Serial Drama

The Good & the Better!

Holy crap holy crap holy crap, y'all! My prayers have been answered! Finally someone told off that waffling douchenozzle Liam Spencer and it was glorious.

Wow. I need to collect myself a bit. It really was a special experience. And while in a way I'd rather it have been Steffy (since she's been playing the role of "I'll pine and do whatever you want forever and ever" for so long), it doesn't even matter at this point. Steffy, Hope, Hope, Steffy, it makes no difference because for him they both represent the same thing -- as Hope aptly pointed out today!

I am seriously stunned and thrilled.

Shall we review just a bit? I mean for one thing, Hope told Liam she's glad they're not married. And then let's review some highlights...

Hope: I remember how everything seemed to be my fault. I was weak, I was too busy, I was too afraid of sex, I was just too emotional. Now here we are again and you're trying to make me the problem this time, too. [...] But the truth is, there is something wrong. There is something very wrong. With you. And you can't even see it. 

Sweet mercy what a gift. But it didn't stop there!

Liam: The way that you feel now, after having watched [the recording], it's kinda how I felt when I thought that note was from you. But I'm here. And I really believed that we were done.

Hope: Why did you believe it? Why didn't you have any faith in me? Oh, that's right, that's right, because I'd done it before! When I caught you making out with Steffy. 

She makes some most salient points. And it got even better...

So Much Hand Flailing

Dear readers, the past couple of weeks have been crazy. The kind of crazy that perhaps deserves three syllables, really; cuh-razy, or cay-razzy, whichever is your preference. Some of it was the good kind of crazy (vacation!), some of it the bad kind (stress!) and some of it the kind of crazy that comes from having an electric system that goes out immediately as soon as a fair mist starts (whatever they did to fix my week long outage last year during Hurricane Irene seems to have involved little more than a piece of twine and some Elmer's glue judging by how frequently the power goes out, costing me two--two!--live episodes of True Blood this season). Crazy.

Let's pause for a moment and reflect on how little crazy seems to resemble a real word after seeing it repeated that often. SO little.

Anyway, my DVR had a folder full of General Hospital episodes just about ready to burst and I sighed a heavy sigh because watching a huge chunk of General Hospital is normally like having surgery with a Mike's Hard Lemonade as your sole source of anaesthesia. But I caught the last half of today's episode and I found myself wanting to begin a slow clap because this show has finally--finally!--embraced the power of old school soap. The final few minutes were filled with the sort of moments that had me impatiently muttering, out loud because I am crazy, "WHY DO I HAVE TO WAIT 24 HOURS TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? WHY?!"

For example: TODD knows the TRUTH about JOHNNY being responsible for the deaths of Cole and Hope and he is a tightly wound ball of hatred and fury at this point and I cannot wait to see him exact his revenge upon Johnny, with either his words or his fists or, perhaps once he's calmed down, a hilarious roast filled with pithy zingers.

AND: STEVE has a HEAD INJURY. At least, I think he does. He has to, right? Because how could a person in possession of his full mental faculties say, about Heather Webber--Heather Webber whose time in Port Charles has basically been a decades-long spree of craziness and horror. A spree that sees her topping herself in terms of sheer life-ruining and insanity every time she floats back into town--"I can't believe what my mother's done". You can't, Steve? Do you not remember THE ENTIRETY OF THE 80s and EVERYTHING your mother has done, EVER? I look forward to tomorrow's episode in which we see the extent of his brain injury.

AND! AND! Ewen has a personality! It just turns out that his sole personality trait is now EVIL, because it turns out that HE is the one holding Robin captive and torturing her. I mean, I'm sure that he is not the main evildoer here and is merely following orders from someone more evil and powerful than he and it will probably be Jerry, because villainy is almost always connected to Jerry (if it's not Jerry, it's the possibly/probably undead Diego) and because that will get me to stop complaining about how they dropped Ewen's weirdness about the Jacks family and that will all be one hell of a letdown but for now, HOW SOAPY WAS THAT? Especially since the reveal followed a very tense conversation between Heather and Anna, who had Heather at gunpoint and ordered her to confess what she knew about Robin.

Anna: You were mistaken. It was someone that looked like her.
Heather: I saw her. I saw her face, just as clearly as I'm seeing yours now. She was with a nurse, Nurse Fletcher. But there was someone telling that nurse what to do.
Anna: Who?
Heather: I didn't see his face.
Anna: It was a man? What was his name?
Heather: Fletcher just called him Doctor.

[Immensely pathetic Austin Powers joke REDACTED because I could not live with the shame of having made such a joke in a public forum. Even alluding to such a thing likely caused my street cred to diminish considerably. And it started out as basically nil!]

I think what got me the most excited about all of this was Finola Hughes who, as ever, was excellent in these scenes--she's equal parts angry, confused, vulnerable and just a tiny bit hopeful, and it broke every single piece of my heart, especially since I know that Robin IS alive and is being tortured, and I just want this mother/daughter duo to be reunited because Hughes deserves the opportunity to cry happy tears for once.

The Ewwww & the PSA

It's not that I mind Ridge and Brooke as a couple so much. It's fine, it's done, too many years of back-and-forth on that one. So despite his pretty heinous past, I can accept them as a tentpole stabilizing pair. BUT THEY NEED TO CUT OUT THE DIRTY TALK. Because really? 

Ridge seriously used, "Want me to upload something to your hard drive?" yesterday as sexual innuendo. Was the week-long olive-based dirty talk not enough? I ask you! 

And after she called him her "sexy computer geek," he returned the alleged compliment when it turned out she knows about desktops and folders. Seriously? I'm one of the biggest luddites around (case in point: the only music I listen to is on my record/CD/tape/radio player, and the CD player is the component I use the least) and even I know about freakin' desktops and folders. (Thanks to Serial Drama I did learn how to make screencaps, though! Trust me, it was a serious feat.) 

Of course the purpose of all this technology talk was just to lead to Ridge finding and watching the not-so-deleted-after-all video of Steffy and Liam before the wedding, but... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The main event right now is really the hard-to-make-soapy in-show PSA about the dangers of texting and driving. I don't mean to sound glib about it because of course texting and driving is dangerous and has absolutely been the reason for many accidents that led to injury or death. But unlike other "issue-based" soap storylines like those on drinking and driving or about abuse or disease or what have you, I'm not sure where I see any real longevity in this story. Unless they're really going to try to make an argument that texting is a legitimate addiction, the only possibility here seems to be about the secret he's keeping. But since it looks like an arrest is going to happen, even the secret can't last long enough to have that much fallout. It's not as if Anthony is a regular character on this show who's now going to turn around and start plotting revenge.

Notes On A Great Rack

While I would love to write a great big long post on yesterday's General Hospital because it was one of those old-school, jam-packed episode that was a fantastic mixture of hilarious camp and heartbreaking realism, it ain't gonna happen -- to say my real life has gotten insane lately would be an understatement of Jason Morgan proportions ("I just protect the people I love!"). But there are just a few things that simply cannot go unaddressed.

When Anna "saved" Luke from the fire (and I put that in quotes because obviously the action isn't over yet), I was thrilled not only because it was a woman saving a man (even though I personally think Luke's abduction has been the weakest part of the Heather story -- frankly I stopped caring about Luke's myriad abductions years ago, and I don't buy this great connection between him and Anna any farther than I can throw this skyscraper I'm sitting in) but because it was law enforcement saving a civilian! No mob assistance, no mob relevance!

Speaking of Heather's story, she managed to inject Olivia with LSD and I cannot tell you how happy this made me. This was such old-school soapy camp! 

Lisa LoCicero must have been having one hell of a blast doing her best Blanche Dubois/Helen Hunt impression and getting dragged off in a straitjacket while screaming about seeing red everywhere. AWESOME. 

Be Still My Heart

Yesterday was a difficult General Hospital for me to snark on. While I could complain about how we learned that the never-ending cycle of tedium that is the Maxie and Spinelli back-and-forth is in fact still in full swing, with Spinelli once again making sad puppy faces and Maxie deciding to try to make him jealous by using her "dead" cousin's widower because she is such a delight as a human (And it worked!), I just...

But y'all, I can't. I am helpless and hopeless when faced with Todd and Blair. I have other daytime couples I've loved enduringly and irrationally (Duke and Anna! Tina and Cord! Frisco and Felicia!), but Todd and Blair are truly the only ones who render me useless and damn near brain-dead. I mean straight from that entrance...

They really do know how capitalize on the best way that woman enters the frame!

And I'm thrilled that Scott Sickles was yesterday's scriptwriter because although the rest of the GH dialogue team are certainly capable of throwing together a couple of scenes in a room full of emotional landmines, Sickles did write some of Todd and Blair's greatest episodes of the final year on OLTL and he never fails to capture the depth of their connection. 

Not that it's necessary, of course. You could give Kassie DePaiva and Roger Howarth a few pages of Waiting for Godot and they could stick right to the script and we'd still understand Blair and Todd's history, their longing, and their love for each other that has simultaneously destroyed and uplifted both of their souls. It's not just actor chemistry and a comfort working with each other, it's a real understanding of the nuances of that relationship and damn, damn fine craft right there.

The Still & the Planning (!)

Well, we The Bold & the Beautiful viewers (or The Boldviewers, as it's referred to by our southern hemisphere friends) have been clamoring for another storyline for months and months and months now besides the omnipresent Steffy/Liam/Hope triangle. Well, they finally gave it to us, and boy did they deliver!

We have finally been given relief in the form of a SUPER DUPER EXCITING storyline in which people sit around talking about potholes and planning Marcus and Dayzee's wedding! What did we do so right in another lifetime to deserve this fascinating gift? I personally cannot think of anything more interesting than listening to people chat about wedding plans -- and this isn't just any wedding. Why, this wedding is so special that they're going to pull out all the stops by holding it in someone's living room! And doesn't it feel like it's been years since anyone on this show had a wedding? So refreshing!

All right, I might be overreacting to it, but how many times have we been burned by the alleged introduction to a new storyline only to have it wrapped up in two days? I can't help it.

Naturally, the triangle continues. Hope insta-forgave Liam for insta-making-out with Steffy right before their wedding, and Steffy deleted the video of their horizontal hook-up session from her phone so that Liam can continue to lie to Hope about the extent of what really happened, since Liam is such an honorable guy who cannot tolerate dishonesty directed toward him but has never had a totally forthcoming day in his life.

And then...

Steffy: We all know the circumstances. Hope knows that we kissed, but she'll never find out anything more -- how close we came to -- how we close we were to leaving together. But that, that didn't happen. It didn't happen. Hope's your wife, and you committed to a future together. But look, um... what you said in that hotel room, that you wanted to start a life with me again and that you'll never stop loving me, Hope doesn't know...but I do. I'll always remember that. 

A Likely Story

I don't expect the people who write up daily episode summaries for the various cable guides to be well-versed in soap histories or personality traits, but a passing familiarity with the genre would be helpful, if only to save us from episode recaps like today's, which teased "Sam is on the verge of discovering the truth". Delightfully naive at best and wholly unrealistic at worst. Doesn't everybody know that soap storylines are wrapped up no less than six months after they began?! Unless they've just created a macro and plan to use this summary for every episode of General Hospital for the next year or so, in which case I redact the withering tone of the above and replace it with kudos for efficient planning...

Sam continues, and will continue, to have near-misses with discovering the truth about the myriad horrendous things that have happened to her in recent weeks, this time coming seriously close to finding the paternity results Heather had hanging out of her purse in the most tantalizing manner. And to add misery to misery, she then had to counsel Maxie on her love life and make excuses for Spinelli, which is just an awful thing to do to a woman who has experienced unbearable tragedy in recent weeks. I mean, she DID get to live out my dream and make out with John McBain, but I would hardly call this week a win on her end, overall because...Spinelli. Ugh. I know she doesn't have the complete aversion to him that I do and she even cares about him, but still! It just seems like a surefire way to make her even more miserable.

The Bold & the SERIOUSLY?

There I was, going about my merry way, thinking, "Oh cool! Dayzee and Marcus have started turning up on the show more often, so that's good! Variety!" Being the skeptic that I am, I did wonder if we'd just get a few days of seeing them, a quick wedding, and then a one-way ticket to Backburner City so that they could continue torturing us with the only storyline they'd bothered to flesh out at all in the last year.

But then I noticed that some of the B&B actors were giving a real indication on Twitter that this is actually the launch of a legitimate summer storyline. And then the show actually acknowledged twice in one week that Dayzee and Thomas actually used to be a couple and treated that fact as if it had some importance at all.

There even looks like there might be a bit of longing wistfulness on either part there, yes? (And sure, they can't go too far down Memory Lane, since they'd then have to acknowledge that she dumped him because he pretended he'd had sex with his stepmother while high on boinkberries. Let's face it, the characters are really never going to mention that again, are they?)

Things That Are Hot, Part I

I know it's wrong. I know it is. I know he's betraying Natalie. So that's my disclaimer.

But this?

Sam and John. Are. Hot.

Just hot. I can't help it.

You know what else is hot?

Disheveled, grieving, lying, lashing-out, in-denial Patrick Drake. Aiding in the hotness is Jason Thompson and his whole ridiculous talent thing which has officially gotten me preoccupied by a fantasy about devoting the rest of my playwriting career to writing roles just for him. Forever.

The Magnanimous & the Procrastinating

I have to admit I wasn't even a little embarrassed watching yesterday's episode of The Bold & the Beautiful. Not even a little! Sure, it was a little silly that it basically had the same ending as the day before (Brooke's about to see the video of Liam and Steffy! I can't have been the only one who chuckled at Brooke's ethical qualms with watching it, right?) and, sure, it was all about the same three characters it always is. It's a distinct possibility that I just have Stockholm Syndrome.

Can I mention, though, how irked I am that Bill and Katie are having a boy? Look at that damn smirk.

He can raise another little misogynist now! Yay! He's so happy! I guess it's a good thing he's not having a girl because then he might actually have to learn something about women. That would be terribly emasculating.

To be fair, though, the scenes between Bill and Liam yesterday were actually quite lovely. As were the scenes between Hope and Steffy. I wasn't born yesterday, so I do realize that this detente between Steffy and Hope is only so that everything can blow sky-high when the pre-wedding events come to light and when they start this whole damn triangle over again from the beginning, but I can't help but find it a little delightful to see two people actually evolving and trying to behave a little. (Not that I'm really in a position to judge, as "behaving" really isn't in my wheelhouse.)

I admit I cracked up, though, at Steffy's one little attempt to try to rid herself of the newlyweds...

Hope: Oh god, I loved everything about Italy, the -- the people, the beauty, all that history.

Steffy: Well, you know, maybe you and Liam could live there, start branches of Spencer and Forrester publications.

Ha! If only all three of them would move to Italy, sort this out offscreen for a year, and return to new storylines.