In the '90s, after Beavis & Butt-Head broke through to the mainstream and started making appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, I remember Letterman giving an interview at one point and explaining that he was a fan of the show because — and I'm paraphrasing here — no matter how much the rest of the world might change, he could always count on the duo to be just as dumb as ever.
I'm bringing this up now because last week's General Hospital was pretty dumb overall, but it was dumb in ways that were occasionally somewhat comforting. Like the one before it, last week was a week full of characters talking about big things they were just about to do, and big decisions they were just about to make — which, on GH, is always a clear sign that no big things or decisions are actually about to happen. The show always does its best to try and fool you into thinking this will finally be the time someone actually behaves with the level of urgency they claim to have, but major soap moments are always preceded by a series of obvious tells, and no matter how loudly those characters jabbered about what needed to happen, the show drowned them out with the overwhelming feeling that we were really just watching another episode of the status quo.
This is not, to be clear, great writing. It does, however, follow daytime's long-established rhythm of providing narrative release only after creating a lot of needless pent-up frustration. No matter how much the rest of the world might change, I can always count on GH to be as dumb as ever, and lord help me, that is a comfort in certain ways.
Let's dig in.
Does Curtis Know?
After all that preamble about some of the ways GH hasn't changed over the years, let me now pause to point out something new I've noticed in recent years: Specifically, a tendency to put characters (and the viewers) through a whole bunch of short-term drama that ends up amounting to absolutely nothing. Last week's case in point was the salon showdown between Portia and Jordan over Jordan not telling Curtis she could be pregnant with his baby. On Monday, they had it out, and each of them stormed off to a talk-to — Jordan with Stella, Portia with Isaiah. On Tuesday, we learned that Jordan wasn't pregnant after all, and while Stella lectured Portia about letting go of her anger toward Jordan, Jordan told Curtis she'd briefly believed she might have been pregnant, and Portia was pissed at her about it, but it turned out to be a false alarm.
So what was the point of all this? I genuinely have no idea. The best I can come up with is that the writers are obviously really into the idea of drama between these characters, but they just as obviously don't want to try too hard to come up with ways of creating it, so they're just chucking soap tropes at the wall. I'm fully aware that writing for a show like this is incredibly difficult, but as a general rule, I think it's good to avoid anything that eats up several days of screentime, only to end with the equivalent of "Oh. Okay."
It was a waste of time, but it wasn't all bad. I did think it made sense for Portia and Isaiah to talk about her feelings regarding Curtis and Jordan, for example, although I don't care for the cartoonishly catty way Isaiah's being written here, particularly toward Jordan. Overall, though, it felt like the fulfillment of various episode guarantees, and given that I'm particularly annoyed with the way the writers have treated Isaiah and the Ashfords for the last while, I had a lot less patience for it than I might otherwise have been inclined to offer.
Anyway, Jordan knows she isn't pregnant, so do Stella, Curtis, Portia, and Isaiah, and… that's that, I guess. Oh, and also, Curtis told Trina he moved in with Jordan. She's fine with it.
You Were Schtupping the Family Cook!
Over at the Quartermaine mansion, the big drama of the week erupted when Michael and Jacinda sneaked off to the gatehouse for some afternoon delight, only for Olivia to get an eyeful of Jacinda when she showed up looking for Leo's inhaler. Positively scandalized by their behavior, Olivia called an emergency family meeting, which led to Michael, Ned, Tracy, and Olivia airing each other's sexual dirty laundry.
These actors are all pros and they work well together, and the dialogue was genuinely funny in spots; at one point, Tracy admitted she didn't want Michael's active sex life "giving Danny ideas," leading an unruffled Michael to point out that Danny's a teenage boy, which means he gets ideas if he so much looks at a paper plate. I also got a chuckle over Michael pointing out that Ned was a bigamist and Ned responding "briefly," as well as Ned asking Tracy how many mobsters she's been with, and Tracy arching an eyebrow before pointing out Olivia's been with more.
Still, was there a point to any of this? I can't really see much of any. If I'm being charitable, I'll say maybe the writers were looking for a way to make us think about Jacinda without being totally obvious about it. When she and Michael were shacked up at the gatehouse, she got a text that caused her to make an unhappy face; she told him it was "work," but it looks to me like they're starting to lay track for the arrival of an inconvenient person or secret from her past — particularly since she spent a few minutes talking about that past last week, specifically about the relationship with an older man that destroyed her relationship with her parents and led to her career as an escort.
It's also becoming fairly obvious that we're looking at the start of some sort of triangle between Jacinda, Michael, and Kristina. These writers historically have zero appetite for spending any significant time or attention on queer relationships, and they've shown even less willingness to indulge in the type of truly soapy fun that would go along with a woman torn between her boyfriend and his sister(ish), so I'm not expecting much of anything to come of this. Still, I'm impressed that they'd even think to float the trial balloons we've seen so far. Who knows? Maybe they'll surprise us and decide to really get nuts here.
Eliminate That Bastard
The rest of the week's major action revolved around Cullum and Sidwell's nefarious plans. Very little actually happened, but I'm pleased to report that we've reached the stage of the game where even seemingly unrelated scenes — like, say, Lulu drooling over a shirtless Nathan after they have sex and he makes her breakfast — are at risk of being interrupted by Cullum/Sidwell-related developments. Veteran soap viewers know this means we're close to critical mass, which also means it won't be much longer before we're able to put some of this nonsense behind us.
The week started with Sonny and Jason having one of their mob talks, which is another way of saying they sat around saying things that both of them should already know about how they intend to handle some villain or other. In this case, Jason — after telling Sonny he's headed out of town to protect Britt — announced his plan to murder Cullum before he goes. Like a lot of Jason's plans to kill people, this doesn't make the most sense in the context of the story; after all, if Cullum's dead, then there would seem to be far less reason for Jason and/or Britt to go on the run, and also, if it's that simple, then why wasn't he eliminated weeks ago?
Well, for starters, it isn't that simple. After Jason went to his super secret storage unit and stared teary-eyed into the middle distance while assembling and disassembling an absurdly huge rifle, he strutted off — without bothering to lock the storage unit, natch — and lined up his shot. To do this, he climbed up on a freaking roof in broad daylight and scoped out a WSB conference room where Brennan and Cullum happened to be arguing with each other, but no matter how many clear shots he had — I think I counted five — he didn't pull the trigger. Instead, he abruptly showed up in the parking lot outside Danny's big basketball game, where Dante just as abruptly arrived to tell him he had a WSB warrant to bring him down to the station.
There's a lot to unpack here. First of all, I'm always in favor of outdoor shots — and these actually looked better and less washed-out than most — but someone involved in this had to realize how dumb it looked to have a hulking middle-aged man aiming a giant rifle off a tall building on a sunny afternoon. All that chit-chat about how this couldn't be tied back to Jason, and this is the best plan he could come up with? Did he think if he stood real still, no one would see him?
Equally preposterous is the notion that the World Security Bureau would ever have windows in any area of any building where any kind of actual WSB work is getting done. My dad has worked for a defense contractor since the '80s, and as soon as he enters that building, the outside world disappears. There's just no way this would ever even come close to happening, and there's also no reason for it to have been written this way; Cullum is forever skulking around town all by his lonesome, not to mention constantly ferrying to and from Wyndemere, so Jason never needed to try and kill him at work. I'm pretty sure it only happened because someone thought it'd be super cool to show Jason on a roof with a rifle, which is admittedly kind of fair; again, there wasn't anything wrong with the way those shots looked. The context, though, undermined them so fatally that they felt incredibly silly anyway.
And then there's Dante showing up to execute a warrant from the WSB. First of all, since when does the WSB issue arrest warrants? Have we ever seen this happen in 40+ years of the Bureau existing in the world of the show? These guys definitely take their perps into custody — unless they shoot 'em first — but the whole point has always been that they're a CIA-type organization that plays by the rules of international espionage. Also, even if they did have a warrant for Jason, why would they ask Dante to pick him up and bring him to the police station? Why wouldn't they deal with him at the field office?
The answers to those questions, I suppose, are that it happened at the game because we're supposed to feel bad about Jason being thwarted from actually acting like a parent for once, and it had to be Dante because Cullum and Brennan were in other parts of town and Frank didn't want to pay a day player to say those lines.
While Jason dithered over whether to commit murder again, Lucas and Marco were much more decisive. It took weeks of talking about it, but Marco was finally able to poach a couple vials of Britt's meds from Sidwell's safe and skedaddle back to the mainland, where he handed them off to Lucas. Unfortunately, he only pulled off the heist after arousing Cullum's suspicion, and because he didn't bother to replace either of the stolen vials with something that at least looked similar, it took Pascal all of five minutes to figure out what happened.
Pascal, still smarting after being roasted by Sidwell for his distrust of Lucas — something Sidwell chalked up to Pascal's "embarrassing" crush on Marco — bypassed his boss and dialed up Cullum instead, gloating in his very French way that he'd tried to warn everyone that something like this could happen. Cullum acknowledged that this was true, promised he'd deal with it, and hung up.
Remember how, at the start of the column, I talked a little about how the rhythm of daytime pretty much always lets you feel when a show is or isn't about to pull a particular move? Well, in the hours leading up to Marco pilfering those vials, he spent an awful lot of time telling people how much he loved them, and smiling beatifically when they said they love him too. Although he's still keeping one very big secret from Lucas — namely, his eager collusion with Cullum to get revenge on Sonny — his desire to help save Britt, and eventually sever ties with the criminal side of his father's organization, seems sincere. And when our show starts beating the good-guy drum this hard, you know what that means: Death, or something close to it, is waiting in the wings.
Sure enough, after meeting with Lucas, Marco showed up at the Miller & Davis offices, where he crossed paths with Alexis just long enough to give her a very brief crash course in basketball before settling down to work on some contracts for Sidwell's "Costa Rican project." Moments later, who should enter but Cullum — holding a knife behind his back?
Lucas, meanwhile, texted Britt to let her know he had the meds in hand, so of course she told him to meet her at Pier 55, and showed up with her damn luggage in order to take receipt. Much like Jason on the roof and the WSB windows, this is very dumb. Very dumb! This is the pier with the launch to Wyndemere, after all, which is just one part of why it makes zero sense for them to meet there; the other is that it's very much in public, leaving them vulnerable to being seen by pretty much anybody — like, say, Rocco, who we witnessed peeping on the handoff after being told by Britt that the suitcase in her room was just for storage. What will he see next? I have no idea, but we do know that Brennan is already aware that Britt's room has been emptied; he entered it not long after she left, and was in the process of scoping it out when Nathan arrived, demanding to know what he was doing there.
The most interesting thing that happened where Britt's concerned, however, occurred after Joss climbed into her room via the fire escape in order to beg her not to blow her cover. I'm not sure why this conversation needed to happen now, but that isn't important; the only thing that matters is that when the subject of Faison came up, Britt said all that's left of her father is his brain in a jar, four children, and her Huntington's. This raised a lot of eyebrows, given that as far as GH viewers know, Faison only had three children: Britt, Nathan, and Peter.
So what gives? There's a lot of conjecture around the idea that the "Nathan" we've been spending time with all these months is actually the real Nathan's twin, but I don't really like that idea, partly because I'm pretty sure Anna ran his prints after he was found behind the wheel of that truck. More appealing to me is the thought that Cullum is Faison's fourth offspring, which opens up a lot of possibilities while taking advantage of the fact that Andrew Hawkes looks like he could actually be Anders Hove's son.
Getting back to Cullum and Marco for a minute, while it made for a fun Friday cliffhanger to see Cullum entering the office with a knife, I would be surprised if he actually ended up killing him; I think it's far more likely that he'll be interrupted by Suzanne. I say this mainly because Carly saw Sidwell at the Metro Court, and — in full view of a disapproving Ava — scheduled their big "bringing our families together" dinner party for the following Friday. A dead Marco means no dinner party, and GH loves a good dead body in the midst of a large gathering, so while I still believe Marco will at least come close to seeing the other side, I also believe it'll have to wait.
No matter how it happens, it's fairly obvious that the show is trying to push Sidwell away from big bad territory and make him more of a morally ambivalent story driver, which is fine; he can flit about town from now until forever as far as I'm concerned. I'm less interested in the writers' efforts to reframe Brennan as a good guy, but whatever; right now, I'm kind of distracted by the idea of Cullum as a sort of new Faison, who disappears and/or pretends to be dead for years at a time before resurfacing to make someone's life hell all over again. Could be fun, right?
On that note, it's time to pause until the next edition of Critical Diagnosis. In the meantime, here's another pile of bullets to tide you over. See you next week!
- Cody told Molly he doesn't care that she can't have children and doesn't want to adopt
- Sidwell's helicopter made Tracy fall off her horse
- Diane was appalled to hear that Sonny was reassigning his shadier legal work to Ric
- Ric thanked Alexis for tying him up in her basement
- Emma yelled at Brennan
- Carly and Valentin agreed they had no regrets about their sex, even though it probably shouldn't happen again
- Ric and Liz agreed to give their relationship another chance, even after Lucas called it "the Chernobyl of love stories"
- Joss lit into Carly and Sonny after finding them together in Carly's kitchen
- Brook Lynn and Chase's freshly waxed chest made plans to foster Delilah's baby, who they've preemptively named Phoebe
- James knocked over a bottle of expensive wine
- Brad was livid to discover that Britt was relying on Jason and Lucas, and vowed he wouldn't continue their friendship so he could watch her make another disastrous mistake
- After leaving Britt, Brad confronted Lucas, warning him that Britt's fate is in his hands
- Jason and Danny ate giant sandwiches together
- Tracy and Alexis bickered over who's better prepared to serve as Danny's guardian
- We got a new outdoor shot of General Hospital
- Carly and Brennan had a heavily coded conversation about relationships and trust
- Rocco wants to sign up for GH's medical mentorship program
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