An Open Apology to the Assassins of the World

Sorry, hit men. And your bosses. The ways you suffer. The manners in which people  betraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay you. It's like, you murder (or try and fail, in Shawn's case) (a lot) (though not for much longer) a bunch of people, or you order someone else to murder a bunch of people, and look what happens! Your women turn out to be law enforcement. People lie to you about your identity. People try to get custody of your children. Folks lie about whether or not you fathered a child. All for just a bunch of silly murders! THESE PEOPLE DON'T KNOW THE MEANING OF LOVE.

I mean, love is never having to say you're sorry, right? 

And yet, the people of Port Charles are constantly doing you wrong and then having to line up and apologize to you. They don't love you. You're the ones who understand love. Which means you will NOT apologize for what you "do for a living" or "who you are" or "doing a lot of murdery stuff all of the time." Like, how judge-y can these people be about a person's day job? We all need to make a living!

Also, life is a risk! We all risk our lives every morning when we get out of bed, so what's a little hail of bullets here and there? How does keeping someone away from that world maintain their safety in any way? WHY IS EVERYONE SO UPTIGHT. (We learned long ago where the real danger lies: DOORS.)

Really, the problem is clear: Women. They keep trying to impose their ridiculous "values" on everyone, which is just like a woman. But wear them down enough and they'll show their true colors and take your lead. There may have been a time that Alexis or Anna or Elizabeth or Jordan anyone else thought a murdery lifestyle was a bad thing, but as you can see, there's flexibility. Nobody really means that. Lead by example long enough and you'll even have women who've devoted their entire lives to justice turn into murderers right in front of your eyes! And if that woman is hot enough, the Chief of Police just might help her cover it right on up. Because why not? It's understandable. They're finally starting to get it! It's not like you guys go around murdering folks willy-nilly. Everyone would get it and have to finally stop apologizing to you if they would just realize that the people you murder (or have murdered) are jerks. Some of them did something mean to someone you love, some of them are con artists, some of them did exactly the same thing you do for a living but they did it for some other boss, and some of them are your son's biological father and that is just annoying. IT'S WHO YOU ARE.

So, like Jordan and everyone else, I am so sorry, you guys. I'm sorry that the world doesn't understand that you exemplify LOVE and LOYALTY and RIGHTEOUSNESS.

But there's a light at the end of this tunnel. Port Charles had lost its way in the last couple of years. Things having nothing to do with the mob were interesting to folks. People's lives didn't revolve around organized crime. And the town had NO MORAL CENTER. Whose example was everyone to follow?? Doctors? Nurses? Law enforcement? Ha! It makes sense that everyone was lost. But nobody needs to be lost anymore, you guys. Because guess who's back? Guess which sanctimonious serial killer is back to guide us all with his ethical wisdom, to defend the innocent and rescue all the children, to have otherwise intelligent women sacrifice all their integrity for, to be the local Jiminy Cricket, to wander around town justifying any action that anyone took out of LOVE!

That's right, SAINT JASUS OF ASSASSIN. He's alive and he's back.

So everything's going to be fine, you guys!

Hey, remember when Duke and AJ came back to life and we all felt a glimmer of hope that their presence might undermine the mob stronghold on the in-show moral code? Because Duke was this great character in one of the loveliest mob storylines this show ever told, a story about real redemption through love in which someone actually did finally turn their back on the mob because love -- not just romantic love, but ultimately love of a child, love of self, love of decency -- meant more. And because AJ, while a mess of a human being, could possibly come back to completely explode the mythology that being whiny and being a recovering alcoholic is somehow actually worse than all the murder-for-money nonsense going on. And then remember how all that got canceled out because Duke got more mobbed up than ever and then offed and Sonny got to murder AJ and totally get away with it anyway?

That was fun.

Isn't it cool how Anna's a murderer now? See, the mobsters were right all along. IT'S IN ALL OF US! Who are we to judge?

Well, I came back to visit for the Nurses Ball and the live episodes, and I will say this: it was perhaps all worth it just for the moment after Elizabeth's embarrassing "Jason was the very personification of AIDS Awareness!" speech when Jake, stars in his eyes, talked about how he finally was able to start really seeing Jason and how much he meant to everyone and everything and also world peace and injured animals and global warming and probably the Middle East conflict if they would just pay attention to his essence. It was basically like that hilarious moment at the end of Titanic when Bill Paxton starts talking about how he thought he knew the Titanic his whole life, but he realized that until now he'd never really LET IT IN. Well, we all need to let Jason in, you guys. If we really listen, we might finally understand his magic and meaning.

(I have angry feelings about Liz's hair and sweater.)

Just open your heart and let him in, you guys. It will be beautiful. It will be luminous.

He may not even know yet that he's Jason, but his eminence prevails as evanescent. No one can deny it.

Anyway, I'm sorry, Shawn. And Sonny. And Jason, and Julian, and Carlos, and Duke, and Bruce, and whoever else is currently mob-affiliated now. And Nik, too, I think, since he's ordering hits these days. Why wouldn't he?

We're all so sorry.

Comments

[Incandescentflower]

*slow clap*

That was perfection.

[Spazzo47]

Wait! Wait! Anna is a murderer now? I haven't watched in over a year and probably more, but, but, what? I can't even. I need to watch a long marathon of 80s Anna. The one that was a partner to Robert. The one who was redeemed from her sins of being a DVX agent (I'm still convinced that those were the most devious sounding letters of the alphabet). LIfe was more simple when people were eitehr redeemed or put in jail and you knew whetehr you could trust a person by how their agency's initials sounded. Good won and bad didn't and we all felt good at the end of a story, a ludicrous story typically, but a story where things ended the way they were supposed to.

Is there any chance that Anna faked the murder to catch someone or that something just isn't what it seems?

Oh Anna.

[horselove]

I love it when soap bloggers speak the truth and don't kiss certain producers and writers' asses. Bravo!

[Laura]

I know Anna was redeemed from her DVX days but I kinda like the fact that she still was gray enough to pull the trigger. And that she's a much better shot than Shawn. I just wish that she and Robert had killed Faison when they the chance.

[C]

OMG, I need a cigarette after reading that. Kudos, Louise!

[Holly]

Anna didn't just murder.. she fired 4 rounds into a guys chest at point blank range after telling him to "Go to hell!" and then she realized that although the man she murdered did indeed murder Duke, by killing him she had killed the only person who could give evidence on the man who ordered the hit on Duke.. the REAL KILLER!

It was sickening. Every bit of it. When Sonny screamed, "ARE YOU THREATENING ME?!!" at Carly because she told him his order to murder Jake meant there was no point of return, no going back for the two of them just like with Michael after Sonny murdered his father.. (over Jake! A man she doesn't even know!) I wanted to vomit. Ugh.

What the hell is wrong with this show? FrankenRon stated that for the live shows, all ABC wanted was a SHOOT OUT and a wedding! Seriously? Shoot outs? Who are these people? What is going on here? Why is this happening?

[lhe]

ok, this is an awesome post,and I agree with so much of it. In particular, I hate the way they have ruined Nik, and Elizabeth, and pretty much ruined Duke's character before he died ( I mean, is it really ok that he put a hit on Jordan, and the only reason he called it off was because he reconciled with Anna? ) But I have to admit that I completely understood why Anna killed Carlos. And, for future hit men, if you are held at gunpoint by the grieving lover of the person you executed, probably not a good idea to highlight the flaws in the PC justice system.

[Chris]

I know that you hate the character of Jason on GH, but what do you think of Billy Miller the actor

[Chris]

I know that you hate the character of Jason on GH, but what do you think of Billy Miller the actor?*

(I wish this type of blog format had an editing option!)

[Louise]

I hate the character of Jason?? Damn, I was trying to play that close to the vest! :)

[soapbaby]

I gave up on GH months ago and have never felt better. Similarly, I wanted to tune back in when the live episodes came around but even that could not get me ti tune in. Thank you for doing that for me.

[Louise]

Oh wait, I meant to answer the question! I don't have an opinion on Billy Miller as Jason Morgan. I think Billy Miller's a good actor, but acting was never my problem with the character of Jason.

Moreover, I have to admit that even though I've hated Jason since his deification the 90s, Burton's Jason did have exceptional heat with both Rebecca Herbst and Kelly Monaco (never a shipper on either end, but enjoyed some sexy scenes from time to time). I'm not seeing that with Miller. The Jakeson/Liz sex scene looked like the wedding night of an uncomfortable arranged marriage. No heat.

[Neka]

I'm loving the hell out of all of this. Sorry to be that strange person on the outs. Three bad guys are going away. (And yes, once Duke called a hit out on Jordan, he became a bad guy.)

That rarity isn't ever going to come back again.

Anyway to shrink this cast, y'all.

[cleanuppc]

Anna isn't a murderer. She, like Bond, has a license to kill bad guys. Yeah maybe and supposedly she doesn't currently work for the WSB, but Frisco runs the entire organization and would 100% grant any and every authorization necessary and their jurisdiction supersedes all other agencies in the PC universe. The show trying to create angst over this reminds me of how stupid the "Faison in the hole" nonsense was--on his first ever visit, Sean, Anna, Robert and Frisco got ride of him by sending an assassin after him and it didn't faze him one bit, he didn't come back on a high horse self-righteously railing against his poor treatment and the unfairness shown to psychopaths. It's okay to eliminate bad guys. Ron has got to be kidding if he thinks he can create this amoral universe where only crime pays and then have me taking this nonsense seriously enough to be worrying about international spies, the chain of command and authorization.

Of course doing it to avenge Duke, who was a bad guy, that part I hate. The crime was ever going back to him. THere are about 27 criminals she should have gotten to before Carlos, but He's still on that list, so whatever. And I hated trying to make her look stupid by having Sloane "explain" how trials work, but Ron can't help himself. Clean up the town.

[Quinj]

You forgot Sabrina. Carlos busts into her house, confesses to murder, and ties her up and then she has an emotional breakdown because she doesn't want to be involved and she'll never be able to live with herself if she helps bring him to justice (meaning arrested, she has no inkling he'd do anything but wind up in jail) instead of living to kill another day. Tragic. On top of anything else, these characters have no survival instinct. Does it ever occur to them that they're not immune to being hurt by these peeps they know are deranged lunatics and it's in their interest to have them put away?

The best dialogue from the live show was Liz telling Nik if anybody finds out they lied about St. Jaysus they'll be pariahs, disappoint Audrey and have to move out of town. Lol

[Quinj]

Oh and about Anna, I loved so much that she was the only person ever to want to take responsibility for her actions, but I expected Sloane to say "Anna, uhh, remember how I ran around town trying to make an issue of Faison, but I had to stop because the WSB said they were more than happy to let their superspies deal with criminals however they thought best? Remember that? Let's go get a beer" Instead, "I'll help you hide the body"--um, what? Where is this going? Right. It's Cartini. Don't even ask, the answer will not make sense.

Too bad Carlos didn't go to the NB. Spencer could have dropped a couple of sandbags on him and nobody would have even reacted.

[Michael]

If this was the direction TPTB (in this case, I mean the ABC brass) wanted the show to go in, why didn't they just hang on to JFP and Guza? Because frankly, they did it better--with more conviction and thus more believability. Don't get me wrong: I found most of the Guza/JFP years unwatchable for more than a few days at a time--but the moral perspective, however repugnant it was, was at least consistent, and within that repugnant moral perspective, the stories made their own kind of sense and had an internal logic and order that was followed. Now you've got an ugly mish-mash that, as people keep pointing out, doesn't make a lick of sense, really--and is perhaps even MORE repugnant than the Guza/JFP version, if that's possible, because not only is the moral perspective totally screwed up, but you have to be brain-dead, too, to make the stories work (oh, and you need to have no memory of the stories prior to last week, either).

Dear ABC brass: If what you want is a mob-centered show, you don't hire Ron to head-write it and Frank to execuprod it. There, I've spelled it out for you: is that really so hard to grasp? (And can I have a gazillion-dollar-a-year salary as an executive consultant, since apparently the people you're currently employing as gazillion-dollar-a-year executive consultants can't manage to point out something this obvious to you?)

Jasus, what a mess.

[Jen]

I couldn't agree more. My mother and I were ranting after the live shows about the women characters who fall to their knees for all the mob men and about all the self-righteous mob characters. That theme was under control for a while, but it's been creeping back into the stories for some time now and the female characters are being seriously dumbed down to serve these stories. I had thought that Michael's anger with Sonny and Carly was an indication of change, but...

I'm a Jason fan from early on, but was over the character as a mob man a very long time ago. I've had hope for a reboot of the character as Jake, hoping he will get his Jason Quartermaine memories back. I'm not interested in seeing Jason Morgan returning to his lifestyle or in seeing him sainted again. That was always ridiculous and painful to watch. I'm a Billy Miller fan, but I won't watch that. I had hope for the business side of the show when AJ was brought back, and we all know how that went. I'd like to see Jax back, see more focus on the police, like Dante, see more business, see an art gallery with no ties to the mob--I would really love an art gallery story or design business story, truly focused on art/design. I adore Elizabeth and would like to see her involved in that. I'd like to see ELQ as a real focus, with Tracy, Monica, Ned, etc. really running that place. I'd like to see Nikolas on the business side--real business, not the dark mobby side that's coming out of him now. I don't know, I have doubts that the things I want to see will ever happen and I'm hanging on to the ledge with my fingernails at this point.

[Carneasada]

Only on GH would a kid be furiously freaking out because he finds out his mother is a cop and not a hit woman (TJ and Jordan).

I kind of like some of the stuff I've seen from billy miller, but only in the few scenes he's had with people outside of the mob junk and the triangle. They should have made him lucky.

Cleanupp, I feel like Anna was largely destroyed when she ran out after finding out about the hit and greeted Duke with a smile instead of a bullet, but I agree about not being a murderer. In Faison #1 story, he wasn't even really much of a direct physical threat to the Usual Suspects yet. The other bad guys were threatening to kill Anna because they had evil plans for the crystal but when Anna needed it instead Faison just gave it to her., bad guys be damned. His arc was trying to keep her safe from them, albeit in his creepy obsessed way. It wasn't self-defense, Frisco, Sean, Anna and Robert weren't in the WSB then either and they basically contracted with another really bad guy to get Faison for payback over past actions, because they wanted him gone, because they didn't want him talking to Robin, and in general because he's a really bad guy. Robert's newly discovered tortured concern over due process for Faison AFTER he became a direct ongoing physical threat to his loved ones and destroyed everyone's lives wouldn't have made any sense even if it weren't Jason and Dr. O and Franco and Nina's world and everyone else just lived in it. Ron's just a dope, does not know GH history and nothing he does makes any sense.

[Neka]

I'm less upset with TJ because this is like the 3rd.. 4th major lie he caught his mother in. Like how is father died, how Shawn and his mother had had an affair, and how Shawn, the person who has raised him for the last 4 years is now going to jail because his mother has lied to him about who she is and what she's done for years?

That's not unreasonable to me.

[Quinj]

This is why I'd love to be a fly on the wall of the GH writers' room. Because nothing makes any sense. Not just from a character perspective, but from a logical perspective and from a "this totally contradicts what you yourselves came up with 4 days ago" perspective. It's like a sketch show with random characters randomly drifting in to do random things for random reasons. Isn't anybody ever like, hey a tiny bit of consistency or coherence or motivation might be nice? Hey! We could make sense! Let's!

[Neka]

As for Sloan, he obviously has the hots for Anna Devane, which everyone should. I'd help her bury a body any day.

What was interesting was that in the West Coast episode on Monday, he said that he started to remember what it was like to work with her and realized he missed it. On the East Coast episode, he missed the line.

[Quinj]

Totally, Neka. ;) It's just that they have no need to bury the body. Just call Frisco and leave the digging to his team. It just makes me wonder how the hell they're going to play this, like is Sloane crazy now? Sabrina knows what happened, does that mean they're gonna have to kill her and dispose of her body, too? Don't over complicate the situation, dude. Lol

[Elizabeth Kerri Mahon]

I did have a problem with TJ being all upset with Jordan. He had no problem with Shawn being a hit man for Sonny but Jordan potentially being a drug-dealer and working for the Jeromes was a problem. You would think that he would be proud that his mother worked for law enforcement instead of a criminal. And that's she's working to put away bad guys, even if one of them was Shawn. And by the way, Shawn had a legitimate job working at Kelly's and Carly had gotten him a job teaching at the high school. He didn't have to work for Sonny.

I read an interview with Ron Carlivati where he said that he wanted to show the how the mob takes its toll on people, which is why Duke and Carlos had to die, and Shawn go to jail. The mob wars have to have consequences. Unfortunately none of those consequences involve either Sonny or Julian who have come out unscathed as usual.

[Michael]

OMG, Elizabeth, are you serious? That's Ron's explanation, and his idea of "consequences"? (I'd be all over it if the perpetrators were actually going to experience any consequences.)

I wonder if Ron thinks going to jail for 30 seconds for killing AJ constitutes "consequences" for Sonny?

I'd even settle for the rest of Port Charles vilifying Sonny and Julian for being responsible for the death and mayhem. Sometimes perpetrators aren't the ones that suffer the consequences most directly, but in those cases, they tend to be reviled by onlookers who understand that other people paid for the perpetrators' actions. That would sort of work for me, as consequences in this case. But that will not happen, I am sure--or if it does, it will not be for more than a few seconds.

Real consequences of the kind Ron seems to be talking about? That would be, say, Morgan or Baby-What's-Her-Name-This-Week getting caught in the crossfire and dying, and Sonny having to suffer with the pain and guilt of that. Actually--and I'll admit I would hate to see it but it would be right--the perfect "consequence" in this case would be Alexis getting caught in the crossfire, since she means something to both of them.

I cannot roll my eyes hard enough.

[stlbf]

I see that Sam has been hit with The PC Town Stupid Stick extra hard. Honestly, how dumb do you have to be to NOT wonder about this big huge truth about "Jake's" identity and that it affects BOTH SAM AND JAKE? Honestly, what else could it be?

And I just wish that more of PC's denizens would question this crazy supposed godliness of the town mobsters and their galpals. And the ever useless Shawn's bitchiness over Jordan being an officer of the law was rich. Like being a federal agent was working for the devil. Yes, Shawn. Working against criminals and scumbags is bad. I hope that Pentonville needs a new cook.

[annabel]

Excellent post!!!

[Judy]

Ah, Louise, it's so good to have you back. I started giggling at your "holy holy holy" screencap and didn't stop till the end :) Thank you for suffering through the mess that is GH in order to bring us your excellent snark!

[sjgsjg]

Carrrrrlos didn't have to die because the mob takes its toll -he had to die so Sabrina is a 100% free agent. Btw thanks for the link tbat confirmed that was him on Mad Men. He did decently in that part, so I think he's getting out of here just in time before this assily written role ruins his career.

[janet]

Great blog. great comments about it. Does it seem like everybody s now sick of the garbage. Also sick of TIIC trying to fool us into thinking they are the greatest. Anna turned into a blood thirsty killer. Nick puts out hits, and as for Billy Miller ,the actor is fine Jason Morgan no thanks been there, done that. I caught the last minute of TJ being mad his mother is a cop not a drug dealing druggy. Shawn a killer for hire no thanks. .This show has gone to hell! Catching five minutes at the gym is about all I see.