During my many years as a music critic, the hardest part of the job was always having to find a way to articulate in-depth responses to mediocre records. When you're dealing with things that exist at either extreme, opinions are very easy to come by; when you're confronted with stuff that hovers in that messy middle, it's much more difficult to dig into the hows and whys, if only because the material is less engaging. Stretching "eh, it's fine" into 500-1,000 words certainly beats digging trenches, but it can be grueling enough work in its own way. This is a big part of why the culture writing I do now is almost totally driven by whim; if I don't want to write about something, I don't have to.
I'm thinking about all this right now because lately, General Hospital has stubbornly hovered around a C average, and it regularly gives me fits come column time. Don't get me wrong, the show has absolutely been worse, and even the lousiest of the current stories have their share of strong scenes and defensible ingredients. But like I've said repeatedly in this space, it often feels like the writers are afraid of momentum; every time they manage to get a little something going, they slam it back into first gear.
There are obviously numerous reasons for this, many of which are unknown to the audience. I don't believe the writers actively want to deliver a show that just sort of putters along much of the time; I'm sure they're constantly hamstrung by factors far beyond their control. On the other hand? Weeks like the one we just had make my job here a lot harder.
To put it more succinctly: My verdict on last week's GH is "eh, it was fine." Nothing pained me, necessarily, but nothing had me on the edge of my seat either, and now I'm left hoping I can write about it in a way that entertains you more than actually watching the episodes entertained me. Will I be able to make magic happen? Let's find out together.
Anna's in Real Trouble
Recent weeks have split the bulk of the action between Faison's final project and the Drew/Willow/Michael story, and given that we finally saw Willow reveal her master plan to Drew two weeks ago, I figured that would continue last week. I figured wrong! We didn't even see Drew or Willow. Instead, pretty much everything revolved around the Faison chunk of the canvas.
On one hand, I'm grateful for this, because this story is a sprawling mess and I really want to get to the part where we see how it's going to impact the show going forward (if at all). On the other hand, this story is a sprawling mess, and watching these characters try to make sense of it can feel like watching a toddler try to tie a shoelace. At this point, we're pretty much mired in a series of scenes that feel like actors spending a full day in the same room while their characters enter and exit the same door so they can continue the same conversation, and very little of it really goes anywhere. This is particularly prevalent with Carly and Valentin, who go back and forth between her attic and her living room so they can argue over whether one of them should leave the house, and/or debrief after the one who eventually left gets back.
This is a long-standing problem with soaps, of course; what's happening here is nothing new. Daytime is dialogue-driven, and time is the writers' best weapon when it comes to ramping up anticipation for a big story's climax. Even during the WSB's glory days, reams of script paper were taken up with conversations we'd heard variations of before. I think my problem right now mainly stems from the fact that this story has already been going on for so damn long that I've lost my patience for the time it takes to click pieces into place. At this point, there's no way the story can possibly end up justifying all the time it's taken, so I wish they'd just cut bait and jump to the finish.
Unfortunately, that doesn't feel like it's going to happen. Every single one of last week's episodes included something about this story, but nothing actually happened — you had characters expressing concern for Anna, or sharing their suspicions that something fishy had to be going on; you had characters plotting against Sidwell; you had characters blabbering about cold fusion. Did any of it amount to very much? Not really.
The little bit of motion we did see mainly stemmed from Cullum going a little too far in trying to press the issue of Anna's alleged mental breakdown. First, he told Brennan that Anna "isn't the WSB's problem anymore" and ordered him to focus on finding Valentin; after that, he visited Carly, and made a (genuinely creepy) veiled threat to her safety while having a deeply, deeply inappropriate conversation with her about Brennan losing his focus on work because of his relationship with her. In the short term, this led to two things: One, Carly telling a furious Valentin, who immediately knew Anna was being set up; and two, Brennan agreeing to throw in his lot with a suspicious Dante, who told him that Anna said she'd been kidnapped and was never on a WSB mission at all.
I have no issues with any of these developments. Valentin has been proven to be dangerous when he's pissed, and I like the idea of giving him Anna to be even angrier about. I'm also down to see a Brennan/Dante teamup. But my patience when it comes to these characters talking instead of doing something is wearing very, very thin. Like I said, this is not a new problem; if you watched GH in the '80s, you spent many hours watching Robert and Sean discuss plans and/or make thoughtful-but-frustrated noises while poring over maps and computer printouts. But they rarely did it in service of stories that meandered this badly, and now that these pieces are in place, we really need to see some results.
The other little bit of motion came courtesy of Lucas, who put himself in harm's way by overhearing Marco and Sidwell talking about their nefarious plans — and not seeing Pascal, who was watching him the whole time. One of the many things I like about this version of Lucas is how committed he is to doing the right thing even though he's absolutely terrified of danger; it reminds me of Tony, and even though I sincerely doubt that's intentional on anybody's part, I still think it's sweet.
Anyway, Lucas confided in Elizabeth, who gave him some truly awful advice by insisting that even if Marco has lied about the extent of his involvement in Sidwell's dirty business, that doesn't mean he should write off their relationship. To her credit, she also warned him to get the hell out of Wyndemere ASAP, which is why Lucas headed back to Spoon Island after leaving work… and walked out on the parapet just in time to overhear Marco leaving a message for Cullum, letting him know that Britt's medication had been administered per request, and adding that he wanted to revisit their earlier conversation regarding Sonny. After he ended the call, Marco looked up and saw a stricken Lucas, standing well within earshot.
Given that we know Marco will at least attempt to prevent Lucas from leaving next week, I guess the play here is for Lucas to end up being imprisoned in Anna's old cell, which had goddamn well better be a very temporary situation. This show has struggled for decades to find a version of Lucas that fits organically on the canvas, and now they finally have one, so if they know what's good for them, they won't harm a single perfect hair on his head. It doesn't matter who ends up rescuing Lucas — it can even be Super Joss, for all I care — but he needs to be roaming the halls of GH again pronto.
While all this was going on, Sidwell spent the week focused on affairs of the heart. After showing up at Wyndemere with brunch for Sidwell, Lucy was unhappy to find him with Ava, and said he had to choose between them. When Sidwell told Lucy he doesn't respond well to ultimatums, she stormed over to Sonny's and asked him to "clean Sidwell's clock," leading to a very dumb conversation that concluded with Lucy deciding to take Sidwell down from the inside by pretending to want him back and then gathering information about his illegal activities while he's blinded by lust.
There are so many problems with all of this that it's hard to know where to begin, or even to muster up the energy to dignify it by paying it much attention. Lucy told Sonny she's sure he's using Deception to ship contraband, which is the type of shady business soap writers love because it's ambiguous enough to allow them to avoid having to come up with actual details; what they do need to explain, though, is how it makes any sense for her to think she'll be able to dig up extra dirt by dating him. Do the writers want us to believe that Sidwell has folders of incriminating evidence lying around Wyndemere?
The other annoying aspect is that Lucy is one of those characters who's so rarely seen that the audience knows she'll never be used to drive story for any real length of time. We're watching this play out because someone somewhere thought it'd be entertaining to have Lucy and Ava bicker over a man, but there's no way it's leading anywhere serious, which makes the whole thing just one more Sidwell-related development that feels like a waste of time. All three of these actors deserve more, and so do we.
Finally, there's Jason. Felicia delivered Anna's message as requested, warning him that she was right and Faison's alive, which prompted a lot of Serious Blinking on his part, followed by a visit to Joss' apartment, where they talked about her Wyndemere adventure and the discovery of The Crystalline Conspiracy and the cigarillos in Cullum's jacket pocket. He, in turn, told her that Cullum and Sidwell are partners. The implications of all this information would be glaringly obvious to any idiot, but Joss and Jason are very special idiots, so instead of making immediate plans to do literally anything at all about the situation, they just sat on her couch and made concerned faces. With friends like these, who needs rogue WSB directors?
Because we know Jason Burton is on vacation until summer, and because of the recent rumors regarding Finola Hughes' contract status, the assumption out of all this is that Jason will leave to rescue Anna and he himself will disappear; there are other rumors, however, that suggest Jason's temporary exit will be the result of something else entirely. Either way, the writers are doing a pretty lame job of giving allegedly intelligent characters a compelling mystery to solve. Even a person who'd just come out of a six-month coma could put this together without much effort. Which brings us to…
Do I Have Bed Head or Something?
Well, Maxie's awake.
If I seem less than enthused, it has nothing to do with my feelings for the character; I'm just responding to this storyline development in the spirit with which it transpired onscreen. Remember how silly we all thought it was when Lulu popped out of bed and went on the run after being in a coma for years? Well, that was positively scintillating compared to the way they had Maxie wake up.
In a sense, this was a development everyone could see coming as soon as Nathan and Lulu started making eyes at each other — and when Thursday's show opened with Felicia, Georgie, and James making valentines in Maxie's hospital room, while Maxie lay there blissfully unencumbered from heart monitors or feeding tubes or anything that might make her look like she was doing anything other than taking a little nap, it was clear she'd be opening her eyes pretty quickly.
What I didn't expect was for Maxie to just appear in the doorway of her room as Felicia and the kids were in the foyer getting ready to leave, voice clear as a bell, telling James he wasn't allowed to skate without a helmet. Much like Nathan's return, it all felt oddly muted — a doctor checked her out and said she was the picture of perfect health, Felicia and the kids shed happy tears, Spinelli had a few minutes of alone time with his precious Maximista, and that was basically it.
While all this was going on, Nathan and Lulu were having a tortured heart-to-heart about their feelings for one another — one that was interrupted by an immediately suspicious Brook Lynn, who waited for Nathan to leave before laying into her and warning her that she'd lose her friendship with Maxie forever if she gave in to temptation. And just like that, boom! Spinelli called Lulu to tell her Maxie woke up! Right when Felicia was telling Maxie that Nathan's alive! Crazy timing, right?
This isn't a complaint about Maxie regaining consciousness as Nathan and Lulu are in the middle of realizing they have feelings for each other. That's a truly deathless soap trope that isn't even really worth complaining about. What I object to here is the half-hearted way all of it came together. When Nathan woke up, he still thought he was married to Maxie, and he was thrown for a loop to discover she'd not only moved on with Spinelli, but was in a freaking coma. Did he visit her? Did he spend any time trying to dig into the details of her sudden collapse? Not that we saw. This type of return — and this type of effort to use narrative symmetry to build a love triangle — should make us feel something even when we can see it coming from a mile away. We watched Felicia marry Colton, knowing Frisco was on his way back. We watched Patrick and Sabrina exchange vows, knowing Robin would blow it up. There weren't any surprises in those situations, but they were still emotionally impactful because the stakes had been properly driven.
In this case, what are we meant to feel? Well, we feel bad for Spinelli, because he's so desperately insecure about his place in Maxie's life if Nathan's around. But are we supposed to be rooting for Maxie and Nathan? They were a fine couple, but that ship sailed almost a decade ago. Are we supposed to be invested in Nathan and Lulu, after a lot of stammering and a single kiss?
This is still a messy situation with plenty of potential for dramatic fallout, but I guess what I'm saying is that having Maxie wake up with such a shrug — shortly after Nathan's return was handled so similarly — feels like a gigantic missed opportunity. I'd be a lot more invested in this if Nathan and/or Lulu were suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Maxie's coma, teamed up to investigate it, and developed feelings for each other along the way. If we'd seen Nathan torn between his still-raw feelings for the wife he left behind when he "died" and a new love with her best friend. It'd be even better if Spinelli were involved in the investigation too, and he and Nathan developed a real friendship while Nathan struggled to know his own heart. If Maxie had woken up in the midst of that, then I think people would be talking about it out of genuine excitement, rather than cracking up over the unintentional hilarity of a six-month coma ending with zero visible effects.
Soap fans want to be drawn into this stuff. As easy as it can be to poke fun at the melodrama of it all, that's part of what makes it work. As we've seen when things are really clicking, GH has all the ingredients at its disposal, just waiting to be put to good use. The difference between "it's fine" and the type of story that helps define an era can feel profound, but it's often mostly a matter of execution. While that makes weeks like these even more frustrating in some respects, it also means we're rarely all that far from things firing on all cylinders. Hope springs eternal.
That's it from me for now. Enjoy this week's batch of bullets, and I'll see you next time!
- Laura and Mac asked Dante to step in as commissioner long-term, and although he agreed to think about it, he also (unsuccessfully) tried to convince Jordan to take the job
- Emma left for California so she could tell Robin about Anna's condition in person
- Judging from the books on Anna's shelf, she's a Bob Dylan fan
- Tracy gave Cody relationship advice after finding him reading Pride & Prejudice
- Under the guise of a school project, Danny asked Alexis for information about the Cassadine family tree, but quickly made it clear he just wanted to know if he and Charlotte were closely related
- Portia took a paternity test which revealed that Curtis is the father of her baby, delighting Curtis and making Isaiah sad
- Valentin was appalled to discover that Danny knows he's hiding in Carly's attic, but Charlotte assured him that she trusts Danny completely
- Chase and Bailey Lu had a tea party
- Elizabeth prepared for her dinner date with Ric
- Suddenly remembering he has a sister, Nathan visited Britt to tell her that Anna is convinced their father is alive
Comments
Post a Comment