After a week full of action and major revelations, I think we all knew well enough to expect a series of slower, less eventful episodes from General Hospital last week. That's exactly what we got, but unlike a lot of other times when the show has shifted into a lower gear, it felt deliberate and purposeful — a week spent lining up characters and situations for the next round of stories, many if not most of which feel like they're organic outgrowths of the one that just concluded.
Obviously, none of this is any kind of guarantee that whatever comes next will be compelling. But as I said in my last column, I'm at least encouraged by the appearance of a long-term narrative plan; after suffering through years of flailing, that isn't the kind of progress I'm willing to take for granted.
Having said that, I hasten to acknowledge that while GH might be making progress in certain areas, the show continues to regress in its treatment of POC characters, and the latest developments on that front continue to find new ways to offend. On that note…
The Mirror Has Two Faces (And Both of Them Are White)
My least favorite moments from any given week typically tend to involve Sonny and Turner making out. That gross coupling definitely turned my stomach last week, but their scenes weren't as offensive as what the show appears to be getting ready to do to Jordan.
The Ashfords were largely sidelined again last week, and what little screen time they were given was mostly spent on various conversations revolving around Curtis' comically stupid and selfish attempt to avoid repercussions for assaulting Isaiah by mounting a "he started it" defense. He seems to have found a willing partner in Martin, who's back from Reno and flush with cash after winning the case Sidwell secretly arranged for him; although Martin fully acknowledged how hard it'll be for Curtis to avoid jail time — and, at one point, flat-out said he should take the eight-month prison sentence he's being offered as a plea deal — he eventually conceded that they might be able to sway a jury if that jury were able to see Jordan's injuries.
While Martin theorized, Jordan was over at the PCPD, where she'd been summoned by Sidwell, who'd correctly surmised that the only way the cops could have found his supposedly secret lake house is if she'd led them there. Flashing a too-rare reminder of the badass she once was, Jordan fully copped to selling him out, and even admitted she'd been "undercover" the entire time she was working for him — adding that she suspected he already knew, given that he'd kept her walled off from anything illegal.
Turns out this wasn't the case. Sidwell said he had his reservations about Jordan at first, but eventually came to a place where he was happy to rely on her as "the perfect face" for his organization. Lamenting that it had once been such a beautiful face, Sidwell taunted her with the possibility that it could be restored to its former glory — as long as she was willing to travel to Zurich and free up some cash for him, in exchange for an all-expenses-paid trip to the Baden Baden clinic that fixed up Michael.
Naturally, Jordan told Sidwell to pound sand, but after she left the interrogation room at the PCPD, she stopped outside the door and put a trembling hand to her face. How can she pass up an opportunity to lose the scars from the accident, even if it means giving Sidwell something he wants?
I can acknowledge that this might have been the setup for a potentially compelling arc in the '80s, but this isn't the '80s, and there's really no excuse for the writers to let any of this trash get past an informal pitch session. It's bad enough that Jordan — like every other POC character on the canvas — has been shrunken down, isolated, and sidelined, and that along the way, she's given up her law enforcement career as well as a promising position at the mayor's office. It's even worse that she's been depicted as such an incompetent investigator that despite Sidwell not limiting her access to his business dealings, she couldn't find any dirt on him. And her reaction to having scars on her face has been disappointing since the accident happened. All of that pales in comparison, however, to the thought of Jordan being conflicted over whether to accept Sidwell's offer — or, worse still, the thought of Jordan and Curtis having conflict over whether she should turn down reconstructive surgery in order to help his odds of avoiding jail time for a crime he committed under a false assumption that he doesn't even feel bad for making.
This is really it? This is the best the writers think they can do for these characters?
I've complained about all of this before, and I know I'll do it again before very long, so I don't want to belabor my points. But watching this bullshit unfold after the week we just had — a week that tied up a major storyline that every single Ashford or Ashford-adjacent character could and/or should have had a lot more to do with — underscores GH's lack of commitment to, and indifference and/or contempt toward, its non-white cast. The absolute best-case scenario is that this is happening due to incompetence rather than deliberate racism, but it's been so painfully obvious — and so detrimental to the overall show — for so long that I feel like the obvious conclusions are sadly correct.
Even the scraps they're being given are sloppy. If there's an interesting angle in the Curtis/Isaiah feud, it's the fear, pain, and doubt Isaiah must be struggling with after sustaining a potentially career-ending injury simply because a violent maniac suspects him of a crime — but Isaiah is barely a participant in this storyline, which has mostly centered on Curtis' whining ass instead. If there's a single viewer who finds this compelling, they are never allowed to touch my television remote.
With the possible exception of Marshall, every character in the Ashford orbit is more than compelling enough to lead years of storylines — and they've all built up more than enough history on the show to inspire plenty of stories without much effort on the writers' part. The same is true for Brad, Selina, Terry, and any other POC character. GH has taken some strong recent strides toward consistently compelling storytelling, but the show will never achieve a truly satisfying narrative balance until it stops actively sidelining sources of drama.
General Josspital
Without ever leaving her hospital bed, Joss was last week's most impactful character. By agreeing to go along with the WSB's version of events in exchange for freeing Valentin and Jason, she set all sorts of things in motion — starting with Carly and Valentin's reunion, which saw them locking lips in the GH parking lot while a bewildered Sonny and an appalled Lulu looked on.
When Carly and Valentin first hooked up, I said I was interested in their coupling partly because I was looking forward to watching a bunch of other characters get upset about it, but so far, those results have been decidedly mixed. I have to admit that Sonny's reaction has been sort of entertaining — he and Valentin traded barbs about which of them is more dangerous for Carly — the pleasure of watching those scenes was wiped out by the pain of having to watch Lulu reactivate her Mama Bear mode while howling at Carly for putting Charlotte in touch with Valentin while he was on the run.
Eventually, Valentin made his way to Joss' room, where he wryly noted that she didn't seem surprised to see him released from custody. He'd already figured out that she had to be the reason for his freedom, but he couldn't understand why — a mystery she solved by telling him she needed him to be pardoned so Carly couldn't be indicted for harboring him. During this conversation, she played off her opposition to Valentin and Carly dating, but like any good WSB agent, she had another agenda; later, when Brennan returned and was appalled to hear about Valentin's release, Joss told him she'd planted the seeds for Carly and Valentin's breakup by sending him to deliver a message to Anna.
That message won't be delivered until next week, but so far, Anna's homecoming hasn't exactly been happy. After shooing everyone out of her apartment, she was confronted by the ghost of Peter, who reminded her that having returned to Port Charles, she was free to get her revenge. We aren't sure yet who's in her crosshairs, but we do know she's struggling with a number of lingering aftereffects from her long ordeal. After Peter's visit, she flashed back to the nosebleed she suffered in her Wyndemere cell, which I guess we're meant to take as a sign of looming blood cancer-related developments. She was then visited by Liesl, who demanded her help clearing Cassius' name from the WSB smear campaign blaming him for the cold fusion project.
At first, it seemed as though Anna and Liesl might be able to find some common ground, especially when Liesl told her that she, Joss, and Carly had all been held in the same cell where Anna was kept all those months. Anna showed an almost panicked level of gratitude for this confirmation that her captivity hadn't been imagined, even making Liesl draw her a map of the cell — but she stopped short of agreeing to help, arguing that only a Faison would be capable of getting into her head the way her captors did, and blaming Cassius for not only being part of her torment, but tricking her into believing he was Nathan.
While I still have deep reservations regarding Eden McCoy's ability to convincingly play a WSB agent, I'm enjoying the way she's conducting business from her hospital bed. Joss and Carly had an emotional conversation about Joss choosing to remain in the Bureau, and it really worked, with Joss tearfully explaining her desire to help people while Carly just-as-tearfully explained her terror at the prospect of losing another child. Joss and Lucas also had an absorbing heart to heart when she came clean regarding her orders to manipulate him, and honestly admitted that if duty called for it, she'd do it again.
Speaking quietly and surveying the situation with a clarity no one else has, Joss is more compelling than she's been in years — enough to leave me actively hoping that her exposure as an agent will be all it takes to make this preposterous development finally click. I still think McCoy lacks the physical characteristics it'll take to pull that off, but now I have a shadow of a doubt.
The one thing Joss doesn't know, of course, is that Cassius isn't dead after all, and has instead been pressed into duty as one of her fellow WSB agents. I have no idea how long Cassius will be off the canvas, but I like this plot development; putting him on the board for the Bureau opens up all sorts of possibilities, all while hitting pause on any real resolution for the many, many conflicts caused by his monthslong impersonation of Nathan. There will need to be a reckoning between Anna and Cassius at some point — hopefully, one that leads to Peter's last-ever appearance — but it doesn't need to, and shouldn't, happen right away. Plus, if he's working for the WSB, his eventual return could also bring with it the arrival of a brand new big bad.
I Got Dem Ol' Placebo Blues Again Mama!
Before we move on from the Faisons for the week, I need to note that Britt now knows she never had Huntington's, and that all of her symptoms were psychosomatically induced by her false diagnosis. This isn't the most graceful way to end a story — if you've seen the infamous Bruce Willis bomb Hudson Hawk, it might remind you of the main characters guffawing about a Leonardo da Vinci flying contraption turning out to have airbags in the movie's final moments — but it might be best way out of the corner Britt was written into after her previous exit from the show.
It's also giving Kelly Thiebaud plenty of solid material to work with. I know a lot of people dislike her for various off-camera reasons, but I don't think she's a bad actor, and so far, she's made a meal out of Britt coming to terms with the reality that she was not only fooled into thinking she was dying, but she made years of epically selfish decisions in order to keep herself alive. The writers, bless 'em, have even found a way to use this scenario to buck the odds and actually make Joe Fitzpatrick interesting.
Armed with the knowledge that she'd been injecting herself with saline, Fitzpatrick pulled Britt from her jail cell to ask her questions. Believing she was being interrogated, Britt was initially resistant, but it didn't take long before she readily spilled her guts, telling him about how Cullum tricked her into doing his bidding. After she was done, he told her she was free to go — and when a stunned Britt wondered where she even could go after giving up her car, apartment, and (presumably) job to go on the run, he handed her five dollars and told her she could pay him back.
In a truly just world, this would be the setup for a love triangle between Britt, Lucas, and a bisexual Fitzpatrick. I have no faith in this actually happening; for now, it's enough to know that Fitzpatrick knows Cullum didn't actually die a hero, and to imagine the ways in which he might try to soothe Lucas' grief by helping him get the word out about what really happened on Spoon Island. Of course, Jason's headed back to Port Charles, and he also knows Cullum was dirty, so there are all sorts of ways for the Bureau's preferred version of events to be exposed as a lie.
One small postscript here: Cynthia Watros remains mostly trapped in Willow-propping hell, but Nina was allowed a few minutes to try and process the implications of Cassius' death last week. While the writing wasn't great, Watros took the opportunity to remind us that she's capable of greatness when someone bothers to give her a chance to achieve it. In addition to justice for the show's non-white characters, a truly functional GH would also always have something interesting for Nina to do. And Ava, while we're at it.
I Did It. I Framed Willow
As I've said repeatedly, the Willow/Chase/Brook Lynn storyline is a classic example of something very stupid that I'm willing to tolerate in the hope that it shakes various characters out of the doldrums. Those hopes were heightened last week by a series of exceedingly unlikely events.
Unlikely Event Number One: After bumping into Lucy at the Metro Court pool, Chase experienced a Flowers for Algernon-style moment, suddenly developing enough brainpower to not only get the sense that something was off between Lucy and Brook Lynn, but to actually intuit that Brook Lynn might have been the one to frame Willow for fleeing the scene of Curtis and Jordan's accident.
Unlikely Event Number Two: When confronted by Chase with his suspicions, Brook Lynn actually admitted to what she'd done.
The first event surprised me because Chase has been written as a credulous moron for so long that I assumed it'd take a megaphone and a neon sign to make him understand what was going on, but the second one was truly shocking, because it upends decades of soap precedent. I'm old enough to remember the days of Tina Lord's pillow pregnancy, so I always expect female soap characters to cling to their lies until there's absolutely no other choice; against the backdrop of all that silly precedent, I found it thrillingly refreshing to hear Brook Lynn say the words "Yes, I did it. I framed Willow."
For a long time, Chase has been written as a moralizing dummy, so it's easy to see a world in which the writers use this revelation as an excuse to send him rushing into Willow's arms. He also has a history of forgiving Brook Lynn for everything, though, so it's also easy to imagine him finding a way past this. I'm inclined to lean toward the first option, if only because it's the one that'd create the biggest mess for Ethan, who clearly wants Phoebe to end up being adopted by Chase and Brook Lynn in order to protect her from her secret asshole of a father.
Whatever Chase decides, Willow will need a minute before she can really focus on him, because last week, she found out that Brennan's black box went missing while he was laid up at Turning Woods, which means she no longer has access to any leverage against Drew. With Cullum dead and Sidwell in jail, her access to the paralytic drug keeping Drew locked in has been cut off, so she and Nina are on the clock, and they've both resolved to somehow find that evidence before Drew regains the ability to speak.
Given that Willow is not only in Drew's office, but presumably has access to all of his financial records, it seems somewhat unlikely to me that she'd have to dig all that deep in order to find proof of malfeasance, but whatever; this is a soap, and it needs drama, so for the next couple of weeks, we'll all pretend to wonder whether Nina and Willow will manage to checkmate Drew before he can expose their misdeeds.
Because a soap always needs more than one source of drama for any given storyline, we'll also wonder whether Elizabeth will put two and two together in time to upset Nina and Willow's apple cart. Last week, she learned that Brennan had not only been released from Turning Woods, but walked out of the facility under his own power — and then she was even more surprised to find him at Willow and Drew's house. When she shared her hypothesis that perhaps there was a toxin in the house that might have felled him and Drew, Brennan lied, saying he'd been exposed to a classified substance as part of some WSB work. She pretended to believe him, but this is Elizabeth Imogene Webber we're talking about. She has recently (and repeatedly) proven herself to be smarter than every single member of the Port Charles Police Department, so I won't be the slightest bit surprised if she deduces what's really going on here.
That's the big stuff from last week! Now for your bullets:
- Sonny had one of the lines of the week when he told Ava that Ethan got shot in the ass while saving hers
- Michael mentioned that Daisy celebrated her first birthday with Sasha, Robert, and Holly
- After Willow accused her of hacking her trip logs, Tracy realized Brook Lynn was the one who really did it
- Gio and Emma remain cute, and also remain in desperate need of a real storyline
- Danny told Brennan that Rocco shot Cullum, and Brennan told him to go home
- Valentin told Lulu that he wants joint custody of Charlotte, and warned her she's at risk of isolating their daughter with her unreasonable behavior
- Carly told Sonny about Joss being in the WSB
- Laura said Kevin can't come home from Dublin because he's already started his next semester
- Turner asked Molly to prosecute the Sidwell case, even though it'd mean abandoning her book tour
- Lucas got drunk at the Brown Dog and slept it off on Elizabeth's couch, much to Ric's annoyance
- Sonny told Carly that Cullum firebombed his penthouse and burned Michael, which provoked a potentially significant look from Valentin
- Lucy had a phone conversation with Serena
- Tracy was appalled to learn that Lucy ended up with half of Brook Lynn's Deception shares
Comments
Post a Comment