving back home. (Into the guest room, but still.)
The rub here, of course, is that hardly a day goes by without Curtis loudly proclaiming his torrid love affair with the truth. He divorced Jordan because she wasn't honest with him about aspects of her investigation into Cyrus' organization, and he walked out on his marriage to Portia because she neglected to inform him that he might have fathered Trina 20-odd years ago. This puts the writers in a pickle: Curtis should by all rights tell Portia that he and Jordan came close to hitting the sack, but if he does there's no drama, and if he doesn't, he's a raging hypocrite on top of being increasingly insufferable.
It's also hard for me to understand why Curtis and Jordan didn't do the deed. As it is, all they did was kiss, which hardly seems like the kind of thing Portia would get hung up on at the expense of saving her marriage. Aside from further complicating things between Jordan and Portia, and giving Curtis another reason to look constipated, it's hard for me to understand what the writers are doing here, or how any of this will factor into the results of Trina's paternity test.
Corinthos Corner
Last and least, we have Port Charles' bantam don and his perpetually front-burnered brood. The big story remains Michael's decision not to contact the FBI with Dex's footage of Sonny accepting the Pikeman shipment, which has left Dex trapped undercover in Sonny's organization and Joss feuding with Michael while trying to get Sonny to fire Dex.
In theory, there isn't anything wrong with any of this — it's just the type of intractable conflict that soapy goodness depends on — but we've been down this road with this group of characters so many times that there's no reason to think it'll lead anywhere except right back to the status quo for everyone. GH wants to treat Sonny like a hero while keeping him as dangerous as the worst villain, and they've staunchly refused to let him evolve for decades; stories like this always end with him being forgiven for everything and held up as a paragon of virtue while whichever characters had the audacity to be upset with him are forced to apologize.
Playing by those well-established rules, Nina is pre-emptively nailing herself to the cross she'll be forced to bear for telling Martin to rat out Carly and Drew to the SEC — but she's also developing a contingency plan in order to keep that fat rock on her finger and make it down the aisle with Sonny after his surprise proposal. While the Drewfus twofus are plotting to take down Ned through Tracy, Nina's plotting to make Drew think Carly's tempted to flip on him — and she's doing it by going through Olivia, who's a vulnerable target now that her friendship with Carly is being tested by her marriage to Ned.
As with the Pikeman stuff, if any of this had been built on a better foundation, it could be really fun to watch. None of these characters are any fun right now, though — the scheming that's going on is of the mildest variety, and no one is really out to get anyone else. Carly and Drew just seem indignant in the face of consequences for their actions, while Nina's purely petrified that Sonny will find out she (rightly) turned in his ex-wife and her boyfriend for a crime they're totally guilty of committing. Carly and Nina should be giving us Dorian and Viki energy; instead, they're giving us Elmo and Rocco.
Finally there's Willow, who closed out the week in her hospital bed, hooked up to a bag of tomato soup while looking out at the spine-chilling smiles of her nincompoop husband and their awful extended family. Here's to a fast and full recovery so we can finally put this long nightmare behind us.
Comments
Post a Comment