No reasonable soap viewer expects the series to be firing on all cylinders at all times. As fans, we're entitled to judge the final product as harshly as we want, but underneath it all, I think we're all well aware of how difficult it really is to keep one of these shows running — and the beauty of that five-days-a-week schedule is that no matter how good or bad one episode might be, you never have much time to dwell on it before the next one comes along. When the show's in low gear, you want to be diverted; when things are warming up, you want to be entertained; and when a big storyline is in its final stretch, you want to be fully wrapped up in it. One of the problems with General Hospital in recent years has been its frequent inability to work its way up to "diverting" during its lower-gear stretches — the show's still capable of making big splashes a few times a year, but getting to those points is often a lot duller than it should be.
I thought last week's GH was a good example of how the show should operate when it's working its way toward its next explosive payoff. A lot of what happened wasn't exactly essential — Dante and Elizabeth spent an entire episode baking cupcakes, for goodness' sake — but most of what we saw felt like it served a purpose, so even if most of these scenes didn't seem to do much in terms of moving their storylines along, they were still generally diverting. We had a couple of surprises (not counting one development that really should have been a surprise), there was no shortage of fun dialogue, and as an added bonus, I think we might be watching the emergence of a potentially great villain.
Not Without My Dawtah
That villain is none other than Jude Jacks, and if you're surprised to see me saying nice things about this character one week after I lamented his arrival on the canvas, well, I'm surprised too. The big difference lies in how he was used last week: Instead of wasting time trying to make us believe he's rakishly charming and has the sexual stamina of a college freshman, the writers leaned on Jude's darker side, and there seems to be plenty of darkness to spare.
This shift into villain mode works especially well because Wil Traval is a big guy who knows how to project an air of menace without being over the top about it. When Jude surprised everyone by showing up at the Quartermaine mansion and demanding to see his daughter, the confrontation could easily have gone over the top, but instead, Traval played Jude as a guy who knows he can afford to be patient — which is a scary kind of patience to witness when you're talking about a father trying to gain custody of his illegally adopted child.
When he went to Alexis' office to try and secure her services in pursuit of that custody, Jude displayed the same type of chilling agreeability. Some villains project a gentle air as a means of intensifying intimidation, but the way Traval played Jude last week was different — this is a man who's so confident in his own inexorability that he has no problem with being insulted, denied, and turned away, because he'll just keep coming back until he gets what he wants. As an added bonus, he towers over Jason, which made their brief staredown a lot more interesting than most.
I wasn't expecting Jude to play his parental card so quickly, but his introduction into the story comes at the right moment. With Chase and Brook Lynn on the other side of their quickie divorce, they need something new to complicate their lives as co-parents to Phoebe, and the arrival of her menacing old man definitely checks that box. It also comes at the right time to add a little much-needed urgency to Joss and Hudson's corner of the canvas — Jude is obviously the guy pulling Hudson's strings, and putting the focus on him means the writers will be less tempted to spend time on tiresome scenes of Joss and Hudson bickering, or of Baines making annoyingly vague hints as to the WSB's reasons for wanting Joss in the CEO chair to begin with.
Of course, it's also hard not to wonder why the Bureau would bother with all this subterfuge when they've recently been shown to be absurdly abrupt with their "investigations." In the old days, WSB agents went after bad guys with painstaking precision; now, they'll just yoink suspects into custody in a matter of minutes, as Jason and Nina can attest. And speaking of Nina…
Bougie Black Site Cuisine
Surprise! Her recent statements to the contrary, Cynthia Watros appears to be back from her break, with Nina having been transported from Steinmauer to a WSB facility near Port Charles. The reason? As a hilariously unapologetic Baines told Nina, "Apparently, we may have rushed to judgment." To make it up to her, he offered Nina a croissant and some orange juice before interrogating her yet again, demanding to know the details of her last conversation with Brennan. She held firm, dancing around the details of their public conflict before admitting she's sure Brennan's dead. When asked why, she told Baines that it's partly because he keeps telling her Brennan has died — and partly because she knows Brennan wouldn't have faked his own demise if he knew she'd be blamed for it.
Brennan's fate was front of mind for plenty of other characters this week. Facing a libel lawsuit from Willow, Lulu took Tracy's advice and mounted a charm offensive against Carly and Valentin, banking on their ability to help her prove the existence of the paralytic drug Sidwell mentioned in his interview. Valentin played it non-committal, offering to "ask around" and see if anybody at the Bureau would talk to her, but after she left, he and Carly stepped up their efforts to solve the mystery of Brennan's disappearance in order to help Lulu.
Continuing the long tradition of civilians doing better investigative work than the alleged professionals, Valentin and Carly put two and two together and realized that if Ava really was involved in whatever happened to Brennan, she couldn't have been working alone — and if she was working with Nina, then Brennan's body couldn't be far from Port Charles, because Ava and Nina both lack the type of patience and impulse control that's required for careful long-term planning in a situation like this.
From there, Carly finally got around to doing what the cops and/or WSB should have done months ago: reviewing the Metro Court security footage from the night of Brennan's disappearance. Shocked to discover that Danny and Charlotte were on the premises, she popped over to the Quartermaine mansion with Valentin to grill Danny about what he and Charlotte had been up to. When they asked him if he'd seen anything suspicious, he made me laugh out loud by saying yes, he'd seen Carly and Valentin breaking into Drew's office — but the fun didn't stop there, because after a little extra pressure, he fully caved, and told them all about how he and Charlotte found Brennan's body floating in the pool.
At this moment, the case was cracked wide open — not by Carly, Valentin, or Danny, but by the town's true top detective, Outback. Cody's furry friend escaped containment again and returned to the nature preserve, where she was busy pawing at Brennan's grave while Carly and Valentin pressed Danny for information. As soon as Danny admitted they'd seen Brennan's corpse, Outback trotted in with his severed finger in her hand, which led Carly and Valentin to dash out to the preserve with flashlights. Those lights weren't enough to keep Carly from tripping on a large and quite obvious rock, but her tumble turned out to be another lucky break, because it plopped her down right in front of Brennan's hand poking out of the dirt.
There were things to quibble with as far as how all this played out — including the fact that except for that hand sticking out of the ground, it doesn't look like the dirt at Brennan's grave has been disturbed at all, which means his body must be magically pushing its way to the surface — but all in all, it was fairly satisfying. A few weeks ago, I got excited about the possibility of an umbrella storyline under Sidwell's revelations, and so far, the writers are still doing a pretty good job of spreading the love between enough characters to keep that umbrella unfurled.
A Banner Year
Also under that umbrella: Curtis, who opened the week hobbling around the halls of GH and whining about his imminent transfer back to Pentonville. The assist that he and Monet were expecting from Drew failed to materialize the way they thought it would — as Drew rightly pointed out, it'd be a comically bad look for Aurora to mount a PR campaign on behalf of its incarcerated former CEO, especially with his girlfriend having taken over his position on top of the company. Instead, Drew offered to reach out to some other friendly outlets, first among them the Llanview Banner, which is apparently now being headed up by Kevin Buchanan.
Drew's outreach efforts kept him busy, but not too busy to hop the fence at the Quartermaine estate and ambush Willow at the gatehouse, where he tried getting her to see the wisdom of joining forces against Lulu. Noting that it's decidedly to their advantage if Lulu's story is refuted, he offered to have his office draw up a joint statement for the two of them, but she pushed back, saying that if they released a statement, it'd come from her office — and that's where the conversation stopped, because Jason, who'd been tipped off by Yuri, arrived to tell Drew to get the hell off the property.
After Drew left, Jason tried talking sense into Willow, warning her that Drew isn't to be trusted, but she called bullshit on his concerned friend act, telling him that if he's concerned about the welfare of her children, he should go talk to Lulu, since her story resulted in Wiley and Amelia being bullied at school.
As always, it's awfully hard to understand what Willow's endgame is here — even though she's as much of a situational dimbulb as any other soap character, she's got to understand the incredible risks associated with litigating Lulu's story. I enjoyed watching Britt call her out for this last week, straight up clapping her hands to drive home to point that she is in fact guilty of everything she's being accused of, and her best course of action would be to ignore the story and hope it goes away. Unfortunately for Willow (but fortunately for mess-craving soap viewers), she seems stupidly susceptible to people who urge her to fight — especially Chase, who stopped by to share the news of his divorce and make her promise to hold firm.
While Drew was busy making moves against Lulu, Ava was making moves of her own — specifically by going to Alexis, securing her legal representation, and telling her that Drew pressured her into slipping Brennan a sleeping pill. Having Ava throw in with Drew in the first place was woefully lame, but if she proves to be his undoing, I'll forgive it. For now, because GH loves nothing more than leaving conversations and/or plot threads dangling, all we know is that Ava wants Alexis to figure out how to get her immunity in exchange for rolling over on Drew.
Your Biggest Fan
Not a lot to talk about here, but I think we need more than a bullet point to talk about the reveal of Trina's flower-sending biggest fan, which occurred during the closing moments of Friday's show. Upon showing up for their latest performance at the Cat's Eye, she and Gio discovered that the club had been rented out by a mystery individual — presumably the same one who sent a bouquet with a card from, you guessed it, Trina's biggest fan. After making a little noise about canceling the show out of concerns for Trina's safety, they were roundly sassed by a club rep who promised to call her lawyers if they didn't play, at which point Trina said she wanted to go through with the performance.
If you follow GH press at all, it'll come as no surprise to know that the mystery fan turned out to be Heather, who made her dramatic entrance after Trina and Gio's first number. In a marked contrast to recent appearances, Heather looks amazing, which seems like a solid visual indication that the money from her metallosis lawsuit came in. (How else would she be able to rent out a posh 12-seat club like the Cat's Eye?)
My guess here is that Heather's overtures toward Trina are sincere. At the very least, I tend to doubt she's "the stalker" — either her return is a total red herring meant to try and misdirect us away from the real one, or she's secretly in league with the real stalker, who seems likely to be Esme. If I were writing the show, I'd set it up so a well-meaning but deranged Heather used her lawsuit windfall to fund a search for Spencer, who she has waiting in the wings somewhere, but this show is so allergic to fun that I tend to doubt they'd ever go in that direction. I guess we'll find out more next week! Until then, your bullets:
- Danny caught Scout and Rocco kissing, and sensibly went after Rocco for making out with a young woman who's basically his sister
- After signing the divorce papers, Chase buried his wedding ring on a Dominican beach
- Sonny barged into Alexis' office demanding to know whether she believed he was responsible for the attack on Sidwell and Curtis; smartly, she declined to answer
- Dante authorized Joe to open an investigation into Brennan's disappearance, starting with Ava's possible role
- Gio asked Curtis and Dante to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Sonny isn't guilty of ordering the beating
- When Ava told Lucas that he's her favorite nephew, he incorrectly asserted that he's her only nephew, which is cruel Andy erasure
- Portia warned Ava not to trust Drew
- Scout and Drew had a sweet conversation about missing Sam on the anniversary of her death
- Gio and Emma have apparently already found and moved into their new apartment
- Tracy, Brook Lynn, and Jason united to vote to make Deception a subsidiary of ELQ, over Lucy and Serena's loud objections
- Lucy and Serena are apparently working some sort of second angle by "planting seeds" with Willow
- Britt prophetically told Willow that she's happy not to know the name of her one-night stand, because given her track record, he's probably some kind of asshole
- Dante and Elizabeth baked cupcakes, leading to the inevitable frosting mishap and subsequent near-kiss moment
- Lucas arrived as Dante was on his way out, and immediately sensed potential sex
- Valentin joined Anna in therapy, giving James Patrick Stuart and Finola Hughes reels to submit for next year's Daytime Emmys
- Joss and Jason talked about Jax, Jerry, and Jude
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