I doubt there's a soap fan alive who hasn't complained about the amount of time it often takes for major stories to develop — I've certainly been guilty of doing it, and often in this column — but the good thing about those interminably slow builds is the immense satisfaction the audience feels when things finally pay off. Last week was a case in point, as the writers gifted us with some truly juicy courtroom melodrama and the pivotal point in the "who shot Drew?" mystery that we've all been waiting for.
As Wubs pointed out in her column this week, that storyline actually hasn't been going on for that long, especially in soap time; he was only shot in September, and there have been a number of pre-emptions or holiday repeats on the schedule since then. But it felt like the writers were dragging it out, because they were — we started out with a nicely knotty list of suspects, but rather than developing it like a really well thought-out whodunnit, they spent weeks barfing out a flurry of twists and misdirects that took the air of the mystery rather than ramping up the stakes.
And yet the magic of longform serial drama prevails. Even after all this time spent treading water, once the story moved into the courtroom, it proved it still had some entertainment value. Maybe a lot of it, in fact. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let's break it down.
Trial, Period.
After her Portia gambit backfired, Alexis spent last week trying to make the jury suspect Michael — and on Monday, she got off to a great start by calling Ezra to the stand and getting him to say he was in a motel with Jacinda during the window when Drew was shot. Kristina, meanwhile, was busy trying to mitigate the damage by attempting to bribe Jacinda into skipping town by giving her a bag full of cash. Where did it come from? How is Kristina paying for anything at all these days? Is she just living off the insurance settlement from Charlie's? These are questions we're clearly not meant to ask right now, so we'll stick with what happened next: Jacinda took the bag and made a beeline for the courthouse, where she attempted to get Michael to grab his kids and leave town with her. Unfortunately for both of them, she was nabbed by a bailiff before he even really had a chance to respond.
On the stand, Jacinda tried evading Alexis' questions for a few moments, but she was pinned down pretty quickly and forced to admit Ezra was telling the truth — and poof, just like that, Michael's already fishy alibi went up in smoke. Wasting no time, Alexis then recalled Tracy to the stand, and used a bit of well-timed trickery on Suzanne's part to make it look like she had camera footage from another house on Drew's street — which was all it took to get Tracy to admit she'd seen Michael parked there the night of the shooting. After drawing out that big reveal, Alexis went after what might have been the knockout blow, by calling Michael to testify.
Here's where we pause to once again acknowledge the excellence of Rory Gibson's Michael. Gibson's decision to play Michael as a terminally cagey character really pays dividends at times like these; he always looks like he knows just a little more than anyone else in the room, and gives the impression of being someone who's slow to anger because he understands it's a useful tool. The first thing Alexis did was get Michael to admit he hates Drew, but he did it so calmly that it felt more like a simple statement of fact than anything malicious. That set the tone for the rest of his testimony, which always felt like calm truth-telling even though Michael was in the midst of having his alibi's tattered remains dangled in his face.
On the stand, Michael finally admitted that he'd driven to Drew's house that night, planning to ask him to keep his distance from Willow so she could have freer access to their children, but he was stopped in his tracks when his phone rang with Wiley's special ringtone. After hearing it, Michael said he realized confronting Drew would only make things worse, so he turned around and left.
Listening from the spectators' seats, Kai and Trina remembered hearing a ringtone during the shooting, and quickly jumped to the conclusion that Michael must have been lying about not entering the house. After arguing for a bit over whether they had any responsibility to investigate further, they did what everyone in their age group does when they have a problem: They roped in Gio, asking him to encourage Wiley to call Michael. Gio was naturally suspicious at first, and pointed out that whenever anyone asks him to do stuff like this, someone (usually Dante) ends up hating him for it, but Kai and Trina were able to wear him down pretty quickly. He arranged a video game date with Wiley, who called Michael so Gio could ask him if Tron: Catalyst was okay for them to play, and Trina and Kai were there when Michael's phone rang with a custom ringtone… but not the one they were hoping to hear.
In addition to shredding Michael's alibi, Alexis was also able to get Elizabeth to tell the court that he was alone in her house long enough to plant the gun in Willow's room, all of which seemed like a strong enough nail to hang her case on. Drew disagreed, however, and flat-out ordered her to put him on the stand — a decision she warned could have disastrous consequences that she would refuse to take responsibility for if things went awry.
Boy, did they ever go awry.
I've repeatedly criticized Drew's heel turn, for the simple reason that it never made any damn sense. At first, Cameron Mathison seemed just as bewildered as the rest of us, but he eventually leaned into playing Drew like an unrepentantly selfish scumbag, and there's been a certain measure of entertainment to be had from this; even without any real reasons for it, it's often a lot of fun to watch purely dastardly behavior on a soap.
Under cross-examination from Turner, though, Drew finally gave us the peek into his twisted psyche we've been waiting for. Just as Alexis warned, Turner was able to mash his buttons with ease, and he quickly went from visibly irritated to full-on foaming at the mouth, yelling directly at Michael from the stand and laying his inferiority complex completely bare. When she mentioned the receipt for the $1 million wire transfer to Judge Heran that was found in his safe — which was genuinely a nice callback to a portion of the storyline I'd assumed the writers forgot — he snapped and started ranting about how he's Alan's son, and a former SEAL, and a patriot, and a congressman, but none of it is good enough. Willow hissed at Alexis to put a stop to it, but Alexis refused, letting Drew yell that Michael doesn't deserve any of what he has, but all it took was Drew taking one of those things — his marriage — for Michael to shoot him. Vowing that Michael would rot in prison, he ended his testimony by promising that he and Willow would take Wiley and Amelia.
Forced once again to battle back from the ropes, Alexis hissed "you blew it" at Drew before finally yielding to Willow's repeated demands that she be allowed to testify — and that's when the fireworks really went off.
As I've said repeatedly, one of my big issues with the way this storyline has developed is the way Willow has been reduced to a bystander — and the way we, in turn, have been forced to guess at whatever she might really be feeling. I felt all along as though the writers were doing this in order to heighten the uncertainty around whether Willow actually shot Drew, and as it turns out, it looks like I might have been right; on the stand, as she calmly denied ever touching the murder weapon or shooting Drew, we watched her remember doing exactly those things. And it wasn't a crime of passion, either: Willow wore gloves when she pilfered Edward's gun, and she kept them on when she fired two bullets into Drew's back. More damningly still, she was clearly in her right mind when she did it; rather than wearing a blank expression, she had a look of barely contained rage on her face.
All of this was a lot of fun to watch, and I think it's nothing but great — for this storyline, obviously, which now gets to enter a chapter that's really rich with potential, but also for Willow as a character. She's been a cult member, a teacher, a wife, a nurse, a cancer patient, a mother, an adulterer, but she's rarely been truly her own person, allowed to pursue her own agenda for her own reasons. As a result, we haven't had many chances to catch a glimpse of Katelyn MacMullen's real ability, but I think that's about to change — and not just because of those flashbacks, either.
After court adjourned for the day, Willow and Drew went to the PC Grill, where what was meant to be a celebratory meal was derailed when Carly and Jason walked in, distracting and infuriating Drew. The conversation that followed between Willow and Drew was boring on the surface — more of her mewing about people hating her, more of him pledging his undying love and support — but the more I listened, the more I thought Willow might be subtly goading Drew into confronting Carly and Jason. Those suspicions proved correct (for me, anyway) when Drew did exactly that, and the conversation ended with Carly drenching Drew with his own drink while Willow tried and failed to suppress a laugh from across the room.
(Speaking of laughs, I have to give Steve Burton props for his comedic timing here. When Drew walked over, Carly stood up to face him, but Jason kept eating, pausing between bites only long enough to casually correct Drew's prediction that Willow would be found innocent. "Not guilty," he interjected, baffling Drew, who looked nine kinds of annoyed while Jason explained that "found innocent" isn't the right legal term.)
Like I said, it looks like the story is about to enter a new chapter that's really rich with possibilities, and that richness all stems from the major entertainment value waiting to be mined from weeks of watching Willow gaslight her unfathomably arrogant husband into sowing the seeds of his own ruin. Now we know she really will do anything for her kids, up to and including committing attempted murder and marrying the guy she tried to kill. This whole time, she's been saying that being with Drew is her best shot at getting her kids back, which is the kind of dopey thing only a soap character who's being bent to the whims of a storyline would say. But now we know she might have another motivation for marrying him: Experiencing the satisfaction of bringing him down from within, piece by piece.
The call is coming from inside the house, Drew. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
After Willow's testimony, as the various parties gathered in clusters, Wiley called Willow, filling the courtroom with the strains of "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" as Trina and Kai looked on in shock and alarm. After doing their customary dance of arguing over whether or not they should do anything, they marched over to Alexis' office, where they ended the week by saying "We know who shot Drew."
As Alexis prepares to face her own Nora Hanen Gannon Buchanan moment, we're left with the next mystery, which is why in the hell Willow had the gun in her room after she shot Drew. Is she really that foolish? I don't think so. Like I've said before, I think Michael has known all along that she did it. I think he heard the shots go off, watched her leave Drew's house, and followed her back to the Quartermaine estate, where he let her put the gun back in its case. I think he then planted it in her room at Elizabeth's, because even though he didn't want to publicly accuse her of the shooting — which would make him look like an asshole to Wiley and Amelia — he was perfectly happy to watch her go down for the crime. The long, hard look he gave her as he left the stand last week reinforced that belief.
It seems likely that Willow will be acquitted now, which raises the question of whether Michael will stand trial for Drew's shooting. I don't think the show will waste our time with that; instead, I think Dante and Nathan will try building a case against him while Willow moves into checkmate against Drew. I also think Willow and Michael will eventually have it out to the point that Michael tells Willow what he knows — not only about her shooting Drew, but about what she did to Daisy and Sasha. I don't know where any of this leads in the long run, but at this point, I feel like it has to include a total reset of the status quo for Willow, and that happens so rarely with long-term characters that I can't help but look forward to it.
That's all the big stuff! Time to let the bullets fly:
- Kevin took Ace to Dublin, thus sparing the kid the traditional spate of diseases and kidnappings that soap writers always fall back on in order to keep pre-SORAS children on the canvas
- Curtis and Isaiah briefly beefed over the timing of Portia's paternity test before Britt told them to knock it off
- Emma told Brennan she's worried about Anna, which was enough for his exceedingly dim bulb to go off and make him think there might be something wrong
- Charlotte stupidly told Danny that Valentin is at Carly's, and he gave her a ride for another secret visit, which was enough to convince Valentin he needed to get out of town — at least until Carly got home and convinced him he needed to stay
- Dante and Nathan had an odd little conversation about Nathan breaking the chain of custody with a piece of evidence, something Nathan chalked up to "shaking off the cobwebs" after his years away
- Brennan put the screws to Britt, reminding her what she owes him in exchange for getting her medical license back
- Livid about being bluffed into implicating Michael, Tracy vowed to find out who told Alexis she saw him on Drew's street the night of the shooting
- Sonny made chicken piccata
- Unhappy about Britt spending New Year's Eve with Jason, Brad tried talking some sense into her by listing all the people and things ahead of her on Jason's list of priorities — including the moss in Carly's kitchen!
- Michael urged Jacinda to stay in town and continue their relationship, and she agreed to "stay as long as I can"
- Martin smiled to himself as he remembered eavesdropping on Tracy and Michael
- Laura told Sonny she wishes Luke was still alive, because he'd know how to help get them out from under Sidwell
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