I try to be as even-handed as possible in my criticism of the show in this column, partly because I think it's important to acknowledge the tremendous difficulty associated with keeping a series going five days a week, year in and year out; no daytime drama fires on all cylinders all (or even most of) the time. The last year has been particularly trying for General Hospital — between the writers' strike and all manner of other behind-the-scenes turmoil (including several painful deaths), some significant ups and downs were unavoidable.
All of which is to say that I have a lot of patience for this show. But when it comes to rolling one's eyes and cursing the powers that be, I doubt any long-term GH viewer emerges unscathed, and I am no exception. Last week was particularly eyeroll-worthy, and although I suspect it probably had a lot to do with the looming change in writers, that doesn't really help when the onscreen product feels so uninspired. As always, I'm going into this column without any real detailed plan for what I'm going to say, but if you depend on Critical Diagnosis for a positive perspective on our show, conscience compels me to give you fair warning: I may let you down this time.
Hello, Judas
Given that it ate up time during every single episode last week, our only choice is to lead off with the Dex and Sonny Show, which ended up going exactly where we all thought it would — specifically, to Brick finding Michael's wire transfers to Dex's "secret" account, fairly assuming this meant he was on the take and behind the attempts on Sonny's life, and running to Sonny with that information.
So far, so expected. But I can't remember a mob story on this show that didn't descend into abject silliness at some point, and things got real comical real quick. After having Frank pull Dex from guard duty at Ava's gallery, he had them all driven out to the [giggle] pine barrens, where a couple of henchmen gently held Dex by the arms while Sonny screamed accusations and a fog machine puttered away offstage. Ever noble, Dex refused to tell Sonny who'd been paying him, only vowing that they weren't paying him to take Sonny down; in response, only got more agitated.
Meanwhile, Brick stopped by the Metro Court to see Carly, who was working out of Michael's office because Nina invented a plumbing problem in order to shut down the Crimson offices for a few days. In all of 45 seconds, Carly figured out that Sonny was off with Dex, badgered Brick for their location, and sped out to the [chortle] pine barrens just in time to have her closing car door serve as a distraction in the moments before Sonny planned to put a bullet in Dex.
Carly went running up and told Sonny he was making a huge mistake. Sonny told her she didn't know what she was talking about. Carly responded by playing her last card and claiming that she was the one who'd been paying Dex — which resulted in the only legitimately entertaining part of the whole exchange, which was Sonny scoffing at that notion and pointing out that Carly couldn't afford to part with the amount of money that had been transferred to Dex. At this point, it didn't take long for Sonny to figure out that she had to be covering for someone… and that the someone in question had to be a member of their family… and therefore it had to be Michael. After screaming about betrayal for a couple of minutes, he stalked off and left Dex and Carly in the [studio audience laughs] pine barrens.
Okay, so this was all very stupid, but I will say that I'm at least happy about Michael's plan to take out Sonny coming to light — I legitimately feared it'd go the way of Faith Rosco pushing pregnant Elizabeth down those stairs. I tend to find Sonny and Michael more or less equally annoying, but conflict between the two of them brings out some of the few interesting facets in each character; if the show ever trusted viewers' intelligence enough to really put them seriously at odds for a prolonged period of time, that could be an interesting story.
I don't think that's what we're going to get here, though. Michael quickly went to Sonny's penthouse, hat and balls in hand, and sucked up to him while Sonny had a(n admittedly justified) temper tantrum. If the emotions were understandable, the dialogue was insipid, with Sonny playing the "how do you think your sisters would feel if their father was in prison" card and Michael asking Sonny if he wanted to end up completely alone. In the end, Michael left the penthouse, at which point Ava emerged and admitted she'd heard the whole conversation. This led to an admittedly rather sweet few moments, with Sonny admitting he was hurt by what happened — and troubled by the implication of what it meant for his organization if Dex wasn't the inside man. As he put it, "There's a leak in my ship."
Unfortunately for Dex, his next move wasn't as simple as just going back to Sonny's organization — and as Ava pointed out, if Sonny cut him loose, he'd have a lot of value to Sonny's enemies on the open market. For Joss, the solution was simple — the two of them just needed to get the hell out of town together — but Dex refused, pointing out that it'd mean giving up her friends, family, and future as a doctor. Instead, she convinced him to let her go to Sonny and try to talk some sense into him; unfortunately, she headed for Sonny's just as Sonny was on his way to Dex's.
While Joss was at Sonny's place, trying to convince Ava to call Sonny and make him answer the phone, Sonny was presenting Dex with his first and last offer: Either agree to give up his identity and start a new life far from Port Charles, or die. Although Dex initially (and hilariously) erupted in cries of "life isn't worth living without Joss," Sonny eventually convinced him that he and Joss would never be safe from Sonny's enemies unless he left town, changed his name, and never looked back — so by the time Joss showed up at Dex's, Dex was already gone, with only a letter and his dogtags left behind. Her face slick with tears, Joss screamed at Sonny that she hated him, she'd never forgive him, and he was a liar and a criminal. Saying only "I know," he left her alone in the apartment.
While all THIS was going on, Anna, Jordan, and Dante were busy trying to piece together more information about whoever purchased those illegal arms from O'Neil when a call came in informing Dante that Olivia Jerome had been murdered in the midst of a prison transport. After Anna identified the body, Dante handed her the gun found near the scene of the crime, upon which she found a unique marking the WSB puts on every weapon it confiscates. Two plus two equals four, and all this equals a scenario in which the person who tried to shoot Sonny at the Metro Court all those months ago is the same person who shot Olivia Jerome point blank in the back of the head. Of course, this fails to account for why the attempted hit on Sonny was such a sloppy job, but whatever — the pieces are now in place for an enforcer-less Sonny to be more vulnerable than ever just as a serial killer of mob kingpins has him in their sights.
Given that we know Jason is headed back to town, we also know this can go in one of several directions, and I'm pretty sure all of them are stupid. The most obvious path would seem to be that Jason is behind all this, which would theoretically be interesting but would in practice be the last desperate act of a show that incorrectly believes it needs a character even though he's long since run out of narrative road. This could also be the work of a pissed-off Morgan, which I guess might be kind of cool even though it'd involve yet another undoing of a relatively conclusive death and might also herald the return of a deeply obnoxious actor. Or it could be none of the above, and end with Dex and Jason uniting to save Sonny from himself and his would-be assassin.
Whatever happens, I think I can say with a significant degree of confidence that I do not care how it turns out. No matter how much shoe polish they slather on Maurice Benard's head, nothing can disguise how incredibly played out all this is. Much as I dislike Sonny as a character, I do think he has some utility on the canvas — I just don't think any of it relates to the notion of him as a tragic antihero who gets to murder people while whining about his pain and having 90 percent of the other characters on the show praise him for his "code and principles." In 30-plus years, this character has failed to evolve in any meaningful way. Everything he does is boring. Even his romance with Nina is only engaging in comparison to the chewed cud that was his dead tired relationship with Carly. We have zero hope that anything will ever change Sonny, or that any storyline will ever end in anything other than a return to the status quo. Maurice Benard's cultlike popularity has allowed GH to ignore these glaring problems for a long time, but changing viewing patterns aren't the only reason the show's ratings have dropped so consistently for so long. Sonny is a cancer on GH, and this long-ass, rock-stupid storyline is only the latest evidence.
And hey, speaking of played-out characters, let's go back to Jason. Much as I might beg for it not to happen, it's already clear that the show is laying track for his return, starting with Dante giving Sam a fucking leather jacket for Valentine's Day because she mentioned that she wanted to get back into riding her motorcycle. I know this couple has some detractors who find them boring, and that's a criticism I guess I really can't argue, but nothing could possibly be more boring than Sam reuniting with Jason, up to and including a solid 36 minutes of opening and closing credits. Last week, we also saw Danny picked up by the cops while drinking with his friends, followed by two days of Sam fretting over the possibility that he inherited his parents' adrenaline-chasing DNA.
F;aldkfja;dlkfjaasdf;lsdkjf. Look, first of all, Jason was barely ever any kind of father to his children; second, while Sam and Dante's domestic bliss might not produce regularly scintillating drama, it's a damn sight more identifiable than Sam sitting at home and biting her lip while Jason clomps off to shoot someone. All of this smells like a show that's petrified it's about to be canceled. I'm sure a few cast members are going to lose their jobs over Steve Burton's unwarranted return, and I can't deny that some branches could stand to be pruned from the GH tree, but boy am I dreading whatever's about to happen. (I will very happily take all this back if the show ends up giving us legitimately entertaining stuff we haven't already seen dozens of times over.)
Searching with Cyrus
I could probably just bullet-point everything else that happened on the show last week, but let's keep going and turn our focus to Laura, who spent the entire week in her apartment with Kevin. Heeding Martin's urging, the two of them have decided to proceed with a legal adoption of Ace, and if they weren't talking about that together, then they were entertaining one of several guests — starting with Lucy, who barged in looking for Martin, missing him mere moments after he left to catch a flight to visit his mother offscreen for an indeterminate period. (She scurried after him and went so far as to purchase a ticket to Duluth so she could get past security and try to catch him, but she failed.)
As a somewhat brief aside, I need to say how disappointed I am in the way this whole "Lucy and Scott scheming against Tracy" storyline has gone thus far. It looks for all the world like it's completely finished before it even really started, with the only real upshot being that Lucy and Martin — who were not an unappealing couple! — have broken up because Scott and Lucy had a literal roll in the hay. I'm all for putting vets on our screens, but I don't understand the point of any of this. There was no reason to even hint at this storyline unless it was going to include two or three months of Scott and Lucy putting their heads together against Tracy, followed by at least one instance of Scott and Tracy knocking boots. Instead we get Martin off the canvas, Lucy running away from a desperately horny Scott, and Tracy cackling with glee while Gregory tsks her with his few remaining breaths.
Anyway, back at the apartment, Laura welcomed Elizabeth, served her some tea, and then got the graveside tea as Elizabeth told her how Heather lost her shit on Kevin after Spencer's memorial service. I can only assume that this is all a prelude to Heather kidnapping Ace and kicking off Genie Francis' next vacation/Jon Lindstrom's book tour, but everything on this show seems to be in a state of fundamental flux, so who knows?
After Elizabeth left, Laura and Kevin resumed discussing their pending adoption of Ace, only to be interrupted by a visit from Cyrus, who asked if he could see his grand-nephew only to be rebuffed by Kevin, who told him Ace was taking a nap. After suggesting to Laura that perhaps Kevin was the one who could use a nap, Cyrus told his sister that he had a new gig — turns out that the favor he called in from Nina, in exchange for dropping the charges against Sonny, was a radio show. Titled "Searching with Cyrus," the show will allow Cyrus to spread the gospel far and wide — or at least as far as the local station's signal will take him.
As I've said repeatedly, I think Jeff Kober is a marvelous actor and I'm not mad about Cyrus on the canvas, even though it's positively ludicrous that he was let out of prison. On the other hand, this whole "evil mofo finds religion" storyline is beyond tired, and also arguably an insult to the memory of Roscoe Born, who did essentially the same thing with Mitch Laurence eons ago. It's relatively interesting as long as we don't know what Cyrus' endgame is; once that comes into view, I'm fairly certain we'll all be at least a little disappointed.
That's basically it! I apologize for the pessimistic tone this time around; hopefully, the coming week will give me more to be positive about. (I'll be out of town again this weekend, but am planning on watching ahead and writing my column on the plane — hopefully you'll actually end up getting it early next time.) Bullet points ahoy!
Willow and Michael reconciled and had Valentine's Day make-up sex
Brook Lynn and Chase saw a Hallmark comet and had Valentine's Day Hallmark sex
Curtis and Portia had Valentine's Day post-op sex
Trina dropped a painting and cried
Gregory moved into Finn's apartment, bringing along a preposterous amount of stuff for someone who's been living out of a hotel room, and they all told Violet he's sick
Kristina told Molly that Blaze knows about the pregnancy
Blaze told Kristina that her mother is coming to town, and resolved to tell her family that she's gay
Cody and Sasha connived to get Spinelli and Maxie back together
Drew aggressively offered to buy Nina's half of the Metro Court and was a dick when she said no; Valentin interrupted their confrontation and urged Nina not to cave, later phoning someone with "a proposal"
Anna became the hundredth person to notice that Drew is "different"
Alexis told Ava that Olivia Jerome had been murdered and expressed her condolences; Ava shrugged and suggested that perhaps Alexis was being a tad disingenuous
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