Most weeks, after I finish watching General Hospital, I'm able to come up with some sort of theme to explore in this column's introductory paragraphs. It's a way of checking on the overall pulse of the show before getting into the details of various storylines, and helps me avoid feeling like I'm just grinding out a long recap — but some weeks, it's difficult to figure out what to say beyond "Welp, here's some stuff that happened."
This is one of those weeks.
In fairness, last week's episodes weren't as painfully dull or misguided as some of the others we've been handed in recent memory. Yes, we had to watch Brook Lynn grovel at the feet of her dough-brained husband; yes, Sonny and Turner had their umpteenth conversation about having to hide their flaccid affair. In large part, however, it at least felt like the writers were following a set of actual plans. I may not like those plans, but it beats aimless drifting.
That being said, this really wasn't an essential week of GH. Two biggish things happened — Britt and Jason broke up; Nina was arrested by the WSB — but you really didn't need to watch the first one, and the second was worth scoping out only because Cynthia Watros went fully in on her scenes, to the point that it started to feel like she might be paid by the decibel. Everything else was either holding patterns or advancement by a matter of small degrees.
Now that I've lowered your expectations, let's get down to business, shall we?
Buckaroo Bonsai
On most soaps, if you took a character who'd been on the show for 40 years and sent them out into the woods to nearly murder an innocent person because a ghost told her to, it'd be the type of event that detonated a bomb across the canvas. Not our GH, baby. The fallout from Anna's thwarted homicide attempt on Britt was last week's big story, but it was really pretty muted — and to a significant degree, it involved scenes that didn't even include Anna.
I do need to say that I appreciate how much time is being spent on Anna's emotional state, and how she's been warped by not only Faison's campaign of terror, but the simple act of living in a world where constant lying is necessary to survive. While I think the show's current demonization of the WSB is overly simplistic, I have to recognize the little bits of nuance that have been allowed to squeeze through.
That only goes so far, though. Much as I continually advocate for GH to treat its viewers more like adults, I recognize that you can't power a storyline solely on characters talking about their troubles, no matter how compelling those troubles might be. They need to lead somewhere — and right now, we don't really know where that will be.
Here's what we do know: In addition to sessions with Dr. Nichols, Anna has arranged to lean on Tristan, who gave her a cursory "exam" to establish their doctor-patient relationship and allow her to unburden herself to him while sheltering her secrets via HIPAA. She also had a highly charged conversation with Joss, reminding her that WSB protocol dictates she be reported for trying to kill Britt. When Joss balked at this, saying she didn't want to make a bad situation worse, Anna stressed that if she doesn't want to follow the rules, then she shouldn't be an agent.
Joss interpreted this as Anna telling her she had to tattle to the WSB, but I'm not so sure that's what Anna meant. Yes, she's been very open about expecting — and perhaps even wanting — to suffer the consequences of her actions, but she's also well aware of where Joss' road with the WSB could lead. Rather than urging Joss to turn her in, Anna may have been tacitly warning her how unpleasant her career will be if she's this conflicted about doing her duty to the Bureau.
That's a bridge I think we all know Joss is bound to cross sooner or later. For now, though, she's gone and narced to Agent Baines — not just about Anna plotting to murder Britt, but also for hiring a civilian to help her work on her mental/emotional well-being. This is obviously a big no-no in the eyes of the Bureau, if for no other reason than wanting to prevent Anna from sharing any secrets, but Baines — who's been given his first character quirk in the form of a bonsai-pruning hobby — was seemingly too busy going after Nina to do anything about Anna.
Now that Nina's been hauled off to Switzerland (more on that in a bit), perhaps Baines will shift his focus to former Agent Devane. Anna will not, however, have to worry about Britt bringing charges against her, if only because Jason refused to serve as her witness. Which leads me back to…
I Love You, Yawn, Goodbye
On most soaps, if you broke up a couple that had been through a series of high-stakes adventures — including the assumed deaths of not one, but both people — that would also be the type of event that detonated a bomb across the canvas. Love 'em, hate 'em, feel indifferent toward 'em, but at least on paper, Britt and Jason were a pairing whose demise should have been too significant, and too emotionally impactful, to screw up.
The problem, as I've kvetched about previously, is that GH no longer knows how to write romance. The show remains reasonably good at finding an initial spark between characters, but a lot of that rests on actors who understand that a fan-favorite pairing can still be a golden ticket to hanging around long-term; once those relationships actually get going, the writers run screaming in the other direction.
If you've been watching daytime for a long time, you know soaps have always had difficulty with domestic bliss. Happy couples have languished on the back burner for decades; that's nothing new. But GH has also developed a nasty habit of fumbling relationships that should be easy sources of fun and excitement, and the Britt/Jason pairing is a good example.
This is not necessarily an endorsement of either character. I'm just saying that there's a lot of potential in a love story between a hitman and a morally ambiguous semi-reformed schemer. Early on, GH seemed to understand that about these two. I thought their first go-round was kind of charming, with an entertaining blend of banter and romance serving as the glue for their adventures. Everything since Britt's return has been stilted and lame, though, up to and including their roundly anticlimactic breakup on the Quartermaine docks last week.
From the moment Anna started plotting to murder Britt, we knew Jason and Britt's relationship was at risk; however it went down, he was going to end up torn between his friend and his girlfriend. This was an objectively solid setup for a heartbreaking soap split, too — it's easy to understand why Jason would focus on the reasons for Anna's actions, and also easy to understand his persistent belief that she never would have actually followed through on her threats. It's just as easy to understand Britt's hurt and anger in response, as well as her fear that Anna could end up coming after her again.
I think Kelly Thiebaud and Steve Burton did their best to convey as much of that emotion as they could during Britt and Jason's breakup, but in the end, it basically came down to this:
JASON: Why didn't you help Anna when she was being held captive under Wyndemere?
BRITT: Cullum and Sidwell moved her before I could.
JASON: I wish I could believe that, but I can't.
BRITT: We can't trust each other, so we can't be together.
JASON: Yeah, you're probably right.
I don't know what's behind the modern GH's allergy to romance — we can all tell that nothing's been the same on that front since COVID, but this trend started before the pandemic — but whatever the reasons for it, the end result is that stuff that should go out with a bang ends up landing with a wet plop.
Justice for Emma
Speaking of starting out well and fading down the stretch, I want to spend a minute on the brightest silver lining out of this situation last week, which is that it gave Emma something to do besides have sex with Gio and/or be sad and jealous because he's busy with his budding recording career. Emma is a character with a ton of dynamic potential, and Braedyn Bruner is excellent in the role; her recent sidelining makes absolutely no sense at all. These recent episodes didn't fix that situation, but they did offer Emma an excuse to go in on Joss and Carly, and Bruner made the most of the opportunity.
Joss, to her credit, told Emma to her face that she'd had to report Anna to the WSB. Also to her credit, Joss knew Emma was right when she put her on blast for doing what she did. Carly did what Carly always does, which was rush to Joss' defense — at which point Emma reminded Carly that she's been in a straitjacket before, and probably wouldn't like it very much if someone exploited that.
I harbor no illusions about the show having any interest whatsoever in imagining an equal power dynamic between Joss and Emma, but those scenes were entertaining to watch because of Bruner, and I'm always such a sucker for long-term frenemyships on soaps that I'm unreasonably cheered by even the barest hint of a suggestion that these two could develop a Viki/Dorian-style history.
Enjoy Your Vacation, Cynthia Watros. You've Earned It
The WSB's role in international peacekeeping affairs has always been fairly nebulous, which is fine; it's really just a delivery mechanism for action and intrigue, and we don't really need to know much about its inner workings. It can create problems, however, and the biggest might be the free rein it gives the writers to just make stuff up when they need something to happen.
Nina's arrest is a goofy case in point. With Brennan barely gone long enough for the cops to file a missing person report, the Bureau launched an investigation, got a warrant to search Nina's things, and arrested her after finding the wallet Drew planted under the passenger seat of her car. As Ric pointed out, there's no body, and no proof that any crime has even been committed, but that doesn't matter; after some unfortunately over-the-top threats from Agent Baines, Nina was charged with making a threat against an agent and hauled, sobbing, off to Steinmauer.
Now, it's obviously not a good idea to go around antagonizing spies. And the idea of Drew implicating Nina in Brennan's demise isn't necessarily a bad one. But this whole scenario reeks of the writers believing that a lot of yelling and a little flurry of action can cover for a multitude of narrative sins, and that ain't necessarily the case. For Nina's arrest to feel sensible, or like it even really matters, I think there should have been a deeper lead-up to this moment; as it is, it's hard to understand how or why even an agency as apparently all-powerful as the Bureau would be able to rush to judgment so swiftly.
Wubs tells us Cynthia Watros will be gone for a bit, so I'm guessing her arrest was rushed in order to accommodate her schedule. The upside to this is that it led to Drew telling Ava that Willow shot him, Nina tried to drown him, and Willow and Nina were both involved in keeping him mute and paralyzed for months. It's still very stupid that these two have been pushed together in order to try and take down Sonny, but it's about time someone else found out the real story behind Drew's "stroke," and I'm glad it was Ava — not only because her reactions to this sort of thing are always priceless, but also because there's a chance Ava's knowledge will somehow tie in with Trina's, and additional bonds between those two are only a good thing.
Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Cassadine
Drew thinks he's gotten the last laugh on Nina, and now he's taking aim at Willow — but what he doesn't realize is that he currently faces a new threat in the form of Charlotte Cassadine.
Last week, Scout finally warned Danny that she lied and told Drew she'd been with him on Labor Day. She also lied to Danny about where she'd really been, inventing a story about going to a college party on King's Beach; Charlotte saw through this instantly, and after Scout left, told Danny she could tell that Scout was really out with some guy. But before figuring out the identity of that guy, Charlotte insisted that they deal with the bigger issue: Drew.
In order to neutralize Drew and keep him from continuing to harass Danny, Charlotte decided Drew needed to be caught in a bad situation — and hatched a plan to wait in his car and pounce on him when he entered in order to make it look like they were hooking up, all while everything was being captured on camera.
This is objectively icky, and I can understand why some viewers would be so repulsed by the idea that they'd want to bail. On the other hand, it's very soapy, and also a callback to an era when daytime wasn't squeamish about putting teenage characters in adult situations. In recent years, this show's teen set has been depressingly averse to genuinely bad behavior, so I'm willing to tolerate the grossness of Charlotte even pretending to make out with Drew if it means these characters are going to be used for something more than squeaky clean filler. This is the devious direction Charlotte should be heading anyway.
I'm guessing we aren't actually going there, however. Danny, who was sensibly and adamantly opposed to Charlotte's plan, figured out what she was up to on Friday, and while she lurked in Drew's car outside the Metro Court, Danny hustled out of the Quartermaine stables to try and stop her. Friday's episode ended with Charlotte watching as the driver's side door of Drew's car opened, but rather than Drew finding her, I think it'll be Danny — and then Drew will find the two of them, and assume Danny was about to indulge in a little grand theft auto. However he reacts to this, he'll do it while being unwittingly filmed by Charlotte's camera, so these two might get the ammo they're looking for even without resorting to false statutory shenanigans.
And that'll do it for the big stuff. I leave you with bullets, and hopes for a better week to come:
- Serena likes to go nightbird watching in dresses and heels
- Outback keeps going back into the woods to try and dig up Brennan's corpse
- Baines keeps his little WSB badge loose in his pocket
- Alexis told Chase she isn't interested in representing him or Brook Lynn in divorce court
- Cameron and Aiden were both mentioned
- Carly was once again surprisingly mature regarding Anna and Valentin's friendship
- Brook Lynn uttered the words "I'm the reason you missed the blueberries"
- Curtis and Jordan weren't allowed to touch at all during her visit, but he and Trina were allowed to hug when she showed up. Pentonville has funny rules
- Drew used his SEAL sniper skills to help Scout with her math homework
- Carly told Joss that Brennan spilled the beans about her secret assignment, and did it in front of Valentin too
- After trying and failing to get Lucy to give her Deception stock back, Brook Lynn told Serena that Lucy betrayed her
- Turner told Sonny that Robert is officially stepping down as DA, and she's running to replace him
- Molly went to the Aurora gym, where her workout mostly consisted of making "OMG" faces while sensing love in the air between Lucas, Joe, Elizabeth, and Dante
- Brook Lynn apologized to Jordan, who shockingly shut her down by taking the blame for her own role in the accident
- Willow suspects Drew of framing Nina
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