Really interesting watching an event episode like this that used nearly the entire cast. It makes me nostalgic for days when soaps had the budget to do this. Still, it's telling that the best scenes--the ones where, when watching out of context, it's easiest to care about the characters and their dramatic situation--come at the Hughes house.
At the ball, we get a lot of short, polite, small talk conversations that are boring enough to replicate an actual charity event. Thank god for Susan and Lucinda, as Susan's clear disdain for Royce, Lucinda's brief emotional moment with Lily, and her amused reaction to the Hutch/Evan fight are some of the liveliest moments in this episode. Although I liked the Linc/Debbie scene at the end, I was really struck by how bland the younger characters were, to the point where they almost seemed interchangeable.
I didn't get into ATWT until 2000, and when I briefly caught scenes from it in the mid-90s, it always seemed dull and impenetrable. Watching this episode now, I have a greater appreciation for what the show was doing well at the time--especially in its use of its veteran cast--but I'm also struck by how it provided very few compelling "points of entry" for new viewers, unlike Guiding Light, which hooked me almost immediately when I started watching it in 1994.
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