Serial Drama

Last Week in Llanview (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)

The bomb being, of course, any attempt at some semblance of logic and sense. I don't care. I love it. Could pregnant Natalie in her bridal gear carry an unconscious Marty through a staffed courthouse, put her into the car, drive her up to the lodge, and drag her into the place, all without stumbling or getting noticed? No chance. I don't care.

Who would care when it gave us a seriously old-school soap scene with a pregnant bride in high-heeled boots holding a crazy lady hostage with a shotgun? Could anyone not have fun watching these scenes? I know I complain about the lack of logic on this show all the time, but when the payoff is good, it's worth the shameful suspension of disbelief. We even got the obligatory crushing-the-captive's-phone-with-the-spike-heel bit:

What's not to love?

As far as storyline advancement, it was nice to see that Natalie saw that her only way out was to come clean (as she obviously should have done months ago). No sense in resisting it on principle just because the woman lording it over her got the information illegally and immorally, but since this is a soap, things just can't be that simple. The tables were turned as Natalie went into premature labor, though she was in denial about it. This allowed Marty to show some doctorly concern, which in turn allowed Natalie to remind Marty that she's not exactly an OB-GYN and, to boot, is in fact a lousy shrink as it is (a line that I'm sure got many cheers in many, many households). But a collapse gave Marty control of the shotgun, allowed her to return the phone-destroying favor (but with a lot less fashion panache), and put her in the big moral decision-making test that daytime loves so much. 

From what I've heard around in addition to the comments here, various fans on either side have been incredibly frustrated that this storyline seems designed to unfairly represent one character to make the other look better somehow, but I am not in that camp at all -- both these women are completely in the wrong, hilariously and awesomely. Each has had the upper hand at different moments, and always for the wrongest reasons. I love that it's not some black-and-white moral battle; that it gives us shotguns and bitch-slaps and hyperbolic language and all of that equals pure joy. Which of course means that Marty did not, in fact, have a crisis of conscience that made her an automatic hero. Instead she left Natalie behind.

Going Out With A, Um, Bang

Finn Wittrock and his glorious soap opera character name are leaving All My Children, which I think I have neglected to mention here (I have neglected to mention a lot of things about All My Childrenlately. My 2010 Review is still, after all this time, a work in progress and I haven't commented on recent episodes lately. I was having a hard time creating new and exciting ways to say "Alicia Minshew is as amazing as can be" and "I hope Madison hauls off and stabs Greenlee" and "El Douche then said something in a doucheish manner"). I'm not exactly torn up about this because, really, Damon was a HORRIBLE character. A history rewriting, wholly unlikable, sent to the backburner as soon as the show found another good-looking guy in his twenties character (and if I am choosing between Asher and Damon, I am choosing Asher, if only for the delightful homoerotic subtext he and Jacob Young bring to their scenes together).

Wittrock decided that if he's going to leave the show, he is going to do it AT ELEVEN. "I'm going to go ALL OUT," he may have thought to himself. "By next week, people might not even remember that Damon was a thing, but if they think about it long enough, they'll say 'The one with the yelling? And the strangely robotic arm motions?' Yeah. ALL OUT".

Damon walked in on Colby and Asher making out and unleashed on her. All those months sitting on the backburner gave him ample time to work on his hoarse with rage voice.

Whatever Happened To Predictability?

Referencing the Full House theme song is definitely showing my age (and telling you the following factoid is definitely showing that I have moments of serious dimness: when I was little, I misheard the rest of that line as "The milkman, the paper boy, even TV". It baffled me! "Nothing happened to TV! You're singing this song ON TV!"), but I am just excited to finally have an answer to the question posed alongside genial family montages of the Tanners doing stuff: predictability is alive and well, and residing in Port Charles.

Seriously, Allie's death? Her last name might as well have been Quartermaine. That is how clearly the writers were itching to kill her off.  

 

Allie: My head has been hurting ever since the accident. It's so weird. [Collapses on Kristina's bed]

The actress gave that collapse her all! She has a future in wordless, overly dramatic gestures and movements! And, um, less of a future in talkies.

The surgery during the end of the episode montage (set to Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah"! This half-assed excuse for a story has come full circle) confused me. Because I knew that Olivia already had her surgery and Dante was sitting talking to her, but I couldn't figure out they were operating on. And then it hit me. "Oh! Her!" Patrick probably should have saved the energy and not even bothered. 

Her death did lead to some inadvertent hilarity, and I don't just mean the collapse. Kristina confessed to Sonny that she felt guilty for what happened to Allie.

Kristina: Nobody even knew how bad she was, because they were focused on me.
Sonny: Sweetheart...(pause for a beat while he thinks, "And that's wrong because...? Oh, I know, it's wrong because they should have been focused on ME!") it was an accident, okay?

Note to Bo: When You Forget Everything After the First Beer...

...something fucked up happened. We humans do not black out after one beer. When something that is total common sense has to be told to you by Rex and you still don't even take it into consideration? You're in serious brain power trouble.

"Eh? Drugged? Nah, Inez is a really, super wonderful woman who apparently seduced me while I was too far-gone to make any sort of reasonable decisions! Just because at the same time this was happening my wife was being held captive by Inez's ex who was sending fake text messages pretending to be Nora telling me to sleep with Inez, that doesn't mean it has anything to do with me sleeping with Inez! Where do you see this connection? I frequently get loaded and forget everything halfway through the first beer!"

A Non-Event Even Less Eventful Than Usual

You've known me long enough to become familiar with some of my quirks and oddities, like how I sometimes become obsessed with people behind-the-scenes at soap operas and spend a lot of time constructing elaborate backstories for them. I've been thinking a lot lately, for example, about the gravelly-voiced man who does the ABC promos. What is his deal? How does he cope with the fact that it is his job to blatantly lie to the public?  "A perfect day becomes a perfect nightmare," he said during the promos for the General Hospital bus crash in a most intriguing manner. "They won't just hope for a miracle...they'll fight for it". That doesn't even make SENSE and yet I found myself thinking that there was a chance this story could approach interesting, which is ridiculous because HELLO. Do you think he feels guilty? I hope he does. Not in a "is driven to drink" way, but more a "gets home from work and sits down with his wife and says 'It was a rough day, Karen'" way.

Because this bus crash--and it is impossible to overstate this--is (was? Is it over? I am guessing Olivia's going to have a vigil and that Allie is probably going to die, because her line "It's just a bump. No big deal" signed her death certificate. The only way to make it clearer that she is going to die would have been to give her a few anti-Jason bits of dialogue) unfathomably dull. UNFATHOMABLY. Most, if not all, of GH's non-sweeps non-event stories are heavily promoted feasts of boredom, but this! NOTHING EVEN HAPPENED. They didn't happen IN SLOW MOTION.

(Seriously, I checked at least five times during today's episode to see how much longer was left. When I was confronted with the fact that we were not, as I thought, heading into the last commercial break but had only reached the midway point, I wept.)

There were a few things that DID get a reaction out of me (man, am I relying on the caps lock today or what? I think this is why I have grown so fond of Carly. She speaks the way I type!), but they are the same things that always get a reaction out of me, like...Sonny being selfish.

Sonny: How are the--how are my kids?

This could be a botched line reading, sure, but I am going to give Maurice Benard the benefit of the doubt here (right?! I hope you were sitting down when you read that) because how perfectly Sonny is that?! He can't even keep the facade up for an entire sentence and decides to cut right to the chase: what does this mean for HIM?

Brenda's answer?

 

Brenda: Molly's good, and I saw Michael, he's okay...

She is going to have a hard time keeping track of all of her step-children. Just kidding, their wedding will probably never happen. But if it does, her inability to remember the complicated Port Charles family trees will put her in danger of being taken advantage of by a grifter, coming to town pretending to be Sonny's child in order to hit their stepmother up for money.

Also!

Dante: Why do you always insist on thinking the best of Sonny?
Brenda: Why do you always insist on thinking the worst of Sonny?

For the love of Jason Fucking Morgan (who, by the way, was not even the first hero to make it to the bus crash--Dante was! Does that mean that Dante now officially out-heroes Jason? Or am I going to hell for even putting that thought out into the universe?), does nobody remember the time Sonny SHOT DANTE IN THE CHEST? I know that Dante's petulance is really more about his father marrying the woman he all of a sudden has loved for a really long time than it is the gaping bullet wound, and that any snark would be wasted on Brenda, who thinks the shooting was no big deal, aside from how much it upset Sonny, but seriously: Shot! In! The! Chest! Dante deserves to be pestered for a lot of things, most notably his hair, but his issues with Sonny should be off-limits. If you can't get annoyed with the guy who SHOT YOU IN THE CHEST every once in a while, who CAN you get annoyed with?

I feel like something else must have happened over the course of that episode, since it was, like, ten hours long, but my mind is a blank. I have vague memories of Cam being predictably adorable and new Morgan showing himself to be a pretty good little actor, but other than that...nothing. Yeah, ABC, it was totally worth it to have the promo for this damn story airing round the clock on every channel known to man, because it was obviously compelling stuff.

The Outlook

Ah, 2011. Will One Life to Live make any resolutions to keep on this upswing and give equal time to all their soapy characters? Let's see how things look.

 

Well, Jess looks like she thinks something crazy is going on.

Natalie looks a bit like she's bracing herself for the shit to seriously hit the fan.

Gigi looks... a bit like a clown. And she also changed her lip color about four times over the course of the episode.

One Life to Live: 2010 in Review

I feel it only to fair to warn you that I'm finding reflection on One Life to Live's 2010 to be incredibly depressing. I started by taking a look at my 2009 review, and was legitimately surprised to see what a glowing review I gave the show for the year. I'd honestly forgotten. Then it got worse when I started looking into what was happening on the show as we rang in 2010. You'll understand my sorrow when I show you that this is what was going on:

That's right. We began the year basking in the afterglow of Kyle and Fish consummating their relationship for the first time. Must we re-visit them and go through the heartbreak of losing them once again? Dammit. DAMMIT.

Oh, and shall we now add insult to injury? Here's something else that was up as the year began:

Blair and Eli being all sexy and fun and happy. Why again was it necessary to torch this completely?

So why don't we just get the hard part (and the bulk of the whole thing) out of the way first.

THINGS THAT WE LOST OR WERE RUINED IN 2010

• Blair and Eli. A hot, fun couple -- something unfortunately incredibly refreshing on soaps, so we knew it couldn't last. A man just really was nuts about Blair and totally appreciated her? Impossible! Naturally he had to turn into the evilest kind of evil who'd just been using her all along while planning to kill her and take her fortune (while murdering a bunch of other people for shaky reasons while inexplicably letting a bunch of other people much more damaging to his "cause" get away just fine, naturally). Oh how we miss you, pre-evil Eli! Someone explain to me slowly how the folks in charge saw a suave, attractive character played by an appealing and gifted actor and thought, "Huh! We have a real goldmine here... why don't we make him the most implausible villain ever and have him commit so many abominable crimes that we can't possibly keep him on the show!"