It isn't yet Thanksgiving in Port Charles — due, I assume, to the array of pre-emption shenanigans that plague our poor show every year — but here in the real world, the holiday season is upon us. What this means for us right now is that we're coming out of a very short week during which not a lot happened; if things had landed the way I presume they were intended to when these episodes were written and filmed, we would have wrapped things up with another round of emergency pizza at the Quartermaine mansion, but instead, we had a few days of filler.
This isn't necessarily a complaint. We've all seen how dull things can get when General Hospital is dog-paddling, and what's going on right now is far from the worst these writers have to offer. All I'm saying is that if you didn't tune in last week, you didn't miss a lot — and while I've been extremely wrong with this prediction before, I think this will be a fairly short edition of Critical Diagnosis. Let's jump in and find out together.
This Is What Happens to People Who Disobey Orders
Maybe Joss should just try a dating app. After she and Vaughn tearfully agreed they couldn't be together again on account of Brennan's orders, they abruptly started sucking face outside the Brown Dog a couple of weeks ago — and then woke up in bed together last week, with Joss moping about being ordered to leverage her uncle Lucas as an asset in the investigation into Faison's final project. (I'd mope, too — it's a pretty dumb way of wedging Lucas into this storyline.)
Vaughn, ever manly, ever artfully tousled, told her he had her back, and vowed that if Joss got to a point where using Lucas got to be too much for her, he'd help her extract Lucas from the situation. My notes at the end of this scene read "Vaughn's gonna diiiiiiieeee," which hasn't happened yet, but we're getting close: Shortly after Joss and Vaughn parted ways, he met Brennan in an alley for a status report, which is of course what you do when you work in a secure government facility, and their meeting ended with a pair of WSB goons dragging Vaughn off while Brennan reminded him he'd been warned not to have sexytime with Agent Jacks.
So, what is the point of all this? Friends, I do not know. Joss and Vaughn have been a pair of wet matches from the start, so there really isn't any drama to be generated from keeping them apart, whether by circumstance or by kidnapping. If this is the writers' way of clearing Vaughn off the board, it's a pretty lackluster way for him to go. I mean, really, since they got caught humping in Australia, he really hasn't been on much; after they agreed not to see each other anymore, he could have disappeared without comment, and I'm not sure anyone would have complained.
The sole purpose, I guess, is to remind us that Brennan isn't a nice guy, and working for the WSB comes with a long list of personal costs. Did we need the reminder? Of course not. But given that the timing of Vaughn's "arrest" dovetailed with Carly letting Brennan into her secret garden as a means of lulling him into a false sense of security while she works with Valentin to take him down, this is my best guess. If I'm right, then I guess that's fine; it won't be enough to prevent this version of Brennan from emitting pungent kindly uncle vibes, but we do what we can with what we have.
Rocco Gets Rocked (and Released)
I've ranted and raved before about how GH perpetually wants to have its cake and eat it too where Sonny's concerned. He's a philanthropist, but also a murderer; he's a mobster, but he doesn't allow anything truly evil to happen in his town; he's subjected his loved ones to life-threatening danger countless times, but he's a loyal friend and great father; so on and so forth. Well, it happened again last week, because Rocco was in juvenile detention for about ten minutes before he had his ass kicked.
This obviously happened in an attempt to froth up the urgency around getting Rocco out of lockup, but it doesn't make a single goddamn lick of sense. We kept hearing that it happened in order to "send a message," either to Dante or Sonny, but in a world bearing any resemblance to our own, the only message that might have sent would have been "please kill me and/or my loved ones." Whooping on the grandson of a mob boss is not a smart strategy, and it's also very stupid writing. Either Sonny is the mighty don of Port Charles, and his family is all but untouchable, or he's a feeble excuse for a kingpin and his so-called empire is a house of cards waiting to be sneezed on.
And yet! And yet. Ultimately, we learned — to no one's surprise — that Rocco's juvie beatdown came courtesy of Sidwell, who told an aghast Britt that keeping him in custody and under threat of assault was an effective way of keeping Sonny and Laura in line. Again, no it isn't, but what makes all this even dumber is that Sidwell hasn't even said anything to Sonny or Laura. What good is a threat if the people being threatened don't know it? The only person who ever seemed in danger of suffering even the slightest consequence for all this was the hapless guard who was yelled at by various parties all week long.
In the end, I think the only reason Rocco really got roughed up was to help pad out the episodes leading up to his inevitable release — and perhaps to arrange for a surprising chem test between Lulu and Nathan, who earned her undying ovulation for stepping up and taking Rocco into his custody pending the bail hearing. ADA Turner was predictably pissed about this, but there wasn't much she could do; with Dalton in the wind following his clearly bogus claims, and the PCPD's extremely belated investigation turning up no evidence that Rocco actually did what he was accused of, she wasn't left with much of a case to pursue.
As I've said before, I don't support killing off characters unless it leads to more story than they'd generate while alive. Dalton is a fine example of a character who's worth more as a corpse; during all the months he lingered in Port Charles, he failed to do anything of genuine interest, but now that he's dead, he's gifted us with at least the possibility of a story that either puts Sonny in Dante's crosshairs or forces Dante to compromise what's left of his professional integrity by looking the other way over his dad hiding Dalton's body. I mean, yeah, we've seen Sonny and Dante at odds before, and it never really goes anywhere, but this is still more interesting than Dalton drawing breaths.
All of which is to say that Dante is now demanding that the PCPD — by which I mean Nathan, who is immediately the department's busiest detective three days after having his badge bizarrely reinstated — hunt down Dalton and haul him in for questioning. Nathan's investigation has so far taken him to the Metro Court, where he was inexplicably living on a public college professor's salary, and the PCU campus; Dalton was obviously neither of those places, but Dante is undeterred.
While all that was going on, Laura was in the midst of an uncharacteristic freakout over Dalton's death and its aftermath. This is a woman who's faced off against the Cassadines countless times and committed a murder or two of her own, so the idea that she'd melt down over a body in her trunk is laughable; I guess what the writers are going for here is a conflict between Laura's earnest desire to do the right thing versus Sonny's nonexistent morals, but they didn't need to turn her into a shrinking violet to get there. If anything, Laura's desire to keep her hands clean should be pragmatic, not panicked; Dalton was a dirtbag who had her grandson arrested on bogus charges, and she should be more than capable of making him disappear all by herself. It'd be a lot more interesting than listening to the thousandth round of Sonny and Laura talking about how some criminal act is entirely justified and there's nothing wrong with their friendship.
And then there's Danny and Charlotte, who spent the week insisting that Dalton hauled off and punched Rocco in the stomach when he caught him in the lab. There's no reason for any of this, but Charlotte and Danny are teenagers, so it's easy to believe they'd do something dumb and unnecessary, and it was all worth it for the fun of watching Alexis, Laura, and Jason sidebar in total agreement that the kids were lying through their teeth. I doubt any of this is leading anywhere, especially now that Rocco's home and Dalton's dead, but like I said at the top of the column, this was basically a filler week anyway.
Here Comes the Bride, Pass the Stuffing
The longer the mystery of who shot Drew is allowed to go on, the more I hope and pray the perp turns out to be Willow — if for no other reason than it'll finally give this wide-eyed blank slate of a character some semblance of agency. All Willow ever really does is react to things that other characters do, a sorry state of affairs that continued last week when she moved back in with Drew at his urging, walked into their living room, and found him there waiting to hobble to one knee and propose (again) with Lila's ill-gotten ring in hand. You know what happened next: She questioned whether this was really the right thing to do, he insisted it was, she tremulously agreed.
If Willow shot Drew, then I'll be wholeheartedly on board with this gross couple's latest engagement. Otherwise, it's just the latest example of soaps pretending that any marriage — even a quickie to the guy you were accused of shooting after you left him at the altar for lying by omission about sleeping with your mother while you were cheating on your husband with him — is some sort of magic bullet in a custody battle.
We'll see which way that goes. For now, here's what we've got: Willow rushed to GH to ask Elizabeth — who was, as you may recall, left at the altar by Drew when he thought he was Jason — to be her maid of honor at an "intimate" ceremony in front of whoever Drew could bully and/or cajole into showing up to his crime scene house for Thanksgiving dinner. Michael, of course, saw the whole thing; later in the week, when Chase tried to get sanctimonious with him regarding his treatment of their shared adulterous ex-wife, he was quick to let Chase know about the latest developments. (Chase, predictably, blamed everything on Drew.)
None of this was fun to watch. What was fun was (almost) everything that went down at the Port Charles Grill last week, starting with Nina meeting up with Liesl, who wanted Crimson — which is, as always, a fashion magazine until the writers need it to be something else — to run a story about the grave injustice facing Rocco. Nina begged off, explaining that helping Willow is her focus, and admitting she'd done things on Willow's behalf that she regrets, at which point Liesl gleefully assumed Nina was admitting she'd shot Drew.
(Kathleen Gati is an underutilized treasure. That is all.)
While Nina and Liesl were talking, they were joined by Ava, who'd come fresh from the Jerome Gallery, where she patiently listened to allegedly adult Trina fret about the pending demise of her parents' two-year-old marriage before informing Portia that Nina had outed her as a potential suspect in Drew's shooting. Here we pause to give props to Ron Carlivati, who dreamed up a character so dynamic that she's capable of injecting life into multiple storylines even when she doesn't have any of her own — and double props to Maura West, who always delivers capital-E everything, even when the writers can't be bothered to give her shit to do.
Ava, Liesl, and Nina were happily chatting when Drew slithered in and invited them all to Thanksgiving, smugly predicting that dessert would be "spectacular." From what I recall, none of them could be bothered to ask him what he was talking about, but they were all plenty interested when Stella — who was there with Curtis — walked up to Drew and told him it was his own fault he'd been shot. Like I said: fun! The only false note was Liesl saying she'd "read about" Sidwell, which is either a needless redirect or a sloppy whiff on the part of the writers. She should know exactly who she is. I'm completely down for Rehabilitated Liesl, but her past with Faison is immutable, and there's no way she would have been unaware of Sidwell's connection to her freaky little man.
That'll do it for this week. Until next time, here's your customary parting batch of bullets!
- Brennan told Joss to make up with Carly, "for the good of world security" as well as her relationship with her mom
- Elizabeth spent another week being wasted as a talk-to with no storyline of her own
- Britt and Jason had the same conversation for the hundredth time
- Sonny and Turner are supposed to be sexy and interesting, but remain neither of those things
- Chase wants to make a turkey
- Trina is way too invested in her parents' love lives
- Drew asked Martin to officiate his wedding to Willow, and when Martin agreed, Drew celebrated by sharing his dream of making Curtis pay for crossing him
- Liesl arranged/forced the latest reconciliation between Nina and Willow
- Dante and Nathan spent an afternoon with the "who shot Drew" cork board, reminding everyone in the audience who all the suspects are, before deciding they need to take a closer look at Curtis
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