Soaps By Remote

Emerging. Soon.

I know those screencaps below are cute, but there was actually an intention to follow up with a few posts.

As it turns out I have instead been diagnosed with my own form of multiple personality disorder having spent the last couple of weeks jumping back and forth between being a proper lawyer with court appearances and stuff, and being an entertainment lawyer-executive producer attending conferences in sunny locations and hanging out on set and stuff.  I don't think I need to tell you which is preferable, or how difficult it is to do both at the same time.

Anyway, all that has resulted in me being in a deep dark non-TV watching, non-blogging hole from which I am only now emerging.

In other words, posts to come.  Many of them, about the range of quite significant on and off-screen goings on that have been going on while I have been leading a double life.

This Week in Soap Babies (Part 1: General Hospital)

Can we all just pause to say awwww.

Now that that’s done (for the moment), let’s fast forward for a moment and say could they please quit with the pregnant women delivering the babies safely in difficult circumstances and then crashing?  Please.  Blurg.

Then, going back, so much of the last couple of weeks of GH did in fact give me faith that there are some people in there who do know how to write this show.  Who do remember what it’s about.  As a result I actually enjoyed not insubstantial parts of the show.

At the centre of that was the one-two punch of Robin and Patrick’s wedding/Emma’s birth and the Hospital itself.  Those two things being irrevocably tied.  As they should be on a show called General Hospital.  

Two legacy characters (one much more than the other, but both tied to the canvas regardless), both of whom work at the Hospital, with almost all their friends working at the Hospital, and everyone coming together for a wedding and a birth.  Which was delivered with a charmingly appropriate mixture of romance, drama, comedy and family.  That’s what this show is about.  That’s what I enjoy.  

The dynamic they’ve established between Robin and her girlfriends initially seemed forced to me, but in recent times it’s really started to work.  Seeing Patrick and Coleman, and Robin, Liz, Epiphany, Lainie, Kelly and Nadine hanging out at the shower/hen’s night felt so relaxed, so real, and frankly like a completely different and better show than the mob-iverse going on in the other half of the show.

Dumb Plans 'R Us

One Life to Live was all about the dumb plans last week.  From the monumental and complex, to the mind-bogglingly brainless.

Todd's multi-layered plan of delusion is, of course, rather awful.  With its elements of baby-napping, imprisonment of a rape victim, and strange concept of Happily Ever After.  But the more people that become involved in it - the Doctor, Janet, Tess - the more it seems destined to fail.  Not to mention that given Todd faked the death of one his children before, any idea he has that Blair's going to take the death of her grandchild at face value in these circumstances is clear proof of his level of delusion.  So the only question for me here is exactly what's going to happen to him when all this comes undone?  Which can be left for another day.

That dumb plan, however, provided no amusement.  Gigi and Marcie's plan to sneak Gigi into see Rex was far, far more laugh-worthy.  Generally in a good way.  And mainly because of Roxie and Charlie pointing out how silly it was.

Charlie: “Wait, the idea is that no one is supposed to recognise you?”
Roxie: “Because it still looks an awful lot like you.”

Gigi: “You hate it.”
Charlie:  “No…It just seems that your plan kind of…”
Roxie: “Sucks. I don’t think you could get into a first aid kit dressed like that.”
It’s rarely that Roxie takes the words right out of my mouth, but in this case she totally did.

Roxie: “Ever feel like the universe has it in for you?”
Charlie: “On a daily basis, yeah.”
Okay, so that last one had nothing to do with the plan, but it was Charlie's almost under the breath delivery of that last line that was so great.

Then there was Tina's "plan" to blow the safe with dynamite in order to rescue the Crown Jewels of Mendorra which was so utterly dumb that it doesn't even deserve the title "plan".  When Tess of the locking people in the basement is calling you Wyle E. Coyote and perhaps being generous in the description, there's definitely a problem.  Of course, Tess then started dumb plan #346; aka take the dynamite and maybe blow up the basement under her mother's house.  Dumb.

Also in the dumb plan stakes: Adriana keeping Rex in Dorian's living room.  But at least that was short term.

So, if OLTL to give up on both the false imprisonment and the dumb plans, that would be great.  Unless the dumb plans are actually funny, of course.

Character Poll: John Black

In the second of our character polls, another polarising character (see what I did there?):

poll by twiigs.com

Night Shift, Season 2, Episode 13 (2)

Not so many tears this time around, which was good because I didn’t need to go out crying from a series that wound up delivering so much good soap .  I much preferred to go out smiling, as I did here.

This episode was really two separate shows in one.  The first show was the five odd minutes with the aftermath of the bombing and the well-built tension between the bomb defusing and Saira reviving.

Unfortunately I think it was then let down a bit by the complete sapping of that tension in favour of a startlingly quick wrap-up of the bomb/suit against Patrick plot and a sweep straight into the second show of the evening: the wrap up.

I didn’t have any problem with the wrap-up itself, just the transition to it.

Some of the tying up of loose ends was a bit neat/predictable, but I would much rather they tied them up than left them hanging.

First, Kyle and Claire, finished off as expected in all respects, but sweet nevertheless.

And Kyle and Leo wound up in an equally predicable, but no less sweet place.  It’s just a pity that they had to completely cut Leo’s personality to shreds at the beginning of the series to wind up bringing him around back to human again with both Saira and his brother.  I’m still of the view that the whole series would have been much better had they not made this character “Leo Julian” and instead started with someone new.

I think they short-changed the Toussaint has a son story throughout this.  Obviously I didn’t even remotely watch the whole first season, but this was groundwork that was laid then, yes?  So why the story got all of about three minutes in this series, with most of it in the last episode, I’m not sure.  And I didn’t care much about it because I’d been given nothing to work with.

For Jagger and Robert I appreciated that they gave them out of town stories, if only to save me from having to ask, futilely, why they’re not in certain upcoming stories or attending a certain wedding during the Day Shift.  Well, I’ll probably still ask that, but not in a “but they’re in town, they should be here!” kind of way.  And they left the doors wide open in both their various relationships to have them come back should pigs start flying backwards through an icy hell and regular GH starts being run by smart people again.

I also loved where Anna and Robert wound up.  I loved that they got their relationship back, but that they didn’t send them off together in some mushy way that wouldn’t have felt right, and would have only given the Day Shift the ammunition with which to decimate their relationship again by having Anna come back straight away and say it all failed because Robert was an ass.

They got Patrick nicely, and reasonably, out of a job he never should have had in the first place, gave him and Robin a bed for the first time in years, and left them argument-free and sweet as always.  All in time for the Day Shift to wreak whatever hell they have planned for their wedding and the birth of their child.

So, let’s leave this series that was imperfect but exceeded all expectations with some happy pictures from the finale.  Well done, Night Shift, well done.

Caps courtesy LiznJase.