Well, after a few subpar weeks, General Hospital decided to roust itself — at least partially — from its slumber and give us a series of episodes that were mostly entertaining, even if only slightly, and also even if only because much of what occurred was too absurd not to get a mild kick out of it. I think we can feel things clicking into place for the fall storylines, which — god help me — still fills me with a sense of anticipation even though I know it shouldn't.
Also, we didn't have to listen to Lulu and Brook Lynn having the same argument yet again, which is only a win. If this is what passes for good vibes in Port Charles these days, well, I'll take it. Let's dive in!
Drew de Grace
With each passing week, Drew eats a little more of the canvas, which I continue to maintain is only a problem because he has absolutely no reason to do any of the dickish things that have finally made his character interesting. I'm a big believer in the value of a perma-villain, and General Hospital really hasn't had one in far too long — there's an awful lot to be said for a Dorian Lord-type character who can always be counted on to stick a thorn in someone's side. The problem here, once again, is motivation. Drew was a cardboard Boy Scout until the moment he developed a deviant erection for his nephew's wife, at which point he made a series of deeply stupid mistakes and/or betrayals that made people hate him, and instead of realizing he'd been a total asshole, he decided to double down and fuck everyone over further.
This is interesting enough in terms of viewing, but it's piss-poor writing. If Drew was a character in a book, you'd pause your reading, brow furrowed, and wonder whether the writer had fallen and hit their head; after that, you'd probably drop the book off at your nearest Little Free Library and feel bad for whatever sucker ended up taking it home. I'm sure the writers expect us to just accept that Drew is a bad guy now, and eventually I'm sure people will, but it still bothers me that his heel turn never felt like anything more than the GH writers deciding the only way they could fill Cameron Mathison's episode guarantee is if Drew turned into a jerk.
All that being said, I can't deny we're getting to a point where we can reliably expect Drew to purposely annoy and enrage everyone around him at every juncture, and more often than not, the results are pretty entertaining. We're also at a place where the other characters in Drew's orbit have no problem with letting him know they think he's a cheesy piece of shit, which is also entertaining. Long story short: My complaints are real, but they can only go so far.
Last week, Drew's campaign of terror largely centered around two things: One, his decision to sic a team of fraud investigators on Stella in order to hurt Curtis; and two, his comically inept quest to have Michael arrested for punching him in the face.
Stella's branch of the story started with Jordan calling Curtis while he was busy experiencing afterglow with Portia (oh noes!) in order to tell him he needed to get down to GH, where Stella was in the midst of an extremely ill-advised interview without the benefit of legal counsel. This wasn't entirely her fault — Martin tried to put a stop to it by saying he was her lawyer, but the investigators told him he couldn't represent her because he was a person of interest. The rest of it had to do with Stella's usual bull-headedness, though; as she told Alexis once Curtis was able to set up a meeting, she was willing to face the consequences for fudging any details she might have finessed in order to ensure her patients received the proper care.
Of course, it took Curtis and Alexis about two minutes to figure out that Drew triggered the investigation, and about two minutes after that for Curtis to crack me up by pouting, "I knew Drew was trash before, but targeting my auntie?"
Just as Curtis, Alexis, and Stella started to get their heads around Drew's latest skullduggery, Martin was also in the process of figuring it out. After getting socked in the melon by Michael, Drew sped over to Sonny's, where he made a series of demands: One, that Sonny make Michael petition the court for Willow to get visitation rights; two, that Sonny sell his piers to Sidwell; and three, that Sonny take a long vacation away from Port Charles. Unbeknownst to Drew, ADA Turner was lurking nearby, hiding her presence so he wouldn't know she'd been eating Sonny's pizza — an unlucky break for the congressman that would end up causing him great embarrassment at the PCPD.
Predictably, Turner was appalled by Drew's behavior. She had every reason to be, of course, but it was still pretty hard to listen to her compare him unfavorably to Sonny; Drew might be an amoral creep, but he isn't a mobster. Even if it's true that he's even grosser because he's doing what he's doing with the weight of the federal government behind him, he still hasn't spent the last 30 years murdering people in cold blood. Still, as strenuously disinterested as I am in watching the slow-motion car crash of yet another brunette go from hate to love with Sonny, it was undeniably fun to see her let Drew hoist himself by his own petard.
Here's how it went down. Drew went to GH, where he was seen for his injuries after putting up with Elizabeth laughing in his face; following that, he reported that he'd been the victim of an assault, which led to Michael agreeing to voluntarily come in for questioning. Impatient for results, Drew barged into the PCPD with Martin in tow, demanding to know why Michael hadn't been arrested yet. Shortly thereafter, Chase arrived, bearing the unhappy (for Drew) news that absolutely no one at the Metro Court could remember seeing Michael clock him.
The clear implication here is that the entire town knows Drew is a jiveass who spends more time waging petty wars than doing his congressional duties, but I think it would have been funnier if we'd been able to see a montage of people telling Chase they had no memory of something that happened right in front of them. Still, what we got was funny enough: When Drew said he went to GH to get checked out after Michael hit him, everyone in the room dunked on him. At first, Drew thought he still had Martin as his ace in the hole — but then Martin pulled him into a hallway, made it clear he knew Drew had gone after Stella, and said he'd only sign his statement if he agreed to call off the investigators. Drew refused, Martin left, and just like that, Michael got away with socking a public official.
But Drew wasn't done yet: After glowering at Turner and accusing everyone in the room of being on Sonny's payroll, he fled to GH, where he told Willow that Michael punched him because he told Wiley she missed him. This was basically all it took for Willow to let Drew pull her into an embrace — just in time for a revolted Nina to see, of course — and later, after Kristina refused Willow's request to be a character witness at the custody hearing, it was also all it took for Willow to call Drew and admit she needed his help to get her kids back.
That's an awful lot of Drew! I completely understand why so many viewers want him to die. As I've said before, I disagree. Port Charles needs full-time shit-stirrers, even ones as repugnant as Congressman Cain.
Home & Heart Attack
The week's other big story was the sudden medical drama surrounding Maxie. I think most viewers are aware of the fact that Kirsten Storms is off the set for the rest of the year, thanks to her recent move to Tennessee; knowing she'll be back makes it harder to care about this story, but it's already produced a few fringe benefits we can be thankful for.
It all started, as so many hard-to-care-about stories have, on the set of Home & Heart, where Maxie and Lucy were on camera to roll out Deception's new overnight face cream. Minutes before starting the segment, Maxie made the bizarre decision to solicit some legal advice from Martin, asking him if she could be kicked out of the company for going against her partners' decision to sit on the evidence against Sonny. He didn't give her any conclusive answers, but he was there long enough to attract the attention of Lucy and Brook Lynn, both of whom wanted to know why she was talking to him. I wanted to know, too — why do it there? Why not ask him to meet somewhere private?
Well, whatever. Before Maxie could be forced to answer, she offered a live demonstration of the cream, and instantly passed out. Bad for sales, and worse for Maxie — after she was rushed to GH, Lucas tried to jump-start her heart by applying defibrillator paddles to her fucking neck. Against all odds, this tactic eventually worked, at which point they discovered there was some sort of mystery enzyme in Maxie's blood, which led to a lot of people standing around picking their noses and wondering whether she might have possibly been poisoned.
Okay, so Sidwell obviously did this in order to ensure Maxie's silence. But why do it on live television in a way that could only hurt the company he's invested in? And why do it in a way that would leave her alive to come back and rat you out anyway? The only real answer, of course, is "this is the best we could think of on short notice after Kirsten told us she needed the rest of the year off," but as I said, we can be thankful for a few fringe benefits.
The first of these is the way Maxie's medical crisis led to a quick truce between not only Lulu and Brook Lynn, but Lulu and Liesl. Lulu has been so unbearably shrill since her return that when she started a recent scene by running a vacuum cleaner, I thought I was hearing the sound of her voice, but seeing her old pal in peril has restored her to some semblance of normalcy (at least until Britt comes back to town and starts the shrieking again, anyway).
The second is that it's given Kristina Wagner something real to do for a change. I can't help thinking that it's kind of shitty to ask an actor who's buried a child to weep at the bedside of her character's deathly ill offspring, but I guess you can't argue with results, and the fact is that even though the writers forget it 90 percent of the time, Felicia is a character with deep ties on the canvas, played by an actor who's always a consummate pro. This doesn't mean it isn't cheap and lame for GH to bend over backwards (again!) to remind us of the "BJ's heart" storyline, but hey, whatever; that's what soaps do.
Five Poppies, Zero Interest
Thanks to the flawless one-eyed marksmanship she developed during her nine minutes of training, Joss prevented Vaughn from being strangled to death with a shoelace — but it took its toll on her emotionally, as evidenced by the way she curled up in the shower, fully clothed, while reliving the moments she shot Cyrus and the unnamed assassin. Including Cyrus' murder in her flashbacks was interesting, actually; she wasn't all that broken up about killing the guy who killed her boyfriend, so why should she need weepytime under running water after killing the guy who tried to kill her new boyfriend? Well, either way, Vaughn soon found her and plopped down next to her under the spout, and then they had sex.
Once the post-nut clarity hit, our two goober spies realized they had an extremely small window of time to figure out who tried to kill Vaughn and where he came from — but since it was getting late, they agreed it was better to get some sleep first. Suddenly awkward, they decided to sleep in shifts, and the next day, they were back to arguing again, with Vaughn insisting that they tell Brennan the op was blown, and Joss insisting that they wait as long as possible. They eventually compromised, deciding they'd hold off for 24 hours while they swept the grounds of the Five Poppies in search of Britt.
Britt, meanwhile, was hilariously easy to find, ping-ponging between her room and the lab when she wasn't skulking around the patio. It took Jason about two minutes to find her room, where they had a long argument about whether she needed saving and whether he had the right to ask her how she survived Heather's attack; in the end, all we learned was that her Huntington's is "in remission," which is the most offensive thing I can remember hearing on television that does not involve a member of the current presidential administration.
Thwarted by Britt, Jason used his "John Moore" persona to attract the attention of Greta the courier, who apparently also lives at the Five Poppies when she isn't lugging Dalton's backpacks through international customs. Britt saw this too, and was so disgusted that she complained to Pascal, who told her Greta was cozying up to Mr. Moore on assignment, in order to determine whether he was a WSB mole. When Jason got back to his room, Britt knocked on the door and made sexyface at him. (Friday cliffhanger!!!!!!)
Despite Britt being very much out in the open for much of the week, neither Joss nor Vaughn were able to find her, which left Vaughn unshakeably convinced that they needed to call Brennan and give him the bad news. Unable to change his mind, Joss said she was going to sweep the grounds one last time, and barely missed seeing Britt — but she did see Jason, and like a good spy, she hid behind a bush with her mouth open until he was out of sight before she scurried back to her room. While calling for Vaughn, she missed the arrival of Pascal, who got the drop on her comically easily, aiming a gun at her cute little tennis outfit while offering to facilitate a reunion with her "husband."
Where was Brennan while all this was going on? Fixing the garbage disposal at Bobbie's.
I've ranted about this storyline before, so I won't waste everyone's time by doing it again this week. But I think it says a lot that while watching this, I found myself considering how much more entertaining it'd be — and frankly, about as believable — if James, Avery, and Donna were working for the WSB instead.
Clayunt and Delaaaahlahhh
This doesn't really merit a full-on entry, but it's too much to deal with in a bullet point, so I'm taking a few minutes here at the end to say that if you're the type of soap viewer who enjoys the campy side of daytime, you owe it to yourself to check out the cuckoo sequence from last week that found Molly imagining herself as Delilah, the protagonist in the novel she's working on. Apparently it's a period romance, because the sequence saw her running around with a cowboy named Clint Buchanan, coming a whisker away from kissing him before another cowboy — who looked an awful lot like Cody, natch — grabbed her and told her to run.
If you were a One Life to Live viewer, you know exactly who Clint Buchanan was, and if you watched the show in the '80s, you'll also remember Delilah, who married Clint's father and brother before settling down with a guy named Rafe, who was basically the show's version of Chase at the time. You'll notice that at no point did she hook up with Clint, which is only part of why this is so weird; the other part is that since Llanview and the Buchanans have been established as part of the GH universe, what Molly's doing is akin to someone deciding to write a book about Warren Buffett having an affair with his sister/mother-in-law in the 1800s.
All of which takes a back seat to the way the segment was filmed, which included poor Kristen Vaganos running around outside in a corset, not a stone's throw away from the Gregory Chase Memorial Park Bench, and recording a voiceover for the whole silly affair in a breathy Southern drawl. It must be seen to be believed. Again, if you love the campy side of soaps, you'll love this; as for me, I mostly felt bad for Vaganos, who is quite talented and deserves better than all of it.
The point, such as it was, was to help Molly realize that she has feelings for Cody. Daytime being daytime, just as Molly was reaching this realization, Cody was hooking up with Ava, who heard him attempt to confess that he was being paid to hook up with her, misread the whole situation, and slathered on the come-hithers. You know what happened next: Molly rushed to the stables to tell Cody how she felt, only to find him sweaty, shirtless, and locked in an embrace with Ava. Mah stahrs!
That's all the big stuff. Time for your bullets:
- Flora tried to get Brook Lynn to understand Lois' actions, presumably so Susan Batten's healthcare would kick in for another year
- Sidwell told Marco that Lucy is "a woman worth cultivating"
- Marco and Sidwell agreed that Drew could become a liability
- Spinelli told Maxie that he'll propose as soon as she wakes up
- Carly told Lulu that she comped Liesl a suite at the Cosmo; Lulu did not offer to reimburse her
- Nina and Carly got into another screaming match, which ended with Nina in the Metro Court pool, missing one shoe again
- We learned that Alexis has Ric saved in her phone as "Don't Answer"
- Tracy mucked a stable
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