jsbt

I didn't see those scenes as talking about genes or Jason Quartermaine. YMMV. Hardwired can be a turn of phrase.

Yes. Valentin Cassadine has had them tampered with as part of a plot to destabilize Sonny, destroy his organization and take his territory. Valentin is secretly in control of the Pikeman Security Group and arms trafficking outfit. Nina discovered Ava had deliberately given her bad advice in her campaign to win Sonny's love back, and that Ava is conspiring to take Sonny for herself.

No, I love loud '90s patterns!

I will add that despite some criticisms online I actually really dug the Anna/Laura and Anna/Molly scenes last week. They were being very determined to drive a stake into the Anna and Laura relationships with Sonny and spelling out why they are doing it now and what they want it to mean for the show and characters. I respect that. As I said, there is never going to be a good time to do it in 2024 after decades of these characters excusing Sonny and massaging these relationships to put him over to the audience by way of of fan favorite heroines, but they really dug into the material and Finola in particular ate it up. I believed in her integrity again. And I loved Laura talking about Luke's Club. I miss that place. Also: Is it me, or was Danny trying on Jason's clothes in Jason's room a mirror of Sarah Brown's Carly doing the same in Bobbie's room, when Mulcahey first started with the show?

I think the future for Nina is probably in her wacky business machinations and Drew, and I'm all for that. You would not have caught me saying that two months ago, when I was ready for both characters to be fed to the woodchipper from Fargo along with so many others (several of which you have helpfully mentioned). Progress!

Like Kristina said awhile ago, I think for Ava the first appeal, whether she fully realizes it herself or not right now, is ultimately power. Ava has been dickstruck for unworthy men before (Griffin, Silas, Morgan himself) so Sonny is not unusual in that respect. But when the chips are down, even when Sonny turns on Ava she will still be there for the power and will make that her priority again, IMO. Something Claudia Zacchara, IIRC, lost sight of with Sonny and in the end it got her killed. There's a lot of online commentary fretting over her (I'm not referring to your post to be clear), but I never really worry about undoing all the work to make Ava supposedly viable. Because most of those stories to make her viable sucked and were embarrassing to watch AFAIC. I don't need Ava 'viable' and I don't need her to be sympathetic. All the humanity and dimension she needs for me is encased in her relationships with Trina and her surviving daughter, and imbued in Maura's complex performance. The rest is steel, and all I need from her in story is a way to insulate herself in order to continue on for as long as possible. And if she doesn't after a certain point, or if she become a recurring villain who goes in and out for stints, hey, she's been here over ten years. I prefer blazes of glory to fizzling out with another weepy Phantom of the Opera story, mewling over Griffin and Kiki.

Willow has clearly wanted to fuck both of Michael's uncles for some time. I won't hate them going there if they do, but I am more into Drew and Nina. Maybe they've done something different in today's show, but I always felt in past eps they were saying Danny was trying too hard to emulate the street image of action man Jason Morgan, the absent father he's mythologized (or his mother's own pistol-packing past, which she also has acknowledged in those conversations), not Jason Q. I can buy that.

The nonsense from last year(?) that Mac 'never felt like a dad' is total horseshit, of course. But so was when they suddenly started having Maxie stop calling him Dad. I blame FV and Ron Carlivati for that, believing they could make their Frisco/Felicia dreams come true before being shot back down to Earth by reality. AFAIC Maxie should be calling him Dad again today.

I don't mind Cody being Mac's kid. I do mind it still being a thing as a dangling plot point, and the fact that the mom is Dominique which AFAIK is literally impossible given the timeline of their relationship. I'm not talking the typical soap impossible, I mean even moreso than usual since I believe Dominique was barely ever offscreen til she died lol. At this point I'd just have Cody tell someone he and Mac Zoomed and worked it out off-camera and how glad he is to have it off his shoulders. And then I'd have Sasha hit by a bus.

Oh, that's sad. Meg Bennett was a soap lifer in many roles in front of and behind the camera. My sympathies to her loved ones (including Guza). I think so, as a non-fan who only really watched the previous finale. There is a bit of a recap/intro video on Amazon I think (though I haven't seen it), and I think a lot of the opening episodes are skewed around recapping/introducing people and the town through a variety of somewhat clumsy narrative devices, like one of the senior characters going through a scrapbook. Tonally it's a much more family show though, and a bit slight/goofy in some ways. But full of heart.

I agree with all that, but the fact remains that we're now in 2024. Those losses didn't happen, and Guza ran the show for close to 10 years (longer if we don't count the JFP/McTavish interregnum). So the question becomes, at this late date what do we do about it? I don't need to see Anna or Laura shamed any more than they already have been (by Wagger, by themselves), and you have to start somewhere. Doing that was going to be jarring no matter how or where it was done at this point.

Nina having the hotel never made any sense anyway. I mean, that's six of one and half a dozen of the other to me. We can't complain for decades (as I have, endlessly!) that they don't treat Sonny honestly on the show, then complain about the timing when they finally work on it. After 20+ years there is never going to be a 'good' time. The best times where when he got some of his immediate family either horribly injured (Michael) or killed (Morgan), and it didn't happen then. So here we are.

Neighbours fully deserves it.

Yeah, that conversation was about them putting their friendships with Sonny to bed.

I mean, I guess? From what I watched of that storyline the most interesting part was when he first got back from Nixon Falls, tried to put her out of his life but couldn't get over it. That was fresh because MB was playing a new kind of beat. But once they were together they whitewashed both characters and it was the same old Sonny Romances the Ladies playbook to me, which I just have no interest in with a new person at his big age. AFAIC Nina was a placeholder in his life for other people, like Brenda; she and Nina have superficial similarities in their personal history and careers, and those trappings can delude Sonny into thinking he is getting a 'fresh start' outside of his usual milieu (which he tried and failed to do for Brenda) while really doing nothing much different. Sonny does not change for others, others change for him. I think Maurice and CW have some chemistry but it has long since failed to grab me in terms of an ongoing romance, when so much of it was seemingly down to Nina just smiling beatifically and accepting that Sonny had to go off and do his mob business she'd rather not hear about. There's just no core of any kind of engaging reason re: the why of them being together for me, other than the actors enjoying each other's company (and it upsetting Carly/Michael/etc. isn't enough to get me to watch multiple segments a day of just these two canoodling). Whereas Nina the spoiled, histrionic socialite scheming with Drew (or getting snowed by BFF Ava) is much closer to who she's always been for me, and a more active role. And as is I really don't want Sonny with anyone atm to be clear, other than getting conned by Ava back into bed as his evil bride Iago while he continues to lose the last shreds of his Four Loko-soaked mind.