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Speaking of one of those floppy-haired guys, were Lucas and Elizabeth portrayed as such close friends when Ryan Carnes was in the role? Not that I'm complaining, because I think Van and Becky are great scene partners, and I loved their "watching the Nurses' Ball at home" scenes today. It was fun to see them dishing about the people at the Ball, and it was a nice contrast to the heavy drama playing out elsewhere.

I also like how they've set up all the pieces where they could do yet another "shocking Gio parentage reveal" in another year or so if they want to. Because it's not at all implausible that teenage BLQ would have sexually experimented with both Dante and Cody. So if they want another violin-smashing moment next year, just have Gio find out that Cody is his real bio-dad.

What I love about this story is that I can empathize with both Lulu's point of view AND Lois's point of view. I can understand why Lulu thinks it's important for the truth to come out and why she feels a moral obligation to let Dante know he has a son. But these good intentions have gotten all mixed up with her hatred for BLQ, and so she's going about it like a self-righteous bully who hasn't thought through all the consequences of this reveal. And I can understand Lois's thought process keeping this secret. She couldn't bear to give her grandson away to strangers, and so she arranged an adoption that kept him in the family. From her perspective, it's worked out beautifully because as Gio grew up as a "Palmieri cousin", he got to know his father Dante, his mother Brook Lynn, and his grandfather Sonny. She just had the hubris to believe that she could play God and keep the secret forever. Maybe it's just getting to see Cynthia Watros and Laura Wright in full-on catfight mode a few days ago, but the show is starting to remind me of Guiding Light in its heyday, where most of the drama comes from the interactions of long-running characters who are likeable in some ways but have enough fatal flaws that they create their own problems. That's a sharp contrast for the way GH has generally been written since the JFP era, where most of the drama comes from external threats: supervillians, Sweeps month disasters, the mob shootout of the week.

I'd been pretty sure for months that they were going to reveal the big Gio secret during the Nurses' Ball, but the way they did it was pretty spectacular and exceeded my expectations. Good on the writers for not rushing this and instead giving us months worth of scenes that show off Gio's charm and great chemistry with the Qs, which made his devastated reaction today really mean something. Especially on a show with a cast as large as GH, we need time to build an emotional connection with a new character. I just hope they continue playing all the beats of this storyline for the next few weeks, because this reveal has huge repercussions for a whole bunch of characters and should lead to tons of organic conflict between them. I can't wait to see what Tracy will do when she finds out that Lulu was responsible for this reveal.

I like the twist of Drew framing Tracy, but now I'm sad that it deprived us of the sight of Jane Elliot performing "These Boots are Made for Walkin," which is such a perfect Tracy Quartermaine song.

Really enjoyed today's episode the whole way through. Having Drew and Nina as red carpet hosts was a brilliant move. You could really see Cameron Mathison channeling his own experiences as a TV host for shows like Entertainment Tonight, but putting a more sinister spin on the host's glib patter. And Cynthia Watros gave some amazing reaction shots during Drew's interactions with people like Carly, Joss, and Willow. I also really liked the Alexis/Kristina scenes. I know a lot of us find Kristina exasperating, and she is, but Kate Mansi and Nancy Lee Grahn do a great job of portraying a very real dysfunctional mother/daughter dynamic.

It feels like the show suddenly woke up today and remembered it was Sweeps month. Lots of action and forward momentum, including a delicious Nina/Carly fight.

Really good episode today. Even the characters who usually annoy me, like Chase and Brook Lynn, got some sweet scenes. I also appreciate that they're finally giving Lucky more to do, letting him in on Ric & Ava's blackmail scheme. And those Liz and Lucas scenes were fantastic; Van Hansis has been bringing such playfulness to the role of Lucas, he brings out the best in scene partners like Laura Wright and Becky Herbst. It was also nice to get Liz's perspective on why her romantic rapprochment with Lucky is moving so slow; it makes perfect sense that she thinks he's not really capable of settling down, even if he wants to be with her.

As always, really interesting to get your impressions! I was only watching sporadically during this period (whereas I was transfixed during the Marian storyline), but if I remember correctly 1996 was a pretty rough transitional year. It came at a period where P&G was playing musical chairs with its executive producers--ATWT was hit especially hard by this. The current executive producer, Michael Laibson, is out in November 1996, replaced by Paul Rauch, who stays for nearly 6 years. While Rauch has a few really bad ideas that cause long-term damage to the show, those don't really kick in until 1999, and his first couple of years are very strong. So once you get to 1997, you should see the show rebound significantly.

I can actually buy Brook Lynn being so self-absorbed and incurious that she never thought to question why her mom and grandma were so attached to Gio.

I know some of y'all really like Brooke Kerr, and so I've tried to give her a shot, despite her frequent flat line readings and distracted "did I leave the front door unlocked?" facial expressions. But lord, she is so bad at playing a tough-talking badass that I was actually rooting for Brad today to spill the beans to Drew.

I think it gets confusing because of the mixing of genre codes. Sure, a realistic character might contain multitudes and might do bad things but also be an enthusiastic supporter of his gay son. But in nearly every other way, from writing to performance choices, Sidwell is not a realistic character--he can only be perceived as a comic book villain or James Bond villain. It's like if you had a drawing of Donald Duck, but the bottom half of his face was replaced with a photograph of an actual duck's beak. It would be really really weird, right?

I'm not sure even the writers know what they're trying to achieve with Sidwell. Most of the time they write him as a Bond villain. But one who has a PFLAG sticker on one of the rotors of his private helicopter, I guess.

Really? A few months ago, before Marco was introduced, Sidwell had some scenes where he seemed to be flirting pretty hard with Lucas. Now, I guess I could see Sidwell being disappointed like, "I raised you to be a fey bisexual like me! But you're just so butch, Marco!"

Okay, those drugged party-boy Drew scenes today were hilarious. Hats off to the writers for contriving a way to get so many characters in the Savoy watching him do body shots off the escort Nina and Portia hired to seduce him. So many great reaction shots, but I think my favorite belonged to Joss:

I remember getting my hopes up back in 2012, when Ron and Frank came in and reduced the focus on Sonny. So I'm wary. And I don't even need MB to leave. If they just write up a new contract that cuts his episode count in half, I'll be happy.

Boy this is the kind of Sonny-centric episode that makes me wish they really were killing him off. It's like they're playing the "greatest hits" of all the annoying Sonny storylines they've done in the past, including mawkish scenes with Max Gail's Mike plus Stephen A Smith having a slow-motion shootout in a hospital room.

That's a great idea! Maybe Jordan could take a moment in one of her scenes with Isaiah and go, "Say, thanks for recommending Doctors Without Borders to TJ. He called this morning, and he's really loving it there in Zambia." And then they could go back to arguing about Sidwell or whatever. Or better still, Jordan could say, "You know what, I'm tired talking about Sidwell. Let's talk about you. You've been in Port Charles for nearly 8 months now, and I still know almost nothing about your past. Are you related to the Llanview Gannons by any chance?"

Absolutely--they need to cut some people first. They can start with the Sidwell-Ramirez family (though keep Marco for a while). And before they give Molly a new boyfriend, they could start with baby steps, like giving her some kind of interior life that doesn't revolve around her sister and mother. I mean, at least half of Molly and Cody's scenes together have been set at the hospital. Would it kill the writers to have Molly say something like "I hope I don't run into my ex here," then have her open up to Cody about how tough the breakup has been on her? Or better still, she could say something like, "It still feels so weird coming to GH and not seeing TJ here. After we broke up, he took a fellowship at a research hospital in California..." and then open up about her feelings. It still boggles the mind that TJ, by far one of the longest-running black characters in the show's 62-year history, just basically vanished from the canvas and no longer even gets mentioned.

I have mixed feelings about Molly. I think that the character is so thinly written that she could be written off the show tomorrow, and we'd barely notice. But I do think that Kristen Vaganos is doing a good job of bringing some specificity to the character, and with a bit of care, the writers could actually turn her into a key part of the canvas. The big thing Molly has going for her is that she's very different from most of the female characters in her general age range. GH has way too many "spoiled princess" characters (Kristina, Brook Lynn, Lulu, Maxie) who are played by actresses pushing 40 but who frequently act like they're sorority girls. Molly is their complete opposite; she's actually too mature for her age, neurotic and responsible to a fault. I think the best thing they could do for Molly would be to match her up with a guy who has some of those same qualities, who's a bit nerdy and introverted and OCD. You're absolutely right that this would go against Frank's general tendencies to "Insert Person A into Person B" to maximize his budget. But if he can afford to bring two new guys onto the show to support Joss's spy storyline, then he could bring a guy on to be Molly's boyfriend (and to introduce a fresh male character type).

I can see the actors trying hard to make it work, but Molly-Cody seems like such a forced coupling. I can understand why the writers wanted to try the "opposites attract" formula with them, but Cody already had a perfectly good "opposites attract" relationship with Tracy that felt like it could blossom into a full-fledged romance. And Molly is in the middle of the Kristina/Alexis/Ric/Ava storyline, so she has plenty to do right now. There's no need to rush her into another romance after she lost her child and broke up with her weirdly memory-holed partner of over a decade.

I totally agree that the show has been misusing Josh Kelly badly for the past few months, but I hope they don't get rid of him. He's one of the very few actors in his age range on the show who projects warmth and a sense of humor, so I'd definitely keep him over guys like Josh Swickard or Donnell Turner. There's always a place on a soap for a handsome loveable rogue; they just need to start writing some material that taps into that side of his character.

100% agree. I just think Jason works best when placed into storylines about his family relationships. Steve usually has Jason speaking slowly and deliberately, which makes sense for the character. But it doesn't always work when the show is doing action/mob scenes, as his slow-paced speech can take already-boring expository dialogue and make it more sluggish. But in family storylines like his scenes with Danny today, the slower pace gives the actors more time to react and convey things with their facial expressions. It feels more like old-school soap opera, which is very welcome on the frenetically-edited GH.

I actually think Drew's heel turn is an extremely smart use of Cameron Mathison's screen persona. I don't think Drew is all that different from Ryan Lavery (post-Gillian) on AMC. The difference is that GH isn't trying to pitch this smarmy, slick, self-righteous guy to us as a romantic lead. Instead, Drew likes to think of himself as a romantic lead and has sold Willow on the fantasy that they're the protagonists in a romance, but the show takes care to point out how he's manipulating her. And Cam really does have a talent for portraying all of Drew's smug entitlement and sliminess.

Ric and Ava are 🔥. I loved their hospital room scenes today. I'm also a bit impressed that GH is taking Ric and Elizabeth's car accident seriously by showing them each having a lengthy recovery process. Usually on this show, even if you're shot or poisoned by polonium or whatever, you're back to normal within a week.