Serial Drama

Monday In Port Charles

Two quick snippets of dialogue today told me everything that I need to know about Jerry Jacks (alias: "Mr. Craig", also known as "We really like Sebastian Roche, much more than we like the audience"). I now have two working theories for why he became a psychopath:

(1) He has a possible brain injury causing him to forget huge chunks of his past

Do you like this Carly woman?

"This Carly woman"? He KNEW Carly. He almost married her mom! He also almost shot her in the face, but more importantly: she was almost his stepdaughter!

(2) He became a sadist to get back at his mother for saddling him with the name Gerard Aloysius Jacks.

The Day's Most Awesome Dialogue

Okay, Sharon, you started to earn back some of the good will you lost when you continued to moon over Brad.

Sharon: And people wonder whether I miss being in the Newman family. You know, I'd take the public scrutiny over being Jack's wife over that any day. Because the press couldn't possibly be any nastier than the two of you.
Nikki: Oh, nice.
Victoria: Oh, look, there she goes, being the victim again.
Sharon: You know, I always wondered what would be the perfect way to get back at Phyllis for sleeping with Nick. I'm looking at it! I hope she enjoys taking over the role of the reviled daughter-in-law.

Love it. I also loved Nikki's stripper past being broadcast all over the internet, and the image of Victor being the quintessential old man, studying the newfangled world wide web.

Not that Victoria and Nikki don't have perfectly good reasons to loathe Sharon at this point in time, what with the whole sleeping with Victoria's husband thing, but Nikki, especially, has always been straight bitch to her just for the hell of it. I simply adore seeing Sharon with a backbone. I want her and Jack to be beautiful and snarky and happy together for a long time.

I also adore Melody Thomas Scott's new look! She looks hot, yo.

If GH Can Keep Repeating Itself, So Can I

Promising Ingenue and I have both already ranted about this, but seriously, what is up with Liz?  I, too, used to love her (PI and I routinely exchanged emails questioning the fairness of the universe given how much of its gorgeousness Rebecca Herbst used up, and since we are shallow I guess we became enamored of her character as well . . . plus, you know, Liz and OriginalLucky were freaking awesome), but she is ticking me off. Standing at the edge of the dance floor none-too-subtly rubbing her pregnant stomach while watching her hitman/confidante/babydaddy dance with the bride was tacky enough:

And then she had to go and shoot the two of them the bitchface:

All These Idiots Held Their Peace?!

Carly and Jax are getting married!  Yay!  OMG so awesome!  They are so MFEO!!!!

Blech. I tried to be a fangirl. Really, I did. I didn't even hate them when they got together, despite the fact that Carly was going after her dead best friend's sort-of-husband like five minutes after she died. Ingo Rademacher started to sell me on the pairing. (In the interest of full disclosure, Ingo could also sell me a wardrobe of gauchos and ponchos and Uggs.)  And Laura Wright is a good actress who plays "Carly in love" well.

But the forced triangle retread, capped off with the whole "You went out of town to help your brother [who is NOT Craig, goddammit], so I married and slept with my mobster ex-husband. And?" thing just really killed this couple for me. And now despite all evidence that they are completely DOOMED and should never get married, they're married. Fortunately, the wedding meant that much of Port Charles got together in one place (which almost never happens). Unfortunately, there was wrongness besides the actual couple everyone was there to "celebrate." I have therefore divided my thoughts about this particular marital extravaganza into two highly sophisticated and descriptive categories:  bad and good.

BAD

The couple.  DOOMED.  Please see above.

However, Carly looked lovely (mostly - I didn't love her eye makeup and I'm not sold on those highlights).  And Jax looked, as always, devilishly handsome:

Of course at this moment he is beaming not at his bride but at Alexis, but, you know....details.

Goody Goody Two Shoes

What's the deal with Belle Black? Is she a robot? Is she actually from the 1950s? Is she a robot from the 1950s? She is, right? Maybe a robot from the 1950s who got sent to present day Salem to wreak havoc on the Bradys, except that her havoc chip was ruined in a tsunami she got stuck in while in Europe, so Evil DiMera Plot #62467 was foiled and BelleBot wound up much beloved by the people of Salem. It would make so much sense. Well, not sense as defined by anybody rational, but, you know, "sense" in the Days kind of way.

Genoa City's Next Top British Guy

Is it sad that I read the news about world renowned fashion photographer Nigel Barker making a cameo on The Young and the Restless in my most solemn Tyra Banks voice? It kind of is, isn't it? "Four beautiful soaps stand before me, but I only have three photos in my hand..."

On principle, I'm against plots that revolve around Gloria and Amber, but I think that this could become some sort of campy nirvana. Dare I hope for ANTM injokes? Will Nigel call Amber a no-neck monster? Will Nikki have to back her bag's, y'all, to go to Milan? Will someone admit to being in denial about their snout? Will someone pour beer on Sharon's weave? The possibilities are endless!

Cage Match Style

There was a time following Sharon's divorce from Nick when she RULED. She waltzed around town being snarky and assertive and awesome.

And then as quickly as it came, Sharon went back to being the nitwit we knew and...knew for the past decade. Why? What happened?! Is she mourning the disappearance of Dru? Did she experience head trauma? If it's the former, I totally understand, because the show just isn't the same without Dru and her fierceness and isn't it a little off how everyone in town is so willing to accept that she's dead, even though they didn't find a body? If it's the latter, I'm disappointed because it seems to disprove the notion I've had that weaves can protect a person from head injury, a lesson I learned from Rebecca's fainting spell on America's Next Top Model and if Tyra leads me astray, who can I trust?!

Either way, something huge happened that robbed Sharon of her newfound sense and coolness, because she's married to the amazing Jack Abbott and is still mooning over Brad Carlton. Jack is about a billion times better than Brad. At least. Everything about Brad is awful.

Let's do a head to head comparison, shall we? Because, to quote a wise man, cage matches work; why wouldn't they? If they didn't work, everybody would still be at the bottom of the cage.

Are You Kidding Me?!?!

A LIST OF THINGS I FIND EASIER TO BELIEVE THAN THE REVELATION THAT CRAIG IS ACTUALLY JERRY JACKS

1. Kevin Federline showers more than twice weekly

2. Blake Lewis truly deserved to be in the bottom three last week on American Idol

3. Barry Bonds's head has always been that size

4. Sharon Case's hair is all natural

5. Global warming is caused by the Muppets

This effing show.

Every time you think they've thrown their final curveball at you, every time you tell yourself that what they did was so COSMICALLY stupid that they won't be able to top it, General Hospital is all "Suck it, fools!" as they give you the finger and rewrite history with appalling dialogue and a lack of common sense.

All the Gripes of our Days

This show is bugging me like whoa. 

Witness: The way the unnecessarily recast Stephanie keeps calling Steve "papa" is driving me crazy.  Every time she over-enunciates it, I flash to Yentl.  "Papa, can you hear me?"  (Yes, he can.  He says you have excellent diction but mediocre acting skills and for god's sake please put some clothes on.)  Anyway, this got me thinking, wouldn't this show be much improved with a storyline about a secretly cross-dressing religious scholar?!  I think that might just be the way to finally make Belle interesting!  Not to mention smarter!  I'm not Jewish, so help me out -- would she find the answer to "Is it a bad idea to throw a toddler off the top story of a cruise ship into the turbulent ocean?" in the Torah?

Funny and Unfunny

You guys, I think I'm becoming a Philip fan. It's only taken, you know, over a decade, but I finally like him. It was this scene that did it:

Kate: Oh, my god. Oh, excuse me, do you happen to know the couple that's in this suite?

Hotel Man: Oh, late 20s or so. Average sort of guy with a hot blonde.

Philip: That's them.

Kate: He's not average.

Hilarious! And I think it was actually meant to be hilarious, which made it a ray of light in the sea of unintentional hilarity that is Days of Our Lives. Stephanie's outfit? Unintentional funny.

Like Evil But Twinless recently said: A recast isn't going to fix what's wrong with Steve and Kayla's storyline. The character of Stephanie is just poorly written, it has nothing to do with who is playing her. So this version of Stephanie sleeps with thugs and gets tattoos. On one level, it's an obvious step up from mooning over your uncle, but on the other...um, there's no way for me to finish that sentence. So, uh, congratulations for keeping it out of the family? I guess? Sami tackling EJ to give him the Kiss of Death was so unfunny that it swerved back into the land of funny before rapidly becoming unfunny again.

Every time I think about it, I laugh, but then the laughter turns to tears...

Screencaps courtesy of Days of Our Lives 2

- Promising Ingénue