KerleyQ

What I'm getting from it is that she was fully intent on begging his forgiveness and trying to repair their marriage. She wasn't even thinking about Liam/Steffy. She kissed Thomas, but, in the light of day, when she was headed home, she felt guilty and just wanted to put it behind her and refocus on her marriage and family. But, the way Liam was so ready to just jump right to divorce, despite how many times she has given him the grace to work on things and repair their marriage, it became, to her, about how she has hung in, multiple times, despite his obviously divided heart, and he doesn't love her the same way, because he knows he has Steffy on the back burner. And he pretty much confirmed it at the end of their first confrontation, when he (falsely) told her that he hadn't been having those thoughts about Steffy, but he certainly was going to now. That's the thing that pushed her to stop fighting for their marriage and realize that it was never good and healthy for her in the first place. Liam asked for a divorce because of Thomas. Hope jumped to accommodating him because he made it clear that he felt he had options, so he didn't have to forgive her the way she's forgiven him.

Hope, I was with you for most of this episode, but then the defense of Thomas popped up. First, of course he's devoted to only you, that's how obsessed stalkers work. Second, Liam is perfectly within his rights, after all that has happened, to consider Thomas a bad guy, forever and ever, amen. But, that's my only quibble. I totally love that the Waffle went over there, ready to magnanimously allow Hope to grovel for his forgiveness, and he left having signed the divorce papers she sprang on him instead. Why do I have a feeling that Steffy is going to find out about Finn's patient he was heading out to see being Sheila right around the same time Finn finds out about the kisses, so Steffy can act like him keeping that from her is remotely the same thing? My guess is that RJ's story is going to turn out to be that he was in a relationship before he came home, and he fucked up somehow, so now he's working out his own regret by trying to help Hope fix her marriage. He's made multiple comments over the course of this that make it sound like he's speaking from experience and regret.

Since Douglas married them, I assume that Beth making a little X with a crayon counts?

It seriously feels like someone who has been watching the show for a long time got a hold of the reins and got to finally give characters lines they've been dying to hear from them for years.

"You beat me to it." Yes she did. Suck on it, Waffle. I laughed so hard at his face when she showed him her ring was gone. And, yes, Liam totally showed up there ready for her to beg him to give her another chance. My guess is that, since Steffy already told him she wasn't interested, and he's had Wyatt and RJ working on him for a couple days, his plan was to go over, let Hope beg for a while, and maybe give her some lingering hook of "maybe we can keep talking," fully intending to eventually "forgive" Hope, provided she agrees to completely cut Thomas out of her life, up to and including leaving HFTF and having someone else handle custody exchanges. And, instead, Hope changed the game on him and said "you're right, we need a divorce." It was amazing. Oh, Steffy, you are in so much trouble when Finn finds out about those kisses. You sat there reassuring him that the exact fucking thing Liam did was absolutely not something he needed to worry about. You're dumber than Liam. Also, I will be disappointed if he doesn't ask "why didn't you tell him this shit wasn't happening after the first kiss instead of after the second one?"

It's been multiple months since I tuned into Y&R, but if Liam found his way over there, I'd have to watch, just to see if something happens between him and Sally, since they did have good chemistry when they were in storyline together. I could totally see Liam getting Bill to transfer him somewhere else so he can get out of town for a while, and then he runs into Sally at a bar, and the two of them start bonding. (I admittedly know nothing about where Sally is in storyline right now to know if a romantic thing there is possible, but it seems that neither show has a history of letting Sally be happy for long, so...)

Thomas looked like he took a direct hit when Hope said she'd always love Liam. It was like he had a momentary "oh, am I becoming my sister, here?" I wonder if he's going to follow up on that when they're not dealing with Brooke (who really, really needs to just stop and go home.) Because every single thing Hope has said has been a variation on "I love Liam, but he doesn't only love me, and this guy does, so..." If his intentions were good, he'd be putting some brakes on here. Let her figure out her shit and get through her divorce now, before the two of them go forward with anything. I don't like Thomas, but I can give him a pass on not being able to resist when the woman he's been obsessing over for three years was pulling him towards his bedroom. But, none of this is the recipe for anything healthy going forward. (And, if he's still "putting in the work" and going to therapy, I'm pretty confident a decent therapist would be telling him he needs to slow it down.) Hope got a lot of good lines in there, shit that she needed to realize years ago and that Brooke needed to realize decades ago. We've gotten so much, in recent years, from the Tridge kids about how much their father's waffling affected them, but Brooke's kids haven't been able to express that same experience. (Mostly because Hope has been the only one in town, and she's been so caught up in the same kind of "true love" and "destiny" romantic notions that she hasn't been able to call her mother out without exposing her own exact same situation.) It was nice to see Hope get to have her say over how growing up with that mess affected her. But, having said that, Hope, the answer isn't to take on the Ridge/Liam role yourself. Put an end to the toxic waffling pattern for good. Be on your own, date around, but don't get into a relationship with someone else until you aren't still licking your wounds from your waffle not having an ounce of grace for you. Don't put your own kids through the same shit the original ToD put you through. And she still seems to me like she's trying to rationalize everything and force this. I'm not saying she didn't enjoy sex with Thomas. But, I do think she's trying to convince herself that there is some big relationship to be had here, because that's how she has to justify, to herself, it blowing up her marriage. And, since she (rightly) feels like one of the reasons Liam was so quick to walk away was because he believes he has another woman waiting in the wings, she can rationalize Thomas as only wanting her. A whole lot of her being with Thomas right now is about Liam. I really do hope she slows things down, but I fear she'll probably have Thomas all moved in with her (or she with him) by the time school starts next month. Steffy practically gloating to her father about how great her own life and marriage is going while Liam and Hope are going through shit "because Hope kissed Thomas," is one of the many reasons I can just never like the character. Honey, your happy, peaceful marriage is being greatly enabled by you not coming clean with your husband about your own kisses with Liam. Kelly's dream about Liam felt more, to me, like foreshadowing that he is either going to be killed off or just up and leave town in a snit over both Steffy and Hope not being an option for him than it felt like Kelly being the one to bust Steffy and Liam to Finn. Unless her dream was about Finn not being there, but does she call Finn "daddy" without any differentiation between him and Liam? Also, I can't see Finn completely abandoning Kelly if she wants some kind of relationship with him still, even if he does leave Steffy.

They do, but, at the same time, I'm so annoyed with that crap Taylor pulled on Brooke that, even if Brooke dumps Ridge after realizing that she deserves better, I don't want Taylor to have him. Or, if she gets him, I want him to spend most of their time obsessing over Brill. He can talk about how he doesn't think Bill is worthy of Brooke as often as Liam talked about Hope working with Thomas. That is the Ridge relationship Taylor deserves. What I'm really hoping for from this story is for Thomas to simply be the gateway for Hope in realizing that she deserves better than a waffle. She can get hers with him for a while, but then move on to someone who hasn't killed one of her friends to cover up that her baby was still alive and well so he could up his odds of getting her in bed.

This is the story I wanted for Hope. Brooke should be all "are you fucking kidding me? Over one kiss after all these years of your Steffy shit?" to Liam when she hears his reaction to the kiss. She won't be, but she should.

Which is not something this show does these days. And it wasn't even that long ago that they knew how to do that. PF's Thomas went from raping Caroline to basically being a labrador retriever by the time he left a couple years later.

Yep. All of this. I thought things were going to be different when Liam didn't end up in bed with Steffy two minutes after Hope told him to go to her and the girls. And, in fact, he only had sex with her during that whole mess because Thomas drugged him. Hopequin was bad enough. But this shit is inexcusable. At least that time, he was drunk before anything happened (beyond him going to her to whine in the first place). But this time? He was very intentionally thinking "well, one of my women has displeased me, so I'm going to go try to bust up the other one's perfectly happy marriage with a man who has been nothing but a friend to me despite the fact that I was a complete shit to him for the early stages of their relationship and then had sex with her while they were together." It's just so disrespectful to both women, making it clear that they're truly just interchangeable fucktoys to him. Steffy should have slapped him in the face along with telling him to back the fuck off because this shit isn't happening again.

I saw a spoiler on FB, not sure how reliable the source is, but it did have other items on it that I have seen on other spoiler sites, so... Anyway, it was something about Hope and Wyatt talking about their past. I really hope that's true. I really liked Hope and Wyatt, even though I wasn't a fan of what an impetuous brat that version of Hope could be. (There's only so much "we were robbed," you can take when she and Liam were just so immature and reactive all the time.) I'd be perfectly happy for her to get over this Thomas thing and end up with Wyatt.

It should say "dialogue repeats itself."

Shh! Don't summon her! I love Brooke, but she was being patently ridiculous today. Brooke, Hope is a grown ass woman with kids of her own. Your ability to tell her what she can, can't, or has to do ended a long damn time ago. Brooke and Taylor basically moved their fight over Ridge to fighting over their daughters fight for Liam, and Brooke "won," so she's ridiculously over invested in the Lope marriage. I was cracking up at Taylor and Ridge talking about how Thomas has put in so much work. What work? The show keeps telling us about all this work he's done, but we've never seen it. And he's "sticking to his program"? What program? Is there some kind of Obsessed Stalker's Anonymous 12 step program out there?

Yeah, I snorted at that line. I really cannot wait for Finn to find out about those kisses. If she had just told him right away, saying she put a stop to it, she would have been fine. But not telling him and continuing to talk with him about all that has happened between Liam/Hope/Thomas without saying "oh, and you won't believe what Liam had the nerve to do..." just makes her look guilty as fuck. He'll have no reason to believe that she wasn't an active and happy participant in those kisses when he eventually does find out.

So, we went from the same damn dialogue every day in Liam's months long Thomas tour, where he had to talk about Thomas to at least one person per day, every day to our new repetitive dialogue of Hope and Thomas. "You're a shmoopy." "No, you are." Then some fucking. Then back to the "You're a shmoopy." "No, you are." Lather, rinse repeat. I'm not even sure who's trying too hard her now, Hope, Thomas, or the writers. And, of course, the repetitive Finn/Steffy scenes where she marvels over their love, compares it to Lope, and keeps hiding what happened with Liam from Finn. "I would never take what we have for granted." Um, aren't you doing just that when you withhold something like that from him? Brooke, what did you expect to see when you burst into Thomas's bedroom after seeing Hope's ring on the desk? Have some boundaries, woman. I know you like to be way too involved in Hope's love life, but knowingly interrupting mid-thrust is a few bridges too far.

It seems weird to me that they'd use

And to add on to that guess, wasn't Katherine Heigl in that New Year's Eve movie, hence the NYE glasses on the headshot?

Yep. I've said over and over that if they took some time on redeeming him, I could maybe buy it down the road, but he was on the outs with everyone for like five minutes, Taylor browbeat Steffy into accepting him back into the fold, and then Steffy decided he was all fine since mommy said so. We got one session with a therapist, which mommy attended and ran roughshod over. The last time we saw him before Taylor started dragging him over to Steffy's house to force a reconciliation, he was still being sinister and plotting. We haven't actually seen him do anything that shows he's better now. I liked Todd Manning for crying out loud. You can make a previously bad character root-able, even if they remain gray, but you've got to put some work into it. I don't think she's necessarily using it as an excuse for kissing Thomas, or even a weapon to force Liam to get over it. She's just pointing out what a giant hypocrite he is to act like this is the single worst thing that has ever happened in the history of their relationship when she's been forgiving way more with Steffy over and over and over again. And she's also using it as a point of reference for herself as to what a shitty partner it turns out her husband is, because he expects forgiveness no matter how many times he betrayed her with Steffy, but one kiss and he's immediately saying divorce. They way they both keep falling all over Liam for all this time, you'd think he must be doing something right in bed, but it turns out he isn't. But, Hope, honey, I saw those scenes with Wyatt back in the day. You were pretty freaking happy with what he was bringing to the table. That was one of the reasons I wanted her with Wyatt instead of Liam back then. She was still having issues being comfortable in bed with Liam, but she had no such hang-ups with Wyatt. She was clearly enjoying sex and letting loose then in a way she never did with Liam. I wonder if her entire relationship with him has been like that - never fully letting go in the bedroom because some part of her never fully trusted him enough to just let go and enjoy it.

This is where I am with him. He's great at playing a bad guy. But, sometimes playing "good" can be a lot more challenging to make interesting, and he just does not do it for me when he's playing "good." He's this weird combination of being way too earnest and "golly gee" dorky, while still looking sinister. And, yeah, I can totally see the Ford comparison. Don't tell us someone is all good now, show us them earning that. God, I need those kisses to come to light ASAP. If that doesn't blow up Steffy's life, I'm going to be so pissed. She's had multiple chances to tell Finn. And now that he had that line about how Thomas was just as responsible for those kisses as Hope was, he's not going to just let Steffy off the hook. And given the history, he won't buy that Steffy pushed Liam away. Of course, the obvious progression there would be for Steffy to go running to Liam, but it's way more interesting if she still holds onto that "nope, I'm not an option for you" stance with him, as she tries to fight for Finn. And then Finn ends up in bed with Taylor. And this is all definitely the time to bring Li back. The only downside to this whole story for Finn will be if, after leaving Steffy, he decides to open the door even a sliver to any kind of relationship with Sheila.

On the one hand, I hope that these two convince Liam to go "magnanimously" offer to take Hope back, and she says "no, we're good. By the way, I fucked Thomas," and walks away, leaving him in tears. On the other hand, while Annika was selling the hell out of her scenes, I just have this visceral creeped out reaction to MA. I don't even think it's exclusively just Thomas as a character, but something about the way he plays him, or something. And their pillow talk scenes were largely about her clearly being on the rebound/reacting to Liam being a complete tool, and her feeling like she stepped out of her shell. But there's also a bit of an element of her trying too hard here. It's like since kissing Thomas blew up her family, she thinks she needs to make it worth it, so she's over-investing in this right now. I appreciate that Hope is driving her own story, because she rarely gets to do that. It's pretty much constantly shit happening to her, not her taking action. Sheila can go away any day now, and Deacon can have literally any other storyline. I'll even grit my teeth and deal with him and Taylor as long as he can be done having "dates" with Sheila in the prison waiting room.

Sadly, not mine. Just a picture I found when I was looking for a cute profile pic to use.

I just can't get behind Thomas/Hope because I could still see the manipulation he does. Like with the ring. If the real meaning behind it was genuine, he wouldn't have immediately been "OK, then, now we can fuck!" because she took it off right then and there. If he actually cared about her well being and state of mind, he would have told her that it's not the right time, and he doesn't want to sleep with her on the rebound like this, while she's just been talking about the fresh breakdown of her marriage. Did Thomas finally get his own place? Liam, ugh, shut up. I should be able to sympathize with you, but you've made it impossible. Wyatt is the superior Spencer son, by far. My only complaint is that I wish he would bring up all the Steffy shit Hope has put up with. I know Hope brought it up, but Liam can brush off her bringing it up as her just trying to justify what she did. He needs other people, who he might be more inclined to listen to, to remind him of how much Hope has forgiven and how, for her, Steffy has been that "Thomas" figure for pretty much every minute that the two of them have been together. But, Hope has gotten over it every time, including when it was possible Liam had gotten Steffy pregnant. Of course, I'd also like Wyatt (or anyone) to point out to Liam that he complained about Hope working with Thomas so much, and lost his cool at Hope about it so many times, including trying to tell her what to do about her career, that he should consider that the stress of all of that may have contributed to Hope doing something so out of character for her. Deacon, come on, man. Why do you have to self-sabotage for Sheila, of all people?

I was so surprised by how much I liked Hope and Liam when AN came into the role, because, while I didn't like Liam with Steffy (may we never hear "cha cha cha" again), I also was not a fan of how much Liam and Hope sabotaged themselves over and over again. And I actually liked Hope/Wyatt, but uber hate that they married because Liam was like 2 minutes late. Liam and Ivy were good together, but always had that cloud hanging over them of "we're only pairing him with her because we have no other option right now." It was clear that the show intentionally cast someone who looked a lot like JMW, and that Ivy was just a placeholder until the show could get JMW/Steffy back. And then they made that clear when they had Steffy kill her off.

I had one little dangling thread of hope on that one after she said something like "I want to be with the man who only wants me." Since that's something he's told her over and over, it kind of almost felt like it could be a little bit of programming. That and, as others have pointed out, Thomas has had no point of view in this whole story. I've been thinking for a while that that is because he's not "all better" and they've been hiding that reveal from us. Because you know, it will be such a super duper shock when the guy who has been a manipulative asshole about Hope from the second he set foot back in L.A. turns out to, gasp, still be a manipulative asshole.