Xanthe

I'm not surprised they waited until after they had Iris back on the canvas to bring Dennis back though. They could have created any old part for Chris Bruno if they wanted him. Adding Dennis without Iris would have left everyone wanting Iris. Beverlee McKinsey was such a powerhouse I never really got used to Carmen Duncan as Iris and thought of her as a different person. If they had recast Iris sooner though we might never have had Donna Love, which would have been sad.

I just need to sit and admire your phrasing for a moment. When I first saw photos of Robin Strasser's Rachel I was amazed by how much she reminded me of Erica Kane. This also reminds me of the SCTV soap parody "The Days of the Week" with blonde socialite Mrs McKay and her half-witted maid Mojo. I always thought they were Iris and Vivian but then I found out about Kay and Esther on Y&R.

This post re James MacDonald in the Soap Hoppers thread reminded me of a pet theory I had at the time when he appeared as "Blade" on Another World in 1986. Blade was an ex-con who hung around with a gang of creeps who menaced Nancy and kidnapped Victoria (thinking she was Marley). Michael hired him to help protect Donna when he knew Reginald was on the verge of coming back from the dead, and then Quinn hired him with Mitch to renovate the Cory mansion because they needed employment as conditions of their parole. He seemed to just disappear after that, but I think there must have been something in the soap press at the time hinting that Jake might have a brother because I really thought it was possible that it would turn out that that was the case, since he seemed to keep having significant interactions with Jake as well as other people. Nothing ever came of it and if it was the idea it was dropped and Jake left town with Marley soon after.

Based on the Another World home page synopsis for 1981 it sounds like Jerry sustained some kind of brain injury that made him stalk and rape Clarice. The synopsis uses the word "schizophrenic" but it's not clear whether they portrayed any symptoms of the disease like hearing voices or suggested anything like a split personality (which back then was the popular conception of what schizophrenic meant).

That doesn't sound impossible, but from a story perspective it feels as though the creation of Lorna broadened the story opportunities more. Lisa already had a close family relationship with Felicia, so making her her daughter would serve only to add Lucas to the mix. It seems more likely to me that Lisa was replaced by Jenna in Felicia's life. If Jenna had not been there Lisa would have been the obvious character to feel pushed out by Lorna's arrival.

Denny Hobson and Sally were married, which somehow never came up after she got involved with Catlin, even though he talked a lot about his misspent youth and even when she felt betrayed by the fact he had been married to Brittany. Clarice's father married Ada as well (wasn't Ada using the Hobson surname to the end of her life?).

I'm curious in what sense it fell apart. This is well after the expansion to 90 minutes and the spin-off of Texas, both of which are discussed as the beginning of the end. Was there a major change in the writing or in the cast that made the wheels come off?

The only thing I knew about Nina was her name, so I had no preconceived notions about her character. What was wrong with her? Taylor Miller's storyline as the Lesoleil Woman was ridiculous, but at the time I was glad that they didn't kill Sally off when Mary Page Keller left and had her leave town to visit Alice when she and Catlin were feeling more optimistic even though Brittany's arrival had caused some trouble in their relationship. I didn't think that Taylor Miller was terrible, but it felt like they did a lot to emphasize that her Sally came from a more middle class world than Catlin's rodeo past. And even though Catlin and Sally were not what they had been with Mary Page Keller, I have to admit that when Catlin slept with Brittany I was actually devastated and cried quite a bit.

That's funny -- I always thought of Chris Holder's Peter as a bigger jerk because he was interfering in Sally's life for no reason other than selfishness. However Marcus Smythe's Peter was behaving badly because he wanted the approval of his villainous father Reginald. It was one of the few areas where I thought Reginald actually made a valuable and interesting contribution to the canvas.

Since we've been discussing Brittany and Sharon Gabet again . . . when she started on Another World she had just had her first child. While she was on Another World she got pregnant with her second and left. It was actually her third child who was born later (during or after her stint on OLTL) who had special needs. https://www.serialscoop.com/2014/11/the-sharon-gabet-interview-journey-from.html

I'm not sure where the blame falls. I think in this specific episode there should have been an undercurrent of the scheming that was going on but she seems to be playing it straight. I'd blame the actor and director before the writer. Was there any writer who depicted her as having any scruples about what she was willing to do to get what she wanted? The character was always given sympathetic hooks: Lost everything (husband, baby, voice, hearing) in an accident; Zane liked her; Sally's son Kevin liked her and she rescued him from some danger; Donna was a snob to her; Peter became monstrously abusive to her, physically and psychologically; Rachel became her confidante during her marriage to Peter; Widowed Catlin became her protector. Maybe once Sally died and Peter started abusing Britt they stopped treating her as a villain and made her a victim, because of course she had to protect herself and her baby and there was no longer any reason why she couldn't have Catlin.

Peter was her second string if she couldn't get Catlin. Catlin was her first choice but he wanted to stay with Sally (as we see in this episode) even though he had cheated on her with Brittany. Zane had been in love with her but fortunately she never tried to trick him into thinking he could be the father of her baby.

Exactly. Watching that episode in isolation I can see how it wouldn't be clear whether Brittany is a sympathetic character or not -- she comes across as simply grateful to Peter for his kindness. And who could blame her for bristling at Donna's unreasonable attitude? But the previous day Brittany was hanging all over Catlin, trying to convince him that he must prefer her to Sally and trying to figure out how to make the best use of her pregnancy (which she hasn't told either of the men in her life about . . . I believe she hasn't slept with Peter yet so she has to get moving on how to set it up so that he can be persuaded that he is the father of her enormous "premature" infant). Actually the part where she beats him at chess ("I'm good at games") was I think supposed to be suggestive of the fact that she is playing him, but I'm not sure that comes across without the context.

Could this be a confusion of two Susans? I don't find any info re Susan Sullivan (who seems to have been partnered with a man for years) and Rita Mae Brown, but Susan Flannery's Wikipedia page notes her relationship with Fannie Flagg and their friendship with Rita Mae Brown.

She bridged the gap between Anna Stuart's Donna and Philece Sampler's Donna. She mostly functioned as a sidekick for Michael against Reginald.

Rhonda Lewin was the only Vicky who can be said not to have had much of a chance, IMO. All of the others were popular and lasted for years. As for Nicole, Kim Morgan Greene was cocaine Nicole who dated Jamie. Lauri Landry was singing Nicole who didn't get much to do. Anne Howard was the last Nicole, the fashion designer who was engaged to Cass and killed Jason Frame. I have been watching some of the episodes from 1986. Adam is supposed to be a fine upstanding honourable man, and I know I shouldn't expect much from the DePriest era, but I was somewhat shocked by how it was totally fine that he made his work colleague (and really I guess subordinate because she had been demoted to uniform for no good reason) MJ feel uncomfortable about having to sleep in Cecile's hotel room in scanty lingerie on their stakeout.

Larry Lau was the Jamie who came home as a doctor. (There was also Stephen Yates between Richard Bekins and Larry Lau. He worked at Cory Publishing and had no patience for Peter Love's nonsense. He dated MJ.) Larry Lau didn't appeal to me as Jamie. He was somehow too self-satisfied. I preferred Russell Todd (whose Jamie was still a doctor; was he the one who had the whole sexual harassment problem with Kelsey?) probably only because Larry Lau had set the precedent for bland and pompous Jamie and I shallowly preferred Russell Todd's looks for it.

Yes. He almost killed her three times. You could say the first two times were accidents and that Rachel was just collateral damage, but the third and final time in 1991 he hired someone to kill her because he was worried that she could implicate him in Grant's shooting. Yes, that was what I was getting at, he never intended to kill her in the 1980s, he just came up with cockamamie schemes that wound up putting her in danger in his quest to kill Mac. It's hard to blame Matthew and Amanda for being suspicious about whether it was a good idea to trust Carl. Of course Matthew also seemed to forgive Mitch for his crimes, so...

Alice's arrival coincided with the murder of David Thatcher. Sally had already been growing close with Catlin since his arrival earlier in 1984, so I would hardly say that Alice brought that romance with her. And Margaret dePriest arrived a couple of years later after a lot of intervening stories and then she killed off Sally and invented: Reginald and Mary; MJ's prostitute past and her pimp/boyfriend Chad; John Hudson and the idea that he, not Michael, could have been Marley and Victoria's father; and Lisa Grady and the serial killer the Sin Stalker. If they had been able to create a story with Alice and Steve that didn't undermine her maturity and her career as a doctor, that could have been more interesting than what she did get (mild romance with Mark Singleton and maternal support of Sally). Did Steve interact with Sally much during his David Canary phase?

Osburn with a u and no e on the end. Reading this interview on the AWHP, both Sally Spencer and Kathleen Layman attended Julie Osburn's wedding where they met each other for the first time. I always thought Julie Osburn was brilliantly cast. She played so well with Cass and Felicia but she also had a real rapport with Kathleen Layman -- and they looked like they could be real sisters. Sally Spencer looked less like Julie, but it's nice to hear they were friends offscreen.

Did Carl ever reach the point of trying to kill Rachel? For a long time his shtick was that he had it in for Mac and wanted Mac to die and/or suffer, but he had a thing for Rachel (presented as Richard III and Anne at least once) and swore that no real harm should ever come to her. I mean, she got amnesia and things, and he tormented and killed other people along the way, and they should not really have made the effort to redeem the character, but still, I thought he had always drawn the line at killing Rachel.

Matt Crane was only on-screen for about a year before Douglass Watson's death, so there's not a lot of storyline to look through. My guess is that he wouldn't have been so upset about any of the things going on in his love life at the time. So the likeliest possibilities look like either when he found out about Janice/Mitch/Mac/Rachel or when he was forced to turn in evidence that implicated Mac in the alleged murder of Drew Marston. And Mac's message of "have faith" sounds more appropriate to the Drew situation, so I'm guessing that.

That was why he was emotional with Rachel and thinking about Mac. I was wondering about the storyline within the flashback, where something had made him emotional and Mac was comforting him. Did she fire Justin Chambers (who seemed like a much more interesting performer) in order to hire him, or was she forced to come up with a replacement on short notice?

Mark Mortimer as Nick Hudson seems more competent than I remembered. I had recalled him as a vacuous prettyboy and rather dull. (Not that I liked Kevin McClatchy better in the role.) Jensen seemed very subdued, for Vicky. Does anyone know what was upsetting Matthew in his flashback with Mac?

Yeah, that's what I figured. I use the plot synopses to get the rough date of major storyline moments, and (since a character might appear yet not rate a mention in the synopsis) the Character Guide, Minor Characters, or even Day Players list to get date ranges for actors. I still had to go through 3 or 4 episodes before I found one with Rhonda.