Vee

Taibbi and co. have been on the wane even in more ardent leftist circles for awhile now, but this may just about kill that. I could swear Taibbi, like Glenn, is now a regular Fox News panelist.

That's a good point. This will summon @DRW50 to the discussion, as they have never gotten over this story and I don't blame them.

Thank God.

I think they wanted Emma to stick around, but she refused. I loved Susan Keats. S6 is the last season I took seriously. It got pretty trashy but I enjoyed a lot of it. Apparently the Ray story got away from them.

You're too good at this.

This show doesn't do "dramatic" "storylines".

Be serious, Khan - that is an actual storyline!

We're not going to war with Russia. It's just awful, tragic and ugly. But I sure do wish Taibbi, Greenwald and most of the staff of the Intercept were right there on the ground at Kiev Ground Zero.

When it comes to the 2020s, in the immortal words of Dr. Kimberly Shaw, it's not what it looks like - it's worse: Putin:

It would've been so easy to say the latter. The error's just dumb.

Not surprised at all. It is a waste, but I am glad if they actually invested in children.

Lord. Didn't she send him a decree that Lee burned or something? While he was out of town? Wasn't that key plot material?

I wouldn't be opposed to Johnny DiMera, Twunk Satan tempting the gays if there were literally any other non-broad, better-written LGBT examples on the canvas. Unfortunately, Ron's ability to write nuanced gay storytelling went out the window after OLTL, long before he had reduced the GH gays to a variety of cliches like 'watching Golden Girls on Hulu'. When you're not committed to emotional storytelling for queer characters then it just comes off lazy, shrill and yes, prurient.

Well, I think you can easily fudge the exact year. If they said 1980/1981 onscreen then they were being stupid, because yes, Scott didn't get back to town til Luke and Laura's wedding, pretty late in the year. I just assumed it was anywhere between '81 and '83.

This will be an interesting change for the show which seems to have virtually no other high-tension storylines going, and has somehow unwisely launched a Cassadine weather machine storyline at the very end of sweeps.

No? Why not? I'm not challenging it, I'm genuinely curious; I was under the impression they were schemers and fuckbuddies somewhere in that span. Heather got out in late '80, right?

I think the show really wanted to cement the ready-made Webber family in those years. I did find it odd how quickly she took to Rick being her father, but Laura was very young and had already had a very tumultuous life.

The character is a cipher and always has been. There's better Black characters to bring on.

The Cassadine retcon was meticulously designed and executed. I went back not long ago and rewatched the scenes where Laura lays out in detail for Luke how she almost told him but learned of Lesley's 'death,' where and when they were when she found out, etc. and it's clear someone had mapped the timeline out - it's brilliant.

I doubt it was the same thing. I vaguely recall a scene like that, but I think it was the shock of recognition after being gone so many years. I think the mistake (aside for, in GH's case, the secret itself) is in doing at a point when they were so frontburner. If you can fix on a point in the characters' onscreen lives where they were not, say, in frontburner A-story, then retconning new stuff into a past era is not a big deal IMO. This was not the case for the Webbers at that time. Same goes for, say, Viki and Jessica and the disgusting molestation retcon Higley wrote for Jess on OLTL - Viki, Clint and their family were frontburner almost nonstop during Jessica's childhood years in question. Even if the retcon were somehow acceptable, which it wasn't, it would not be possible.

Yeah it was, and that is bullshit. I think the Webber house was a place where they tried very hard to build a picture-perfect, happy life and largely succeeded on the balance, but still had a lot of stuff seething under the surface - not just the David Hamilton trauma which made Laura a town pariah for a time onscreen, or Rick's own past with Monica which eventually came roaring back, but also Lesley's dark past with those other men and maybe even Laura's commune days. I think there are secrets you can still retcon in there, because retconning is often the nature of soap opera for better or worse. But I think a finer balance had to be struck with a family the audience knew so well and loved dearly, with three very popular characters in their heyday. Maybe something related to the Hamilton case, or Cameron Faulkner or Gordon Grey's family, that Rick helped cover up re: Laura, who was volatile back then.