Xanthe

The main problem with Mandy Ashton was that Amanda didn't seem to have any goals or thoughts that weren't about attracting Sam Fowler. If the writing or the performance had been more nuanced maybe it could have been more satisfying, but it didn't feel as much like there was a character there as a plot. But they didn't really do enough to give depth to Amanda's relationships with her family and her background and then also kind of substituted Sam being related to Mitch for real stakes.

Ugh, the baby rabies. Not that long ago I watched some of the episodes where it seemed like they were trying to set up a situation where Marley found her fertility doctor (Eric Jansen, played by David Carroll) more sympathetic than Jake. (Apparently Eric also went out with Stacey, presumably as a contrast to Derek.) That never really went anywhere but I remember a scene where Marley went off on Dr Jansen about how frustrating and difficult it was to have to plan and schedule sex rather than just take pleasure in it. And then more recently I have been seeing episodes from the end of AW, where Jake and Vicky start trying to conceive, and obviously the show never intended me to juxtapose Marley's rant from 1989 with domestic Jake and Vicky in 1999, but hearing Vicky grouse similarly about how annoying it is to bother about cycles and whatnot without any apparent recognition that Jake had been through this (only more stressfully) with Marley before was offputting. Hot take: I am also more offended by the Lumina storyline than I am by the gorilla interfering in Cass and Lila's wedding. At least the gorilla was supposed to evoke memories from the period when Felicia and Cass and Wallingford were together and pay homage to some of the writers who wrote for them. Lumina was a weird supernatural Phantom of the Opera knockoff in the middle of a normally naturalistic show that put too much weight on the not very interesting romance of Amanda and Cameron.

Thanks for the correction. I remember the accident and Lisa communicating with comatose Vicky but I had forgotten the Marley drop-in. But now that you remind me, I do recall the appearance. And my shallowest recollection of it was that they managed to style Anne Heche's long hair so that it looked like Marley had a shorter cut than Vicky. I'm not sure if they just pinned it up or if they actually hid some of it under her clothes. Marley's clothes were a bit bulky and covered her pretty thoroughly.

My favourite objective fact that an actor was 100% wrong about was John Considine writing in his memoir that he had worked with Anne Heche on his first day as Reginald on AW in 1986. Ellen Wheeler was still in the rôle when Reginald arrived and Anne Heche did not arrive until July 1987. (I don't think Anne started playing Marley until after Reginald's death, either.)

In 1987, Rex Allingham (pretending to be Cass) dressed as a woman and pretended to be Nicole's Aunt Blanche in order to ruin her date with a bland minor character (after pretending to be a French waiter just got him kicked out of the restaurant). In 1994, when Felicia was being held prisoner by Walter Trask, Cass went undercover as Krystle Lake again in a much more chic wig in order to get information at a Romance Novelists' convention. ETA: Mac Cory shaved off his moustache and affected an English accent in order to get close to his temporarily blind ex-wife Rachel.

Are you going to insist I also remember Mandy Ashton? 🤣

Did Amanda have two? In 1989 Dustin Trent (played by James Kiberd) tried to force her to impersonate his dead wife in order to obtain some kind of inheritance. Then in 1999 the reason Jordan Stark was obsessed with her was because somehow she was also his beloved Amelie (and they had to break her strong, strong love for Cameron Sinclair so that Jordan and Amelie could be together). Don't forget that Alexander Nikos was a dead ringer for Lucas, and Anne O'Donnell exactly like Frankie.

Jake thought his name was Bunny Eberhardt when he had amnesia in 1995 because he had Bunny Eberhardt's wallet. I forget when he dressed in drag -- did he use the name Doris then?

I think if the show had not been wrapping up they would have gone further down that path. Where they left it Felicia seemed to have affection for Sergei even though he was frequently maddening, and Sergei I think at least once tried to suggest that perhaps they should kiss, although I don't remember if Felicia reciprocated. That does remind me that when Felicia came into town wasn't she sleeping with Gil, her driver? He was young enough that he dated Julia but I am not sure if the story made anything of the age difference. Dee (Deirdre Evans; played by Katie Rich) was the uncouth niece of loan shark Tony "the Tuna" Jones. Tony wanted Dee to attend Bay City's debutante ball which required her to be accepted by snooty society matron Enid Royer, so he demanded that Cass prepare Dee for the interview. Dee would have been supposed to be about 18, like Nancy and Marley, who were both also making their debuts that season. (It was absolutely expected for Marley and a bit of a social climb for Nancy.) Kathleen did not fully trust Cass at the time and there was an incident where Dee kissed Cass, Kathleen misinterpreted the situation and broke up with him (or if they were broken up at the time refused to reconcile with him) even though nothing had actually happened and Cass did not instigate it or pursue it any further. Depending on how you measure time, although Anne Heche was 19 when she started on AW in 1987, Victoria had turned 18 in 1985 on the show and could therefore have been considered 21 in 1988 when she seduced Jamie. I don't think there was any acknowledgement in the storyline at the time that Vicky or Lisa was "too young" for Jamie in any way, which is sort of what I was getting at generally -- they don't consider age differences to be significant in most cases even if objectively there must be a significant gap. And it seems to be more likely for it to be an issue plot-wise if the woman is older than the man. The sinister lookalike Rex Allingham came a couple of years later, after Kathleen was presumed dead in a plane crash. Unless you mean Krystle Lake, Cass' disguise that he started using when he returned from Majorca in order to hide from Tony -- but that was exposed pre-Dee at New Year's Eve.

Both the impulse to rapidly age characters who are too young and the pull to keep characters who would otherwise be too old within a generational age bracket have the same root cause -- perception of romantic viability. I tend to think of the phenomenon as a whole as time elasticity, because it expands and contracts unpredictably but it tends to keep the generations in place more or less. Cass did seem to stay in the same generation for his entire time on the show -- fully adult but never the parent of an adult, which I think tends to be represented as roughly anywhere from 25 to 45. Cecile was considered age-appropriate for Jamie, Sandy, Cass, and Peter. For Matthew, who was born on the show, we saw him pass through infancy to a toddler stage and then he was SORASed to about 14 before he jumped to college age and then eased into general maturity. Did he become generally mature at the point when he went into business with D&M and started an affair with Lorna? Just thinking about when the show did and did not acknowledge an age disparity in relationships ... by the time I was watching I didn't realize that Rachel was Mac's much younger wife. I was a child and they both just read as adults to me. I know that Matt was scandalously younger than Donna (who had also had flings with Catlin and Jake). But I don't recall it coming up that Cass was older than Lila, or John was older than Kelsey -- maybe I missed it. Any other acknowledged May-December romances I am not thinking of? Dee had an inappropriate crush on Cass and I think Cheryl had an inappropriate crush on John.

I rank Ellen as #1 for both because she was so good at not only differentiating between them but at doing Vicky pretending to be Marley and Marley pretending to be Vicky. I rank Anne as #2 for Vicky even though her Vicky didn't really get interesting until Reginald, Peter, and Lisa were out of the picture. I rank her as #3 for Marley because everything I can think of that she did always seems to come back to how it affected Vicky rather than what Marley wanted. I rank Jensen as #3 for Vicky and #2 for Marley. I enjoyed her Vicky with Ryan and Grant (even though of course she was messing up her life). I didn't care about Vicky and Bobby. Somewhere in there Vicky became too much of a heroine at Marley's expense, and pairing her with a more heroic Jake and ultimately splitting the twins so that Ellen was playing Marley reinforced that. But even though I disapproved of Marley's romance with Dennis, she felt like a more fully-realized character to me than Anne's Marley. I rank Rhonda Lewin as #4 for Vicky. She never had to portray Marley and she suffered from the same weak writing that made early Anne so much less interesting.

Wikipedia doesn't allow people to edit their own pages, so it can be frustrating when one knows something about oneself isn't accurate. (I can understand however the principle that Wikepedia doesn't want individuals to control whatever it says about them.) My comment about the AW page wasn't to complain that it was wrong -- if it had been absolutely clearcut I would have felt bold enough to edit it. I was more bewildered and curious to see how other viewers interpreted it since I assumed it was intended as a good faith interpretation and evidently the wording has been there for a long time.

I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for Another World (I wanted to know when exactly the cancellation had been announced, which was apparently April 12, 1999) and I was brought up short by this description: I cannot think of anything I would describe as exotic melodrama, let alone anything that was more exotic or melodramatic than something I might have seen on Days of Our Lives or As the World Turns.

I'll go out on a limb and say I didn't hate Jensen's Marley. She had the advantage of having storylines that didn't depend on Victoria (Anne's Marley, even at her peak which took a while to get to, seemed to exist chiefly to showcase Vicky) and she resembled a person and not just a line-delivery system. But Ellen's 1999 Marley was more raw and I wish that her storyline at the end had been better, that her trauma (especially vs Jake's treatment of her and any issues she had with Donna) had been treated fairly, and that she had been able to portray identical Vicky instead of towering over Jensen. While I am at it (I've been looking at some May/June 1999 episodes) I think that Sandra Ferguson (Rinehart?) was a slightly better actor by then than she had been in her original run but even if Lumina had been a good idea, she didn't seem to do very much to make Jordan Stark's beloved Amelie interesting or compelling. (Also I did not care for Cameron at all.) If they had not been in a hurry to wrap up the show due to the cancellation I wish that it had been possible even after the reveal that Remy was Paulina's daughter to keep Tito around rather than just make him the irredeemable villain of the piece. I liked Troy Hall and even though Tito was scamming Paulina I enjoyed the scenes where he was being sweet to her.

I enjoy all of these types of thought experiment and I do wonder about what might have been different. It is interesting though -- Chris Bruno and Jensen Buchanan seem to have been hired around the same time and I wonder if that was driven by casting Jensen or if they would have wanted Dennis as a spoiler for Jamie and Marley regardless. I found Chris Bruno very dull but he was supposed to be more exciting than stodgy Jamie (while I was rooting for Marley to hook up with Byron Pierce instead). I can sort of see (if I squint) how the same Vicky who was attracted to stodgy Laurence Lau's Jamie could have found Mark Pinter's Senator Grant Harrison appealing. The other day I came across a scene where Jensen's Victoria was giving herself up and returning Kirkland to Grant after having gone missing and it reminded me of the time that Anne's Victoria brought Steven back to Jamie after having run away over Xmas. The difference was that Anne's Vicky was truly somewhat repentant whereas Jensen's Vicky had swapped Kirkland for one of the endless* supply of Miller babies for the Loves to take temporary custody of. *Well, one of 2. The child Mikey that Donna and Michael took in and wanted to adopt in 1988 was a Miller, parents Toby and Eve; the one Vicky substituted for Kirkland was Sean Patrick Miller, child of Patrick and Laurie. And there was an unrelated Andrew Miller who raped Courtney Evans and killed Bridget -- I think I had imagined that Fax Newman must have been behind the hospital murders as well but I guess they had to get rid of so many characters in 1995-96 they needed a whole stable of serial killers.)

Absolutely. Although I did start wondering about how the timeline might have been supposed to work if Paulina had been Felicia's daughter. Paulina was old enough to know Derek from foster care. Derek was old enough to have killed Noah Grady when Felicia/Fanny was still around which I didn't think was supposed to have been very long after Felicia had her baby. Would Derek have been young enough to be in foster care at any point with Felicia's daughter? Mac's daughter has room to be a little bit older -- I believe the affair was pre-Rachel so she would presumably be younger than Sandy and older than Amanda.

It depends on when they decided what. Sometimes the information for casting is simply deliberately misleading so that storylines don't leak. When Paulina was cast the audience already knew that Felicia and Lucas were looking for their daughter. So maybe they were really casting for Felicia's daughter and changed direction after they cast Cali who looked more like Sandra Ferguson than she did like Felicia. Or maybe they always wanted a love child for Mac and just hedged during casting. I was looking through the synopses to see if there was any interaction between Paulina and Felicia or Lucas early on and there was none described. The closest she came was all the time she spent with Derek. Maybe her knowing Derek was a vestigial plot from when they intended to make Paulina Felicia's daughter, or maybe it was just a way of giving her a link other than to the Corys. Ultimately it seems like it was better that Lorna was introduced after Felicia adopted Jenna, so from that perspective I would say the story was not yet ready for Felicia's daughter when Paulina came to town. I was under the impression that Lorna ("Mavis" during casting) was originally supposed to be a minor role but when they cast Alicia Coppola they seized the opportunity to make her Felicia's daughter. But even if that was also misleading, the time (after Jenna and before Lucas' death) was right.

Jake behaved pretty badly over a lot of things, probably starting with the custody of Steven where both he and Jamie were asses. Before that he was kind of a good guy but misunderstood. I was recently watching the episode with Ellen Wheeler as crazy Marley with Vicky on a ledge and Jake pretending to be remorseful for the rape in order to try to make sure Marley doesn't go over the edge and take Vicky with her. But then of course as soon as Vicky is safe he viciously tells Marley how much he hates her. It made my blood boil to see Jake think he had the high road here. (Not that Marley should have taken Vicky hostage either, but she was clearly not in her right mind. It's too bad that they weren't able to tell a story about Marley's trauma without making it about poor precious Vicky and her self-righteous champion. I did like the scenes with Donna worrying about Marley even though it appeared that they were chiefly supposed to show how mean Donna was to heroine Vicky.) Thinking about Marley's trauma reminded me of one of my favourite scenes from 1985 where Carl meets Vicky for the first time. He has a little throwaway line about how Donna's treatment of Marley must have caused her to disassociate and create the Vicky personality. https://youtu.be/tNn5q5MOILE?si=zv1MvTzod70FlL4h

To give credit where credit is due I believe I got the idea here from @watson71.

I vividly remember that quote from Michael Laibson about Cali's delight on learning that Paulina was the one who shot Jake. Maybe she found that appealingly gutsy, at least. It does sound like there are two possibilities: either AW did always want Judi as Paulina and continued to manoeuvre to try to hire her even though they had cast Cali, and then fired Cali as soon as they had Judi; or else they knew they would like to cast Judi in some part but didn't decide to make her Paulina until they had decided to let Cali go. (Although only imagine if they had cast Judi as Nancy and kept Cali as Paulina. Nancy could have been a suspect in Jake's shooting, an antagonist for Victoria, a contrast with Amanda, a friend to Marley . . .)

Cali's Paulina as I remember her held more back and could therefore be sly and sneaky. She was more about self-preservation and I liked the way she made her own conditions when Jake blackmailed her into marrying him. She knew how to take advantage even when she seemed to be over a barrel. Maybe this is unfair but I feel like Judi's Paulina wouldn't be very cunning about it. She might push back but her heart would be on her sleeve. Did Paulina as Cali start to fall in love with Jake or was she more emotionally tied to Dack's Grant until after Judi took over? I don't know anything about Maggie on Ryan's Hope so I don't know how similar the character might have been to Paulina. I would not really have said that Paulina didn't have guts. Not sure who I envision being in competition with Paulina for storyline, but maybe that's not what Cali means by backstabbing.

If the men of Bay City want to have a gay dance party, more power to them. But promotions that focus on how attractive the people are instead of how interesting their problems are are much less likely to reel me in.

I managed to find a version of the Breakaway promo with Sam/Amanda, Felicia/Mitch, and John/Sharlene. It's not as good as the Vicky/Jamie/Jake version where Anne Heche really sells it despite Larry Lau's awkward moves. I don't think there's anything going on plot-wise for any of these couples at this point (early 1989?) that seems to suit the theme of "Breakway" and no one looks very comfortable to me. Breakaway Sam Amanda Felicia Mitch John Sharlene.mp4

I was touched by Natalie Haynes' tribute to her on Facebook. They had discussed working on Euripides' Hecabe [aka Hecuba] together. https://www.facebook.com/100027157131384/posts/pfbid0Bis71bB2XVjnuAajGPeWSCsZGGhUusdUoH1ApQJndSKrT5JSUbyt81KdnzWiHfhhl/?mibextid=Nif5oz

Haydn Gwynne has died. I remember watching Drop the Dead Donkey years ago. https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/actor-haydn-gwynne-dies-aged-66