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Hello and welcome back to Critical Diagnosis! Once again, this wasn't a banner week for General Hospital, which we'll get to in a minute — but it was a pretty big week for me, because I released my debut novel. Titled Langley Powell and the Society for the Defense of the Mundane, it's a supernatural comedy about a renowned debunker of paranormal phenomena who dies in a sudden freak accident and is extremely embarrassed and annoyed to discover that he has become a ghost. Released via Humorist Books, it's currently only available through Amazon in paperback, but I'm told that ebook and non-Amazon options should be available soon; you can get more information, sample the first chapter, and find a purchase link right here.
Now that I've gotten my little bit of self-promotion out of the way, let's get down to the business of GH, which seems to keep getting more uncertain by the week. I'm not a regular ratings watcher, but after getting a glimpse of the most recent numbers, I'm feeling less than optimistic about the future of our show, especially as it continues to flail creatively with little indication that any sort of turnaround is on the horizon. In fact, based on what's happening right now, I feel like the only real plan is to turn this back into the Sonny, Carly, and Jason show — which I guess wouldn't be the most unpopular choice they could make, but it certainly isn't what I want to watch, and it certainly doesn't say anything positive about the long-term prospects of GH or daytime in general.
As plenty of other people have pointed out (for years), GH might be the most stubborn of all the soaps when it comes to doubling down on unpopular creative decisions. For as long as I can remember, this is a show that's come across as extremely reluctant to give viewers what they really want, and while I believe you need at least some of that in order to maintain the tension necessary to keep viewers tuning in, with GH it seems like a whole-ass way of life. If the network is serious about wooing lapsed viewers — and with these ratings numbers, they'd better be — something has got to change.
I'm a Big Girl!
It should come as no surprise that last week was dominated by the greasy remnants of the Pikeman storyline, which continues to seep into the pores of every major character despite reaching its ostensible conclusion when Valentin hightailed it out of town with Charlotte. If you, like me, were hoping that we'd be allowed to start paying attention to something new, joke's on us, suckers — one way or another, it's still Pikeman, Pikeman, Pikeman, all the goddamn time.
The major driver for last week's Pikeman-related nonsense started on Monday, when Jagger rudely interrupted Jason and Danny's big day out to tell Jason that because he'd failed to hand over Valentin's satellite phone fast enough to prevent Valentin from skipping town, he was not only not being set free from his servitude to the FBI, he was actually being ordered to board a bus to Quantico that night, where he'd begin a new mission that would see him going undercover at the federal correctional institute in Lompoc.
Because Jason is Port Charles' Most Special Boy, this upset a bunch of people and sent a few things spinning into motion. Danny, of course, was very sad about not being able to go boating with his dad. Carly, naturally, exploded in a volcano of rage and threatened to go turn herself in to the FBI, thus removing their leverage over Jason (and also rendering meaningless the years he spent away from his family in order to protect her). When Jason tried to talk her out of it, she screamed "I'M A BIG GIRL!" — I am not making this up — but eventually agreed to let him handle it.
This promise lasted about ten minutes, during which Carly stormed over to Anna's office and started jawing at her about being in league with Jagger's plan to take Sonny down by going after Carly and Jason. This exchange left Anna with her knickers in a twist, and inspired her to call Jagger's boss; minutes later, Jagger barged into Anna's office to complain about her making that call.
While all this was going on, Carly went back to the Metro Court, where she instructed the front desk to change the key to Jagger's room and put his stuff out on the street. Jagger didn't notice this at first, because he was busy flirting and smooching with Ava while trying to convince her to flip on Sonny — but when he went to his room to fetch a bottle of scotch he could tipple during their dance of love and couldn't get in, he headed to the front desk to report a problem with his key, at which point Carly marched up and told him he was no longer a guest and to get the hell out.
Although Jagger has been written as a flaming doofus over the past couple of months, and he's currently being written as a total dope who's being led around by his belt buckle, he isn't a pushover, so he responded to Carly's tough-guy act by giving it right back to her — at which point she essentially dared him to arrest her, a dare she repeated despite several warnings from him, at which point he slapped on the cuffs and led her out of the hotel in full view of Sonny, Diane, Anna, Joss, and Gio.
Before being hauled off to the PCPD, Carly told Joss to book it to the train station and tell Jason not to get on that bus to Quantico; thanks to Gio's fast driving or whatever, she made it just in time. Sonny, meanwhile, was waiting for Carly in the interrogation room at the jail, where she finally told him why Jason agreed to work for the FBI — which naturally sent Sonny into a rage that included some violent threats toward Jagger. After Sonny stormed out, Carly saw Dante and begged him to find Sonny, explaining that he was going after Jagger and she didn't know what he'd do. We know, though, don't we? I mean, even if we didn't see the closing moments of Friday's episode, which depicted him calling Brick and demanding a location for Jagger, then loading a gun and aiming it at his office wall, while Jagger told Jason he could stay in Port Charles if he delivered Sonny to the FBI.
To boil all that down to a few words, let's just call this what it is — yet another story about a law enforcement officer who wants to put Sonny in prison and is somehow presented as being in the wrong for it. Was Jagger cruel for forcing Jason into servitude at the expense of his family? Sure, but neither Jason nor Carly would have been in legal jeopardy if they hadn't been, you know, openly associated and/or affiliated with organized crime for decades. We've been down this road SO many times before, and the show has demanded for SO many years that we see this petty little thug as some kind of hero. I've said this before, but: At this point, it's beyond simply being morally repugnant. It's just bad, lazy television.
The backdrop to this tiresome garbage is the looming custody fight over Avery between Sonny and Ava. Now that the show has given Ava sole responsibility for Sonny becoming unwittingly unmedicated, he's essentially doing two things — one, begging his few remaining friends and loved ones for their assurance that they'd be willing to testify on his behalf during a hearing; and two, throwing a fit whenever those friends and loved ones tell him something he doesn't want to hear. He did it to Michael last week, exploding when Michael responded to his request by pointing out that not only have the two of them been publicly at odds recently, but their shared past includes a whole bunch of things that Scott could very easily take advantage of with Michael on the stand.
The obvious plan here is for people to FINALLY come to the unavoidable conclusion that something has gone awry with Sonny's mental health, which is a plot development that is wildly overdue. As is so often the case, however, GH is making its way to a sensible place in an extremely silly way. For example, when Michael brought up the fact that Scott would make hay out of the fact that he was shot by a bullet meant for Sonny and that Carly sent Morgan to military school to keep him away from his father, Sonny's response was "I thought we got past all that, Michael." This is not just lazy dialogue, it makes no goddamn sense — even if Sonny isn't taking his meds, he should still be able to realize that "getting past all that" doesn't mean those events never happened and can't be weaponized in court.
On Ava's side of things, there's also plenty to dislike — starting with the rotten way the show is heaping the blame for anything and everything on her shoulders, but I've complained about that before, so let's focus on other stuff, like Ava suggesting that Scott put Dex or Kristina on the stand so they're forced to talk about Sonny assaulting Dex at Chase and Brook Lynn's wedding.
This is a fine suggestion, I guess, but you know what would be even easier? Bringing up the fact that Sonny beat the hell out of Cyrus not long before he attacked Dex — an assault that is public knowledge, unlike Dex's beating. It seems pretty obvious at this point that GH has chosen to forget about Cyrus and Martin, which is the writers' prerogative; that said, it doesn't absolve them from needing to plug plot holes created when they decide to do stuff like this. There's also the glaringly obvious fact that neither Sonny nor Ava should have much of a legal leg to stand on in any custody battle with anyone on Earth; if and when this case makes its way to a judge, you'd think they'd both be more concerned with the threat of having Avery remanded to a foster home.
Fortunately, it seems like it'll all be over fairly soon, given that Sonny's going to spend at least part of next week tearing ass around Port Charles with a loaded pistol, and also given that Ava told Scott about Sonny's meds as a means of convincing him to put Sonny on the stand and provoke him into a meltdown in open court. I'm sure we'll get some solid acting out of some of these scenes, but that in no way changes the fact that everything about this story is leftover ass.
I'm being cranky here, so I'll add a spoonful of sugar by recognizing a few minor grace notes. For starters, it was pretty satisfying to watch Anna gently tell Jason that as difficult as it must be to find himself squirming under Jagger's thumb in an effort to protect Carly, there's no getting around the reality that both of them are where they are because they made a long series of choices to get there. (It was arguably even more satisfying to see Jason quietly agree.) There was also a nicely subtle scene between Steve Burton and Asher Antonyzyn when Danny found Jason at the bus station; although every single person watching knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jason was never going to board that bus, I'm still not going to complain about scenes that focus on Jason behaving in an age-appropriate way while reckoning with the consequences of his stupid, stupid behavior.
I have spent so much time talking about a storyline I wish I could completely ignore, and I'm not even done. But we're close, so bear with me.
While most of last week's Pikeman-derived action centered on Sonny, we also got an indication that the Brennan/Valentin corner of the story also isn't over, because when Anna went to Pentonville to see Brennan, the warden told her he wasn't there — and what's more, there were no records of him ever having been there. Returning to the station and finding the PCPD's file on Brennan also deleted (although an empty file folder with his name on it still hilariously remained), an understandably annoyed Anna confided in Dante, who agreed to head over to GH and see whether there was still any record of him having been a patient there after stabbing himself.
Before he left, Dante raised the extremely sensible question of why Anna even cares where Brennan went; her not-entirely-convincing answer was that Brennan's disappearance was clearly engineered by the WSB, and she's determined to know whether they did it because they need him for something else or they just want to make him go away forever. Okay? I guess?
Meanwhile, ol' Mikey the Cuck reacted to the news of Carly's arrest by going full Motherboy and pressuring Nina to get him a meeting with Congressman McConkey in the hopes that he'll be able to pressure him into making the FBI bring Jagger to heel. Understandably suspicious, Nina pointed out that this is extremely close to openly breaking the law, and questioned whether Michael would throw her under the bus as a co-conspirator if and when his plan went sideways; his exceedingly lame response was that no one would believe Nina would ever lift a finger to help Carly, which Nina agreed with, neither of them acknowledging the fact that Michael is her boss and could easily strongarm her into helping exactly the way he's doing it.
Feh. It was basically all a bunch of blabber to get Michael to the point where he'd promise to tell Willow that Nina deserves all the credit for everything anyway, and we know Nina can't possibly resist that. End result: Michael and Nina are going to D.C. together so he can join her for lunch with McConkey. During this trip, Nina will no doubt grow closer to Michael, which will make her feel even worse about knowing that Drew and Willow made out. The only way any of this will ever be interesting to me is if these characters decide that the only way forward is for the four of them to enter a polyamorous relationship, with mother and daughter taking turns sharing a bed with uncle and nephew. I don't want to watch any of that, mind you, but at least it would be a creative solution whose foolishness matches the problem.
The Real Victim Here
Speaking of foolishness, Blaze and Kristina sat down with Perez Hilton last week, and it was just as dumb as you'd expect. In fairness, I guess, I will begin by saying that these scenes would have to have been slam-dunk Emmy-worthy in order to overcome the fundamentally, fatally flawed central idea of putting this pivotal moment of an LGBTQ-focused storyline anywhere near the slimy hands of an alleged pundit who made his name by outing queer celebrities against their will. Yes, he has apologized, and yes, perhaps this is some sort of public penance for him. I don't care. I would rather have seen these characters interviewed by a cardboard cutout of Peppa the Pig.
That being said? The interview itself was vapid and useless at best, and downright insulting at worst — the worst coming when Kristina said that Natalia was the real victim in the scandal because her ignorant ramblings were recorded without her knowledge or consent. My notes for the interview were basically "fuck all this," and that's the gist of what I have to say about it.
The fallout from the interview managed the near-impossible feat of being even dumber than the interview itself. During her prep for the exchange, Kristina extremely sensibly decided that she would deflect any questions about her pregnancy by saying it was something she wanted to keep private; unfortunately, on the day it aired, TJ and Molly were back to being written as though they're both as dumb as a box of rocks, so they both interpreted Kristina's words as meaning "this is my baby and Blaze and I will be keeping it."
Very stupid and very alarmed, Molly went over to Kristina's apartment with a stack of papers terminating Kristina's parental rights, at which point Kristina was basically cornered into admitting that she's worried about the future of Molly and TJ's relationship, and doesn't want to sign anything until she feels more confident about them staying together. Molly got pissed and said a bunch of hateful things about Kristina's romantic past, Kristina got pissed and said she sometimes wonders whether she'd be the better parent for the baby, and it all got interrupted when Natalia showed up to thank Kristina for being so nice to her during the interview.
The silver lining in all this is that the show, in a lately too-rare display of recognizing genuine dramatic potential, is bringing Ric Lansing back to the canvas. I have no idea what the plans are when he returns, and I know I shouldn't get my hopes up, but I would love to believe that not even GH is so allergic to good soap that they'd bungle the opportunity to explore this unbelievably tangled family dynamic. You've got Ric defending Molly, unhinged Sonny defending Kristina, and Alexis caught in the middle! Come on. Nearly every step leading to this point has been lame, and most of them have also been boring, but there's some real potential here. I'm rooting for them here. Don't blow it, you jerks.
Okay, that's enough out of me for now. On with your weekly bullet points!
- Tracy was bitten by a horse, after which she talked to Ned and Sonny about missing Luke on his birthday
- Ava asked Nina and Willow if they'd testify on her behalf in the custody hearing; both of them told her to go to hell, one of them in a polite way
- Finola Hughes finally met her match with the extremely tiresome speech Anna gave Jagger about how his single-minded pursuit of Sonny was "corrupt"
- Willow gazed upon Drew's abs at the lakehouse after he went for a swim; later, Drew watched jealously from the bushes as Michael and Willow kissed
- Diane told Sonny that Ava had been awarded court-ordered visitation and cautioned him not to be an asshole about it
- Sasha introduced Violet to ants on a goddamn log
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