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That scene just left me thinking that Alexis shouldn't just leave the dagger that killed her mother lying around. What, is she using it as a letter opener or something? I did generally love those Alexis/Ava/Ric scenes though, and I like how Elizabeth is being brought into the storyline. And I thought that all the James/Nathan stuff was exceptionally well-done. They were very sweet scenes, helped by the fact that the boy playing James is the show's best child actor, but they also had a strong undercurrent of tension because we know that something is wrong with Nathan, as well as sadness in the scenes with Spinelli.

Fascinating to compare this to the 2024 list and see how they've been using their black cast members more this year, especially Brooke Kerr and Donnell Turner, presumably in response to BTG. Now if they just gave them more interesting stories and fleshed out their characterization. Like I think Sawandi Wilson has a very engaging onscreen presence--he's the kind of actor who says a lot with his eyes--but Isaiah has been on the show a year now, and we still know almost nothing about his backstory.

Honestly, they should have sent Eleni packing as soon as Melina left. I just saw that Jennifer Roszell was there for 4 straight years--just as long as Melina--and I couldn't believe it, since she seemed like such a non-entity, and I didn't feel the chemistry between her and Frank.

I know you didn't want more Coopers, but I wonder why they never tried pairing Bridget with Frank. He was backburned along with nu-Eleni for most of the late 90s, but I think that Frank and Bridget could have had nice comic chemistry.

The blandness of Ryan Paevey's performance actually worked to the show's benefit on Monday's episode, because even though I could tell from Britt's reaction that he's playing the "boss" she fears, I genuinely couldn't tell if he knew it too or whether he has memory loss and has reverted back to Good Nathan. In other episode news, I loved how we got Kristina referencing Abby and suggesting that maybe her brother has a thing for sex workers. I also appreciated how they wrote Molly as smart enough to immediately figure out that Jacinda is Michael's alibi and their run-in with her at the Q mansion was all a set-up. Finally, what a joy to see Ric again! I have no idea where this story will go next, but I'm eager to find out.

It's funny: although I never knew that TPTB had tried to get Maura West to play Cassie, I had just been thinking about how Cassie's backstory seemed more appropriate for an actress like Maura West, Sarah Brown, or Ari Zucker, not Laura Wright. We were constantly being told about Cassie's hardscabble past and her work as a stripper, and even though Wright did her best with the material, I just never found it believable that her Cassie had come from that background. Unlike West or Brown, who excel at playing scrappy underdogs, Wright just has too much head cheerleader energy.

Unfortunately, you've got a long time to wait. I know they have some major conflict in 2002, but I can't recall much conflict between Reva and Cassie before this. Before that, I recall a few "Reva and Cassie Team Up" storylines that I found nearly unwatchable.

I think there's still plenty of good stuff on the show in 1998, but I'd totally agree that Reva's storylines for the next few years are the pits. After Annie pushes her out of the plane, I can't think of a single Reva storyline I liked until the Time Travel by Walking Through Paintings storyline, which is not a popular choice among fans, mainly because it involved time travel by walking through paintings. I should add that I found Cassie pretty annoying even back in 1997, but Cassie and Reva as a sisterly duo just grew insufferable as the decade continued. Cassie was truly the Scrappy Doo of Guiding Light.

I'm usually against giving characters total personality transplants when you bring them back with new actors, but with Dinah I'll make an exception. She hadn't been seen on the show since she was a teenager, she'd been away for 6 whole years, Moniz's Dinah was much closer to what the character should have been in the first place (given her traumatic backstory), and the original conception of the character was extremely boring and bland. There's basically no way you could have driven years of story with Original Recipe Dinah like they did with Self-Pitying Bad Girl Dinah.

Sure, Sonny's a supporting character in terms of how much he actually drives story these days. But when you look at episode counts, only Laura Wright and Cameron Mathison have been onscreen more frequently this year. Sonny has been averaging over 3 episodes a week! Divide that by three, and he'd be a lot more tolerable.

Aw, I loved Hunter! The dweebiness was a plus in my book because the show was so terrible at writing young people with any kinds of distinguishing personality traits. I thought he had great chemistry with Emily, and I enjoyed his little awkward romance with Maddie for as long as it lasted (which wasn't long). But as was typical in those days, the show had no idea what to do with new characters, so just threw him away after a few months.

Honestly, even though I loved the fact they were honoring Monica, I thought the clips they used for today's memorial were a little underwhelming, not really highlighting the aspects viewers most loved about the character, like her tart wit and her steely resolve. But I guess that's in keeping with most real-life memorials, which tend to flatten out even the most complex individuals with bland platitudes like "she loved her family so much."

I can think of one thing they haven't tried for Sonny: demoting him to a supporting character. Seriously, one of the reasons we're all so sick of him is that MB has a contract that demands he's on the screen nearly 3 days a week, whether they have any meaningful story for Sonny or not. And they used up all the viable stories for Sonny years ago. I think we'd all be able to tolerate him so much better if they moved him into the role as talk-to "Grandpa Sonny" and had him on once a week, tops.

Oh yeah, they teased the possibility of Matt/Dinah hate sex for years. There's an early scene (a couple of days after Dinah and Matt first meet) where he's still living in the boarding house, and she barges into the shower room to yell at him, and he walks out naked, basically daring her to look at his body. And then later in Vanessa's near-death It's a Wonderful Life fantasy, she imagines a scenario where Matt and Dinah get married (but still hate each other). I think during the Wheeler era they finally do have sex, but since both Matt and Vanessa are on recurring by that point, the impact is somewhat muted.

This will be a bit spoilery for alwaysAMC, as it comes in mid-1998, but we do get at least one great scene where Dinah finally crosses a line and Vanessa strikes back:

I just realized that she must have cut Decker, who I quite liked, and Colton (who was fine, but had probably run his course). Is there anyone else who got cut by Monty that seemed like a significant loss to you? Or did it seem like she actually was cutting some of the "dead wood" from the cast?

I haven't watched much of the short-lived Monty 2.0 era, but I was intrigued by your posts and found some coverage from Entertainment Weekly in July 1991 saying that the year had been a "bloodbath" in which Monty fired "a dozen" actors. I don't think this number included Finola Hughes or Tristan Rogers, who left at the very end of 1991 and early 1992. So does anyone know who else was fired? All I can figure out is that Jack Wagner left and the actress playing Dawn was fired. But who else was part of this "bloodbath", or is the number of firings being exaggerated?

I'll be the contrarian here and say that, so far, I'm fine with the fact that Maxie is sidelined for Nathan's return. If she were in Port Charles, then the story would have to center around her feelings that her husband is back from the dead. Which is fine, but--because soaps have done so many of these back-from-the-dead stories--is not as dramatically compelling as the beats they've actually been playing out this week, like Nina's reaction, and Felicia's reaction, and little James talking about his father. I also like the twist that Nathan recalls nothing since his shooting 7 years ago. Ryan Paevey has very limited range, but he played those scenes well. My theory is that they'll play this out into a wild gothic horror/sci-fi story where Nathan was implanted with Faison's brain and has been acting as the unseen big bad ("Him") in the Britt/Five Poppies story. I'm guessing that he was in town to menace Britt and leave the box of meds on her bed, but then got into a car crash that somehow took the Faison brain offline and rebooted his Nathan memories. The only question is will the Faison persona somehow come back? That might be so-bad-it's-good, watching Ryan Paevey try to play a Eurotrash supervillain!

I think romance is one of the show's real weak spots right now, and it's telling that of the actors who are in the Top 10 for episode counts this year, the only one in a really romantic storyline is Eden McCoy (Joss). I'm not counting Carly/Brennan, Sonny/Random DA Woman, or Drew/Willow or even Brook Lynn/Chase as genuine romance storylines. And it's too soon to tell whether we'll get any romantic scenes between Jason/Britt. I will say that the one advantage of the show's huge cast and rotating storylines--where we'll sometimes not see our favorites for a week or more--is that it does allow more time for slow-burn romances to percolate, like Lucas/Marco (who were dating for months before they even slept together) and Emma/Gio (who were a little too slow-burn IMO).

I saw this posted to another board, and I wanted to give a chef's kiss to whichever writer penned this dialogue for Monica: "I bet you're an excellent lock pick. You have the hands for it. I remember Alan and I used to argue for hours what kind of surgeon you should be. Of course, it didn't really matter then, you were only in high school. But he wanted neurosurgery and, of course, I wanted cardiology. And here you turn out to be a skilled henchman for the mob. It's funny how life turns out!"

I started watching GL in the 1990s, which I think helped me warm to Beth Chamberlain's performance in her second stint, since I didn't have any previous incarnations of Beth to compare it to. I didn't exactly love her in the late 1990s, mainly because she was mainly there to cause trouble for Harley and Phillip, who I did love as a couple. But I grew to appreciate her a lot over the years, especially as the writers mined the depth of Beth's psychological damage. Honestly, Beth's behavior--as maddening as it was at times with her love-hate relationship with Alan, where she kept coming back to him because he provided safety, money, and power--made a lot of sense to me given her past as a teenage abuse victim. Whereas the sweeter Judi Evans version of Beth played to me more like a romanticized fairy-tale version of abuse, with Phillip as the Prince Charming who rescues her from the ogre who wants her for himself. Especially during the Wheeler years, I thought some of Chamberlain's performances as a self-destructive female antihero were just magnetic. But I can understand why some long-term viewers felt that this "ruined" the character.

Just echoing what everyone has said about how great the Tracy/Jason scenes were today. It's pretty rare that the show delves into the traumatic implications of Jason's brain injury, so I loved how he acknowledged the loss of those precious memories growing up with Monica as his mom. I also want to give the writing team credit for making a very unusual choice. Typically after a major character dies, the next episode is spent with the whole town learning about the death and reacting in various ways. I'm sure we'll still get some episodes like that, but they smartly used this episode to focus on the grief of the two people who were closest to Monica.

I missed the first iteration of Jason/Britt, but I've generally been enjoying them this time around, as their scenes give Burton more opportunities to do deadpan comedy. That said, I totally agree with you that KT is a limited actress at best. I can tell the writers enjoy crafting Britt's snarky dialogue, and I think her whole abrasive-yet-vulnerable characterization is a winner on paper. But even after all these years, KT can't quite pull it off. It's too bad that they didn't recast this part, because I'd love to see what an actress like Jen Lilley or Emily O'Brien could do with the character of Britt.

I'd agree with that, but they didn't just ignore her--they actively broke up Obrecht and Britt's emotional reunion, then pushed them out of the hospital before Britt could get her life-saving meds. Dante and Lulu act like they're the only ones who have feelings that matter, which is about I would expect from the spawn of Sonny and Luke. If I just looked at the overall plot points, I would totally agree with you and Antoyne and feel like I should be on the side of the parents who got their baby stolen. But the day-to-day acting and dialogue choices just make Dante and Lulu so damn unlikeable to me. I actively want Rocco, who comes off as a sensitive, thoughtful teenager, to ditch their smug, self-righteous asses. And I should add that I don't even especially like Britt or Obrecht, and I'd be happy if they left the show forever to conduct unethical medical experiments together somewhere in Europe. But I've still been finding them less obnoxious than Dante and Lulu recently.

Unpopular opinion, but I'll just say that if I had Dante and Lulu as parents, I'd also be actively fantasizing about what it would be like to have someone else as my parent. The two of them got on my last nerve today, as they interrupted the emotional reunion of a mother and her presumed-dead child, then proceeded to make it All About Them. By the point that they managed to shoo Britt out of the hospital before she could get her Huntington's meds refilled, I was rooting for Rocco to run away from home and live with Britt.