Another World Discussion Thread

[robbwolff]

I don't think Mary ever fully regained her memory so that may explain why she didn't know Michael. However, they did interact. Michael was the one who told Mary about Reg's involvement with the twins.

 

As for Mary's complicity, what likely derailed the story was Anna Stuart leaving in 1986. Margaret DePriest set it up so that it appeared that Donna gave birth to triplets, not twins. Scott was rumored to be the third child that Donna gave birth to. The story was dropped when Donna resurfaced in 1987, now played by Philece Sampler.

 

As for why Peter, Donna, or Peter didn't mention Mary to MJ or Ben. I doubt the story involving Mary was planned when Ben was on the canvas. Ben was only around from July 1984 to February 1985. Richard Culliton and Gary Tomlin were writing at the time. Mary didn't factor in until DePriest was writing in 1986. Michael didn't show up till January 1986 so he never interacted with Ben.

Edited January 26, 2018 by robbwolff

[amybrickwallace]

Had Anna Stuart not left, do you think she would have been able to pass as the mother of Hank Cheyne (Scott LaSalle)?

[DRW50]

 

Yes.

[amybrickwallace]

There's less than a 10-year age difference there, but there was only ONE year between Y&R's father/son duo John O'Hurley and Peter Barton. 😨

[robbwolff]

 

Good question. I think she could have passed as his mother. Viewers bought Ellen Wheeler as her daughter and Ellen was only a few years younger than Hank. Viewers bought Stephen Yates as Rachel's son Jamie and there was only a three-year age difference between them!

[amybrickwallace]

Only in daytime, I guess!!! 😨😉😂

[watson71]

 

Yes, I believe he could have passed as Donna as his mother.  The writers did make a point to keep saying that Reginald and Mary were his parents by adoption when Scott arrived.   

 

Then, when Barbara Van Arkdale (Carla Borelli) came to Bay City as a rival fashion designer of Nicole Love, it was hinted that she could have had a child with Michael Hudson, possibly Scott , but the character of Barbara was quickly dropped from the show.

[Dr Neil Curtis]

I didn’t really buy Donna and Rachel as High School classmates, I guess mainly because Rachel was established first and seemed older. 

[Xanthe]

 

Marley is at least a year older than Cheryl -- if Michael left town say 6 months before Marley was born and Mary came to work one month after Cheryl was born, that could be a gap of at least a year and a half with no overlap. Michael met Mary as Marissa when she turned up in Bay City and he didn't seem to recognize her.

 

Mary left Reginald because he was rotten to the core -- he wasn't written in a way that gave her any justification for being loyal to him after she found out what he had done even though she had apparently loved him up until that point. There was no subtlety about his character and he had no redeeming features. She also didn't just leave him and go back to Vince -- she worked in Vince's restaurant in order to support herself and be around her daughters, and she also went to college. It took some time before she actually got together with Vince. The complexity of her choice wasn't between two husbands -- it was between independence and one husband (and reconciled once she had achieved something like independence and was therefore able to be both independent and have a husband).

 

Regarding Vince's face -- Mary was dead during the first Vince (Jack Ryland) and really only experienced Duke Stroud and Robert Hogan.

 

 

[SFK]

 

Her return is on my YouTube channel:

 

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[teplin]

 

Yes, that character was badly conceived, badly written and badly played by John Considine. He might as well have been twirling his mustache every time he was on screen, he was so over-the-top eeeevil. That made it hard to sympathize with Mary and her choices, even though Denise Alexander had audiences in her pocket from day one in her previous soap roles. I think Alexander made the best of what she was given, but the show really failed to capitalize on her appeal.

[vetsoapfan]

Ahhh, the good old days.

 

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[j swift]

Excellent point, Mary's growth is the one part of that story that I can appreciate

 

Another excellent point, I hadn't thought about the fact that Michael wasn't there for the birth of the twins (or triplets?) and I haven't done the math to see how long Mary worked in the house before she hightailed it to Paraguay.

 

Two points from my re-watch, when Mary-Marissa was first shown in South America there was at least some initial conflict.  Mary-Marissa believed that her husband was funding her charity work and that was important to her.  She seemed sophisticated  and comfortable in her role as an ex-pat socialite.  The scenes in her villa prior to arriving in Bay City only lasted a few episodes.  I guess that's what drove her to further her education? 

 

However, I do not appreciate that Mary never got a financial settlement from Reginald.  It was seen as a character building exercise for Mary that she refused Reg's money but I reject that narrative.  Reg stole many of Mary's good years and she deserved some cash for her troubles. 

 

What story brings in MJ?  I read that she dated Stephen Yate's Jamie.

[Xanthe]

 

Yes. M.J. was mostly involved in police work at first. My dim recollection is that she had a degree in psychology and tried to apply that to a case where someone was stalking Quinn. She had a kind of silent crush on Larry that never went anywhere. Jamie had been mixed up with Stacey Winthrop and then Nicole Love, but both of them had left town. Jamie and M.J. met when she mistook him for a criminal for some reason. Their relationship was pretty low-key and she was charmingly neurotic about it. I liked them together but it didn't set the world on fire and then Jamie left town.

 

I liked Kathleen Layman a lot as M.J. and thought she and Julie Osburn (Kathleen) made terrific sisters, but M.J. didn't get a major storyline until after Sally Spencer took over the role. And I liked Ed Fry as Adam tremendously and his romance with M.J.. I could have lived without Chad Rollo and M.J.'s past as a prostitute (at least as it was written), but on the other hand I adored the scene where Adam had to tell her family he was jilting her without revealing why.

[j swift]

Stacey Winthrop was a character that fell between the cracks.  During Cass's dramatic final few years in Bay City there's nary a mention of Stacy (or her Beast-ilke lover).  I was never a Mark Singleton fan so I appreciated when Stacy returned as a single gal.  The UK soaps are always good about having out of town relatives phone an excuse before a wedding but people become estranged when they live Bay City.