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Welcome to another edition of Critical Diagnosis, fellow GH viewers! It feels like there's been a LOT of Soap Twitter discourse regarding the current state of the show lately, and for good reason — whatever your reasons for watching might be, I think most of us can agree that there's a lot of room for improvement right now. That being said, I thought last week's episodes were a little tighter, with some genuinely heartfelt moments and others that hinted at future storylines that could be truly interesting. Let's dig in and see what went down.
Metro Court Shooting: The Aftermath
This was one of those weeks that largely revolved around the fallout from one or two major events, with minor bits of action taking place on the margins. The main event, of course, was the aftermath of the shooting at the Metro Court, which left Curtis fighting for his life while Sonny and Anna tried to figure out which of them was the intended target.
The way all this has been sketched out thus far is really a case of the show giving and the show taking away. While I continue to believe it's deeply silly that Anna is suddenly Public Enemy No. 1 because of some headlines about stuff she did more than 40 years ago, and I think it's at least faintly misogynistic that various writing regimes have thought it necessary to torture this character for her crimes all over again, Finola Hughes is flawless as always and I'm not mad about a storyline that threatens to pit Anna against some shadowy adversary from her past. Similarly, although quite a bit of Curtis' medical drama was pretty corny, it also led to some well-written, well-acted moments between the other members of the Ashford/Robinson clan.
To recap: After Curtis was hauled off to the hospital with a bullet in his back, Dante and the PCPD searched the shooter's room, leading to a deeply hilarious set of scenes in which an entire goddamn SWAT team somehow missed a rifle that Dante found simply by peeking behind a couch. (They don't call him Detective for nothing.) The rifle in question is an untraceable "ghost gun," but Dante traced it anyway — and it turns out it was stolen from WSB custody after being impounded during an earlier operation.
Despite the fact that the would-be killer did a pretty sloppy job, firing at a table and into the pool and only hitting an innocent bystander via ricochet, Anna latched on to the gun's chain of custody as all the proof she needs that the shooter was aiming for her, however poorly — and she's determined to draw them out by using herself as bait. I don't love that Sonny is involved in this — if we really have to relitigate Anna's WSB/DVX past, I'd much rather have Robert helping her through it — but thus far, his presence has been at least partly mitigated by Dante, who's great with Anna and tends to take a refreshingly light touch with his father. (I loved the moment when Sonny promised that the next guy he sent to watch Anna would be "silent and invisible," and Dante quipped "Maybe you should send a ninja," earning a glare from Sonny.)
So who's the shooter, and are they really gunning for Anna? Selfishly, I'd prefer it if Sonny had been the intended target due to his involvement in the Pikeman deal, if only because it'd give a character or two the opportunity to rake him over the coals for irresponsibly and stupidly loitering at a public pool after barely escaping an attempt on his life mere weeks ago. But if this is really going to be an Anna-centric story, I worry that the current regime's apparently rather loose grasp of GH history will lead it down a series of silly dead ends. In theory, there are a number of ways they could invent a new threat while leveraging Anna's connections with classic characters from days gone by — It'd be cuckoo good times if the shooter was an escaped Grant Putnam, delirious with rage after reading the stories of Anna's double agent past and thinking about her walking free while he's been cooped up in an asylum for the last 35 years — but I'm not sure these folks have that kind of fun in mind.
Curtis, meanwhile, spent hours in surgery after a bullet ended up lodged near his spine, which led to some sweet moments between various members of the family. I enjoyed the conversation Stella and Marshall were having when they got the call from Portia, and was also happy to have both of those characters serving as talk-tos for Trina throughout the week. Less enjoyable? Curtis' heavenly picnic with his mother, who briefly tried getting him to help his brother Tommy fix her car before setting him free to return to his life among the living. These were far from the cheesiest afterlife scenes I've ever seen on a daytime drama, but stuff like this rarely if ever lands the way it's supposed to, and for me, the whole thing amounted to little more than a wig workout for the actor playing Curtis' mom.
Anyway, while they were waiting for word on Curtis' condition, Molly and Kristina found the time to fight over Kristina's hasty offer to serve as a surrogate for Molly and TJ. The writers have historically tried way too hard to create a bickering dynamic between the Davis women, and they were working overtime here. While it's true that "I'll be their surrogate" isn't something a person should blurt out, and it's easy to believe that Molly and TJ might be more prone to lashing out than usual while under the stress of Molly's endometriosis and Curtis' shooting, this all felt like a lot of hot air to me. Alexis is the sole voice of reason so far, sensibly pointing out that having a baby is a big deal no matter what, and the conversation between her and Sonny on the subject was handled well in spite of the jarring continuity error of Maurice Benard's ever-changing dye job between scenes. Still, it's difficult to understand what the writers are planning to do with any of this, or what the dramatic payoff could possibly be.
One fundamental issue here is that Kristina isn't a very well-defined character — for years now, she's basically been the Corinthos/Davis equivalent of Tom Hardy, a legacy offspring who could and should be a cornerstone of the show if only some writer, any writer, could figure out who the hell they're supposed to be. As currently written, Kristina is a bar manager who's opening a shelter for LGBTQIA+ youth and spending her free time getting screamed at about what how self-centered she is. This isn't a lot to go on.
Gaslighting Sasha
If you're a regular reader of this column, you know I've bitched repeatedly about the way the show's had Gladys screwing Sasha over while being blandly wracked with guilt over it. Well, sound the alarms, because all of a sudden, Gladys has gone from whining "I don't want to steal from my dead son's wife, but I have no choiiiiiiice" to sashaying around town in designer duds while twirling an invisible cartoon mustache. It's a very sudden change and I'm not sure it makes much sense in the context of everything else we've seen onscreen, but it's more interesting to me as a viewer, so I'll take it.
Anyway. As previously reported, Gladys has teamed up with her poker buddy Doctor Montague to make sure Sasha's conservatorship is extended, with the good doctor secretly slipping Sasha some pills that are supposed to be sedatives but are actually a mystery drug that interacts with her antidepressants in unpredictable ways. For example, she spent a good portion of the week bouncing off the walls in a wildly manic state that only seemed to wear off once Chase arrested her for shoplifting outfits from Logan's.
"Wait," you might be saying. "Sasha is loaded. Why would she steal?" Well, reader, it's because in addition to turning her into a toddler on a sugar high, the pills also apparently made her think the department store had a deal with Deception that allowed her to take whatever she wanted? And also made her forget that she put the clothes in her bag and never bothered to tell someone who worked there that she was taking them?
I would like some of these pills, and I would like to use them to make myself forget about this storyline.
It's all very silly, but let's focus on saying thanks for small favors — specifically that at least this storyline finally appears to be going somewhere, and that the somewhere in question involves Selina. As you no doubt remember, Cody has been moonlighting at Selina's card table as some sort of magical player who's mystically able to alter the flow of the game and guarantee Ms. Wu's profits — powers he abandoned in order to mark the deck and intentionally lose big to Gladys and Doctor Montague. Selina is no dummy, so she caught him and had her muscle rough him up until Cody admitted he did it in order to get fired. Selina denied his request and sentenced him to a beating, which he weaseled his way out of by offering her a cut of the settlement he stands to gain by suing the WSB for the loss of the Ice Princess necklace.
Two notes here. One, it's very funny to me that Cody lowballed the amount he's planning on getting out of the Bureau, which will doubtless end poorly for him. Two, as we've discussed here before, Cody has no case against the Bureau; unless the writers have their WSB dial set to "comically inept" for the remainder of the year, there's no way in the world that this lawsuit will proceed without Cody's true family lineage being revealed. He's a dead man walking in so many ways.
That'll happen later, though. For now, he's actively trying to be a good friend to Sasha, and he also seems to be the only person who sees that her pills are making her act goofy. He's clearly destined to be her white knight during what has got to be Gladys' exit story, which is fine with me; I think Josh Kelly has settled into this role well, and I don't mind Cody and Sasha as a unit. And now that we know Mac is staking out Selina's game, I'm crossing my fingers for a real, honest-to-gosh story revolving around the Wu crime family. (P.S. Where the hell is Brad?)
Deception in Pine Valley
While most of the rest of the canvas was preoccupied with the Metro Court shooting, Felicia and Lucy scampered off to Pine Valley in order to meet with an attorney who could potentially be an unwilling source of information in their Martin investigation. That attorney, of course, is none other than Jackson Montgomery, who popped up for a few minutes and a few lines while Felicia used his secretary's absence as cover for some (ultimately fruitless) rooting around in his files. Although that search came up empty, there's also a safe in Jackson's office, and Felicia thinks she can crack it; we'll see where all that leads in the next batch of episodes.
I know some folks are allergic to this sort of crossover action, but I don't mind it at all, especially when it involves characters who aren't already eating up a ton of screentime. I actively enjoy Lucy and Felicia together, and like a lot of you, I still have a lot of nostalgia for All My Children and One Life to Live, so I'll probably always be intrigued by this kind of thing. The borders around any soap's onscreen world tend to be pretty limited and non-porous, so stuff like this almost always feels like a breath of fresh air to me — even if Walt Willey has already told us that we won't be seeing Jackson more than a handful of times, at least for now.
Also fun: the scenes between Anna and Martin last week. On Valentin's orders, Martin followed Anna on her clandestine mission to scope out the Metro Court shooter's room, only to catch a face full of hotel door for his trouble. The conversation that followed was great — mainly because Finola Hughes and Michael E. Knight are always entertaining, but also because it advanced this whole "Marty's hiding something" story in a meaningful way. Although Anna hilariously refuted Martin's "you're close with Lucy" by reframing it as "I have been in close proximity to Lucy for periods of time," she still knows enough about Lucy's frame of mind to authoritatively set Martin straight regarding his girlfriend's true feelings about marriage. (Short version: She would love to get married again, no matter what she says, and also if they do get married, Martin stands to lose the $50,000 a month he's getting from his "sadistic and rich" third ex-wife.)
Corporate espionage stories on soaps pretty much always hinge on bits of "because business" magic that undermine the stakes, but for now, this is my favorite GH storyline — I like the characters involved, I like the Pine Valley detour of it all, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing whatever the show has in mind for Martin's third ex.
Everything Else
We've covered the major stuff already, but a few other things merit passing mention, starting with Spencer and Esme lightly bonding after taking a parenting class at Portia's suggestion. The co-parents' conversation was interrupted by Joss, who sent Spencer scurrying off to be by Trina's side before lighting into Esme for being a shitty person with psychotic parents. (As an added bonus, Joss also told Trina she thinks Spencer is "intimidated" by Dex, har de har har.)
There could be an interesting story somewhere in all of this, but we aren't seeing it right now. Aside from however you might feel about the sticky moral wicket that arises from a storyline that effectively sidelines one half of the show's hottest couple in the name of feebly redeeming a villain via amnesia, this simply isn't very interesting — as the mighty Wubsy pointed out, a co-parenting story in the dead of summer is really just a colossally lame move on the part of the writers. They should have killed the amnesia idea with fire and instead have had Esme skedaddle with Ace after giving birth, thereby giving Trina and Spencer a great adventure before Nicholas Alexander Chavez takes his upcoming hiatus from the show. He could have disappeared while searching for them, and done so in a way that left Trina in peril — further adding to Portia's belief that he's bad for her daughter, and giving her more of a reason to surreptitiously mess with them once everyone is back in Port Charles. The way all this is happening is just boring. It lacks spark.
Speaking of sparks that should but do not exist, here's Liz and Finn! Our dreary duo were talking about something or other when the Metro Court shooting happened, and because it was apparently decided that Portia is the only doctor in GH history who should be forcibly recused from a loved one's medical emergency, Finn and Liz jumped in. As you may recall, Finn is an infectious disease specialist, not a trauma surgeon, but that didn't stop him from brilliantly assessing the location of the gunshot wound ("it's in his back") and sticking around until the EMTs arrived. Afterward, these two alleged lovebirds wandered off to the park, where they talked about the state of their relationship before treating viewers to the daytime equivalent of that one video showing Tom Brady kissing his son on the lips for an uncomfortably long time.
It was gross! But it was not the grossest thing that happened on GH last week. That honor goes to the depressingly dopey interlude that took place at the Quartermaine gatehouse after Sasha was dragged off to the PCPD. Remember how Michael and Willow were planning a trip to Paris? Only now she can't go on account of being in remission? Well, Michael and Wiley tried to make it better by bringing Paris to her, specifically by slapping a beret on Michael, giving Wiley a fake mustache and a goddamn accordion, and handing Willow a plate of French food. Sacre bleu!
In general, I'm in favor of slice-of-life stuff like this, particularly in the aftermath of a character's brush with death. It's very hard to write compelling scenes around recovery from a life-threatening illness, so anything that doesn't entail a character returning instantly to normal and never mentioning it again is a win in my book. (Along the same lines, I was also a big fan of Marshall telling Stella he'd been to therapy to help him with his grief following Epiphany's death.) In theory, there isn't anything wrong with Michael and Willow talking about how they can't have sex for a while during her recovery, but in practice, there is so little romantic chemistry between these characters that I reject every opportunity to think about them in bed together (and for that matter, I refuse to believe Michael wants to think about it either). Whatever the writers have planned for this couple going forward, I pray it's more entertaining than this.
And that's the week that was on GH, folks! As always, I welcome your responses, and I'll see you back here next week.
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