Apologies for the late column this week, dear reader — I was busy during most of Mother's Day doing various Mother's Day-related things, and despite my hopes and dreams to the contrary, time ran out before I'd been able to even get started on this edition of Critical Diagnosis. It's always my goal to get this published on Sunday; here's hoping this interruption will be the last one for a long while.
It's a little funny that Mother's Day kept me from the column, because the majority of the action during last week's General Hospital was mom-driven. You've got Carly figuring out Joss is missing, and reluctantly agreeing to go along with Valentin's Nina-assisted plan to save her; you've got Lulu, determined to hide Rocco's involvement in Cullum's shooting; you've got Nina, stuck in a very bad situation because of her desperate need to protect Willow; you've got Brook Lynn and Chase, practically drooling over the idea of adopting Phoebe, the baby whose mother was, we now know, mixed up in whatever story Ethan brought back to town with him.
Mamma mia! Here I go again…
Oh, Brother
Before we get into any of those stories, I want to dispense with the dumbest stuff that happened last week, all of which centered around Sonny suddenly deciding that Ric is out to get him again.
In Sonny's (extremely limited) defense, he has no shortage of reasons not to trust Ric, and while I have zero interest in watching these two characters go to war over old grudges again, Sonny being suspicious of Ric actually makes a lot more sense than Sonny hiring Ric to represent him. That being said, Sonny and Ric have been a solid team since Ric helped Rocco avoid jail time, to the extent that I've actually dared to hope the GH writers would be willing to allow Sonny and/or anybody in his immediate orbit to actually evolve for once.
There's still a chance this could happen; in fact, by the time this publishes, I'm betting we'll already know — or be close to knowing — that last week's abrupt manufactured drama was really just a fakeout meant to make us worry over something that'll end up being a big misunderstanding. The problem with this is that the entire situation still makes Sonny look like a complete fool.
It all started when Ethan, who was at the Metro Court tailing Lucy in order to "save her from herself" per Sonny's orders, noticed Ric sidebarring with Ava. He reported this back to Sonny, theorizing that Ric wanted to talk alone with Ava in order to use her as a go-between for a message to Sidwell. Sonny grumbled a little about wondering why he should trust Ethan's take when Ethan doesn't like Ric, but when he asked Ric where he was when Ethan spotted him with Ava, Ric lied, saying he had a meeting at the DA's office. Just like that, Sonny believed Ric was working with Sidwell.
To the writers' (somewhat less limited) credit, they had Sonny share his suspicions with Turner and Alexis, both of whom pointed out that he really needed to get more information before he jumped to any conclusions. For a minute, it looked like he was ready to listen to reason, but that all went out the window when Ethan reported that Ric and Ava were meeting alone at the Jerome Gallery.
At the risk of pointing out the overly obvious, I feel like it's worth noting that Ric and Ava have history, and Sonny knows about this history. He also doesn't know Ava helped keep Ric ball-gagged in Alexis' basement, so there's absolutely no reason for him to think it's the slightest bit strange for Ric and Ava to speak or meet. The speed with which this all developed, and the wafer-thin "evidence" it took to get Sonny frothing mad, reeks of plot-driven hooey that needed to be sped up in order to fit some behind-the-scenes timeline.
What also reeks: the writers having Ric and Ava speak "mysteriously" while discussing whatever deal they're working on. We know it involves a third party only referred to as "he" or "him," and we know Ava's making a chunk of money by brokering it, and we also know that the dialogue — and the tones of voice used while speaking it — is delivered in such a way that we're supposed to think there's something suspicious going on. This kind of thing only works when it's done with relative subtlety, though, and this stuff has been about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Still, those narrative gears have got to keep grinding, so we ended the week with Sonny and Ethan barging in on Ric and Ava's meeting, followed by Sonny pulling a gun on Ric and grumbling some bullshit about Ric betraying him for the last time. All things considered, I would rather have seen GH devote all this airtime to more of Curtis whining about how he just wants to find the other driver — that stuff is boring, but at least it doesn't insult our intelligence while making an allegedly fearsome and ruthlessly intelligent mob boss look like an utter clown.
The Perfect Patsy
Now for the good stuff. We led off last week with Brennan storming into Carly's bedroom, seeing clothes on the floor, and demanding to know who else she's sleeping with and how long it's been going on. In classic Carly form, she sneered at him to turn around, at which point he found Valentin holding a gun on him.
I've spent a lot of time bagging on Carly and criticizing the total lack of chemistry between her and Brennan, and in all honesty, I'm sure those feelings undermined my enjoyment of these scenes. Be that as it may, they were still a lot of fun — partly because they brought about some long-awaited reveals, but also because the situation was engineered in a way that took advantage of each character and/or actor's strengths. Laura Wright gives great bitch, but because Carly can never lose, she rarely has any reason to be such a jerk to people. This situation is an exception, and when Carly tore into Brennan for recruiting Joss into the WSB, you really felt the heat of her anger and the chill of her fear. Chris L. McKenna's Brennan lacks the secret agent spark that the best Bureau agents have had, and he isn't believable as someone Carly could ever fall in love with, let alone find attractive, but he can play angry and wounded just fine; the dialogue between them, with Carly attacking and Brennan vacillating between rage and regret, was written and performed just about perfectly.
And then there's James Patrick Stuart, who's never more entertaining to me than he is when Valentin is tossing off one-liners and threatening lives.
Valentin is the one who put a bow on the situation, telling Brennan that if he doesn't keep his mouth shut, he'll be fed to Cullum as a fall guy — "the perfect patsy," in his words. In order to stay out of prison, he'll need to keep going into the office like nothing's changed, making Cullum believe he's still just a regular old WSB lackey. Smart enough to see he'd been boxed in, Brennan warned Carly that Valentin will eventually betray her too, and then moped off into the night.
Brennan wasn't done being pushed around for the week, though. A few days later, Cullum was discharged from GH, and when Brennan showed up to help get him packed up for Belgium, Cullum informed him that not only was he sticking around in Port Charles, but he was taking over the WSB station to boot — which meant Brennan would need to hand over all his files, including a list of all the agents working for him.
Nathan, You Son of a Bitch, Let Me Out of Here
Brennan's Carly and Cullum woes proved particularly poorly timed, because while Carly and Valentin were unveiling their affair, Joss was busy being beaten up and choked out by Cassius, who placed a call to Pascal for "help with a situation." When next we saw Joss, she was waking up in Anna's old cell in the bowels of Spoon Island — a situation she responded to by pounding on the one-way glass and demanding that Nathan let her go.
When Joss tried using a clothes hanger as a makeshift screwdriver to disassemble the lock on the door, Cassius got on the intercom and told her to back away; when she did, he entered the room with a plate of food. She tried convincing him that she could get him help with whatever happened to his brain during Nathan's lost seven years, at which point Cassius came clean, stunning Joss by revealing that Nathan is dead, and he's Cassius Faison.
Because Joss is the first person he's revealed himself to, we were treated to a good-sized Cassius info dump during these scenes — including him telling Joss that Liesl was led to believe he died during childbirth. This strongly suggests an extremely clumsy retcon, because if Faison stole Cassius and raised him in secret, then the whole "Faison finds out Nathan's his son" reveal leading up to Nathan's death makes no sense at all. But we're not supposed to think about that right now; instead, we're meant to focus on Cassius telling Joss that he and Britt want to break free from Cullum and Sidwell, and if she wants to survive, she needs to stop thinking of him as a captor and start thinking of him as her best shot of making it out of the mess she made for herself.
Unfortunately for Brennan, it didn't take Carly and Valentin very long to figure out that Joss was missing, and to decide that Brennan must have had her reassigned out of spite. Determined to impress his girlfriend by saving her daughter, Valentin made Nina summon Brennan to Willow's place, where Nina had found herself reluctantly placed into home healthcare service so Willow could take a phone call with another congresswoman on the international law funding committee or whatever the hell it's called.
Stricken with a fit of conscience, Nina spent approximately one hour blabbering at Drew while holding a syringe full of his top-secret sci-fi meds in her trembling hand. Whining to him that even though he doesn't deserve to be rendered mute and paralyzed, she needed to inject him because Willow said so, she was repeatedly interrupted before she could actually administer the drug — the last time by Brennan, whose arrival caused Nina to panic and hilariously stash the syringe with Wiley's toy truck before answering the door.
Brennan glowered in, wanting to know what Nina had for him. Nina played cagey, asking instead to talk about his arrangement with Willow vis a vis digging up dirt on Drew. Brennan told her that his office had been taken over by a superior, and he needed to hold off on that until the scrutiny died down. At this point, Nina went full Vesuvius, yelling wide-eyed that Brennan needed to get out of Port Charles NOW — but her sloppy attempt to get him out of the house was foiled by Valentin, who, for the second time in a week, revealed himself holding a gun on Brennan.
Aside from not being able to understand why Cynthia Watros decided to go so wildly over the top, I had a great time with these scenes too. Valentin demanded to know where Brennan had sent Joss, and when Brennan sputtered that he didn't know what Valentin was talking about, Valentin shrugged and said that if he was lying, then he was about to die, but if he was telling the truth, then he was useless, and neither option spelled a good outcome. Out of options, Brennan lunged at Valentin, kicking off a good old-fashioned living room brawl that was punctuated by Nina's increasingly desperate screams. Finally, she grabbed the syringe and ran at them, reaching them right as Valentin spun Brennan around, exposing his back to the needle just in time for her to plunge it in.
Guess who heard every word, just in time to start regaining the use of his body thanks to the overdue dose Nina spontaneously administered to Brennan? Yep, it's everyone's least favorite former Navy SEAL, who was just handed a lot more blackmail ammo for when he's finally able to move and speak again. I have very much enjoyed Drew's living statue era, but we all knew it had to end at some point. The fact that he's been absorbing all this damaging information will encourage him to continue being a complete asshole once he's freed from those drugs — and now he actually has a list of reasons to be one.
I Think I Know Who It Was
Last but not least, we have the continuing chem test of Dante and Elizabeth, which led last week to Dante asking her if he could possibly borrow an eensy weensy sample of Cullum's blood in order to test it against the genetic material left on the gun that was used to shoot him.
Annoyed by Cullum's stonewalling, Dante had the evidence from the shooting taken out of PCPD storage, and after testing the gun, they realized that two different people had bled on it. One of them was Jason; having already ruled out Britt, Dante wanted to see whether Cullum was the other. We know, of course, that the other blood on the gun came from Rocco — and now Dante does too, because when he started talking about how weird it was for Jason to catch a slide bite, and how he had to be protecting an unknown party, Elizabeth added it all up. Telling Dante she treated Rocco for his hand injury the night of the shooting, she added that it didn't look like a knife cut, and while she wasn't focusing on their behavior at the time, she could tell that neither Rocco nor Lulu were acting like themselves.
There isn't a lot to talk about here yet, but this conversation is another example of the way this whole giant storyline finally appears to be moving with a sense of urgency. Years from now, we'll look back on this mess, starting with Pikeman and concluding in an occasionally potent cocktail of made-up meds and cold fusion, and figure out where it ranks on the list of the most aimless and needlessly sprawling stories in GH history. For now, I'm just grateful that it feels like it's moving along.
Where these specific scenes are concerned, I'm also grateful to the writers for deciding to go with Thoughtful Dante rather than Aggro Dante. Instead of flying off the handle, he looked at Elizabeth and apologized to her for his child's role in the arrest of the father of one of her children; instead of looking for someone to blame for Rocco's life-altering decision, he thought of Rocco's feelings, finally understanding why he's been so withdrawn lately. This is the Dante we missed when Gio was in his crosshairs, and I'm glad he hasn't been forgotten.
I am also, for the record, here for a Dante/Elizabeth pairing. Rebecca Herbst has chemistry with everyone on the planet, and she's never anything short of delightful in her scenes with Rick Hearst, but Ric and Elizabeth have been down that road so many times at this point that I'm much more interested in seeing them find a way forward as friends. Dante and Elizabeth could be a foundational pairing for GH — although I said the same thing about Dante and Sam, and look what happened there.
That's all for now! Be back next week. 'Til then, your bullets:
- Michael James Scott came to Port Charles and performed for the hottest 30-person room in the Northeast
- Pascal not-so-subtly threatened Lucas with a fireplace poker; in return, Lucas sassed him about the quality of his dusting
- After hearing about the Marco Rios Memorial Tennis Courts, Sidwell said he'd chip in via a substantial anonymous donation
- Chase took off his shirt
- Tracy tried to get Ethan to quit working for Sonny
- Jordan remains sad about her face
- Ric invited Elizabeth to go away with him for the weekend and she said yes; later, Laura tried talking Ric out of it, warning he was risking making Elizabeth a target for Sidwell
- Ethan met Phoebe and heard about her story from Brook Lynn and Chase; later, he went to the docks and burned a Polaroid of Delilah while crying and saying he was sorry he couldn't prevent her death
- Curtis and Jordan had a very long and exceedingly tiresome conversation about whether or not Isaiah might have been the other driver in their accident
- Even though her editor only signed off on it a week or two ago, Molly's book is hitting store shelves next month
- Gio agreed to accompany Trina during her industry showcase
- Willow gave Travis his 35th day off
- Cassius told Britt he intends to come clean to Lulu and James "when the time is right"
- Britt is apparently Emma's new gynecologist
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