It was another short week for the residents of Port Charles, but don't let the abbreviated episode count fool you — plenty of stuff still went down on General Hospital during the last batch of episodes, including the most delightful Friday cliffhanger we've had in some time. Let's dive in!
Gladys' Dangerous Game
The walls continued to close in on Gladys last week, as Sasha pursued the termination of her conservatorship and Selina texted from out of town with a reminder that her debt's coming due. With Sonny proving a less than fruitful source of information or funds, and her access to Sasha's fortune at risk, Gladys has plenty of reasons to be jumpy — but she was tossed an unexpected lifeline when it turned out that the doctor tasked with assessing Sasha's mental health is also a regular player at Selina's table.
You can't have a show like this without depending on coincidences once in a while, although I tend to think it's much better to do it as subtly as possible. At the moment, this development seems distractingly convenient, although I suppose there's every chance that Selina arranged for it to happen in order to game the outcome and preserve Gladys' ability to continue racking up huge gambling debts and then siphoning Sasha's assets to pay them off. With Sofia Mattsson visibly approaching maternity leave, I feel like this storyline has to hit some sort of tipping point within the next couple of weeks — I guess we'll find out more after Selina returns from her trip.
The main thing I think is missing from this storyline is any level of agency on Gladys' part — by which I mean that, like a whole bunch of villain-ish characters on the show, she's mostly presented as a person who's having stuff happen to them rather than a person who's faced with the consequences of their own actions. Gladys was long written as a money-grubbing character who always felt she was entitled to more no matter how much she was given, and I think it would have been very easy to make that the fuel for this story rather than having her develop a sudden gambling problem. Rather than showing her doing reprehensible things and only being wracked with guilt about it, why not have some fun with it? Really lean into her wildly situational morals? As it is, Selina is being written as the real heavy here, and as much as I love Lydia Look, I think the resulting balance prevents this story from living up to its full potential.
The only person Gladys seems comfortable being shitty to is Cody, who's about to become even more of a thorn in her side now that he's asked Sam — who in turn asked Spinelli — to reveal her as the crook she is. This is all partly fine, I guess, although anytime Spinelli gets mixed up in something like this (which is far too often for my tastes), we're usually looking at some sort of lightning-fast resolution that's chalked up to magical computer stuff. I'd much rather see Sam and Felicia putting on disguises to try and catch Gladys in the act.
Mason Jars Ava
It looks like we might finally be getting some consistent motion with this Austin/Mason business, which I'm glad for even though it took gluing Ava (and by extension Sonny) onto the story's lumpy backside in order to make it happen. After being ordered to use her co-parenting relationship with Sonny to dig up information about his involvement in the Pikeman deal, Ava stopped by the penthouse for another heart-to-heart with Nina, who remains comically guilt-wracked over her involvement in the SEC bringing charges against Carly and Drew. Nina, convinced that Sonny would be breaking up with her any minute, left her engagement ring on the mantel and darted off to the hospital to see him, leaving Ava conveniently all alone in the penthouse, free to snoop for Pikeman dirt.
There are so many more interesting directions that all of this could have gone in, but for the moment, I'm just happy to see Roger Howarth being given a little bit of something to do. Maura West, of course, can do absolutely no wrong, and I'm sure she'll sell the hell out of whatever's being slapped together, right up to and including Sonny inevitably threatening to kill Ava for the thousandth time. It just all feels like chewed gum right now, and my faith in the writers' willingness or ability to throw us a really compelling curveball here is very low.
As I apparently do quite often, I'm going to avoid dwelling on the likely quite lame resolution to all of these shenanigans and savor the untold possibilities while they still remain possible. Given that they've barely leveraged Austin's family ties to the GH of the '80s, let's just imagine that whoever's pulling Mason and Austin's strings is a character from that era, or at least related to them. Someone from Beatrice LeSeur's family? Grant Andrews? Someone connected to Celia Quartermaine? All of these possibilities are delightful to me, which means none of them are likely to happen. For now, a guy can dream.
Backgammon? Seriously?
In years past, I occasionally joked that what I really wanted was a GH spinoff that showed us all the kitchen-table conversations and day-to-day lives of the characters who largely lived offscreen, centering around weekly bridge games played by Monica, Audrey, Gail, and Lesley. What I got instead was a backgammon game between Liz and Finn.
I will say up front that while I'm a Michael Easton agnostic, and don't truly understand his intense and enduring popularity, I also don't dislike Finn to the extent that a lot of other viewers do. And as a viewer, I also don't really get all that invested in couples — I'm usually happy to see whatever pairing is currently happening, given that it tends to mean increased job security for the actors involved, but I'm not generally a shipper. All of which is to say that my hackles aren't raised by the Liz and Finn pairing; I recognize the validity of the opinions expressed by the Red Flag Brigade, but my real issue with all of this is that the tremendously talented, chemistry-with-a-wall Rebecca Herbst has been paired with a guy whose acting fallbacks seem to be smirking, whispering, and telling women they look pretty.
There's a lot of consternation surrounding the notion that the current GH regime seems to be trying to make Liz and Finn some kind of 21st-century Steve and Audrey, which is an idea that I can agree is offensive on its face…but also somewhat sensible in that one, it's fucking necessary to have characters who anchor that portion of the canvas, and two, the show has done such an abominable job of hanging onto legacy characters that there don't seem to be many other options.
Alan is dead. Tony is dead. Rick Webber is dead. Monica is offscreen. Tom Hardy has been in Africa since 1997. Steven Lars is in jail. Patrick and Robin are toking up in a drum circle in Berkeley. Between senseless character deaths, lack of writer interest, and parts not being recast, multiple generations of would-be Hardys have been hollowed out of the GH canvas, to the point where if the show actually actively wants a new Steve and Audrey, the pickings are very, very slim.
Anyway, he plays a doctor, she plays a nurse, and they've both been ABC-affiliated since the '90s, so…that's that, I guess? Also, if I have to choose, I'd rather watch them playing backgammon than humping.
Curtis Is Older
I support representation, I think Vernee Watson and Tabyana Ali are great, and I'm absolutely here for the Jordan/Zeke coupling and Portia interfering in her daughter's love life — so even though Curtis seems doomed to forever be written as a man born with a stick lodged several feet up his butt, I'm generally happy anytime the Ashford/Robinson clan gets a bunch of screentime. Between Curtis' birthday and TJ's presence at Ned's bedside (more on that in a bit), this was one of those weeks!
It was not, however, a week that led to a whole hell of a lot in terms of story being advanced. For the most part, these characters just had a bunch of blah blah blah around the Metro Court pool — Curtis and Trina getting a little closer after learning they're father and daughter; Marshall and Stella engaging in a bit of idle chit-chat; Marshall announcing he's moving out of Curtis and Portia's house; Portia being a delightful bitch to Spencer for no good reason; Zeke discovering he's just bumped uglies with his brother-in-law's ex-wife (and that she shared a smooch with said brother-in-law). Much as I tend to gauge a lot of this stuff on how much it moves story forward, there's also something to be said for scenes that merely depict people living, so I was totally fine with the amount of space these characters took up on the canvas this week, and also very happy to see a series of scenes that found Taggert sloppily working through his feelings regarding the paternity test.
That being said, it's been weeks since the WSB offered Curtis a job, and I continue to maintain that Jordan kissing Curtis is no kind of scandal worth keeping a secret over. I suspect the former is an iron being kept in the fire just in case Donnell Turner decides to take a hike, and I'm prepared to accept the depressing reality that Jordan and Curtis' kiss will eventually become some sort of major issue in the very slow reconciliation between Curtis and Portia. As I said last week, I'm absolutely here for Portia messing with Spencer and Trina. The rest of this is fine. It's fine! Let these characters hang out by the pool as long as they want. At least none of them are dumb enough to trip over a towel and break their brain.
From Ned to Ed
By and large, I think the current GH writers' room is far too timid, but credit where credit is due: Having Ned take a header into the pool, lose consciousness for a couple of days, and wake up as his musical alter ego Eddie Maine is a total cuckoo move that I totally applaud. Yes, you can poke holes in this story until your arms are tired — for one thing, Eddie was never a separate personality, so there's no reason to believe Ned would ever wake up from a traumatic brain injury thinking he is Eddie — but it's still more believable than Sonny's criminal enterprise, and it's also soapy as hell, so I'll cheerfully accept it. There are all kinds of possibilities here, and many if not most of them are a lot of fun to contemplate. Will Lois return? Will Eddie hop out of his hospital bed and go on tour for a few months, returning only to serve as the musical guest at Sonny and Nina's wedding where he remembers Nina is the one who tipped off the SEC? I don't know, but this is all soapy as hell, and if you don't like it, then you might not like daytime. The only thing that might have been wilder is if Ned woke up thinking he was Decker Moss.
The caveat here, of course, is that basically no one involved in this side of the story is on contract, so there's no real reason to believe that whatever happens here will be worthy of front-burner consideration. This is suboptimal! But for the moment, I'm very eager to see what happens next.
This and That
We saw a couple of potential seeds being planted for possible future storylines last week, the first of which was sown during the otherwise deadly dull conversation between Alexis and Diane at That One Mostly Unnamed Coffee Shop. After touching on Diane's relationship with Robert, they got into Alexis' professional ennui, which marks the second time in recent memory that Alexis has whined about only being the editor in chief of a major newspaper instead of the successful attorney she used to be.
What's the endgame here? I have no idea. As far as I'm concerned, it was a minor stroke of genius to make Alexis the insta-EIC of the Invader — it rescued the character from loose ends and put her back in a central position that sensibly involves her in virtually every major storyline. What's the point of giving her a career crisis when her career has barely begun? If this leads to her getting a job as one of Eddie Maine's backup singers, I might be persuaded. Otherwise, I can't see the point.
Elsewhere, Chase and Michael had an interminable best bros conversation at the hospital, the only useful takeaway from which was the subtle-as-an-anvil suggestion that Brook Lynn and Chase could end up being parents for real soon. As I've said before, I think the writers have done a splendid job of smothering and then tinkling all over the chemistry between Amanda Setton and Josh Swickard, so I don't really care what happens here. I only hope that if Brook Lynn gets pregnant, Tracy is still in town. (Can we keep her? Please?)
Corinthos Corner
Not much going on here last week, folks. Carly is still unwilling to turn on Sonny or Drew, Michael and Josslyn are still petulantly peeved, Willow is still turning up her adorable little button nose at Nina from her hospital bed, and Nina is still wringing her hands over the notion that Sonny will dump her for turning in Carly and Drew. The sole bit of anything new that came out of all this crap last week: Drew has committed to turning himself in and taking the rap for those stupid SEC charges. Much as I would love to see this largely useless character shuffle off to Pentonville, thus breaking up the most poisonously romance-free pairing the show has seen since Maxie and Peter, I'm sure something even sillier will come along before Cameron Mathison has to be offscreen for too long.
And that's the (abbreviated) week that was on General Hospital. As always, if you think I got anything really right or wrong, let me know in the comments!
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