This poor, goofy show of ours remains the victim of its own unforced errors — many of them occurring in the editing bay, where storyline-scrambling gremlins seem to have taken over — but last week's General Hospital was still fairly satisfying in many respects, chiefly because it felt like we were actually getting somewhere with all this Cullum/Sidwell foolishness.
To be clear, I'm not willing to predict we'll see the end of any of that storyline's numerous threads anytime soon. This thing has been going on for so long that I'm starting to suspect it's the only story GH will tell from now on. We are, though, at the stage of things where characters who've been keeping stupid secrets for far too long finally start sharing information, and it's always unbelievably satisfying when a long-term arc reaches that point, no matter what else you have to deal with to get there. All in all, this was one of those GH weeks that mostly entertains in the moment, leaving you to pick apart the wait-a-minutes after you've been given a few days to catch your breath — which is to say it probably rates at least a B-minus on the deeply curved grading system applied to daytime drama in 2026.
Let's dig in, shall we?
Tyler Anderson? You Look More Like a "Ben" to Me
I think we're all in agreement that this Sidwell stuff has gone on way too long, but I will say I appreciate the way it's given the writers an excuse to develop (some of) the characters in the teen set. While Georgie and Aiden remain inexplicably invisible, we know a lot more about Charlotte, Danny, and Rocco than we did before it all started. They're still being driven by the plot instead of the other way around, but that's been true of basically every soap character over the last 30 years; in that context, I'm just grateful to see their personalities being fleshed out.
Last week's action was centered, in large part, around poor, guilt-stricken Rocco, and the various ways in which the adults in his life are scrambling to protect him from the looming fallout of shooting Cullum in the back. Because Cullum is a crook and an asshole and a member of the global espionage organization we're all supposed to hate now even though we watched its members save the world over and over again in the '80s and '90s, he's allowed to be five times more clever than any given member of the PCPD — all of which is to say he's rapidly piecing together what actually went down that night on the pier. Britt, Dante, Lulu, and Cassius are all freaking out about this, but they can't agree on what to do about it. At all.
Cullum's biggest helper, though, might have been Danny. Angrily calling Rocco's bluff to tattle on them, Danny took Charlotte with him to break into Wyndemere, and the two of them arrived just in time to overhear Sidwell and Cullum playing another round of "Let's Threaten Britt." They heard her talk about the prototype, which is now supposedly 24 hours away from completion; they heard Cullum and Sidwell talk about the life-preserving meds they're using to keep her in line; they watched Cullum inject her. And then, after the room was cleared, they entered the house.
Naturally, it took them about 15 seconds to get caught by Cullum, who got handsy with Danny and accused them of trespassing. (Danny, definitely being written as his parents' child: "So are you!") He grabbed Charlotte's phone and was in the middle of marching them into the study when Sidwell and Ava walked in; Ava asked what in the world was going on, and Sidwell said he'd like to know the answer to that question too.
Long story short, Cullum played it off by saying he was there to ask Sidwell some questions, and Sidwell played it off by saying the WSB had to go through his lawyers. Meanwhile, Ava smartly tiptoed off, called Alexis, and handed Danny her phone, saying his grandmother wanted to talk to him. Cullum, smart enough to know when he's beat, took off; later, Alexis arrived and gave the kids a stern talking-to, and in the process, she just so happened to mention that Danny was with her when she discovered Marco's body.
This is important because when Cullum found Danny and Charlotte, he was working on the hypothesis that Danny was the one who'd shot him — but, as Sidwell quickly informed him upon Alexis' departure, Danny had to have been with his grandmother when it happened. By this point, Cullum had moved from lurking around Wyndemere to lurking around the halls of GH, where he watched Britt huddling with Rocco and decided he had a brand new suspect.
Rocco's as anxious as a border collie on a good day, so you can imagine the depths of Pepto-guzzling hell he's descended to since popping Cullum with his own gun. (Like father, like son: Dante was spotted making himself a cool glass of Alka-Seltzer last week, which I thought was a nice touch.) Everything in this poor kid's life is stressing him out, including his propensity for being in earshot whenever his mother and father argue about how best to keep him safe from the spy chief he almost killed.
In a somewhat surprising turn of events, Lulu decided that maybe going on the run with Rocco was a pretty good idea after all, despite basically ending her relationship with "Nathan" over him insisting that she do it. To that end, she interrupted Ethan's busy schedule of crying on the docks and botching assignments for Sonny to ask him to get fake passports for Rocco and herself; roughly five minutes later, he brought them back, hiding them hilariously conspicuously behind his back while Lulu sent Rocco out for detergent so she and Ethan could talk. Their conversation was interrupted, however, by Dante, who immediately intuited that the two of them were up to no good.
Ethan left the room, allowing Lulu and Dante to have it out. She admitted to her plan surprisingly quickly, and as expected, he didn't like it one bit, telling her that she'd turn his son into a fugitive over his dead body. Naturally, this was right when Rocco returned with the detergent — and after Lulu and Dante left the room, he entered, finding the go-bag Lulu'd packed for him, along with the fake passport for Tyler Anderson. Pocketing the passport, he made a beeline for Britt.
In point of fact, Britt summoned him to her office — and although I haven't had a chance to mention it yet, the two of them had a pretty significant conversation earlier in the week, with Britt admitting to Rocco that this entire situation basically stems from a selfish decision she made, and vowing to fix it by announcing for the thousandth time that she's just going to leave town and go off to die alone. (She had a similar conversation with Danny, who was all kinds of pissed about her telling the cops Jason shot Cullum until she said the magic words and told him it was his father's choice.)
Anyway, Rocco rushed to Britt's office, where he showed her his fake passport, told her about Lulu's plan, and begged her to take him instead. She said no, he insisted, and she caved, finally agreeing with his argument that his family would be safer if he left with her instead of making Lulu and the rest of his family an even bigger target by going on the run with his mom. They were nearly foiled by Elizabeth, who grew rightly suspicious when she spotted Rocco on the hospital grounds and followed him to Britt's office, but Britt dealt with that by putting Elizabeth in an armlock, bopping her on the head, and stuffing her in her office closet.
(Don't worry, Liz fans. Dante found her a few minutes later.)
Rocco's week ended in the completely deserted GH parking lot, where he and Britt got in her car and drove off — but only after she called Sonny to tell him that Sidwell killed Dalton and covered it up with Pascal's help. After ending the call, she stomped on their phones and did a piss-poor job of running over them. Given that Cullum was on his way to Britt's office long before Britt assaulted Elizabeth, I feel like she and Rocco aren't going to get very far — especially since Dante is also hot on their trail — but one way or another, we're inching closer and closer to some sort of finale.
So how are we going to get there? Well, it's pretty clear that however the details break down, Cullum will be the one who takes the biggest fall. Sidwell is fearsome when the writers need him to be, but for the most part, they've been working overtime to soften him from the blithely violent maniac he was shown to be when he was introduced as Lucky's captor in Africa. I enjoy Carlo Rota and I think a show like GH needs solid long-term villains, so I support this, and didn't mind being clumsily played by the way the writers had Sidwell react with something like tender curiosity when he saw Charlotte and Danny caught by Cullum in his entryway.
The writers have also been trying hard to make us like Cassius, which is a tougher ask, if only because we really don't know who he is. They've established that he isn't Nathan, and that he's jealous of the twin he never knew, but beyond that? Nothin'. What are his skills? What does he bring to Cullum and Sidwell's project, aside from an ability to masquerade as a member of the inept local police force? How was he brought in? When the hell is Liesl going to be made a real part of this? And what, pray tell, was even the point of making such a tremendous fuss over his relationship with Lulu if they were just going to blow it up ten minutes after getting it started?
I don't know, and for the most part, I don't much care. This is also basically my attitude toward Cassius' kidnapping of Joss, which gave us another tiresome round of "witty banter" between captor and captee last week. They played cards, they talked about her murdering Cyrus, they argued over whether he was locking her up or keeping her safe, she bashed his head in with a chair and tried to escape, but was dragged back by her ankles. She showed him the "ANNA WUZ HERE" graffiti on her bedroom wall, and he denied being part of her kidnapping, but acknowledged that he knew about it. Later, Joss found pieces of metal that Anna had stashed in the mattress, which is hilarious — either Joss sleeps perfectly still or she has significant hearing damage, because otherwise, she should have heard those things clanking days ago.
Whatever happens there, we're clearly meant to be invested in Cassius as a character. This leaves us with Pascal, who 100 percent fits the profile of the sort of fairly long-term but wholly inessential character whose "shocking" death is often used as an endgame catalyst for stories like this one. At the Five Poppies, he was Britt's hardass handler; at Wyndemere, he's a pretend butler whose main responsibility seems to be weeping through the halls and hissing insults at Lucas. If he has a real job in this conspiracy, I guess it's as some sort of nominal fixer, given that his most recent non-Marco-grieving activity included helping Cassius get an unconscious Joss from her apartment to the sub-basement at Wyndemere.
You see what I'm getting at here. Pascal knows Cullum killed Marco, but hasn't told Sidwell because — as Lucas pointed out during their latest fight — he knows he'd be signing his own death warrant if he did. He also knows Cassius is keeping Joss under the mansion, but hasn't told Sidwell or Cullum, because… well, I don't know, really, but the point is, he's getting sloppy, and he doesn't need to be here. Whatever clicks into place in order to seal Cullum's fate, I think it'll involve Pascal going to meet his beloved Marco in the great beyond. Which is all incredibly strange — Pascal could and should have sold out Lucas to Cullum simply to keep the project going, and it never needed to be a crime of passion — but here we are.
I suspect it may also end up having something to do with Valentin, who spent last week pulling the classic soap move of getting some big news, abruptly announcing he was leaving town, getting into a big argument over whether that was the right thing to do, and then just as abruptly changing his mind after getting some more big news.
The first big news: Anna escaped from her facility, hijacked a car, and nearly made it to the French border before being recaptured and assigned to a hospital for the criminally insane. Telling Carly he understands Anna's Faison-related PTSD better than anyone — even Robert Scorpio — he resolved to leave for France and break her out. She didn't like this at all; in fact, she tearfully accused him of still being in love with Anna. Before he could respond, however, Danny and Charlotte busted in to tell them about everything they'd seen at Wyndemere, and he vowed to shut Cullum and Sidwell's project down. This was on Wednesday, and we haven't seen him do a damn thing since, but hey, maybe he's dog-paddling out to Spoon Island just to be extra sure he doesn't attract any attention. I don't think he needs to worry, since we've seen zero evidence that Sidwell actually has any security on the island apart from a wailing Frenchman, but better safe than sorry.
Days Without a "Curtis Sucks" Incident: 0
We've covered most of the big stuff that happened last week, and I don't want to write about this next story any more than I did before, but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least offer a rough overview of where we currently stand with Curtis, Jordan, Isaiah, and Portia.
After socking Isaiah in the face and sending him crashing into a Metro Court Gardens table, Curtis was arrested by Dante's latest hire, a guy with the unbelievably stereotypical cop name of Joe Fitzpatrick. Joe was appalled by Curtis' entitled attitude after being arrested, which is more than fair; he was also unhappy to learn that pretty much everyone involved in the case has some sort of meaningful tie to not only the PCPD, but high-ranking local politicians. (This is really how every new character should react, all the time.) Dante assured him that Curtis wouldn't get any preferential treatment, and talked him out of quitting just in time for both of them to watch Curtis make bail after a ten-minute conversation with his girlfriend the former police commissioner.
Isaiah, meanwhile, needs to start taking calcium supplements, because he somehow ended up with a bunch of broken bones and fractures in his hand — not to mention assorted tendon damage, all of which will undoubtedly prevent him from performing the life-saving operation that angelic young Derek needs. So Curtis will hate Isaiah because he believes Isaiah left the scene of a near-accident that Curtis and Jordan caused by driving irresponsibly, and Isaiah will hate Curtis because his violent assault will prevent him from helping save a child's life. Did we need this? Couldn't they just hate each other because they're each sleeping with someone the other guy used to be with?
Whatever. The main takeaway here is that Curtis has officially gone from annoyingly sanctimonious to outright asshole, Isaiah might have osteoporosis, and everything these characters are doing is so lame that it hurts to watch. Fitzpatrick doesn't bother me as a character, although Jonathan Bennett definitely needs to dial down his tendency to mug for the camera, and while I don't really care yet about why he's in town, I'd definitely be down for another month of this guy being openly astonished by the countless bizarre entanglements and conflicts of interest in Port Charles.
That'll do it for the big stuff! Be back next week. Until then, your bullets:
- Gio practiced for Trina's showcase with Ned's lucky guitar pick
- Felicia baked an almond cake
- Emma broke Anna's favorite mug
- Mac was on for a minute
- Turner met Sonny at their gross sex pad so she could fret about the possibility of having to prosecute her friend Jordan's boyfriend and alleged sole support system
- Rocco turned to Gio in a panic, and then got angry when Gio told Dante that Rocco needed help
- Laura asked Willow for help getting the charges dismissed against Anna, and Willow magically made it happen
- Nina, who is definitely on her way to adding Brennan to her Eskimo Sisters list with Carly, tried injecting Brennan with another dose of the locked-in drug, but he woke up before she could do it
- Ava told Alexis that Delilah's tattoo is connected to an artist named Kiyoko; later, Alexis shared this with Brook Lynn and Chase, and volunteered to try and get more information from the Manhattan gallery where her work is displayed
- Alexis and Ava remain a great deal of fun and should be in more scenes together
- Chase, appallingly, told Brook Lynn that he understands why Curtis assaulted Isaiah
- Ethan held Phoebe
- Pascal stole the tie Lucas bought for Marco
- While arguing with Lulu about the Spencer family propensity for running, Dante briefly but delightfully dragged Lucky for being a deadbeat dad
- Nina returned days later to try and inject Brennan again, only to discover that he can speak — something he's hiding from Cullum, who intends to send him to Turning Woods to "rot in peace"
- Elizabeth and Ric had their weekend away, entirely offscreen
- Laura, looking blindingly patriotic in her Uncle Sam tie, gave Lulu her blessing to go on the run with Rocco
- Molly and Kristina helped fulfill contract minimums by strolling the halls of GH and talking about what a great guy Cody is
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