In recent years, General Hospital has tended to cycle between periods of not much happening and everything happening at once, with very little balance in between. All that buildup between bursts of energy means that when the show's hot, it's genuinely exciting, but the momentum lost during all the downtime isn't worth the tradeoff.
Lately, though, I think we're seeing something different. Who knows how long it'll last, but in recent weeks, it's felt like GH has been edging toward more of an old-school balancing act, with characters moving around the canvas and getting involved in stories that function independently while also tying in with larger developments. Even the younger set, largely ignored for years, has been treated to more dynamic storytelling lately. It's all been a really nice reminder of how important it is for a show like this to be able to operate at a solid medium pace.
Of course, I'm saying this about a week that started with a heart attack and ended with someone being led off to jail, so it isn't like it was all chatting over coffee. Let's take a look back together, shall we?
Widowmaker? I Hardly Know Her
Once the Ronnie arc ended, I assumed GH would go back to mostly forgetting that Ned, Olivia, and Leo exist, but apparently, the writers had other plans — and those plans included Ned dropping to the ground outside Bobbie's while Drew sneered at him, accused him of faking a heart attack, and sauntered off.
It all happened because Tracy left the country for a stay at her favorite spa, leaving Ned to manage the delivery of her keepsakes from Lulu's living room back to the Quartermaine mansion. As he told Gio over an honestly pretty sweet and enjoyable breakfast chat at the diner, he was having a hard time getting the moving company to tell him where Tracy's stuff was — which, we soon learned, was because Drew had it delivered to his house instead.
This makes no sense at all, of course. As Ned pointed out, it's theft, and that's just for starters; perhaps more importantly, there isn't a moving company in the world that will alter a delivery address based on some rando's say-so. But instead of calling the police, Ned erupted at Drew, demanding to know why he would do such a thing — and then boom! Heart attack.
So why did this happen, aside from the writers wanting to send Drew's villainy soaring to even more cartoonish levels? Mostly, I think, because Ned was discovered by Gio and Emma, who were on their way to meet up with Charlotte, Danny, and Rocco so they could break into Dalton's lab together during Laura's big mayoral debate against Ezra Boyle. Gio performed CPR while Emma ran back into Bobbie's to get Britt, and after the paramedics arrived, our two young lovebirds agreed that sticking around the hospital was more important than breaking and entering. Emma called Charlotte to let her know their mission was being postponed, and figured that was the end of it. It wasn't, of course, but we'll get to that later.
Were there less contrived ways of getting Emma and Gio to change their plans? Certainly. Maybe there are other purposes for Ned's sudden health crisis, but so far, we haven't seen them — in fact, after being rushed into surgery for an emergency bypass, he disappeared for the rest of the week. This was obviously largely driven by the fact that the show had so many other things going on, but it still felt like a fumble that made the heart attack look like a narrative stunt. Tracy's absence further compounded the weirdness of it all; spa or no spa, you know she'd hightail it back home the instant she heard about this, but no one even mentioned giving her a call.
Mommy! You're Out on Bail!
While Drew was busy stealing Tracy's stuff, his girlfriend started the week in Pentonville, where she made goo-goo eyes at Chase while he nobly vowed to spend all his free time working to have her exonerated. Lips aquiver, she held his hands from across the table, the camera zoomed in… and up walked Alexis, sternly reminding the both of them that physical contact is verboten when you're in lockup.
The writers have been unsubtly hinting at some sort of Chase/Willow redux for some time now, and they continued lumbering toward that destination last week; aside from the hand-holding, we also saw Brook Lynn tell Dante she's worried about the amount of attention Chase is giving Willow's case — a concern we know Dante shares, albeit for different reasons. He told her how many times Chase had been to visit Willow in the pen, then beat a hasty retreat so she and Chase could spend an episode arguing about his motivations.
The obvious goal here is to make the viewer think Chase and Willow are headed for an affair, but I don't see that happening. After starting out as a genuinely interesting couple, Chase and Brook Lynn have been so unrelentingly dull for so long that it has to be intentional; this is clearly not a case of the writers not knowing what to do with them. It's far more likely that Chase will end up in trouble at work — now that Dante has been appointed acting commissioner while Anna's "out of town," his doubts about his partner's objectivity carry a lot more weight, as we saw when he gave Nathan his badge back, made him Chase's new partner, and warned him that he had "some blind spots."
Either way, no one has to worry about Chase visiting Willow in Pentonville anymore, because Alexis got her out on bail — and rather than making a beeline to Drew, she headed to the Metro Court, where she was positively scandalized to find Michael and Wiley at a table with Jacinda. Why were the three of them together? Because of Nina, who cooked up a remarkably convoluted and stupid plan to trick Michael into blowing up his own alibi.
See if you can follow along. Mere days after going to Sonny and telling him they could save Willow and Michael by putting a cloud of suspicion around Portia, Nina abruptly and inexplicably changed her strategy, deciding what she really needed to do was make it so Michael was put in a situation where he, Jacinda, and his kids were in the same public place at the same time. The idea here, if you can call it one, was that Michael would be so scandalized by the thought of a (gasp) sex worker near his innocent babies that he'd have no choice but to deny they were in any kind of relationship.
Like I said: Convoluted and stupid. Even if Michael's romantic past didn't already include a love affair with a (gasp) sex worker, and even if he were as lame and judgmental as you'd have to be to behave the way Nina expected him to, you'd think he'd definitely be able to keep it to himself for a few minutes if it meant hanging onto his alibi.
The only saving grace here came courtesy of Rory Gibson, who's very good at playing Michael as the unflappable, ruthless badass we've always been told he is. Smiling at Nina, he told her to go ahead and take a picture for family court — and then told her she not only needed to leave the Metro Court immediately, but she'd be working remotely for the foreseeable future while Jacinda had the run of the Crimson offices. Then, after Nina left and Willow arrived, he gave her the same cold smirk while she lectured him about morals and threatened to ice him out of the children's lives forever.
This Michael is a pleasure to watch, but that only goes so far. The mystery of who shot Drew has been allowed to go on a little too long, especially given the way they've been writing Willow since it started. In the beginning, it made sense that we didn't know where she was when Drew was shot, and that we couldn't tell what she was really thinking most of the time — but after all these weeks, she remains the blankest of slates, and it's stalling the storyline in ways that no amount of tearful confrontations can cover up. Someone needs to make a breakthrough in this case, pronto.
For a moment, it seemed like the person to make that breakthrough might be Chase; as he told Willow, part of his efforts to exonerate her revolved around digging into Jacinda's, uh, visitor log for the night of the shooting. If he could prove she was with a client, then Michael's alibi would go up in smoke. Unfortunately for him, we saw Michael and Jacinda talk about this later in the week, and she told him she'd been alone all night after they parted ways at the PC Grill. (The fact that they waited until now to have this conversation makes them even dumber than Nina was when she hatched her cockamamie plan. It's only fair to point this out.)
And then there's Portia. Alexis hired Felicia to look into her alibi, and last week, that investigation started gaining momentum. First, Felicia went to Portia's office and said Alexis wanted to know whether she saw Willow in the hospital the night of the shooting; in response, Portia lied, saying she was on call that night, but spent her shift in her office and didn't see anybody. Isaiah, who was also there at the time, later reminded Portia that they were together at his place that night, and recommended immediately coming clean — an idea she immediately shut down, saying the case had nothing to do with them and it'd only make them the focus of undue attention. He agreed, but that won't matter for long; all it took was a quick look at the shift logs for Felicia to discover that Portia wasn't in the hospital after 8 that night. She immediately called Alexis, so it won't be long before that bomb goes off.
Of course, when it does go off, it won't have much of an impact on the investigation into Drew's shooting — the collateral damage from that news will be largely confined to Curtis and Portia's marriage. Having already ranted about that storyline recently, I'll leave it alone for now.
Our Grandson's Been Framed
Despite Emma's attempt to abort the mission, Rocco and Danny convinced Charlotte that they'd never have a better opportunity to break into Dalton's lab. All they needed was Britt's key fob — and she handed them a golden opportunity to grab it when she asked them to go back to Bobbie's and get her purse, which she'd left behind in all the fuss over Ned. They happily obliged, pilfered the fob, and headed over to PCU, where — after a couple moments when it seemed like the damn thing didn't work — they unlocked the door and we finally, after lo these many months, got to see the inside of Dalton's legendary lab.
Would you believe me if I told you it looks just like every other lab we've seen on GH in recent years? And that there wasn't an animal in sight?
Would you also believe me if I told you that after finding nothing at all and getting ready to leave, the kids had to scurry and hide when Dalton suddenly arrived?
Rocco went one way, Danny and Charlotte went another — and when it looked like Dalton was about to stumble upon his siblings, he made a loud noise, outing himself to save Danny from getting in legal trouble and giving Drew even more ammunition to keep him away from Scout. Dalton pounced on Rocco, dragging him across campus to the building where Laura and Boyle were getting ready to debate. Although she initially tried to stamp out the situation by accusing Dalton of manhandling a minor and saying she wouldn't press charges if he agreed to leave, Laura lost her leverage when a PCPD officer told Rocco to empty his pockets… and out came the fob.
Even after he was arrested, it seemed like things might not be so bad for Rocco. Dante figured he'd be facing a misdemeanor at worst, and when Ric visited Sonny to extend an olive branch in the name of encouraging lasting peace between their daughters, Sonny agreed to hire him as Rocco's lawyer. On top of all that, Britt asked Sidwell to intercede with Dalton on Rocco's behalf, explaining it'd be for the best if the charges were dropped because they didn't need the police looking at the lab. With all this in his favor, it was looking likely that Rocco would get a slap on the wrist.
Dalton, however, had other ideas. When Sidwell told him to make the situation go away, he flatly refused, saying Laura humiliated him and he was determined to make her grandson pay the price. Instead of shooting him on the spot for insubordination, Sidwell sent Marco to the arraignment hearing to observe and report back.
Ric entered the courtroom feeling good about the deal he'd struck with Turner, which would have added up to less than a year of community service for Rocco. What Ric didn't know, though, was that after he left Turner, Dalton showed up and supplied her with photographic evidence that his lab had been extensively damaged during the break-in, leading Turner to suddenly revise the charges to destruction of proprietary material. Remanded to custody until his bail hearing in two days' time, poor Rocco could only wail that he didn't do it as he was led out of the courtroom. Rushing into the hall, Marco called Sidwell and said, "It's over. And it's worse than we feared."
The way this came together at the end is very stupid, of course. There would be no reason for the district attorney's office to act on Dalton's say-so with nothing more than a couple of pictures to go on, just as there would be absolutely no reason that the PCPD wouldn't conduct at least a cursory examination of the lab after Rocco's arrest. Much like Ned's heart attack, I think this is something unnecessary happening in a nonsensical way in order to accomplish a specific set of goals.
What are those goals? Well, if I had to guess, I'd say the writers have finally decided to get rid of Dalton, who's never been anything but a nothing character. His rude defiance of Sidwell can't go unpunished. It also gives Britt an opportunity to play hero in a couple of ways — one, I suspect she'll step forward and say she gave Rocco the key fob and sent him to the lab on an errand or something; two, I suspect she'll agree to go all in with Sidwell in exchange for Rocco's freedom. It could mean giving up her job at GH, as well as her bid for reaccreditation, but even if she isn't forced to make those sacrifices, it'll begin her latest road to redemption while also giving the audience a bigger window into Faison's final project.
Or maybe not! I have no actual idea. Maybe Sidwell is the one behind the trumped-up charges, and Marco's "worse than we feared" remark was in reference to something else entirely. I hope not, though — this storyline desperately needs to get moving, and making Britt the fuel that pushes it along would be smart for several reasons.
That'll do it for now, friends. Until next time, here's a batch of bullets:
- Turner showed up at Sonny's house after suffering a flat tire; after activating his "fleet of tow trucks," he sensuously and repulsively rubbed grease off her cheek
- Offscreen, Mac declined Laura's offer to serve as acting police commissioner, because he's commuting to and from Boston while Maxie's in her face cream coma
- Drew hired Martin to serve as Alexis' co-counsel on Willow's case, at least for the ten minutes it took for Alexis to convince Martin it was a dumb idea
- Britt dumped out her purse, which apparently contains like six items
- Chase and Nathan reminded us that Judge Heran was murdered back in August
- Ric told Sonny he has a legal strategy that would let him keep his piers even if Measure C passes
- Molly worked on her book
- Carly reacted rudely to Lucas' news that he was moving into Wyndemere with Marco, even suggesting that Marco might be using him to help Sidwell — and then when Joss supported Lucas, she blasted Joss too
- Stella and Curtis had an absolutely appalling conversation that found her demanding that he find a way to keep his marriage together for the good of the baby
- Trina confronted Jordan, blaming her for the divorce and vowing to convince Curtis never to get back together with her
Why can't the show give Nina a win once in a while? Hopefully Michael will have egg on his face soon.
ReplyDelete