I spent the previous edition of this column preemptively worried about how fast General Hospital would come thudding back to earth after giving us a week of wall-to-wall goodness, and… yep, I still know our show. Last week's GH included one major revelation, but it also contained a bunch of filler — including more than one conversation consisting of exposition and plot points that the characters involved had already discussed ad nauseam.
Like I've often said here, I know putting together a show like GH is a nearly impossible job. These shows are like bumblebees; they really shouldn't be able to fly, and the fact that they ever get off the ground can rightly be considered a natural wonder. Still, I can't help but wonder why it has to be this way — do we really need to condense so much important action into a single burst of shows? Couldn't these things be spread out a little more, so the audience spends more time really in the story instead of anticipating it?
The answer, at least for now, sadly remains "absolutely not." It definitely wasn't all bad last week, but there won't be as much to talk about as last time. Let's see if that means I can keep this one short!
…Cassius?
We'll dive right in with the week's big reveal. On Tuesday, Nathan was all set to take a trip to the batting cages with James when he got a text, flinched, and said he had to take a raincheck on account of a work situation. When James asked if he had to go off and fight the bad guys, Nathan said yes — and one in particular, who he wasn't looking forward to fighting.
Minutes later, Nathan entered the study at Wyndemere and offered Sidwell his condolences for Marco's death. In response, Sidwell said he didn't need Nathan's phony sympathy; he needed results, specifically of the "hurry up and help me pin this crime on Sonny" variety. When Nathan balked at Sidwell's demands, saying "that doesn't sound like something I'd do," Sidwell closed the study door and agreed that perhaps Detective Nathan West wouldn't do such things, but he wasn't talking to Detective Nathan West — he was talking to Cassius Faison.
So there it is. We don't know how Nathan came back from the dead because he didn't — the guy wandering around Port Charles for the past six-plus months is really his heretofore unknown twin brother Cassius, who's fully in league with Sidwell and Cullum. Sidwell praised Cassius for pulling off his ruse with the PCPD; Cassius praised Sidwell for poisoning Maxie, and therefore eliminating the risk that the person who knew Nathan best would smell an imposter upon his arrival.
There are lots of things to roll your eyes at here. First of all, I'm not sure any soap needs to pull another long-lost twin out of its butt ever again; like returns from the dead, that's a button that's been pushed way too many times to have any serious impact anymore. Second, Cassius' importance to this scheme seems extremely overblown. They needed him so they could… infiltrate the PCPD? An organization that hasn't been allowed to solve a major crime since the early '90s? And also, putting Maxie in the hospital to help Cassius slide into Nathan's life ignores the fact that Nina and Liesl should also have been able to realize something was off with him.
On the other hand, taking the story in this direction does hold its share of dark promise. For one thing, Cassius pretending to be James' father, and wooing Lulu under false pretense, adds an extremely creepy layer to things; in fact, I now find this the most interesting part of the story, one that holds possibilities far richer than anything to do with cold fusion.
But then there's the matter of Ryan Paevey, and how he's playing Cassius pretty much exactly the same way he plays Nathan. Since we've learned his secret, we've seen Cassius in conversation with Sidwell and Cullum, both of whom are well aware he isn't Nathan. These should be moments when we learn more about who Cassius really is — what his motivations are, how he really feels about people Nathan's close to, et cetera. Instead, he's basically just Nathan, except he's talking about doing bad stuff. Same perpetually concerned look on his face, same gentle big-brother vibes, same accommodating conversation style. If these are choices, they're perplexing ones; if they're signs of an actor's very limited range, then they spell serious trouble for this part of the story going forward.
It would have been far better, I think, for Cullum to have been the fourth Faison, and for the fake Nathan to be the result of a Grant Putnam-style situation, where one man is made to look and trained to act like the other — and the victim eventually becomes the villain, because he's been driven insane by the crazy things that have happened to him. If you watched that storyline, you know that for a long time, the only way you could tell the Grants apart was through their hairstyles — but that made sense, because the fake Grant had spent years as the real one, so of course their behaviors would be similar.
The most interesting part of all this, at least right now and at least for me, is that it sets up Sidwell, Cullum, and Cassius as three parts of a very rickety trinity. Cullum killed Marco behind Sidwell's back, and Cassius is hiding the fact that Rocco's the one who shot Cullum, although we don't know whether he's doing this to hold his cover as Nathan, or because he truly cares about the kid and/or his mother. (Cullum knows Jason didn't shoot him, and doesn't really seem to be all that worried about who did, which is also weird, but whatever.) When all these secrets come to light, it'll be hard for these three to stick together, and I'm intrigued by the chaotic possibilities.
Not Without My Jason
He won't be seen again for months, but last week, it still felt like Jason never left. Carly's on the warpath, determined to find him; Sonny's fully back in league with Ric, who's doing his best to use the legal system to get answers out of the WSB; Alexis is juggling her own efforts to find Jason against her responsibilities to Danny, who started the week on his father's Bridge of Pain and ended it getting suspended for fighting with a kid who talked smack about him. (That kid's name is Hank, which is the least believable thing this show has asked us to accept in 35 years.) Laura, meanwhile, spent the week hemming and hawing over whether to yield to pressure and hold a press conference publicly rebuking Jason. Jason, Jason, Jason!
The most interesting part of it, at least for me, were the moments when characters acknowledged the hinky timeline of Jason's arrest — specifically, the fact that Cullum triggered the whole thing by issuing a warrant whose contents remain a perfect mystery. After Cullum regained consciousness, Dante visited his room to try and get answers; he got insults instead, with Cullum calling him a washout and sneering at the way his WSB tenure ended. This was fun to watch, even if it raised the question of why Cullum would find it advisable to go this far out of his way to antagonize local law enforcement — a question Dante seemed to tacitly acknowledge on his way out. He asked Cullum how he'd even known to go to the pier in the first place, and Cullum shrugged, "A good agent knows when to play his hunches"; shrugging right back, Dante said, "So does a good cop."
Jason's arrest also weighed heavily on Rocco, who spent the week fidgeting all over town while Lulu fretted that he'd crack under all that guilt and "Nathan" assured her that the best thing was for everyone to just keep quiet and let Jason rot in WSB custody. If Rocco's words don't betray him, his hand might; everyone who sees him comments on his bandage, and during this week's continued chem test between Elizabeth and Dante, she mentioned dressing his wound. The next time he sees his son, Dante's definitely going to notice that Rocco's "kitchen injury" looks a lot like the one Jason was sporting after Cullum's shooting.
And then there's Britt, whose new mission in life is to figure out what the hell really happened the night Cullum was shot. She's doing this while suffering the effects of her missing meds, and it remains to be seen how much longer she'll be able to cover for her tremors, but in the short term, her biggest danger is one she doesn't even know about — namely, that while searching for the truth, she'll figure out that Rocco's the shooter. The more we see how deeply his actions will impact everyone around him, the smarter it looks for the writers to put that gun in Rocco's hands.
Speaking of smart: It took Lucas about five minutes to figure out that Cullum is the one who murdered Marco. Of course, he hasn't really done anything about it yet, because soap, but he did agree to continue living at Wyndemere when Sidwell invited him to do so — even after he ended up on the receiving end of a drunken tirade from a broken-hearted Pascal, who accused Lucas of using Marco and said he should have been the one to die instead. If there's any justice on this show, Lucas will be the biggest hero of this story when the dust finally settles.
Finally, and on the opposite end of the intelligence spectrum, we have Joss, who entered Cullum's hospital room, touched his IV bags and lines, and then put rubber gloves on so she could kill him — only to be interrupted by Lucas, who was way too quick to let her off the hook for being there with no real explanation. We still don't know whether Cullum remembers seeing her during his brief blip of consciousness, but we do know that Joss, as a character, has become completely unmoored from any solid anchoring she ever had. Her current wholly plot-driven status was underlined in neon yellow highlighter last week when she worried to Lucas about what would happen to Jason if Cullum died — not half an hour after she was all set to kill Cullum. Whatever the future might hold for Joss, it needs to happen after a long vacation from the canvas.
One last note about all this: Kudos to whoever decided we didn't actually need to watch Marco's memorial, and that it'd be enough to see the conversations taking place before and after. Those scenes are usually used as an excuse for emotional histrionics, and we don't need that right now; we've seen enough of Sidwell and Lucas grieving to feel the impact of Marco's murder. More not-funerals like this, please.
Compression Socks and the Tell-Tale Ringtone
For as long as I can remember, the biggest consistent knock against GH has been that the show sets itself up for cool stuff and then fumbles it, often spectacularly and rarely for any real reason. They're doing it right now, again and again, with the Madame Congresswoman storyline they've got going on with Drew and Willow.
Willow spent years as one of the dullest characters on the show before someone got the great idea to have her shoot Drew in the back — and then dope him with a drug meant to mimic the symptoms of locked-in syndrome, all as a means of deliciously devious revenge for the many ways he negatively impacted her previously quite boring life. And then, almost as quickly as they left Drew completely at Willow's mercy, they shoved the whole thing on a back burner, returning to it only in fits and starts over the last few weeks.
Obviously, there's a lot of other stuff going on with GH right now, but this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I lament the show's herky-jerky momentum. Drew and Willow's story doesn't need to drive the show all the time, but it shouldn't disappear for days on end, either — which is exactly what happened last week, in epically frustrating fashion.
Things started off nicely, with Willow casually talking to Drew, Bond villain style, about how unfortunate it is that he had to be silently trapped inside his own motionless body, and assuring him that when the time is right, he'll be returned to full health — all while we saw Drew remembering Sidwell visiting him and talking excitedly about how much good it would do for Willow's political career if she became a widow.
All that fun stopped as soon as Kai and Trina showed up. Willow summoned Kai, and Trina tagged along, bringing a gift of compression socks for Drew — a gesture of compassion that did not go unnoticed by Willow, who pointed out all the horrible things Drew did to her Trina's parents. During their visit, Willow got a phone call, but couldn't remember where she left her phone; Trina pointed out that it was Wiley's ringtone, and Kai mentioned that it sounded like the phone was in the living room, because sound carried from there into the bedroom.
Willow's fairly new to the whole crime thing, so she didn't immediately pick up on what Kai and Trina dropped during their visit, but she eventually realized they'd both said things they had no reason to know. Now, a lot of this hinges on the writers banking on the viewers not remembering some things; for one, Kai and Trina were both in the courtroom when Wiley called Willow, so they've heard his ringtone before, and for another, Kai has spent more than enough time in Drew's house to know how sound travels from one point to another. But they also spent some time talking about Drew's softball bat, which Kai mentioned having been taken as evidence after the shooting; this caused Drew to flash back to that night, suggesting that the "other thing" he briefly remembered hearing before losing consciousness might have been the sound of the bat being knocked over after Kai and Trina left his bedroom.
Whether or not Willow actually had any real reason to be suspicious at first, her suspicions were fully justified when she went back to her office, and overheard Kai and Trina talking about how they knew she shot Drew. We don't know what happened next, because we didn't see any of these characters for the rest of the week. Momentum!
I fully believe that Kai is dumb enough to have this conversation in such a stupid spot, but for Trina to be blabbing like this is just the latest example of how the writers have done her dirty. Either way, they're both in Willow's crosshairs now, and I'm willing to bet $5 from Frank Valentini's wallet that Kai ends up dead before Father's Day. That's if the writers decide to keep following the story at all, of course.
One last note on this before we wrap up for the week: Drew was also visited by Nina and Michael, which was genuinely humorous. After Michael brushed his way past Nina at the door to say he might as well say hello to his "dear Uncle Drew," Drew started blinking at Michael like crazy; when Michael asked Nina what was going on, Nina scrunched up her face and said "That's just something he does. No one knows why."
This is the kind of stuff we should be getting more of from this storyline. I hope the writers take heed!
- Willow is most assuredly still quite horny for her ex-husband Officer Chase
- Cody won a tropical vacation in a raffle, but didn't take it because Molly scheduled a procedure for her endometriosis; later, in a post-surgery haze, she cooed over his arms
- Michael told Brook Lynn and Chase that they should ask Willow for help making sure they're cleared to foster Phoebe, which made Brook Lynn so mad that she finished all the orange juice
- Kristina called Tracy "Tracy Q," and was somehow not struck down for her insolence
- Trina played Little League as a kid
- Curtis and Portia agreed to support each other's new relationships
- After Sidwell threatened her with the loss of her fancy job if she didn't leverage her PCPD contacts for information regarding Marco's murder, Jordan told Curtis that this could be her best opportunity to finally take Sidwell down
- Brennan played on Jacinda's insecurities, telling her he has something she can use to hang onto Michael if she's able to get Valentin's location from Charlotte
- Laura mentioned Robert twice
- Emma told Felicia that they need to bring Anna home, but Felicia said they can't
- Brad and Britt are besties again
- Laura told Ric she's the other person Sidwell is blackmailing with the evidence he has against Sonny
- Curtis and Nina spent an entire episode rehashing the reasons their friendship fell apart, then deciding to be friends again
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