Critical Diagnosis: Week of June 30, 2025 - July 3, 2025 by Jeff Giles

 

If you're the type of General Hospital viewer who thinks the show is at its best when everything revolves around Sonny, then you've got to be thrilled right now. For the rest of us? Ugh, not so much. This was the most Sonny-centric week I can remember — when he wasn't onscreen, trying to whisper everyone into doing his bidding, other characters were talking about him. Even worse, it was all in service of yet another story about someone trying to take over Sonny's territory, creating a threat that reminds everyone in Port Charles how lucky they are to live in a town that's under the thumb of a bantam AARPfather who murders people with impunity but is still the lesser evil.

I've been very vocal in this space about my total disdain for the way GH has pretended it can have its cake and eat it too where Sonny's concerned. I've written at length about how the show treating a homicidal maniac as a protagonist has created a moral rot at the heart of the canvas. Needless to say, I have zero interest in this latest Sonny story, but more than that, I'm beyond disappointed in the decision to once again sacrifice narrative balance on the altar of Corinthos. For years, it's been painfully clear that Sonny has already done everything the show is willing to let him do. Why are they wasting our time with this? Are they really that afraid of what might happen if GH wasn't centered around a mob kingpin with a laughably vague criminal empire? Do they really think the audience is that in love with the status quo?

You'd think the ratings would clear up that confusion. Some lessons are harder than others to learn, I suppose.

Adios, Natalia

The big story last week was the death of Natalia Ramirez, which was just as abrupt and silly as everything else to do with the character during her awkward, sloppy existence. From start to finish, it was clear that the show had no plan for Natalia; they were just hoping to throw Eva LaRue onscreen and hope the magic happened on its own. Whether she was a mouthy bigot, Deception's CFO, or an irresponsible driver with a surprise drinking problem, none of it ever worked — and as much as you could sense that the writers wanted to conjure a romance between Natalia and Sonny, none of that ever caught fire either.

That last point is key, because even though we never saw any kind of romantic spark between Sonny and Natalia, her supposed feelings for him were intense enough to drive her mad with broken-hearted resentment when she realized he wouldn't be leaving Port Charles with her to start a new life together in Belize. She crashed Daisy's christening, which led to nothing more interesting than a brief conversation with Sonny that ended with her being escorted back to her suite at the Metro Court, where she promptly mixed booze and pills, texting Marco gibberish until she passed out and died.

Initially, Marco had every intention of ignoring Natalia's texts, but he happened to be with Lucas, whose dead momdar started pinging like crazy. "Your mom might be drunk," he warned, "but she's reaching out." This is all it took for Marco to hop in his car and head over to the Metro Court — but he made an unplanned detour along the way.

Bye Bye, Charlie's

With the sun setting on Port Charles, Kristina left Daisy's christening so she could fill in for a manager at Charlie's who'd called in sick. There's already a real mystery here, which is why in the hell a bar would be closed at dusk in late June, but whatever; let's just assume, I guess, that this unnamed manager was supposed to handle the entire day shift all by themselves, and Kristina figured it'd be fine to leave all that money on the table by leaving the joint closed so she could attend Daisy's christening. Fine. But here's what happened next: Moments before Kristina let herself in through the back door, a couple of black-masked intruders broke into Charlie's and doused everything with gasoline. They left before she entered, but again, they soaked the place — which means the smell would have been overpowering, any any semi-functional adult would have stopped, backed the hell up, and called the fire department as soon as they took a whiff.

Not our Kristina. Instead, she wandered in with her usual vacant expression, noticed a puddle on the floor behind the bar, dipped a couple of fingers in it, and smelled it. Before enough brain synapses could fire for her to understand she was a few deep breaths away from passing out due to fumes, a molotov cocktail was hurled through the door, and the place went up in flames.

Did Kristina run out the way she came? You should know better than to even ask. No, she stayed behind the bar, yelling "Help! Help!" until Marco kicked the door in, ran to get a heavy blanket out of his car, and ushered her to safety. They huddled in the parking lot until emergency workers arrived, followed by Dante, and then finally Sonny and Jason — the latter of whom thanked Marco for his act of selfless bravery by squinting at him and saying "What's he doing here?"

Marco's repeated pleas to be allowed to leave so he could get to his mother were finally answered by Dante, although not in the way he hoped. Instead of telling Marco he was free to leave, he gently advised him that he should go to General Hospital — not what you want to hear, especially when you're being addressed as "Mr. Rios." (The mystery of why Marco's last name is Rios and Natalia's was Ramirez will now never be solved. Alas.)

Upon arriving at GH, Marco brushed past the small army of well-meaning folks who tried to keep him from entering Natalia's room, where he found her lifeless body and wept the dutiful tears of a son who, just the day before, had told his mother she was nothing to him. Such was the depth of Marco's grief that, when Sidwell arrived to comfort him, he immediately accused Sonny of being behind Natalia's death — a bold statement that fit neatly with Sidwell's agenda on multiple levels, but one that Sidwell didn't respond to in the moment, probably because he was reeling from the knowledge that in ordering the firebombing of Charlie's, he nearly killed not only Kristina, but also his own son.

Oh, yes. Did I forget to mention that Sidwell is responsible for Charlie's going up in flames? We know this because we saw him on the phone at Wyndemere, ranting at an employee about how there wasn't supposed to be anybody in the building when it was destroyed. I'm sure swift reprisals are due Sidwell's goons now that he knows how close they came to the worst kind of collateral damage, but it's too little, too late — Sonny and Jason already have Sidwell in their crosshairs, and Sonny has decided that "an eye for an eye" is in order. Yep, that's right: Mr. "Code of Honor" has ordered Jason to go after Marco. Now, remember that Sonny still has no proof that Sidwell is even a genuine threat to his business, let alone proof that he's behind any of this. Remember also that Sonny has spent decades talking about how (raspy whisper) family is sacred. And remember ALSO also that Marco just saved his idiot daughter from a fire. No matter, says Sonny; revenge is more important than a debt of gratitude.

The fact that Sonny Corinthos is a self-serving hypocrite and an absolute dirtbag is nothing new, but this particular reminder knocks the last of the legs out from under Sidwell as a character. Carlo Rota is a ton of fun to watch, and Sidwell entered the canvas with no shortage of potential, but now that he's been locked into mortal combat with Sonny, all that potential has been irrevocably pissed away. Everything that's happening here has happened before, many times, and it stopped being interesting about 25 years ago. No matter who wins, we all lose.

This is even more grating because, in a bid to disguise his culpability, Sidwell used two of Selina Wu's guys to burn Charlie's to the ground, thereby framing her. He told her as much after summoning her to Wyndemere, and although she (quite rightly) pointed out that Sonny would have no reason to believe she was behind the firebombing, and even less reason to trust Sidwell over her, she still caught the first flight out of town. Dante has already told Jason that Wu goons were behind the fire, and that Selina has fled Port Charles, but Jason didn't buy any of it for a second. In other words, we've lost a dynamic character for the sake of a stupid plot device.

GH has been allergic to the idea of the Wus on the front burner since Ron Carlivati reintroduced them via Brad Cooper in early 2013. To an extent, I get it; in a number of ways, the Asian Quarter storyline hasn't aged well. But on the other hand, goddammit, there's history there, and there were a million possibilities just waiting to be explored in any direction from the moment Selina showed her face. I mean, look, if the show really wanted Joss to become an action hero, they should have had Dex die after crossing the Wu organization. It would have been a perfect way to mirror the Asian Quarter, which really shifted into gear when Frisco vowed to take down the Wus because they killed his best friend Josh with a (cough) poisoned jacket.

Like a lot of the most memorable soap stories, it was patently stupid and utterly engrossing in equal measure — and also more believable than Joss being recruited by the WSB. Frisco was a pop star and talk show host, and no one wanted him to risk his life in pursuit of an international crime ring; the same should have been true of Joss as she worked her way into Selina's inner circle. Even without the return of the catacombs, it would have been far more satisfying than whatever the hell is happening between Joss and crusty Vaughn.

Instead, we have this mess. Another act of violence, another round of the people in and around Sonny's life blaming him, rinse and repeat. The details almost don't matter at this point.

Tainted Deception

Sonny was also front and center on the Deception side of the canvas last week, thanks to Brook Lynn being forced to tell her co-workers that Sonny's second round of investment money wasn't clean. If you ask me, this idea is even dumber than a poisoned jacket; either Sonny is so careful with his business that the cops and feds haven't been able to touch him for decades, or he's a sloppy jerk who's prone to tainting his above-board investments with ill-gotten gains. You can't have it both ways, and it's insulting to the viewers to try and chalk it up to a "clerical error" made by Sonny's money people, who are supposed to be beyond reproach.

Nevertheless, this is where we are, and it gets dumber still, because Brook Lynn's entire rationale for not immediately going to the authorities — which is what Tracy and Maxie both suggested — is that if Sonny goes to jail because of Deception, it'll just make Gio hate her more. I'm sorry, what? How is this a justifiable excuse for putting an entire company at risk? And how are Tracy and Maxie both willing to go along with it? (Admittedly, we aren't 100 percent sure whether Maxie's along for the ride, because their conversation quickly pivoted to Brook Lynn's investigation into Britt's role in Rocco's birth. But still.)

So far, this all seems like just another excuse for characters to talk about Sonny. After caving to Brook Lynn, Tracy went to the Metro Court pool, where she tried to convince Gio to return to the Quartermaine mansion in order to let her protect him from Sonny's enemies. He angrily refused, accusing her of being more interested in getting him to reject his grandfather than she is in actually keeping him safe; in response, she urged him to view the ashes of Charlie's, visit Kristina in the hospital, and then top off his evening by taking a trip to Morgan's grave.

There isn't much else to say about this at the moment. Will Deception's secret be uncovered? Will Gio ever reconcile with the Quartermaines? Is Morgan waiting in the (penguin) wings? I don't really care, and as long as the answers to those questions are being used to prop up Sonny, I doubt I ever will.

She Needs to Recognize

This section's going to be brief, because in my last column, I sort of went all in on everything that's wrong with the way the show's treating the Ashfords. But I do need to set aside a few words for the aftermath of Jordan walking in on Curtis and Portia as they were about to have desk sex — specifically the way the writers had Jordan rush to Anna, say she knew Portia tricked her into arriving at that exact moment, and then add "the bitch set me up." Because I don't have any insight into these decisions, I can't say with certainty that whoever wrote that dialogue knew what they were doing, but… having a Black character parrot Marion Barry's infamous quote was certainly a choice.

Anyway, Jordan was right; before going to Curtis' office, Portia messaged her to tell her Curtis needed to see her. And she copped to it, too — after Jordan beat a hasty retreat, Portia told Curtis exactly what she'd done. He got angry, she accused him of having impossibly high standards… what else is new?

Nothing. Nothing at all. We don't even know what happened after Kai told Drew that Curtis and Portia are trying to find and bribe Jacinda, because Drew spent the week offscreen and Kai spent it hanging out with Trina, pretending he didn't just rat out her parents to the guy who wants to send his mother to prison. Just another dumb, momentum-killing decision made in the editing booth, folks; nothing to see here. Carry on.

I Have Another Mother

Speaking of killing momentum, it took us roughly a week to find out what happened after Danny found Brook Lynn's file on Rocco. We didn't get to see what happened when they read the file, presumably because their conversation didn't revolve around Sonny, but we did get to see them summon Emma to the Brando Corbin Memorial Coffee Shop, where they asked her what she knew about Britt. It didn't take her long to realize why they were asking, at which point she quickly urged Rocco to ask his parents for the details. Somewhat surprisingly, he did just that, going straight home and demanding that Lulu tell him about Britt.

Who knows when we'll learn what happens next? Maybe Lulu and Laura will meet up at the coffee shop next Friday and talk about it then. In the meantime, we're left to wonder where the writers are going with all this, and what any of it has to do with the quite dead Britt Westbourn, or why Rocco would be any kind of upset to discover he didn't gestate in Lulu's womb. Yeah, kid, your parents had a surrogate they didn't hire. Just wait until you hear about how your grandparents on your mom's side got together!

That's it for the major stuff. Time to let the bullets fly:

• After hearing about the fire at Charlie's, Michael flashed back to his own burning and told Sasha he's still using pain meds to manage his recovery, which may or may not be the start of an addiction storyline
• Gio told Emma he's giving up music and dropping out of PCU, but he's still down to help her expose Dalton
• Lulu is now reporting on Port Charles news for the Llanview Banner, which will surely do wonders for the paper's circulation
• Boyle is gaining on Laura in the polls
• Turner tried to squeeze Sonny for information regarding Natalia's death, but only got a bunch of tough-guy whispering in response
• Joss told Vaughn she joined the WSB to take down Sonny, and he was so turned on he just had to grab her and kiss her
• Wiley saw Michael and Willow at the Metro Court pool, and they were all very sad about it