OLTL: Discussion for the week February 1

[DRW50]

I know Bo and Clint have their feud but I also haven't seen any solid moments between Bo and Jessica or Natalie in a long time, even before Clint and Bo were at odds.

[Cheap21]

which is bad in and of itself but not as bad as him actually raping her

[wingwalker]

Yeah exactly. I already almost feel like I want to skip ahead to March. LOL

I'm willing to give soaps some leeway on stories, no story or soap is perfect, but sometimes when things are as bad as I thought this week's episodes were, ya just have to rant and call them out. LOL

[DeeeDee]

...Seriously?

[Cheap21]

Seriously

[DeeeDee]

Todd not raping his daughter but kidnapping her child to raise as his own makes him better than Mitch?

[DRW50]

Did he threaten to rape her after he found out she was with Cole?

[Doyen]

Co-signs.

[Juliajms]

It does in my opinion too. Giving you daughter electro shock, Raping her and having a baby with her is...unspeakable. I consider it much worse than kidnapping her child, but Todd is a rapist as well, so ...while I do think Todd is slightly less psycho than Mitch, I'm not sure what difference that makes. I wouldn't want to run into either of them in a dark ally.

[Melroser]

Maybe Mitch won't rape Jess and he'll arrange it so Jess will end up getting pregnant with Cris' baby instead. LOL... with this show..ya never know.

I'd like to see a Brody/Jess/Cris story and throw in Layla.

After this Mitch/Stacy fiasco, I'd pretty much be willing to watch anything. I have been a huge fan of this show for years but it has been wearing on me. There aren't too many characters right now in their current states that I look forward to seeing each episode. Now, it's like..oh...so and so is on today.....

[EricMontreal22]

I could almost be ok with it if it weren't played for campy laughs. No one can tell me it's NOT being played that way... the poor actors (well at least they're having fun I guess--it's easier to play the big over the top stuff as camp than to try to put real emotions behind it).

[oltl1]

Today as really lopsided for me. I loved the Roxy/Kyle scenes and the Clint/Kim/Nigel stuff. Roxy and Viki's absence has been the biggest glaring omission from this Mitch story and probably the reason I've lost interest. On the other side, the Mitch/Jessica stuff is just to much for me. I don't mind psycho crazy characters as long as they are not played like cartoons. I do have to say that this winter storm storyline has kept my interest though, even with all the plot pushing. Hopefully the pay off will be so great that I will forget all the things that bothered me to get to that point.

[DeliaIrisFan]

I can't believe I'm even asking this question, but... Is there any possibility that fathering a child with the daughter he just brain-damaged is not really what Mitch had in mind? I only watched bits and pieces of Friday's show and didn't even make it through to the end of their last scene. Obviously the intention was to make viewers think that's where this was going - so it's extremely repulsive even if they were just hinting at it for shock value - but was there any room for the possibility that on tomorrow's show he's going to reveal that his plan is really to have one of his followers impregnate Jessica or something? Again, that's still atrocious and enough has already happened this week - some of which I couldn't bring myself to watch - that I don't think I'll be watching OLTL anymore in the foreseeable future, so I don't know why I care. I guess I just have to confirm that they're really going there.

I do think this Mitch/Jessica nonsense is a new low for OLTL, and I can't really articulate why what's happened on-screen this week is worse than the rapemance. If anything, I think it has more to do with what's probably going on behind the scenes, and the sinking suspicion I have that this whole plot was a desperate attempt to outdo the rapemance and "recreate" the success of that. The ratings actually went up at the climax of that story, and now that OLTL is dead last, I feel like we're seeing a race to the bottom to try to shock viewers into tuning back in by featuring even more rape and violence and misogyny.

I truly don't understand what it is about the Mitch character that has inspired such ugly, ugly, ugly stories in his past two returns. Roscoe Born oozed sex appeal as a young leading man and has only aged beautifully into a dashingly handsome middle-aged man. I didn't even watch OLTL in the '80s, but the scene I most associate with this character is not anything to do with his last two stints but rather a clip I saw on YouTube or something years ago of Mitch and Tina going at it on top of a pile of money that they had swindled from Dorian or Viki or someone. How did the show's concept of Mitch get from there to here? Does ABC really think their so-called target audience (women 18-49) finds the idea of having sex with yummy Roscoe Born on top of a pile of money less appealing than incest and psychiatric torture and pregnant women in labor being left on mountains in blizzards and people being made into living organ donors against their will?

The polarity in this show is just startling. To say nothing of all of the things that I've loved about this show in the past couple of years, already in 2010, OLTL has broken new ground in terms of affirming consensual, loving sex as a beautiful thing - there was so much about that Kyle/Fish love scene that so many people, on-screen and off, should take pride in. But then there are others who want this show to deal in the lowest common denominator, using rape and gender violence for shock value, and it's abundantly clear that they're always going to win. So what's the point?

[DRW50]

I don't think it's been as bad this time, although part of that is based on him being put into the already existing stories with Stacy and her baby. He hasn't amped up the old school icky stuff until the last few weeks.

I think Mitch being written in this manner is based on:

- ratings stunts

- the comfort which comes from having a villain who can do anything and make any plot move

- the general level of perversion and misogyny which has taken over ABC Daytime since Frons

- lack of interest in writing for Jessica unless she is being tortured

and the one I feel has done the most severe damage to OLTL outside of Frons mandates

- a constant need to go back to Victor, what Victor did

I feel like Victor's abuse of Viki was a great story which has had bad consequences down the line. Most of Malone's writing for Mitch was Mitch as Victor and Jessica as Viki. This return has been less heavy on these references but they're back now that we're winding down. I think that OLTL sees all of this as some tragic Lord dynasty. Unfortunately I see it more as a long string of victimization which, adding to Frons's general lack of interest in strong women or in women over 40, means that one by one the women in the Lord family have either been banished (Tina), deadened down to nothing (Viki, Jessica), or are only allowed to be feisty if it involves helping a man (Natalie). It upsets me because the Lord family should be strong and complex women. Tina and Viki propelled OLTL to high ratings in the 80s. This family has become so desensitized that it seemed to take everything to even make Viki and other people move beyond an, "Again? Been there done that." when they found out Jessica was in peril.

The only person in the Lord family who really matters to those at ABC or the show or whatever is Todd, who has been oddly absent for most of this story, perhaps because of the parallels between Todd and Mitch which don't fit the romantic hero/devoted dad/long-suffering soul Todd. Even then, it was jarring to see Friday's show, where Viki brushed off the despicable things Todd allowed to happen to Jessica when she was Tess, and at the same time...Mitch was doing despicable things to Jessica.

[oltl1]

Excellent point Carl. The other thing that bothered me about that scene was how poorly Viki treated Tina in comparison to Todd. Poor Tina was banished by Viki for doing the exact thing and at least Tina tried to help.