OLTL: Discussion for the week November 30

[oltl1]

Another good episode. Loved the Dorian/Mitch stuff. I could watch them all day. Loving how the show is remembering its past by mentioning names like Cassie. Also liked the music montage at the end. Felt so sorry for Nick.

[DRW50]

I wish Cassie could have come back, even just for a day or two, as she did with Mitch's last return. No one knows Mitch like Cassie knew him.

Weren't there some reports, which were soon denied, that Laura Koffman was making a brief return?

Is that why Starr has been so heavily used in this story, as Cassie may have originally been in it?

[Cheap21]

how has Starr been so heavily used in this storyline? All we got was Mitch mentioning her name today and that was it. She's had absolutely nothing to do with it other than expressing concern for cousins

[DRW50]

I meant the gay marriage story. I thought there was some rumor Cassie would be back to attend the wedding. I guess I wondered if she might have had more to do in it.

[RoseVioletDaisy]

If they're gonna go any deeper with Dorian/Mitch, and I certainly hope they do based on what we've seen the last two days, then a Cassie appearance is almost required. A Cassie return would also be great coinciding with Kelly's reappearance; both of them returning to shake up the "Kramer-women" clan. I'm not above begging, Frank & Ron, if that's what it'll take.

As hard as the attack on Nick was to watch, I was very impressed by how the situation was handled. At first I thought Dorian marrying a woman just to try to beat Viki would be a campy joke but I liked how the whole story has come together with Dorian ending up in jail, Fish coming into his own, and Nick being attacked. There is so much good material here for multiple characters. Not that Dorian will ever outgrow her self-interested divaliciousness and thank goodness but I always like it when we get to see her heart peek through a little.

I must be losing my mind but does Schuyler actually make Gigi ALMOST bearable, even with that godawful cockatiel hairdo?

What is not bearable however is Todd, Tea, and their whiny brat. Ditch them. They're the only thing that's FF material.

[Toups]

Those Mitch/Dorian scenes were excellent! Dorian (yelling): Why are you smiling?!!!! Mitch: It's just so good to be home. Mitch putting the fear of "God" into Dorian by mentioning her girls. How fierce was Dorian/Robin with that chair! LOL So what is the backstory of Cassie/Mitch?

Poor Nick. I really like the guy. I agree that this storyline is really good.

I only Gigi in scenes with Schuyler.

Amelia bringing Dorian food was so sweet. I liked it.

[DRW50]

Cassie, who was then a young reporter, put up with Mitch's attempts to woo her (he wanted her trust fund), to expose his cult and various crimes. When he found out her true intentions, he tried to rape her. Dorian hit him over the head with a candlestick or something like that, and stayed in prison for a while until a tape surfaced revealing she had acted in self-defense.

In early 2003, Dorian, recently returned to Llanview, invited Cassie to Llanfair for a wedding. Cassie was horrified to see that Dorian was marrying Mitch. She slapped Dorian and left.

[Toups]

Thanks Carl! If I knew the context of today's scenes I definitely would've enjoyed it more than I already did. So far, Mitch's return has been a homerun.

[reallyhateskateonlost]

Dorian: "Why are you smiling?"

Mitch: "It's just so good to be back home."

[Vee]

Laura Koffman had an absolutely bone-chilling scene in late 2002 in which Cassie recalled her experience with Mitch for Viki and Bo. It was a couple days of a guest stint that mostly focused on that lame Blair/fake mob hit storyline, and a scene they did not have to write since Cassie was barely involved with Mitch's return at all (and should have been), but they wrote it and it was well-written and incredibly well-done by LK, who was amazing given that she was not the Cassie in the role back in the '80s.

Laura did not really interact with Roscoe Born upon his last return, though Cassie came in and out occasionally to clash with Dorian about him during that period. I would love to see her, but frankly the recent mentions have me worrying that would mean our Cassie is dogmeat. Which would break my heart, but hey, Mitch means business.

[DeliaIrisFan]

The scene with the homophobes was necessary. Hate crimes against people because of sexual orientation or gender identity are estimated to have almost doubled in the past year, and no doubt the increased visibility that the news coverage of jurisdictions that have (tried to) legalize gay marriage has been a big part of the motive in a lot of those cases. Ignorant, hateful people can become physically dangerous when they feel their narrow view of the world is being threatened. (Which is probably why racial hate crimes and violence against abortion providers is apparently on the rise as well, when we have a black president and some of the most backwards Bush policies to limit a woman's right to choose having been undone.) The more injustice starts to change, the more backlash there is bound to be from the people who were most desperately invested in it, and too often law enforcement is not inclined to step up their efforts to protect all people without public awareness and pressure to do so.

I applaud OLTL for showing this. If what's going on in Llanview were happening in a real town, you can bet homphobes who've gone off the deep end would be flocking there. I would hope a leader in a LGBT organization would not actively try and stop the police from being called to report a bias crime like Nick and Amelia did (yikes! It is so important for all of these kinds of incidents to be reported and documented) but some in the mainstream gay rights/marriage movement do like to focus media coverage on all things marriage and family and Norman Rockwell for PR reasons. And god knows anti-gay pundits are not eager to shine a light on the ugliest ramifications of the hate that they spew - which might make even some of the most ardent homophobes think of the people they try so hard to dehumanize as human. So the fact that this violence does still happen all too often gets swept under the rug a lot.

As for Nick being "emasculated," I appreciate the fact that they didn't try to have him act like a "real man" (which on this show too often means fighting, waving a gun around, kidnapping, etc.). Nick is an out, gay schoolteacher; he's not Todd or John, which makes him much more sympathetic in my book, not deserving of being brutally attacked. He didn't know how to deal with violent thugs. A lot of us don't.

All in all, I think this aspect of the story was handled really sensitively (so far). I don't know what to say about a soap that can have Mitch coming out of a coffin at a funeral and a gay bashing in the same week... The wildly shifting tone can often be problematic, but I'm usually entertained by the outrageous stuff. And now they're even managing to raise awareness of an important social issue through a storyline that I actually somehow believe is happening in the same universe as Mitch and Todd and Stacey despite myself. And Dorian as an unlikely ally to gay rights in spite of having a self-serving agenda of her own (like most politicians who do anything for anyone) works for me.

Nice job, OLTL! (Hopefully if this show is still on in 15 years, though, the ringleader of this attack will not have become the hero of the show, who it turns out was just acting out because he was tormented about his own repressed gay sexuality - with Jack and/or Shane and/or any other young male legacy characters who don't turn out to be related to him having catfights over who gets to have him.)

[All My Shadows]

I take back my initial feelings towards the Rodi's stuff. I came into the episodes after it began, so I didn't realize that we had already seen the phobes before that scene. I thought they were just random phobes who just assumed Nick and Amelia were gay for no particular reason.

[DRW50]

The only qualm I have with this is that since Nick is mostly just that guy who manipulated Kyle to get him into marriage, mostly just the third wheel to Kish, I'm not sure if viewers will have the sympathy for him that they might have if they had reason to care about him. And if he just goes back to being the spoiler, or disappears, then it will just be written off as another hate crime story which went nowhere, like Lucas on GH.

I do think that showing how prevalent violence against gay is is an important issue and I'm glad OLTL has brought it up, especially since some had criticized the show for being too upbeat in their portrayal of how people see gay relationships.

I kind of wish they'd had Dorian be the one who was attacked, just because I think Robin would have done a great job with the psychological and emotional beats and also because she would have understood more the struggle that gays go through. We could see Dorian go from someone who cares about gay rights but mostly uses them for her own goals to someone who really does end up walking in our shoes.

[SFK]

That last paragraph would have been very interesting Carl, and I know Robin's only interested in a Lifetime Achievement Emmy at this point but I think she would have garnered herself a nomination playing material like that. Wow, that would have been good stuff.

[DeliaIrisFan]

I wanted to add that I too like Mitch so much better this time around so far. I can't quite put my finger on it because he's still over the top, and he's still doing things that are distasteful (although I guess if I had to choose, I'd rather have my corpse stolen after I was already dead than have my heart cut out while I was still alive). Maybe it's just that they took away all of his humor and his sex appeal (I've seen clips of him and Tina in the '80s and he was hot - it was completely believable that he could get vulnerable young women to do his bidding - and Roscoe Born just seems to keep getting better and better looking with time) and had him quoting the most misogynistic bible verses they could dig up while revealing that he had raped Viki, having him seduce a barely legal Natalie, etc. It was clearly a bad match of Michael Malone's fixation with religion and spirituality in his writing and no doubt network mandates to keep pumping up the shock value. During Friday's show, I kept expecting Mitch to start quoting Leviticus to Dorian in jail when they were talking about her newfound commitment to gay rights, and I guess from a storytelling point of view that would be the way to go - make Mitch a voice for people who use false religion to justify hate in the gay story, and maybe even have the gay bashers turn out to be some of his followers. But I'm glad they didn't go there.

As jarring and out of place as it was, I can't deny that Mitch singing the blues in jail was not one of the funniest things I've seen on soaps since...well, since Roxy kissed that bigot at the big gay wedding. And then when Dorian ended up in jail with him and they ended up having it out...perfect. Hopefully they will keep him around just long enough for him to continue to be entertaining without it being overkill (I know, I know, OLTL is not always good at that).