Soaps depend on melodrama as much as they thrive on long — sometimes decades-long — arcs for their characters, which often means those characters end up getting involved in outlandish situations that lead to unforgivable acts against one another, but since they still have to share a canvas, the writers come up with some sort of narrative checkmate device to preserve the status quo.
The specific details in many of these situations are patently ridiculous, but like a lot of ridiculous soap stuff, this is a device that can lead to really durable drama. I'm thinking about the grudges between Palmer and Adam on All My Children, or Viki and Dorian on One Life to Live — the type of seething, entangled resentment that soaps excel at building up so much that it's all but impossible for a veteran viewer to remember how they even started, let alone explain it to a neophyte.
I'm nowhere near suggesting that Drew and Willow will ever approach the levels of greatness achieved by any of the aforementioned characters, but I did think a lot last week about the rich history of daytime characters who hate each other deeply, but have no choice but to co-exist in a state of mutually assured destruction. I know some folks are angry that Willow will face no (immediate) consequences for shooting Drew and keeping him in a mute, paralyzed state for months, and others are upset that Drew appears to be even more of a raspy fucker than he was before his ordeal. To me, though, this is exactly the type of thing that makes soaps fun. I've been looking forward to seeing how these two characters would end up keeping each other in check, and on that front, last week did not disappoint.
Did it disappoint in other respects? Reader, you know it did; this column ain't called Critical Diagnosis for nothing. Let's look back together, shall we?
(Note: I'll be out of town with the wife and kids next week, so the odds of a column are perilously low. Don't forget me while I'm gone!)
You Treacherous Bitch
After months of being trapped in his own body, Drew's walking and talking again — and all it took was Nina pushing him into the lake to make it happen. Man, why didn't Travis the physical therapist think of that? Maybe because Willow gave him so many days off. (In Travis' defense, Drew is absurdly jacked for a guy who's supposedly been atrophying in a wheelchair, so maybe poor invisible Travis deserves a raise rather than insults.)
Nina's attempted drowning of Drew was a fine Friday cliffhanger, and everything that's followed has been as marvelously soapy as one might hope. After shoving him in the water, screaming his name, and running away, Nina bolted for Brennan's office, where the two of them discovered they had a real Gift of the Magi situation on their hands:
BRENNAN: Great news! I found the evidence we need to keep Drew in check.
NINA: It's too late. I just killed him.
Brennan joined her to rush back to the boathouse, where they found a befuddled Gio, who informed them he'd fished Drew out of the water after finding him clinging to the dock. Once back on dry land, Drew rejected Gio's attempts to get him to the hospital, insisting he needed to get back home and see Willow as soon as possible. Gio being Gio, he agreeably complied — which is why, when Willow got home, she found a muddy footprint on the floor, and was in the process of trying to figure out how it got there when Drew slammed the front door shut and growled "Hi, honey, I'm home."
What happened next verged into War of the Roses territory, with much of the black comedy you'd want from a series of scenes depicting a man and wife unloading months of homicidal hostility on each other. Willow started off by trying to reason with Drew; Drew shushed her, saying he'd had to listen to her speak for weeks on end, and now she could be the one to blink her thoughts — while it was still possible, anyway. He threw a vase, she screamed and saw Wiley's bat; he saw her looking at it, and scoffed that she'd never stand a chance.
And here's where Willow's attitude shifted, going from meek and terrified to something more calculating. Noting that he'd had "a very active day," she questioned whether he'd actually be able to fight her off, and he said he was ready to find out — but before they could get down to fisticuffs, Nina and a gun-toting Brennan rushed in.
Since being freed from Carly's clutches, Chris L. McKenna's version of Brennan has found a new spark. He'll always come across as more of a bureaucrat than a dashing spy, but he seems a lot more confident now, and it was a pleasure to watch him take command of the situation. When Nina yelled at Brennan to shoot Drew, Brennan shrugged that it would be a waste of a bullet, and pulled out the magic evidence he'd compiled. At first, Drew said he was willing to take his chances if it meant he could take them down too, but when Brennan explained that he'd be looking at multiple 20-year counts, he caved to Willow's demands.
Those demands? An immediate divorce, with Willow keeping her kids and Drew keeping his assets — with the exception of his seat in Congress, which she'd be taking with her. Is this how it really works when a member of Congress is incapacitated and their spouse takes over? I have no idea, but I'm definitely not mad about it; Willow as a political operative is less believable than Brennan as a spy, but it opens up no shortage of possibilities for a character who was 32 flavors of vanilla before she shot her husband in the back. It was galling to anybody who'd been hoping Willow would be forced to reap what she'd sown, but I enjoyed watching her eyes light up when she realized she had Drew boxed in, and had fun watching her sashay out of his house after dropping her wedding and engagement rings on the floor and purring, "The sound of freedom."
(Yes, I know that's Lila's ring, and Drew shouldn't have it, and that part of this stinks. But still.)
Anyway! I digress. The point is that Drew is back, and although he's using a cane and relying on Martin to drive him around, he needed no extra time or care to snap back to all of his old assholishness. He couldn't wait to get over to Alexis' house, ostensibly to pick up Scout, but more importantly to hiss at Alexis that she'd never be seeing Scout again because she colluded with Willow to go against his wishes. Then he headed to the pool, where he had a conversation with Ava, who he recognized as one of the very small number of people in Port Charles who doesn't actively hate him for intimately personal reasons — and then he decreased that number by having a meltdown when Danny accidentally spilled iced tea on him.
This was mostly just an excuse for Cameron Mathison to flex and pop veins, which was a supremely bizarre choice for the writers — a person could make the argument that modern soaps are short on the beefcake and cheesecake that used to be served on a regular basis, and I'm sure the whole thing was meant as kind of a goof, but GH shouldn't be making us think about the medical impossibility of a character's muscles while they're being shown off. Just my two cents. Also? If they're thinking about allying Ava with Drew, they need to stop it immediately. Immediately.
Drew's outburst was particularly poorly timed because, unbeknownst to him, the Quartermaines had been busy ganging up on Tracy, who was eager to reinstate the ban against him at the mansion. Gio, being Gio, argued for Drew to get another chance — and then so did Danny, who explained that if he kept Scout from Drew, he'd be no better than Drew himself. This was a very silly thing for Danny to say, given that keeping Drew away from the mansion has nothing to do with his access to Scout unless she's… at the mansion, but whatever; it gave the writers another opportunity for Tracy to be 100 percent correct but still be overruled, which is their favorite thing to do with her.
The point of all that complaining is just to say that Tracy reluctantly agreed to allow Drew back on the property as long as he was with Scout — but then Brook Lynn got an eyeful of Drew's iced tea tantrum and unloaded on him, which he responded to by vowing to have justice for everything that was taken from him, and also to completely destroy the Quartermaines in the process.
Getting back to where we started: I do understand why some folks are less than thrilled with what looks like a total return to the status quo for Drew and Willow. In her latest column, Wubs makes the reasonable argument that this might have been more fun if Drew had pretended to be a nice guy again while working against his enemies in secret, and I can see that — but I can also see that now we finally have a Drew who can fully rationalize his many grudges, and be completely out in the open with all of them. He doesn't need to pretend to be a man of the people or whatever; the gloves are off, and he has no shortage of targets.
I guess what I'm saying is that I can appreciate the way this was handled, partly because it feels like a callback to so many of the soap stories of my youth, and I'm willing to wait and see how Drew decides to wage a multi-front war against Willow, Michael, Alexis, Nina, Brennan, and the entire Quartermaine family. It could very well end up being irredeemably stupid, but the pieces are also there for a pretty good time.
Valentin's Gambit
There won't be much to say about this yet, but we have to spend a few words talking about what Valentin was up to last week. As you may recall, he ended the previous week by strolling into Brennan's office and offering to exchange Brennan's black box for the return of his assets. Brennan accepted, because that's what was necessary in order to push this corner of the story forward — and anyway, why were Valentin's assets still frozen after he'd been granted a complete pardon?
For the rest of the week, Valentin reveled in his renewed financial stability, briefly letting Carly think he was running up the tab at his comped Metro Court suite before revealing he'd gotten what he wanted out of Brennan. In fact, he got it so easily that now he's wondering whether he might have sold himself short by only settling for his assets. Given that he found Brennan and Nina together at Wyndemere (which he still intends to buy), Valentin has started adding twos and twos, and the sum points to the possibility that Nina would have been willing to pony up some of her own cash in order to secure the box's return.
I'm not sure if this will really lead anywhere. To be honest, I'm kind of hoping it doesn't, because I don't really want or need to have Valentin and Nina at odds. Valentin and Brennan are fun adversaries, but the enmity between them is too high-stakes to be a full-time story driver. I'd be in favor of maintaining Nina and Valentin's friendship while periodically finding ways to extend the clash of the titans between Valentin and Brennan. We shall see.
Anyway, for now, I guess we're supposed to be paying more attention to the relationship between Valentin and Anna. Anna spent the week pacing her apartment, catching up on case files while arguing with Peter's ghost and (sort of) trying to pretend she's on firmer mental footing in front of the living. She had a talk with Emma, who was lightly bummed that Anna hadn't told her about Joss joining the WSB, and she also reunited with Jason, who told her that Cassius might have been an okay guy, and Britt definitely didn't have anything to do with her kidnapping. Peter's ghost really didn't like that, which sent Anna running to Valentin in the hopes of getting more information she can trust — and then she saw Valentin kissing Carly, which she clearly did not like.
I don't have a lot to say about Anna's predicament this week, given that I complained about it in the last column, and not much has happened since. I'm again forced to acknowledge that Finola Hughes is doing a bang-up job with shoddy material — I'm loving the way she's playing Anna's uncertain state, with brief flashes of rage and annoyance clouding her countenance whenever someone tells her something she doesn't want to hear about Britt or Cassius — but I'm still very much not a fan of this storyline. We need Anna triumphant, and we need that now.
The Part of Ethan Lovett Will Now Be Played by Nobody
I'm recently on record as being indifferent toward Nathan Parsons and/or Ethan Lovett, and I haven't been shy about not at all understanding why in the world the show decided to bring this character and/or actor back, only to have them sort of waft around Port Charles for weeks on end. I am also not shy about admitting when I've seen the error of my ways, however, and now that I've endured Christian Howard's brief, awkward run as Ethan, I'm prepared to say: All is forgiven, Nathan. Come back anytime.
As you're most likely already well aware, Parsons skedaddled abruptly, leaving the writers to play out the rest of Ethan's latest story with what appears to have been the most emergency of emergency recasts. I don't make a habit of criticizing performances on this show, because I know what a brutally tough gig soap acting is, and to Howard's credit, it isn't like he went visibly up on his lines, or even felt as tentative as many soap newbies tend to be.
That said, he was absolutely a wrong choice for this role. I guess Howard isn't necessarily an actor by trade, but I think he acquitted himself pretty admirably in terms of communicating his dialogue and hitting his marks. He just isn't Ethan, and I'm sure everyone in the studio knew that from start to finish. Howard's two-episode run is a blip in the GH footnotes, but he did accomplish one notable thing: For the first time, a Maura West pairing produced zero sparks and zero chemistry.
All of which is to say that as quickly as their tryst began, Ava and Ethan are no more. Ethan spotted Hudson at the pool last week, acted like he saw a ghost, and had scooted the hell out of Port Charles before sunset, leaving Ava to wonder what in the world was going on with her latest boy toy. Between Ethan and Lucky, the audience is left to surmise that perhaps Luke's sons just don't have a place on the GH canvas anymore.
Of course, Ethan's presence was really meant to help launch the Phoebe adoption storyline, so… mission accomplished, I guess? Hudson's first episode was spent awkwardly lurking at the Metro Court pool, overhearing Ava tell Drew that Ethan is Lulu's half-brother — and then just as awkwardly pretending to be some sort of package courier as he called Lulu, attempting to confirm Ethan's address. Lulu, who'd just bid a brother farewell yet again, brushed him off, saying Ethan had left the country.
A subpar Ethan being gone is a gift horse I don't want to look in the mouth. That said, I feel duty-bound to acknowledge the fact that Ethan's absence means the entire weight of the Phoebe storyline falls on the brittle shoulders of Lord and Lady Borington, a.k.a. Chase and Brook Lynn, whose entire relationship dynamic would have led to stifled yawns in the 19th century. Now that Ethan has evaporated and Hudson is in the mix, the best we can hope for is that Ava will somehow manage to wedge herself into the proceedings. It won't make a lick of sense, but at least it'll be better than those two beautiful nothings being left to fumble through a storyline with the aid of the latest stubbled caucasoid to catch Frank Valentini's eye.
That's it for the big stuff! Now for your bullets:
- Jason and Britt exchanged limp I-love-yous
- Willow stonewalled Molly and Dante when she was questioned about her ties to Sidwell, which only made them more suspicious
- Jason, Carly, and Sonny reunited over beer at her kitchen table, and despite my PTSD from all the years these characters ate the canvas, I admit I found it a little bit sweet
- Marshall met Desmond, and it was also sweet
- Joss realized Trina has moved on from their friendship, and it gave her a powerful sad
- Rocco and Danny are okay with each other, but things are still tense
- Marshall and Stella tried talking sense into stupid old Curtis
- Kai and Trina mulled over the idea of telling Michael that Willow shot Drew
- Michael and Willow have already started fighting over their custody agreement
- Yuri owes Tracy $50 due to Drew and Willow's pending divorce
- Serena returned to town in order to tell us that Scott's living in Key West — and also to help Lucy regain control of Deception
- Michael warned Brook Lynn and Tracy that he thinks Willow is coming after Chase
- Brennan arranged to be seen by Tristan, who was unhappy to see him, and warned him that the WSB will get its reports when he has something to report
- Jason told Britt that Tristan is WSB, and she accused him of spying on her; in response, he told her that she should think before she speaks, which is honestly pretty great advice
- Ric spotted Dante helping Elizabeth practice catching fly balls and got jealous
- Jason told Sonny he can't work for him anymore
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