Steph J

Please don't issue a challenge like that to the writers. It's the one occasion they'd be sure to rise to.

And yet there she is giving legal advice on television, which completely waives attorney client privilege. Gizelle's plot against Chris is so half baked that I have to wonder if it's something she just slapped together the night before filming started, not wanting to show up empty handed. One of the things I like about Potomac is that the drama often seems more natural than it does on other Housewife shows, but so much of this season so far feels overly manufactured.

Great finale. This is the rare series for me where I sort of lost interest midway through, but found my interest completely recaptured in later seasons. I'm genuinely going to miss this show. And now seems like as good a time as any to say that I kind of always hoped Jay and Marissa would end up together. Oh well.

Hey, while we're at it, let's just go ahead and make Audrey the hooker. History is meaningless.

I can't remember the last time I saw two people as thirsty to get bumped up to cast member status as Angie and her husband.

Careful, if past is prologue then you might find out afterwards that he was already married to someone else all along. The "duuuurr... what?" looks on Michael and Drew's faces when they found out their actions might have consequences was so good it was actually worth it to sit through a scene featuring Michael. Pretty bummed that they've brought back Heather without bringing back Robin Mattson.

Neither are the writers. "Trying to figure out what line not to cross is tough in our business." Nice try, Robert, but I'm old enough to remember a time when soaps had the moral clarity to know that a person willing to risk killing a person to get what they want is the person in the wrong. Soaps were a lot more interesting when good people actually had to face consequences when they did something bad, rather than getting to climb up on their high horse and justify their actions on the basis that the victim had it coming.

I'm enjoying the show a lot (every time I see Samantha Morton in anything, I'm reminded all over again of why I love her as an actress - it's too bad that Colm Meaney is now gone because I enjoyed their brief interactions in this episode), but I'm wondering if someone can enlighten me about why Mary would think she's the "rightful" queen just because she's the widow of the last king. It's France. They fought a century long war that originated with the idea that not only can a woman not rule, but a man can't rule if his claim flows from a female branch of the family tree. Laying that aside, I can't call to mind a precedent to Mary of a woman ruling in her own right (rather than as regent) just because she was married to the last king. There were the two Catherines of Russia, but they came along well after the events depicted in this series. So is this just for the drama of it, or was there actually a basis on which Mary could reasonably claim the throne?

I'm not really sure I buy that Spencer, the nephew of a notorious and very scary mob boss and a member of a family of notorious, well connected, and resourceful psychopaths, would be a target of other prisoners. Seems like the risk/reward calculation wouldn't make it worth going after him when there are surely more vulnerable people to go after instead.

That's my assumption - that Meghan locked Helen in the bathroom and took her phone away (they did say that the phone had been wiped of prints - why would that be necessary unless someone other than Helen was handling the phone?) and then came back to kill her after setting the scene of their mother's murder. Maybe she knew how catastrophically unhelpful calling 911 would be. I felt for her boyfriend; he must have felt so helpless and frustrated trying to get someone to do something and getting the runaround at every turn.

Lost me at begins at 10PM. I peaced out on this franchise a few seasons ago - at this point I basically just tune in to one or two episodes a season to see if it's worth coming back, because once upon a time I really enjoyed watching this show (verdict: Nope!) I survived ten seasons of Vicky Gunvalson, one season of Kelly Dodd and Braunwyn Windham-Burke, 13 seasons of Ramona Singer, the horrible season of Dorinda relentlessly going after Tinsley, the NY franchise destroying 13th season, and I managed to get through watching both Kim and Taylor on this show, despite feeling deeply uncomfortable watching them battle their particular issues on screen, but for the life of me I could not make it through an entire scene featuring Lisa Rinna. I either had to mute it or turn the channel, she is just so repulsive.

Yes, but they "cut out the bad" (a line which, as a recall, was repeated with great frequency), which reduced him to being an adult with the mind of a child, and then they paired him with an autistic teenager and when he regained his full mental faculties he pretended otherwise so that he could keep dating her. Probably should have just killed him off because it was all pretty gross. Maybe he's a genius and instead of just going after his specific targets, he's also going after random people so that the police can't find a pattern. Or the show is deciding on victims by putting a bunch of character names on a wheel and spinning it to decide.

Oh, well then they're for sure not going in that direction. I'm bracing myself for the killer to be Finn's supposedly dead wife, who faked her death and then started a new life in which she became Esme's nanny and now she's going after the people who hurt Esme. Oh, and also? She's a member of the Bell family and sent Cody to PC by telling him that he's Dominique's son, but that's actually a lie and part of a plot devised by Ryan, with whom she's in cahoots, to mess with Mac and Felicia. And also, she's involved in the Ice Princess plot (assuming that it hasn't been dropped and is merely resting) somehow, I don't know, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

This divorce paper "drama" is so annoying. Curtis getting all worked up and saying someone needs to get fired over this? Dude, take it down several notches. For one thing, you can't prove that the paperwork was filed, so how are you going to get someone fired for not processing it? For another, this is a problem with a very clear and simple solution: reprint the paperwork, sign it again, and file it. I get that it would be annoying to think you were divorced and find out that you're actually still married, but it's not like you're getting married tomorrow. An actually dramatic situation would be if Curtis and Portia went away to a place where you're not required to present proof of divorce in order to get married, and then came back and found out that he's still married to Jordan, making him a bigamist.

She couldn't possibly turn it off, she lives for the drama. I work in family law and many, many years ago had a file that involved an absolutely toxic couple whom a psychologist described as being "fascinated" with each other and with the idea that they were this dramatic, volatile pairing that everyone around them talked about. I'm getting the same vibe from Natasha. Just from what we've seen on the show, it seems like she cycles around in a pattern of starting a secretive relationship, drawing attention to it, feigning that she doesn't want to talk about it even as she appears to be exclusively interested in talking about it, backing away, getting a reaction from backing away that then becomes the topic of conversation with those around her, and then retreating to a different (new or old) partner and starting the cycle again. None of it seems to make her particularly happy, but it does seem like she gets her batteries charged by being the person in the room with the personal life that's so.dramatic.

Ironic that if any one character has a right to have their back up about their partner's past, it's Mac, given Felicia's record for fidelity during the various iterations of their relationship. Why would they have brought Peter's body back to Port Charles to bury (cremate the mofo and flush him, I say) and why would they put him in a marked grave that was bound to be defaced? I'm pretty over it with Anna/Valentine (maybe if the "romance" hadn't moved at a pace even a snail would sneer at, I'd have some investment). I'd go for another round of Anna/Robert.

Guza was good when he had a strong Executive Producer. Unfortunately, his later run was under the oversight of Jill Farren Phelps, who didn't really get GH to begin with and became increasingly powerless as Brian Frons (who did not get, and did not care to get, soaps or soap fandom at all) became more and more meddlesome with the shows. The behind the scenes figure I really miss is Wendy Riche.

But then later it'll be revealed that he had amnesia and only Nina knew about it.

At the risk of advocating violence, good God does Joss ever need to be punched repeatedly in the face. When she and Dex inevitably end up in bed, I'm guessing that there will be some kind of "misunderstanding" where she thinks she's seen the aftermath of Cam cheating on her before she runs to Dex and that way it won't be her "fault."

Good cliff hanger today. I have to say I'm surprised that Olivia didn't accuse Nina of sabotaging the dessert delivery because that's what I was braced for when Nina went over to the mansion.

Oh, soaps don't have plans anymore. They just hire actors and have them meander around for a while. At best storylines are shapeless and at worst they seem to emerge completely against the will of the writers. I recall that the show found an excuse for Drew to have a one on one scene with pretty much every female character when he first got back to town, so I assume that if Carly and Jason had happened, Drew would have ended up with someone else. Maxie, maybe, or Britt, or have Liz ditch Finn for Drew, or maybe they'd do something groundbreaking like pair a leading man with a trans character played by a trans actor and put Drew with Terry. Probably we would've just gotten a Drew/Sam/Dante triangle.

Jason was sleeping with Carly when he and Robin first started dating. She forgave him because he didn't understand why that wasn't cool and broke it off with Carly after she explained to him why it wasn't okay. Didn't Holly cheat on Robert with Luke? Isn't that how Ethan came to be?

This has been a problem across the genre for about 20 years. One of the main appeals of soaps is the history, but at some point around the turn of the century the powers that be seemed to decide that history was no longer something worth building on to continue a story. Instead, it's like head writers looked at history as a challenge and set out to bend and twist and break it as much as they could and, to make matters worse, these twists often existed simply for the sake of having a twist and didn't actually add anything of value. They dredged up long gone characters, recast them with "name" actors from other soaps, and reworked them so that they didn't much resemble their originals so that the characters were just strangers with familiar names; they undid existing family relationships with pointless paternity or maternity twists; and they started to retcon even groundbreaking old plots (yes, I am still mad at AMC for rewriting Erica's abortion). It's like at some point during the last two decades, the shows all collectively decided that nothing should be sacred anymore. There are a lot of reasons why the genre is on its last legs, but the fact that you can't really invest in anything that happens because in could be undone in a month or a year when the writing regime changes or the current regime just gets bored and decides to scramble the pieces on the board is a big problem.

In Canada when the police finish their investigation they recommend charges to the Crown (our equivalent of the DA) and the Crown looks over the file and decides whether or not to pursue charges based on the likelihood of being able to win at trial with the evidence they have. I assume it works in basically the same way in the States, in which case, yes, it would be the DA or ADA who decides to charge. Which begs the question of why Jordan sent the file to DA to approve charges when she so clearly had doubts about Trina's guilt and was still investigating even after Trina was getting ready to go on trial. If this Cody's parentage story is going to continue (and who knows if it will, this show is so bad at maintaining momentum in stories so that they don't just peter out), I'm really going to need someone to take the younger actors in the cast aside and correct them on how to pronounce Dominique's name.

I assume it's because that was the deal. The police know that he sold the phone; his testimony probably came in exchange for not facing charges for selling stolen phones. Unspoken is whether Oz was actually of sound mind to testify/make a deal given that he was just woken from a medically induced coma and might not have all his faculties. There's still two days left, but so far this week has been the inspiration for a seemingly endless number of angry/annoyed eyerolls from me. Aside from basically everything to do with Trina's trial (if the show insists on focusing so much on crime, could it at least hire someone with a legal background to act as a consultant to the writers so that their take on law and order could bear some semblance to reality?), there's Olivia telling Nina she can't have a table in a restaurant that, as far as I could see, remained half empty for the duration of Nina and Sonny's date, followed the next day by Carly inviting herself into said restaurant's kitchen as if she still owns it and getting to smack Nina down when she objects; and then Jordan calling off the search of Wyndemere just because of a social media post which indicates that Esme is in Europe. Because, after all, it's not as if you can post that you're in Paris if you're really still in Port Charles, and it's not as if some evidence might have been left behind that the police might want to collect regardless.