It's been a long time since General Hospital bothered to bubble up a truly soapy week's worth of episodes — long enough that I'd really started to wonder whether any of the folks responsible for dreaming up stories were still capable of delivering. Based on last week's events, it's obvious that they can definitely bring it when they choose to — which makes me wonder why in the hell they don't do it more often, but I'm saving that complaint for later. For now, let's dive in and recount the most entertaining week of GH in recent memory.
Trash with Abs
We'll start with the first big secret spill of the week, which occurred after Curtis confronted Drew, accusing him of blackmailing Portia. Since making his heel turn, it's consistently bugged me that Drew has done villainous things without ever really carrying himself as a villain, but in this particular case, it made sense, and actually enhanced the conflict — Drew didn't even bat an eye when Curtis made his accusation, he just smiled and explained to his former friend that in order for someone to be blackmailed, they need to have done something wrong. From there, he made it clear he knows that Portia tampered with Heather's test results, and he also made it clear that he has proof, without ever actually coming out and saying any of it. With those cards on the table, Drew went on to recommend that Curtis start directing Aurora's outlets to give him more favorable coverage; after making that last threat, he sauntered out.
Curtis is no dummy, and based on the way he was fuming during that conversation, it was clear that he understands Drew has him over a barrel. But he's also no pushover: After Drew left, we saw that Curtis recorded their entire conversation. We don't know why yet, but we do know he hates Drew more than he hates being lied to by his wife. How do we know this? Because Curtis actually confronted Portia during the Nurses Ball, and was his usual self-righteous self when she pleaded with him not to throw away their marriage — but he was also strategic enough to insist that they put up a good front in order to prevent Drew from seeing any signs of weakness.
I enjoy watching Curtis and Drew slug it out, so I'm interested in seeing where this goes, especially now that Isaiah is on the fringes of the story, aware that Portia is freaking out about her marriage ending over a lie. (He found the time to approach her between Nurses Ball numbers and offer her a shoulder if she ever needs someone to talk to.) With Jordan serving as Curtis' confidante through all this, there's plenty of potential for four pretty people to get messy as hell.
Aside from antagonizing the Ashfords, Drew kept himself busy by scoring the latest underhanded blow in his war with Tracy. After leaving Curtis' office, he called Mac and said he knew who drugged him — a phone call that led to Chase reluctantly arresting Tracy on the Nurses Ball red carpet. Turns out the cops found ketamine in Tracy's car, and even though anyone who's been in Port Charles longer than ten minutes knows she'd never be sloppy enough to leave evidence of a crime lying around for the taking, Mac had to act on the evidence. This is the third or fourth time Tracy's been arrested in the last year or so, but I'm fine with it, if only because putting her in the police station leads to a lot of entertainingly antagonistic conversations. (And she doesn't even need to be involved in them. Case in point: When Jason showed up to pay Tracy's bail, Mac sighed, "For the first time in maybe ever, I'm actually glad to see you." Jason: "Thanks, I guess.")
Diane, working mercifully offscreen, quickly got a judge to let Tracy out on bail, so she's free for now. I find it hard to believe these charges will stick, and that's just fine with me; Tracy and Drew are entertaining rivals, and if all they do is publicly humiliate and inconvenience each other on a regular basis, I'll be happy to watch it happen.
Your Ex Is a Psycho Bitch
Of course, in addition to playing dirty with the Ashford and Quartermaine clans, Drew is also up to his neck in Willow and Michael's divorce and the looming custody fight over Wiley and Amelia, which is another story that heated way up last week. In fact, GH gave us a good old-fashioned catfight on Monday, with Carly and Nina officially ending their truce and taking off the gloves (as well as at least one shoe, in Nina's case). When Nina stormed over to Carly's place to forbid her from going through with her plan to obtain emergency custody of the kids, things got real nasty real quick; slaps were exchanged, both of them rolled over the couch onto the floor, and Carly came a couple of seconds away from being brained by a mug or something before Joss rushed in to pull them apart.
I completely empathize with people who've long since grown sick and tired of the Carly/Nina Granny War, and I 100 percent agree that it's gross and tired for them to fight over Sonny and/or try to keep each other from seeing their grandchildren. But even though the basis for their rivalry was poorly constructed, I also think that stuff is far enough in the past that we can move past it and simply concentrate on the fun of two dynamic characters indulging in open animosity. Nina is so rarely allowed to own it when she does something like this; in years past, she would have been forced to go on an apology tour for daring to confront Carly, sobbing along the way. That didn't really happen last week — she definitely played up her softer side when she told Willow and Sonny what happened, but not long after that, she and Carly were coolly sniping at one another in the Metro Court ladies' room. The show has had these two at odds for years, but rarely in a way that's given both characters agency; now, it feels like there's finally potential for a rich Viki/Dorian-style feud, one with enough nuance to allow for periodic truces that are inevitably broken in explosive fashion. Bring it on.
While Nina and Carly tried to claw each other's eyes out, Sonny took the opposite approach, trying to convince Willow to find a compromise in the custody case. He came pretty close, too — she seemed like she was just about to agree to a postponement when Nina walked in with a shiner and told them that Carly was hellbent on taking Wiley and Amelia. That snapped it for Willow, who spent the rest of the week telling anyone who'd listen about how she flew all the way to Baden Baden and Michael wouldn't even talk to her; when she and Drew did come up with a compromise late in the week, it was an insulting offer to Carly that would have given Michael custody every other weekend and two weeks during the summer. Carly, of course, told them to pound sand, at which point Willow flitted off and Drew confidently predicted that his plan to paint Michael as an absentee father would pay off in court.
More on the revised odds of that prediction proving accurate in a minute.
The Show Must Go On
For as long as I can remember, I've been begging the writers to stop pussyfooting around with the "Gio is secretly Brook Lynn and Dante's kid" storyline. Dragging stuff like this out plays into the worst soap stereotypes about how you can supposedly walk away for a year, come back, and see the same damn things happening, but it's done because it builds tension, and the greater the tension, the greater the release. I'm still not willing to go so far as to say the writers did a good (or even passable) job of ramping up the tension here, but it still felt pretty great to finally get some release last week.
It happened, as we all knew it would, courtesy of Lulu. She spent the early part of the week with Cody, who was in the room with her when she tracked down Margaret Harper, one of the musicians who was on tour with Gio's adoptive mom Camila when she supposedly gave birth. They didn't talk long, but they didn't need to; after a few minutes, Margaret confirmed that Camila wasn't pregnant when she left the tour, thus handing Lulu all the proof she needed to confirm that the "Baby Boy Cerullo" born in San Francisco in May of 2003 is actually Gio.
Lulu nagged and hassled and harangued her way into gaining that information, but she was still (barely) convinced to keep it to herself long enough for the people who were actually involved in the birth to come clean on their own — specifically Lois, who she confronted backstage during the Nurses Ball. After briefly trying to play dumb, Lois lashed out at Lulu, correctly reminding her that none of this was any of her business, but as always where Lulu's concerned, this sensible argument fell on deaf ears; in the end, Lulu told Lois that she had until the next morning to come clean, or she'd spill the beans for her.
What neither Lulu nor Lois knew was that Gio, who was supposed to be getting ready for his next Nurses Ball performance, was looking for Lois, who had his earpiece. Just as Lulu shrieked her climactic threats at Lois, Gio turned the knob on the dressing room door and heard everything.
Just as with that tension/release stuff, here's where I pause to say that even though I'm not willing to give the writers a total pass for making Gio such a boring dud of a character throughout his first year or so on the show, I must acknowledge that the extra time in the oven for Giovanni Mazza worked to everyone's advantage last week. He's been hanging around honing his chops long enough to carry a scene, and he definitely rose to the challenge here — from the moment he heard the news, we saw a side of Gio we've never glimpsed before. When Emma found him before his performance, she could tell something was off, and reminded him that if he needed to bow out, it would be okay, but he grimly told her that the show must go on… at least long enough for him to walk out on stage with Anna and Chase, stop playing a few moments into their dance number, tell the crowd he was dedicating his performance to his parents, and then launch into an angry rant about how Brook Lynn and Dante didn't want him and refused to claim him. With all that out of the way, he smashed his violin to bits and left.
The problem with writing something like this is that once you've gotten the big reveal out of the way, you need to try and make room for everyone impacted by it. This gets trickier the more characters are involved, and there are a bunch of them in this particular mix, but the writers were pretty smart about the way they peeled people off into groups. Lois and Brook Lynn quickly ran after Gio, which left Sonny, Olivia, Ned, and Chase to try to untangle it all while Cody pulled Dante into a dressing room.
Wubs has already picked Dominic Zamprogna as the performer of the week, and I really can't argue with that — my notes from Friday's episode include "Zamprogna is GOOD" — but I want to add that Wally Kurth was fantastic as well. Both actors pulled off the same feat, conveying a mad swirl of emotions over the space of just a few minutes, and they were each heartbreaking in their own way.
The conversation between Dante and Cody was affecting because of the way Dante went from being angry with Cody for keeping Brook Lynn's secret to acknowledging his reasons for doing so, and then struggling to come to grips with the fact that a kid he'd watched grow up was actually his own son. Cody's kind of a nothing character at this point, and Josh Kelly is rarely asked to do any heavy lifting, but his relaxed style worked really well here; Cody needed to be quiet, deferential, and accommodating, and Kelly hit those notes perfectly.
Ned, meanwhile, turned to Chase for help in understanding why his daughter didn't feel like she could come to him with her pregnancy, and why she'd gone on keeping that secret for more than 20 years. Kurth was perfect as well, which is no big surprise, but still an immense pleasure to watch. If you're a parent, I dare you to try and avoid getting socked in the feels by his quietly powerful work in those brief scenes.
Also great: Rena Sofer, who was asked to do a whole bunch of face acting and delivered beautifully. The camera cut to her often in the moments during and after Gio's onstage meltdown, and she said everything without saying a word. I'm anticipating some great stuff between her and Amanda Setton next week, presumably with a hearty helping of Zamprogna thrown in; I can only assume everyone involved will come away with plenty of Emmy reel material.
The Role of Michael Corinthos Is Now Being Played By…
Last week's show wasn't perfect. There were some curious omissions from the Nurses Ball crowd, for starters, but more importantly, the powers that be partly ruined an incredible Friday cliffhanger in a couple of ways: First, by showing an unidentified man watching the Ball on a plane, and second, by announcing that Y&R vet Rory Gibson would be taking over the role of Michael. Both of these moves undercut what could have been the type of Friday surprise we don't really get on the soaps anymore — specifically, Michael walking in at the end of the Ball, Wiley yelling "Daddy!" and running into his arms in front of the astonished audience, and the two of them walking out while Drew and Willow looked on in slack-jawed shock.
It was still pretty great, mind you. But it could have been even greater.
Needless to say, I'm very much looking forward to next week's episodes (and preemptively pissed that we're only getting four of them thanks to the holiday). Until then, I leave you with your column-closing bullets!
- Sasha was served papers calling on her to testify at Willow and Michael's divorce hearing, and immediately freaked out over the possibility that Willow secretly knows her baby is Michael's
- Nina and Drew co-hosted the red carpet show against their will, and spent the whole time sabotaging one another
- Lucy arrived with a llama
- Kai surprised Trina by showing up to watch her perform
- The Cody and Molly chem test continued
- Alexis told Kristina she knows she cut Ava's brakes, and Kristina's response was a predictably insufferable "We can tell my dad"
- Cody had one of the lines of the week when he called Drew "trash with abs"
- Drew interrupted an argument between Joss and Willow by letting himself into the ladies' room
- Portia told Nina that Curtis knows everything, and she's worried about what he'll do next
- Ned confronted Drew for framing Tracy, and had the line of the week when he called him "an unconscionable ass"
- Carly spotted Joss and Vaughn talking at the Ball
- Lucas went to Elizabeth's place to watch the Ball while drinking champagne
- ADA Turner continued hovering around Sonny
- Almost none of the young children in the cast can sing
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