Howdy, folks! Hope your holidays were everything you hoped they'd be. In Port Charles, they were filled with small miracles of love, friendship, and forgiveness — plus a potentially career-destroying courtroom meltdown. (This is still a soap, after all.) It was a week light on drama, in other words, so this will be a short edition of Critical Diagnosis, but you should be getting a bonus post soon, because Jenn and I are working on our annual best/worst of GH list.
In the meantime, here's my last solo column of the year. Let's dive in!
Trial and Error
Most of the week revolved around various heartwarming holiday celebrations, which meant the only real action involved Willow's trial — and per tradition for the character, the vast majority of that action had relatively little to do with Willow herself. She continues to be a wide-eyed bystander in her own life, staring mostly mutely while the words and actions of others set the course for her future. It's got to be annoying for Katelyn MacMullen to act this out; I know it's grown very tiring for me to watch. Like a lot of you, I continue to hold out hope for the eventual reveal that Willow has been playing everybody and she really did shoot Drew, but if that's on its way, we really needed to see signs of it coming a long time ago.
Anyway, the week started with Alexis calling Suzanne and asking her to find Amy Driscoll so they could leverage her gossip network to find Portia in order to have her subpoenaed. Offscreen, Amy came through — in the midst of her top-secret cozy bedrest session with Isaiah at his cabin, a process server showed up and let her know she had a surprise court date.
Portia's testimony went about the way you'd expect, which is to say Alexis got her to admit in open court that she falsified Heather's test results, was blackmailed by Drew, and was shacked up at the Metro Court with Isaiah the night Drew was shot — all while Trina watched in horror and Curtis jutted his jaw in righteous anger. Trina ran out of the courtroom while Portia called after her, Drew's eyes bugged out as he realized he'd been outed as a blackmailer, the judge adjourned until after New Year's — like so many other shocking mid-trial reveals in daytime history, it should have felt epic. Cathartic. It should have been the kind of thing that blew the case wide open and left viewers on the edge of their seats, gasping for air.
Instead, it was kind of… a dud?
This is not the fault of the actors involved. Nancy Lee Grahn is often at her best when Alexis has someone pinned on the stand, and I thought Brook Kerr played Portia's confession well — rather than just trembling her lip and justifying her actions, she hit a variety of notes before Portia crumbled and pleaded with Alexis to let her skip the question of where she was during the shooting. In the moment, it was perfectly compelling.
The problem is, it didn't really have any impact on the trial. All it really did was put her in jeopardy at work, where she's now under suspension, and put her further on the outs with her family — specifically Trina, who continues to suffer from some of the worst character malpractice in recent GH history. This character is a young adult who grew up with divorced parents, and yet she's being written like a first-grader whose world has been absolutely rocked by the news that her parents are splitting up — even though she's only known Curtis is her biological father for a couple of years, and even though she knows she's the product of an affair Portia had with Curtis when she was married to Taggert, the father no one's even mentioned in an insultingly long time.
Rather than progressing the trial, Portia's public shaming only happened to prop up a deeply dull love quadrangle that nobody asked for, and which absolutely only exists because someone behind the scenes thinks Black characters can only have stories with other Black characters. Portia and Isaiah have been "together" for a couple of months; Curtis and Jordan are chewed gum. Nothing they've done or discussed since this started has been the least bit dramatic, and as a result, all those courtroom fireworks just fizzled right out as soon as the last scene cut to commercial. The only silver lining I can see here is that now everyone knows Drew blackmailed Portia, which really should lead to some repercussions. We'll see how that plays out, but in the short term, we at least got one laugh-out-loud moment when Drew told Alexis he couldn't believe she went after an innocent woman. Hi, Kettle! I'm Pot! You're black!
Alexis spent the rest of the week fretting about trial preparations, even though the trial has been recessed until after January 1 — and even though, moments after the judge called a recess, she was handed an anonymous letter informing her that Michael was on Drew's street the night of the shooting, and Tracy saw him there. Alexis is always high-strung and nervous about everything, so of course she's going to stress about the outcome, but it seems to me that we should have at least seen her trying to verify that tip? Perhaps Suzanne is busy working her offscreen magic again.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Chase also testified, and was so openly critical of the PCPD during his testimony that Dante ended up suspending him. It's just as well; Nathan's working every case now anyway, and he still has spare time to make Hallmark eyes at Lulu.
Weird as it feels for me to type this after writing less than a dozen paragraphs, I think that might be it for the in-depth commentary this time; lots of other stuff happened, but none of it really warrants a full-on discussion. In the spirit of the holidays, I will leave you with an extra big pile of bullets. See you in 2026!
- Jason paid Britt and Brad's Cafe Cherie bill, and Chase took their pictures for the restaurant's wall of shame
- Cody and Molly are finally officially an item
- Outback stole Tracy's glove and frightened a frog
- Sonny casually mentioned that he officially sold his piers to Sidwell
- Gio and Rocco had their first "supervised visit" while Dante awkwardly looked on
- Tracy shamed Martin in front of Laura, threatening again to have him brought up on charges
- The Scorpios had a holiday FaceTime with Sasha, Robert, and Daisy; Holly was never mentioned
- Thanks to a last-minute save from Molly, James got the new saddle that Cody and Nathan got him for Christmas
- Because Trina is now mad at Portia, she invited Jordan to celebrate Christmas with the family and apologized to her in front of everyone
- Emma gave Gio a didgeridoo
- Marshall skipped the Christmas dates on Wynton Marsalis' tour so he could come back to Port Charles and play the clarinet while Trina sang
- Sonny made his mother's pasta
- Carly took pity on Valentin and smuggled Charlotte into her attic for a Christmas visit; later, Charlotte stupidly told Rocco she'd seen her father
- Brennan had Britt's medical license reinstated
- Leo found the violin that Sonny and Ned bought for Gio, brought it into the middle of the Quartermaine Christmas party, and teamed up with Wiley to pressure Gio into performing for them
- Joss and Avery disappeared for Christmas
- Willow convinced Drew to let her take Scout to Alexis' house the day after Christmas
- Sidwell hosted a Boxing Day party at Wyndemere and invited Lucy and Ava, who not-so-subtly sparred for his attention
- Sidwell has a Janus bust on his mantel, which is probably some sort of sign from the writers
Comments
Post a Comment