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The Best and Worst of One Life to Live


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There was a game going on in the early 2000's... one of the stage managers started it, I think. Anyway, he'd come up with a word of the day and the game was for the actors to try to fit it into their dialog. It was acknowledged that Erika and Roger were the best at it. And there was one word... I think it was 'parcheesi' and Roger used it in rehearsals for Live Week when he was telling Tea what an amazing life he had (this right after Blair figured out he had told her Jack was dead and left him) -- something about being the President of the Parcheesi Club or something but had heard that Erika had already used it so ditched it for the actual shooting...

 

Anyway, apparently, ES was quite good at fitting that sort of thing into her dialog.

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Someone correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I remember that while we knew Alison was up to something and we knew Natalie was up to something (we learned she was involved with Seth early on), I don't think we knew that they were up to something TOGETHER until the reveal, or just before it. 

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Semi-relatedly, I stumbled upon these scenes from 2008, of Natalie railing at Viki after finding out that Jessica purposely let Tess out to kill her and Jared and Natalie being tired of Viki making excuses for Jessica.

 

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Someone correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I remember that while we knew Alison was up to something and we knew Natalie was up to something (we learned she was involved with Seth early on), I don't think we knew that they were up to something TOGETHER until the reveal, or just before it. 

 

That's how I remember it.

 

They often gave Natalie those great scenes calling Jess out, but they never did anything about it. In the end they would just shrug and default to "oh, poor Jess, she know not what she do". Because in the view of the show, Jessica was still the pure heroine and Natalie the spitfire who could be rash - or worse, 'unfaithful' to John McBain by being with another man before they got back together.

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Natalie the spitfire who could be rash - or worse, 'unfaithful' to John McBain by being with another man before they got back together.

 

...even though they hadn't been together in years and Natalie was just recently widowed and John was still in a relationship with the woman who had been pregnant with his child.

 

Ugh.

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They often gave Natalie those great scenes calling Jess out, but they never did anything about it. In the end they would just shrug and default to "oh, poor Jess, she know not what she do".

 

It always drove me nuts that Viki and Clint didn't even let Nat be angry about Tess locking her in the panic room and nearly blowing her up. Nat had every right to be furious, and Viki kept shutting her down. I do think Nat would have gotten to the "oh, poor Jess" stage—everyone did—but let her have her anger. Gah.

 

Jess as fragile flower had to be one of the most exasperating things about the show. The indulgence she got for that was rage-inducing.

 

the 'Word of the Day' game

 

I used to work at a food/design magazine where we tried to get "chubby" into every issue. It had to make sense and work in context; it couldn't be forced. I think we got it in five consecutive issues, which we were really proud of. Hee.

Edited by dubbel zout
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It always drove me nuts that Viki and Clint didn't even let Nat be angry about Tess locking her in the panic room and nearly blowing her up. Nat had every right to be furious, and Viki kept shutting her down. I do think Nat would have gotten to the "oh, poor Jess" stage—everyone did—but let her have her anger. Gah.

 

Viki is really irritating in that scene.  "Isn't it fabulous, darling, that you can express how angry you are!  Now just go ahead and let all that anger go, it's not Jessie's fault."

 

Natalie even admits that she's not being fair, but it's like, shut up for five seconds, Viki, and just let her vent.

Edited by TeeVee329
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Some of the most enraging things would come out of Viki's mouth when the writers wanted the audience to think a certain way.

 

The problem with the Jess/Nat thing was that I felt, a lot of the time, that Jessica took the right precautions. She did go to St. Anne's willingly, she did her best to make it possible for her family to put her away in order to protect them and her from the alters and it was probably the only thing I actually liked about Jessica's DID. It always infuriated me that Viki was allowed to wander free no matter how many times she splintered. Jessica tried to fix that (I totally fanwanked that as being a result of Viki being so 'protected' by the family that she couldn't possibly be expected to be locked away while she was splintered and the damage that resulted) and I loathed and detested their using Ford and then Cutter as a means of keeping her out.

 

Cutter, at least, was painted as a pure opportunist. I wasn't expected to root for him in that situation. Ford, however, was disgusting from the moment he started interacting with Teen!Jess right until the end and having Viki beg his filthy ass to put Tess away and his refusing her because it meant he got fucking money from Ryder's trust... none of that will ever be okay for me.

 

I hated pretty much every aspect of Jessica's DID. I hated its inception, the retconned reasons behind it, the crutch that DID and Jessica or Viki splitting into alters resulted in. And most especially, I hated people's reactions to it.

 

I still hold a grudge for the stuff when Viki's DID back in the 90s had everyone bending over backwards to excuse her while Dorian got shit on from every angle. I'm not saying that Dorian was the hero of that tale but no one seemed to acknowledge what Viki's alters did to her... which reared its head again with Jessica and Natalie.

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Viki is really irritating in that scene.  "Isn't if fabulous, darling, that you can express how angry you are!  Now just go ahead and let all that anger go, it's not Jessie's fault."

 

Natalie even admits that she's not being fair, but it's like, shut up for five seconds, Viki, and just let her vent.

 

I know! That annoyed me, too. It wasn't even as though there was a chance Jessica could overhear and be hurt - she was in St. Anne's at that point. Poor Natalie - I  I didn't expect Clint and Viki to be angry at Jessica themselves, since she was genuinely ill - but you'd think they could've shown some sympathy, if not empathy, for their daughter who was terrorized and nearly murdered by her own sister.

 

It's not even Viki's attitude towards Jess' DID (and her own) that was the problem. It was frustrating and wrong-headed, but I could easily buy that Viki genuinely felt that way. The problem was that the show never seemed at all interested in challenging that POV. Any character who did so was painted as being in the wrong. So sayeth St. Victoria, so it must be true!

 

I always thought a big contributing part of Jessica's problem was the refusal of anyone in her life to let her take responsibility for her alters. (And I agree with Dandesun that she tried - one of the reasons I was still able to like Jess through it all). Everyone behaved as though Tess and Co. were completely separate, evil entities who periodically possessed Jessica's body, instead of part of her. Her family never wanted to acknowledge that Jessica could feel vengeful, angry, or cruel or be anything other than perfect, sweet Princess Jessie. In essence, by coddling her so much, they refused to see her as a whole person. That can't possibly be helpful for someone with even soap DID. I really wish the show had dug into that more, if we had to be stuck with the DID at all.

Edited by Melgaypet
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 I loathed and detested their using Ford and then Cutter as a means of keeping [Jessica out of St. Anne's].

 

For my own sanity, I have always imagined that as soon as Jessica was in her right mind, she set up new safeguards at St. Anne's so Tess couldn't run off and marry the nearest douchebag to keep herself out of the loony bin.

 

Ford, however, was disgusting from the moment he started interacting with Teen!Jess right until the end and having Viki beg his filthy ass to put Tess away and his refusing her because it meant he got fucking money from Ryder's trust... none of that will ever be okay for me.

 

...and then he made a sad kitty face when she was finally locked up by Cutter and lectured Viki about DID (a disease Viki fucking has) and was portrayed as a prince who had to rescue Princess Tess from her evil family and then he ASSAULTED A NUN.  Talk about the worst.

 

I always thought a big contributing part of Jessica's problem was the refusal of anyone in her life to let her take responsibility for her alters. (And I agree with Dandesun that she tried - one of the reasons I was still able to like Jess through it all).

 

...except for the last time.  Sure, she caught Natalie and Brody in the sack and that had to sting, but she didn't seem to feel bad an iota about all the pain she caused over the months she spent as Tess, about the months she missed with Bree and Ryder, about causing Viki to splinter into Niki again, etc.  Which pretty much sealed my dislike of Jessica once and for all.

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...except for the last time.  Sure, she caught Natalie and Brody in the sack and that had to sting, but she didn't seem to feel bad an iota about all the pain she caused over the months she spent as Tess, about the months she missed with Bree and Ryder, about causing Viki to splinter into Niki again, etc.  Which pretty much sealed my dislike of Jessica once and for all.

 

Yeah, that was obnoxious. But it was so out of character, I couldn't really take it seriously. No one was particularly sympathetic in that scenario, frankly. Brody had some great lines where he didn't immediately fall to his knees begging for forgiveness and instead pointed out how awful Jess had been while her alters were in control - but it was totally undercut by the fact that she had just found him in bed with her sister. Kind of hard to claim the moral high ground there. The whole mess was so shoddily written I couldn't engage with the story at all.

 

I blame Ford.

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Brody had some great lines where he didn't immediately fall to his knees begging for forgiveness and instead pointed out how awful Jess had been while her alters were in control - but it was totally undercut by the fact that she had just found him in bed with her sister. Kind of hard to claim the moral high ground there.

 

Brody did have some great lines in that scene, especially when he brought up Jessica's new alter Wes (ugh) that she had created from the memory of his dead friend specifically to hurt Brody. 

 

So while he didn't really have the moral high ground, I was just happy someone told Princess Jessica off.

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It's never fun when one person's alleged well being trumps over everything else. I always loved Natalie and Jessica's relationship so I really hated it when they decided to go the DID route and make Princess Jessica's fragility take over their interactions.

 

But then, I really hated the whole DID thing with her period. One of Higley's worst decisions ever.

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I always loved Natalie and Jessica's relationship so I really hated it when they decided to go the DID route and make Princess Jessica's fragility take over their interactions.

 

And I didn't like how Natalie was always cast as the bad guy to justify Jessica's splits - keeping quiet about Jared not being a Buchanan, keeping the secret about Chloe being Starr's baby, sleeping with Brody, etc.

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 I loved Nat and have always loved Nat but one of the things I hated about her characterization was that she always had to be the bad girl so that someone else looked better. Jess, Jen Vangie, and then most rage inducing Rex. I always loved it when she was allowed to be angry at people but then in the next scene she was apologizing for her anger, I also feel the same way about Blair who always had to be  the bad guy to make Tea Todd Kelly or Starr look better.

 Both Blair and Nat had genuine issues at times but were always made out to be the bad girls for daring to express their anger.

 I always express my anger that I never got my Blair and Nat friendship where they sat around  drinking going Kelly stole a baby Yep  Jess stole a baby and tried to kill me but we are the bad ones,

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Robin Strasser did the next best thing - on an old OLTL blooper reel which is probably not on YT anymore, she improvised some bit at the country club with Gina Tognoni, chirping that Kelly was "showing a little too much cleeea-vage for someone who killed a baby a few months agooo!" I died laughing. That crazy old bird remembers everything.

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You're going to make me go look for those blooper reels, aren't you? (My favorite was Bo with some of his line readings that wound up breaking Howarth... and then he kept going with it. "What's the matter? Doesn't everyone talk like this? GET UP, MAHONEY!!")

 

But, yeah, Robin sing-songing about Kelly killing the baby was a delight.

 

It's frustrating because that's the sort of thing that can and should be held against someone forever, family or no, so Blair holding a grudge was fine with me... it certainly didn't keep her from stepping up for Kelly when it was needed (although, typically, Blair was the last to do so and I was also fine with that.) But when they really stacked the deck in Kelly's favor by having her whine about how she had lost a baby so she and Blair were even... to Blair's face. I rather wish Blair had flat out punched her because, no, that's not how it works. Not at all.

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I loved Nat and have always loved Nat but one of the things I hated about her characterization was that she always had to be the bad girl so that someone else looked better. Jess, Jen Vangie, and then most rage inducing Rex.

 

I'm drawing a blank - what storyline are you referring to where Natalie's bad girl antics made Rex look better?

 

Relatedly, in the later years, I thought Rex was a horrible brother to Natalie on numerous occasions.  His reaction to finding out that Mitch had murdered Jared ("Welp, that sucks, but I just found out Mitch is my daddy and I need to meet him now Now NOW!").  Taunting a worried Natalie that he would tell Clint about their Kim sighting in Kentucky.  And most especially, denying her tearful pleas that he let Clint have Gigi's heart only to turn around and sell the heart to Clint for power, money, and revenge.  Man, I hated that rubber-faced fool.

Which reminds me...

 

Some of the most enraging things would come out of Viki's mouth when the writers wanted the audience to think a certain way.

 

I will never forget when Joey piped up with some (extremely half-hearted) disgust about Rex selling Gigi's heart to Clint and Viki had the nerve to SHUSH HIM.

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I personally always loved the bloopers with JDP. His laugh face kills me every time.

 

Y'all know how much I hate Lunatic Moodswing, but even I will admit that mystical cornpone bitch had every right to be pissed with Max with cheating on her. That double slap here is magical...

 

 

I just wish Gabrielle had pointed out to Max, years later, that while their marriage largely ended because she slept with Tony Vallone to keep him quiet about embezzling money, Max had also cheated on two of his wives later on, because he couldn't keep it in his pants. Just saying. 

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This random clip of Viki vs. Dorian clip from 1994 introduced me to two aspects of OLTL I've never encountered before:

 

 

1) Sloan.  Seems like a tool.

 

2) The "porn opening" with the popping champagne and the blue jeans and people doing it and then, randomly, a baby.  It was as cheesetastic as you guys said!

Edited by TeeVee329
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BITE YOUR TONGUE. I absolutely LOVED G-Sky.

 

I thought we were friends...*cries*

 

That's the thing, leading up to them sleeping together, I actually really liked Schuyler and Gigi, definitely a shit ton more than Gigi and Rex.  Remember them cutely sharing headphones to listen to some silly pop song?  Adorable!

 

But around this time, the show made it crystal clear it wasn't worth getting invested because Schuyler was now totes lying to Gigi and Rex was his superior in every way.  And something about the sex scene itself - the pre-planned nature of their "passionate rendezvous", especially - just didn't work for me.

Edited by TeeVee329
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Those very nice Todd/Blair NYE scenes made me wonder what the rest of the canvas was doing that New Year's Eve.

 

I then recalled that, ugh, most of the canvas was looking on aghast...I mean, with love...at Rex and Gigi getting married.

 

That made me think about how I hated that they got OLTL's last wedding.

 

But then I realized that, thanks to the reboot, OLTL's last wedding was actually Todd and Blair retying the knot.

 

Full circle!

Edited by TeeVee329
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Those very nice Todd/Blair NYE scenes made me wonder what the rest of the canvas was doing that New Year's Eve.

 

I then recalled that, ugh, most of the canvas was looking on aghast...I mean, with love...at Rex and Gigi getting married.

 

That made me think about how I hated that they got OLTL's last wedding.

 

But then I realized that, thanks to the reboot, OLTL's last wedding was actually Todd and Blair retying the knot.

 

Full circle!

 

One of the best things about PP OLTL-reuniting TnB!

 

One of the bad things about PP OLTL-never seeing the damned wedding!!!  Oh well, 

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It totally counts! Fuck Gigi and Rex, anyway. They were so insufferable.

 

I actually wasn't all that bothered by not actually seeing the umpteenth T&B wedding. The scenes they did have were weighty, emotional and told the story. That kind of economy in storytelling can work very well if the writers know what they're doing.

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Those very nice Todd/Blair NYE scenes made me wonder what the rest of the canvas was doing that New Year's Eve.

 

I then recalled that, ugh, most of the canvas was looking on aghast...I mean, with love...at Rex and Gigi getting married.

 

That made me think about how I hated that they got OLTL's last wedding.

 

But then I realized that, thanks to the reboot, OLTL's last wedding was actually Todd and Blair retying the knot.

 

Full circle!

 

I gotta be honest... by that time, I wasn't even watching on television anymore and just watching clips of stuff online. There was no way in hell I was going to sit through Rex/Gigi eating up so much of the last hours of OLTL. They already ate up too much once Ron came up with Rex's long long pregnant teen beloved and her moody son (no, I was never too keen on Shane #notsorry) and her idiotic, insane sister.

 

I still kind of wish Gigi would roll her eyes whenever Viki talked about the good old days in Paris, TX. You know, the days when Gigi didn't have insurance for her asthmatic son and consistently worried about whether he could breathe or not, living in a stinking motel room with her kid... and there's Viki being all 'I lived amongst the common people and was accepted into their tribe!' when she's got more money than God and never had to worry about anything. She was at rich white woman's Fantasy Commoner Camp.

 

Anyway... I didn't really care about the big jailbreak, either... but by then, the show was ending and it did result in Natalie pumping Mitch full of bullets and a chandelier killing Ford so there were definite good points... I was really just more interested in the ones I cared about. Not the ones Ron cared about.

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I'll be honest...I know I'm the biggest Gabrielle fan here (no, really? :P), but I was somewhat...underwhelmed when she came back for the final week on ABC. I loved seeing her (and her dress was BEAUTIFUL), I LOVED her telling the mystical cornpone bitch off about "my Max", but...I don't know. At her core, she was a good woman who became misguided by life along the way (and doubted herself WAY too much at times), and even though her bitchy side was very much a part of her personality...it wasn't all of it. And of course, I'm still bitter her final scenes were with Bo and not with Max, but that goes without saying. :P

 

 

That said, her little ballerina twirl was cute. Reminded me of this (the dream begins at 3:47):

 

 

Fiona herself was a dancer growing up, but a back injury ended that career and she moved on to acting.

Edited by UYI
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Look, alls I know is that when Ron took over the show in late '07 and they introduced that story where Rex was questioning his paternity, I knew from the jump it had to be cult leader Mitch Laurence - Mitch, who was basically a super-raping Antichrist, is the only man Roxy Balsom would ever deny sleeping with, and she and her family were closely connected to his organization. I expected it, they teased it, the 2008 writer's strike indefinitely postponed it, and then over a year later they finally pulled the trigger with huge fanfare - and three or four months after that, they rewrote it all again and said he wasn't Rex's dad after all.

 

I was (typically) smug about it at the time like, 'yeah, I knew it was Mitch' (until it wasn't). But it wasn't until a few years later that people started saying that Ron's original take on the story was that Roxy was actually born male, and that she and Mitch's psychotic aide, OLTL's resident crazy Alison Perkins (Barbara Garrick), had conceived Rex together.* But ABC apparently shot that down immediately. This plot point was inserted into the fabric of OLTL in another way in the final hours of the show, when everyone in Llanview's favorite meta-soap opera, Fraternity Row, was cancelled after the revelation that its heroine, "Lorraine", had been born a man. In a fantasy episode set in the world of Fraternity Row a month prior, IK/Roxy had embodied "Lorraine" and taken her place in that story. During the final episodes, Roxy actually gets up and says something like, "I can't believe Lorraine was a dude!"

 

it could be an elaborate hoax, but it fits together too well with Ron's later action and I remember hearing it in too many different places (well before the final months when the other shit happened).

 

*(You would've seen Alison on GH if they'd kept the OLTL rights, I'm sure - she was deeply involved in Todd and Téa's cliffhanging storylines which they intended to tie into Robin's abduction.)

Edited by jsbt
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In a fantasy episode set in the world of Fraternity Row a month prior, IK/Roxy had embodied "Lorraine" and taken her place in that story.

 

I think they actually played out the "reveal" during the fantasy episode, right?  Right before Roxy woke up from her dream?  I also remember that Nigel was there cross dressing as Nigella.

This isn't even the weirdest shit he did. We haven't discussed the time traveling television.

 

Oh lord, must we?

 

I really wanted to see Rex and Gigi try and explain that shit when they got back to Llanview.  "Don't worry, it's not Stacy, it's Gigi.  A magic television set told us so."  I do remember they threw in a mention that a DNA test was performed, but ugh, it was sooo stuuupid.

Edited by TeeVee329
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I think they actually played out the "reveal" during the fantasy episode, right?  Right before Roxy woke up from her dream?  I also remember that Nigel was there cross dressing as Nigella.

 

I don't remember them playing that out in the episode - I only remember them revealing it offhand through dialogue after the Llanview citizens watched the finale in January 2012. But I watched all that shit exactly once, so I can't recall.

 

And I am not going back over the time traveling TV and Professor Fina, and no one can make me.

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This is giving me Claremont X-Men flashbacks. It's fairly common knowledge in X-Lore that Chris Claremont absolutely intended Nightcrawler's parentage to be Mystique and Destiny. Mystique being a shape-shifter was meant to be the father and Destiny was Mystique's long time companion (a precognitive former opera singer) was meant to be the mother.

 

This was back in the early 80s so you can imagine that Marvel editorial was not remotely keen on going that route. So what they ended up doing was having Mystique be Nightcrawler's mother and depending on the story lost him while she was being hunted down by the pitchfork and torch bearing generic European crowd (seriously, this mob of pitchfork and torch bearing Euros shows up... a LOT) OR she deliberately threw him off a cliff to then shape shift and save herself.

 

I'd almost wonder if Ron ever read Claremont's X-men but... no, impossible. Claremont wrote amazingly strong and layered women who did not exist solely to be incubators, who were flawed and troubled yet also powerful and mighty. One would think that might have rubbed off, alas.

 

I do remember talking about the Roxy situation over at TWoP. IK certainly had the whiskey voice that you could possibly play with a transgender role (think Kathleen Turner as Chandler's father on Friends) but much like Claremont in the early 80s, you just knew that ABC was never going to go there. Ever. In any kind of serious way.

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I had no clue about the idea of Roxy actually being a man, and I had COMPLETELY blocked out "Lorraine" turning out to be a man...thank God, I guess. 

 

ETA: All the talk about Roxy and Nigel in drag reminded me of when they had a five minute secret affair in late 2003. Talk about random as hell. 

Edited by UYI
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Oh, god. I sort of remember that. Weren't they hypnotized or something? It was bizarre. And...I hate to perpetuate stereotypes, but no way was Nigel straight. Come on now.

 

When did Roxy and Max get married? Live Week, right?

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The last few weeks on ABC, when Roxy and Nigel suddenly remembered and started talking about their relationship, and given all the time they were spending together campaigning for "Fraternity Row", I was convinced Ron was going to cram them back together as part of the endgame.  I'm glad he resisted.

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Oh, god. I sort of remember that. Weren't they hypnotized or something? It was bizarre. And...I hate to perpetuate stereotypes, but no way was Nigel straight. Come on now.

 

When did Roxy and Max get married? Live Week, right?

 

Live Week in May 2002, yes. I'll never forget Max seeing his wedding ring, screaming and fainting. :P

 

The actual wedding, however, was shown a week later, on a videotape the chapel in Vegas made for them. Max was drunk and quoting Lincoln's "Four score" speech. LOL

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