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Now that's how you end a Friday episode!
I don't know if it's because of rampant spoilers, problems with recalibrating after pre-emptions, some combination of both, or other factors entirely, but General Hospital has largely forgotten the art of the Friday cliffhanger in recent years. As often as not, I end the week feeling fairly little anticipation for what's to come — and it always makes me a little sad, because I remember the many Fridays that left me antsy for Monday to arrive so I could find out what would happen next.
I'm not saying I'm antsy for Monday to arrive — no self-respecting adult ever is — but the final few minutes of Friday's episode were an old-school delight. Just as Ronnie was about to come clean with Michael, in walked Drew and Martin, sale papers at the ready — and just as she took the pen from Drew, we saw Tracy find Monica's real will. Bang! Closing credits.
I give this show of ours a hard time in this space, but when it's firing on multiple cylinders, it's still more than capable of reminding the audience why soaps are special. While last week was a bit bumpy for me overall, I'm absolutely eager to watch Monday's episode, and it's been at least a little while since that happened. Let's celebrate.
Are You Pregnant?
Before we talk about last week's best moments, we should spend a little time talking about the worst — specifically, the Jordan/Curtis/Portia/Isaiah quadrangle no one asked for, yet is stubbornly developing anyway because the writers can't be bothered to think of anything better for these dynamic characters and talented performers to do.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: None of this is the fault of the actors involved, all of whom have repeatedly proven that they're more than capable of carrying or elevating worthy material. This all falls squarely on the shoulders of the writers and showrunners, who've spent months isolating these characters and shoving them into their own corner of the canvas for absolutely no good reason at all. Is it racism? I don't know. But it sure looks like it, and for a show and/or network with an awfully spotty history when it comes to long-term treatment of non-white characters, that's a really bad look.
There's so much wasted potential here that it's almost physically painful to watch. While I doubt many viewers are lamenting the end of Curtis and Portia's marriage, which often felt like one long argument that always ended with her begging his forgiveness, it's absurdly lacking in creativity for their split to lead to Curtis suddenly wanting to get back together with Jordan. And it's even more insulting to imagine that Jordan not only wants the same thing, but — as she told Anna last week — has never had stronger feelings for him than she does right now.
On paper, it's admittedly quite soapy for Portia to have an affair with Isaiah and find herself pregnant; those are ingredients that would have added up to some satisfying drama in the '80s or '90s. But in this particular case, it's mostly just boring and sad — partly because it's yet another example of Portia's stories being driven by her own impulsiveness and appallingly bad judgment, and partly because it's also yet another example of how badly the writers have bungled Isaiah since bringing him on. This guy used to be dashing and mysterious; now, he's just an adulterous creep with a cabin.
What really makes all this so unbelievably frustrating is that it doesn't take much creativity to imagine better stories for every single one of these characters. I mean, Jordan is working undercover to expose Sidwell — shouldn't that be the focus for her? Why the hell are the writers spending so little time even allowing characters to talk about it, especially after introducing the interesting angle of Jordan being seduced by Sidwell's money? If Isaiah's going to have secret sex with anybody, it should be Jordan. They should be falling in love while she gets in deeper with Sidwell, putting them both in danger. IT'S RIGHT THERE, COME ON.
Curtis? Curtis is heading up Aurora, which owns Crimson, and he's had a long friendship with Nina that could easily lead to something more. This would create a conflict of interest, especially if the writers bothered to do anything with the rampant shittiness of Curtis exposing Nina's affair with Drew. There are whole-ass knots there, just waiting to be tangled.
As for Portia, there's hospital business to attend to, much of which really ought to involve her barely seen co-chief of staff. Aside from all this business with the Quartermaine mansion, Monica's death should really have a lasting impact on General Hospital; I think any longtime viewer could come up with multiple possibilities in the space of a single afternoon. Being drawn into that drama, and ensuring GH's long-term financial health, would do a lot to get Portia back to the strong, intelligent character she was for years before the writers decided to turn her into this dithering, duplicitous mess.
And I haven't even mentioned Trina and Kai, which is an injustice that'll need to be relitigated in another column. For now, you get the point, which is that GH's woeful disregard for the Ashfords not only does a dumb disservice to characters with plenty of potential, it's dragging down the show.
Having groused about this plot, I suppose I should wrap up here by outlining where it currently stands. Portia met Isaiah at his cabin, but their tryst was interrupted when he was suddenly called away to the hospital, so she met Ava at the Metro Court bar and told her about her impending divorce and pregnancy. Curtis, meanwhile, was making his play for Jordan, who tearfully told him she suspects Portia's pregnant; he responded to this news by heading to GH, where he got needlessly snippy with Isaiah before bumping into Laura, who he immediately told about his impending divorce and Portia's pregnancy. After receiving Laura's wise counsel or whatever, he barged into Portia's office and asked her if she's pregnant; she confirmed it, they argued about their future, and he walked out after verbally entertaining the idea of the two of them staying together. While all that was going on, Jordan was busy telling Laura everything, and sharing her fear that Portia's pregnancy would keep Curtis from leaving her.
Didn't enjoy watching it, didn't enjoy typing it. Moving on.
No West, Young Man
I wouldn't say I'm all that upset about this, at least not yet, but can anyone remember another time when a soap brought two characters back from the dead in quick succession and treated both of them like no big deal? GH's decision to shrug its way through Britt and Nathan's returns feels more perplexing by the day. Again, I'm not mad about this yet, but that's mainly because I find it somewhat humorous that we're being shown a world where Britt is working at the hospital and Nathan's just sort of wandering around town giving advice, and every few days, someone or other resolves to find out what the hell they were up to while they were "dead," but there's always something more important to do first.
Nathan's return is the funniest by far, because that guy just has nothing going on. He's presumably living with Liesl in her comped suite at the Cosmo, but we have no idea, because she hasn't been seen in days and no one ever talks about it. How is he eating? Where did his new wardrobe come from? What does he do all day? Last week, his biggest source of drama was discovering that Rocco lied in order to have dinner with him and Liesl and Britt. Sacre bleu!
Britt, meanwhile, finally met Dalton, who surprises me every time he shows up onscreen. At this point, I feel like the number of weeks he's been "on the show" easily surpasses the number of lines he's had while he's been "part of the cast." Last week, Sidwell told Marco that Dalton might need to be replaced, which I assumed was our sign that he'd disappear without further mention; instead, Sidwell introduced him to Britt, and told him he'd be working for her now. This is all apparently happening with the semi-reluctant approval of the unnamed "partner" who's pulling all the strings in this interminable cold fusion project, and who everyone seems frightened of.
Everyone, that is, except for Dalton, who waited all of 30 seconds after Sidwell left the room before he started trying to convince Britt that the two of them should team up and box out their benefactors, running off with the proceeds from their world-altering research. How does she feel about this? We don't know yet, because they were interrupted by Emma, who finally came face to face with "the Britch" and asked her what the hell she was doing in Dalton's office.
Much like everything happening with the Ashfords, this whole debacle is a classic example of sadly blown potential. With the exception of Daniel Goddard, who has spent virtually his entire GH tenure looking as annoyed as I feel while watching him, this storyline boasts an assortment of strong performers, all of whom have been utterly, consistently wasted on week after week of developments so bizarrely, haltingly paced that they've long since lost any real interest. Why have the writers sidelined Sidwell so thoroughly, when Carlo Rota's so much fun to watch? Why do they seem so intent on wasting Braedyn Bruner the same way they wasted Nicholas Alexander Chavez during so much of his tenure? Why does Dalton exist at all?
Here's another way to put it: Lulu spent the entire week trying to come to terms with the fact that Rocco lied in order to have dinner with Liesl and her undead spawn, and that was more interesting than anything Britt or Nathan did. I'm slightly curious to see where the Britt/Dalton situation leads — it should at least be easier to watch than Britt continually sniping at Jason because the writers think it's "flirty banter" — but mostly I just want this story to die a quick death. Whatever this technology is meant to do, it can't be deadlier than the revenge Carly's planning for Brennan, so let's see more of that and less of this.
Monica Didn't Write You Into Her Will. I Did
There are certainly things that don't make sense about this whole Ronnie Bard story, and we'll get to some of them in a minute, but this is one case where I think the good outweighs the bad. It's true that Erika Slezak is marvelously talented, but we've seen this show waste actors who are just as skilled; the real secret sauce here, IMO, is the fact that they only had access to her for a very limited period of time, so the writers knew they needed to get from A to B with a bare minimum of heel-dragging.
If I'm being honest, I'd have liked to see this story go on for a little while longer — as the mighty Wubs has pointed out in recent days, it'd be fun to watch the Quartermaines scramble for alternate housing while Drew enjoyed his dark reign over the mansion — but what we're getting is still better than what we'd have if the writers were free to dawdle. We'd see a few weeks of concerted effort to get things going, and then it'd just drift for months on end with no discernible purpose or destination in sight. Maybe this is how things should be going forward — Frank dreams up some actor to add to the cast, they sign on for six weeks of taping, and then everyone has to scramble to fit a whole-ass storyline into two or three months of airtime. Could be worse.
Anyway, in the last edition of this column, we talked about how Drew and Ronnie finally met toward the end of the week, and he made his pitch to buy the mansion just before Danny and Rocco arrived, giving him the only excuse he needed to make a complete ass of himself. Laura stepped in and tore him to shreds, and Ronnie backed her up, calling him cruel and accusing him of disrespecting his mother's memory before saying he didn't deserve a house like the Quartermaine estate and tossing him out.
Drew vented his fury to the only (non-imprisoned) person who'll still talk to him, complaining to Martin that Laura and those rotten kids screwed up his only opportunity to purchase the mansion, but Martin told him not to give up hope quite yet, and offered to take Drew's offer over for Ronnie to actually look at. Why did he do this? Because as most of us long since guessed, Martin's the one who brought Ronnie to town — and, in a twist that may fuel this story at the expense of Martin as a long-term character, he's also the one who doctored Monica's will to make it look like Ronnie was supposed to inherit the mansion. Against her better judgment, and only because Tracy was so awful to her when they met, she agreed to go along with it.
From a meta standpoint, it was a lot of fun watching Martin and Ronnie interact, just because it meant we got to see Erika Slezak and Michael E. Knight trade lines. From a narrative standpoint, it was less interesting, just because we've seen this kind of thing happen a seemingly infinite number of times. He showed up and told her she had to sell to Drew, she refused and realized he's the one who drugged her at the tea party, he threatened her with the fraud charges she'd face for going along with his scheme to get revenge on Tracy, and she caved. If the template for this type of conversation were a rubber stamp, it would have long since been worn down past its barest nubs.
As an idea, Martin monkeying with Monica's will in order to get back at Tracy might appear to have its merits. Those characters are fun adversaries, and watching the actors go at it is always entertaining, so on the surface, anything that heightens their feud might seem like a plus. But the more you think about it, the worse this seems, because Martin isn't just messing with Tracy here — he's inflicting trauma on an entire family, and turning himself into such a villain that he's actually using an unwitting Drew as the means to his end. Once the truth comes out — and it seems likely to come out soon — everyone should hate him.
There's no real reason for it to be this way. Ronnie's entire existence is a big fat retcon, so the writers could have invented pretty much anything they wanted, up to and including a last-minute friendship between Martin and Monica that led to the two of them enlisting Ronnie to help teach Tracy a lesson. It still could have included almost everything we're seeing, but it would have been what Monica wanted, instead of full-on fraud; in the end, Tracy still could have hated Martin, but he wouldn't have to be even worse than Drew in the bargain.
To put it more succinctly: Often, I fear that the GH writers don't really think about the long-term implications of the things they have the characters do. It's one thing to seemingly write a character into a corner, only to come up with some bonkers way of getting them out — Ron Carlivati did that brilliantly with Obrecht at least once — but it's quite another to commit character assassination for no good reason.
But these are worries for another day. For now, Ronnie's mere moments away from officially selling the Quartermaine mansion to Drew, and Tracy holds Monica's real will in her hands, and that's all that really matters. Monday's episode promises to be an entertaining way to kick off the week. Until then, have some bullets!
- Sidwell and Sonny reminded us that their silly rivalry is still supposedly some kind of story
- Emma and Gio enlisted Charlotte, Danny, and Rocco in their quest to expose Dalton
- Brennan told Anna there's a connection between Faison and Sidwell, which Anna immediately shared with Jason
- Michael strongarmed Nina into hiring Jacinda as her new assistant at Crimson; shortly thereafter, Nina tried and failed to pay Jacinda even more to go away
- We were forced to watch more gross "flirting" between Sonny and Turner
- Molly and Cody were once again thwarted from kissing
- Jason knocked Drew's cane out from under him, forcing him to faceplant on the floor of the Brown Dog and causing nearly two million viewers to cheer loudly in unison
- Sidwell barged into Laura's office and informed her that they were going to work together to save Port Charles
- Emma said the PCU labs and offices are now using a new keycard system, finally explaining why in the hell she hasn't used the key she stole from Vaughn
- Ronnie briefly mistook Brennan for a "Joey," serving up another sweet little Easter egg for One Life to Live fans
- Brennan, unaware of Carly's true motivation for bringing it up, seemed willing to act on her suggestion that he transfer Valentin to a prison in the United States
- Nina yeeted Portia under the bus by telling Sonny she had plenty of motive to shoot Drew, and suggesting that they team up to point the police in her direction in order to save Michael and Willow
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