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As much as folks might complain about General Hospital in its current state, I feel like most people tend to agree that the show's very large cast contains a bunch of incredible talent; even when the writing meanders or is simply subpar, we can usually count on the actors to do the hard work of selling a defective product and keeping us engaged from moment to moment. This was the story of last week's GH for me — in a lot of ways, these episodes were pretty skippable, especially in terms of really moving story or serving up any genuine surprises (with one bizarre exception, which I'll reluctantly get to in a minute). Yet even during its wheel-spinning moments, the show benefited from some typically superlative work on the part of its stars.
One thing I'm noticing while looking over my notes is that last week's episodes were a lot more tightly focused than the show has tended to be in the past, with smaller groups of characters appearing in scenes that dealt with a shorter list of narrative priorities. I don't know if this is due to the fact that we were in the middle of post-wedding fallout or if it's a sign that GH is headed back to the more blinkered view of the canvas we had 15-20 years ago; if it's the latter, I guess it's a decision I can understand, but it isn't one I look forward to watching. As scattered and chaotic as GH can be, I still prefer that to the years when everything revolved around the same five or six characters all the time.
Enough prognosticating for now. On with the show!
Finn de Sobriety
I often make fun of Michael Easton in this space because the show makes it so easy, but under the right conditions, he's reliably pretty great; as I've said before, I think the fundamental issue is just that he isn't a very compelling or believable romantic lead. In that sense, we really got his best stuff last week — even if he delivered it under some typical GH constraints.
My biggest issue, surprise surprise, was with the writing. During Monday's episode, as Finn and Gregory talked about their shared history and forgave one another for various trespasses, it became thuddingly obvious that Gregory was about to die, with the sudsy peak arriving as they tearfully traded declarations of love and manly admiration. Once two characters have well and truly made peace with each other on a soap, you know one or both of them will be with the angels soon, and so it was with Gregory Chase, who went to bed, watched his life (or at least moments from the last six months of it) pass before his eyes, and lost consciousness as the episode faded to black and we heard Violet's voice saying "Goodnight, Grandpa."
It was just as over the top as it reads, and it was also twice as frustrating, because Easton and Gregory Harrison did really wonderful work. I've gone on record as saying how distasteful I find Gregory's ALS storyline, but Harrison really shouldered the load with it, especially as he neared the end of his tenure on the show. And as one-note as Easton can be when he's supposed to be making goo-goo eyes, I'd argue he's one of GH's better actors when it comes to everything else; even if we knew every beat that was coming before it arrived, it was still awfully affecting to watch Finn tell his father he loved him, and then watch him find Gregory's lifeless body the following day.
And now we go back to the "thuddingly obvious" part, because as soon as Finn took an accidental sip of champagne during Chase and Brook Lynn's wedding, everyone knew he was teetering off the wagon — and when the camera zoomed in on a bottle of bourbon even before Finn knew Gregory had died, it was painfully clear what would happen next. Again, Easton did a knockout job with his material; it was subtle and layered in ways that the writing absolutely was not. Even when the inevitable happened and Finn decided to take a drink on purpose, Easton played it up to the last minute as if he might not, even stopping to sniff the cork for a few moments before finally crossing the point of no return.
Of course, Easton may have been/likely was stage-directed to hit those beats, but they still felt authentic and alive in a way that stood at odds with the annoyingly predetermined structure of the scenes surrounding them. I realize that counting on soaps for subtlety is a bad investment, but still; when you've been blessed with tons of acting talent and a group of stubbornly loyal viewers, you might want to go out on a limb and trust them to do the work once in a while. Gregory's death and its aftermath would have been much more impactful if everything hadn't been telegraphed from miles away.
Well, now that it's been telegraphed, where are we? The short answer is that I'm kind of unsure. After Finn knocked back a drink or two, Violet came home from school; shortly after that, Elizabeth arrived due to a request from Chase, who'd gotten the news of Gregory's death from Finn shortly before he and Brook Lynn were supposed to board their honeymoon flight to Florence. As soon as she spotted the bottle of bourbon on Finn's table, Elizabeth knew what was going on, and she offered to take Violet home with her so he could deal with his grief. This was not a suggestion Finn appreciated — in fact, it led to a full-blown fight that ended with Finn literally showing Elizabeth the door.
After she left, Elizabeth called Chase, who wasted no time showing up at Finn's apartment with Brook Lynn. Spotting the bottle as quickly as Elizabeth had, Brook Lynn volunteered to take Violet for a walk; once they were gone, Chase and Finn had a frank discussion about everything that happened, including Finn finding Gregory's body and turning to alcohol to numb the pain. Chase refused to judge Finn for his actions, which seemed to flip a switch for Finn — just like that, he openly lamented pushing Elizabeth away, asked Chase to dump the booze, and said he needed to find himself a meeting.
While all that was going on, Elizabeth was at work, where Portia pretty quickly noticed that something was eating at her head nurse and kept bugging her until Elizabeth finally caved and told her Finn fell off the wagon after finding Gregory's body. Even before the words were out of her mouth, Elizabeth knew she could potentially cost Finn his job by sharing this; fortunately for Finn, Portia acceded to Elizabeth's plea to keep it to herself, saying she was sure it was just an isolated slip-up.
Of course, now that Portia has said that, the odds seem pretty high that Finn's relapse will continue. I don't want to believe this is the case, just because soap characters fall off the wagon anytime something terrible happens, and aside from it being a really tired plot device, I think the aggregate effect paints addicts as incapable of maintaining their sobriety in difficult times. At the very least, I'm encouraged by Finn saying he wants to find a meeting; even if he does end up going on a real bender, I'll take those words as a sign that the writers intend to deal with this clichéd bit of business in a slightly more creative way. That said, I remain irritated by the whole thing, not least because Finn's addiction stems from a highly addictive intravenous drug, not alcohol; if they're going to have him stray from sobriety, it'd be nice if they paid attention to his history.
As I said, I have no idea what to expect here. GH has pulled a lot of "This! No, this!" switches lately, so I won't be surprised at all if Finn gets to a meeting and gets back on track in short order; in fact, this is one case where I won't be upset about it. Finn turning to alcohol after finding his dead father's body is a plot point that's easy to understand; Finn using his father's memory as fuel to rededicate himself to a life free of addiction could be inspiring. Finn spending two months hiding flasks and risking his career/Violet's safety, on the other hand, would be a classic example of the type of soap story you can see looming on the horizon and you know you're going to hate, but you're powerless to stop it.
A History of Violence
Speaking of powerless, I guess it must be time to talk about the fallout from Sonny whaling on Dex during the closing moments of Chase and Brook Lynn's wedding reception. After realizing that Kristina saw the beating — and heard him threaten to murder Dex and Jason — Sonny wriggled free from Jason and followed her into the ladies' room, where he stumbled through some semblance of a self-justifying apology in a doomed attempt to get her to talk to him. When she refused, he wandered back out to the garden terrace, where he (surprise!) smashed some barware and sulked in a chair just long enough for Carly to find him.
Carly was there, of course, because Jason called her, and he stood guard outside the terrace while she attempted to talk some sense into Sonny. Here's where the show started really leaning into its latest attempt to revise history, with Carly telling Sonny that there's a part of him Kristina's "never seen" while Kristina sobbed to Blaze about Sonny's "code of ethics" and how she never thought he could do something so awful as punching and kicking a military vet several decades his junior. Anyone who's watched the show for more than a few years knows that Kristina knows exactly who Sonny is; if the writers really wanted to further isolate Sonny by peeling her away from him, they should have had him do something truly awful. This is just silly.
Also silly: Kristina later calling Michael and, after giving him credit for always seeing Sonny clearly, admitting that she doesn't want to see her father go to prison and asking Michael to "fix" the situation. Sillier still: Michael finding Dex in the park with Joss — both of them still in their wedding outfits because they spent the night in the hospital while Dex had his wounds tended to — and asking Dex not to press charges against Sonny. The rationale? Kristina is pregnant, and the pressure of a trial, or of being required to testify, might be too much for her and the baby. Soaps treating pregnant women like champagne flutes is nothing new, but it's never not annoying.
Anyway, Kristina eventually told Dex she'd be willing to testify against Sonny, but Dex decided not to press charges anyway. He reached this conclusion after meeting with Anna, who greeted the news of her star recruit being assaulted by Port Charles' Public Enemy No. 1 with a bizarre little speech about how a single crime rarely has much of an impact on the person who commits it, and it's usually the ripple effects of that crime that really do them in, and how this might not be the best time to go after Sonny.
Your guess is as good as mine, folks. I got nothin'.
Across the hall from his penthouse, Sonny's very bad week continued when he paid a visit to Dante in order to ask him to smooth things over with Kristina by making her "see the truth of what she saw." This was a plainly cuckoo request, particularly given that Dante wasn't even there to witness Sonny beating Dex, and Dante definitely did not take kindly to it.
These scenes stand as the other great example of stellar acting rescuing subpar material last week. Sonny is plainly not himself, and Dante should have figured out that something is amiss a long time ago; if he really needed a last straw, it really ought to have come long, long before he found out his father beat the hell out of a police cadet in public. Even during the course of this conversation, Dante failed to question Sonny's state of mind, which is aggravating as hell — but Dominic Zamprogna sold the hell out of the dialogue he was given anyway, running an emotional gamut from fury to concern and abject sorrow without ever missing a beat.
The upshot is that Sonny has had enough of dealing with Sonny's crap, at least until he finds out it was the fault of his diluted medication and joins the endless parade of people apologizing to him in a few months. For now, Ava remains one of the last people Sonny's willing to confide in, and it's a position she's still milking for all it's worth — when he told her what happened at the wedding, she blamed Jason for stepping in, and after Carly showed up at the penthouse and asked Sonny what he was going to do when he finally ran out of "traitors" to blame for the man he's become, Ava said it sounded like Carly wants him to be estranged from his children.
Again, Maura West is doing the best anyone possibly could do with this material, even though it stinks. And if you thought things had gotten as bad as they could get when the writers decided Ava would choose to speed the destruction of Sonny's life out of some sort of weird jealousy… friends, I have some terrible news for you.
The Character Assassination of Ava Jerome by the Coward Elizabeth Korte
The other storyline of the week had to do with Alexis traveling to Albany in order to plead her case before a three-judge tribunal established to decide whether her disbarment should be overturned. Because this is an Alexis/Diane story, we had to sit through a lot of hoo-ha about how Alexis is perpetually frazzled and neurotic; because it's sweeps or something, I guess, we also got some stunt casting in the form of Nancy Lee Grahn's old Santa Barbara (and brief GH) castmate Lane Davies, who showed up as opposing counsel, or whatever the proper terminology might be in this situation.
As you're no doubt already aware, Davies is playing Fergus Byrne, the latest in the seemingly endless parade of Byrne brothers determined to avenge Neil's death. Turns out he was the one who filed the complaint against Alexis in the first place, which was loudly pointed out as a conflict of interest by Alexis, who took over her own case and left Diane sitting silently for 90 percent of the hearing.
It was "classic" Alexis stuff, by which I mean it was mostly a lot of hot air. I think Nancy Lee Grahn is talented and I don't dislike Alexis as a character, but I do resent how frequently the writers fall back on silly bullshit where she's concerned. The show spends a lot of time telling us that Alexis is a mess, just as it spends a ton of time telling us that the Davis girls bicker a lot — all of which tends to be annoying because the dialogue rarely supports any of that stuff in a truly entertaining way. The hearing was par for the course; Alexis and Fergus sparred, and Alexis said she hated him, and the judges said they'd hand down their hearing in 30 days, by which time Alexis and Fergus will no doubt already be halfway in love. Yawn.
The sole surprising twist in all this is the news that the original complaint against Alexis was brought by Ava, of all people — a left-field decision that Alexis ascribed to Ava wanting revenge against Alexis for divorcing Julian. This all makes no sense for so many reasons that I can't even get into them here or I'd be up all night; suffice it to say that GH has pretty clearly entered corner-painting territory with Ava, and I'm super pissed about it. I will concede that Ava has been written into some seemingly dead-end situations before, but between this latest revelation and the bullshit going on with Sonny, we're obviously at least meant to think that the end is near for our beloved Ms. Jerome.
Anything and everything feel like they're up for grabs on GH these days; that said, everything always comes down to the writers' will, and given the current state of the regime, I don't know how much faith I have in the prospect of a last-minute reprieve for Ava. Getting rid of this character would be a very dumb decision, but that doesn't mean they won't make it. However this all goes down, I have no doubt that Maura West will sink her teeth into every last line.
Brook Lynn and Chase fell asleep fully clothed on their wedding night
Anna visited Brennan in the hospital and accused him of stabbing himself to get out of prison
Joss told Dex she still loves him
Gio moved into the Quartermaine mansion with Monica's (offscreen) blessing
Anna told Carly that Brennan had been admitted to GH after possibly stabbing himself
Lois and Ned had a sweet moment during which they thanked each other for all the good that came out of their marriage
Molly and TJ are going to call each other "DP," which says a lot about their taste in porn
Tracy had to find out about Gregory's death from Cody, but it ended up being a sweet scene anyway because Jane Elliot is flawless
Stella and Tracy shared their grief after Gregory's passing, and Tracy asked Stella to let her know if there was anything she could take care of — either personally or with her checkbook
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