All My Children Tribute Thread

[ellabelle]

I'm still watching the Erica-Travis-Jackson clips as some of them were right before I started watching the show (I started right after the fire). It's interesting that Erica placed so much importance later on Jack not lying about the affair for her in court when the writers had been setting Erica up to lose Bianca for months prior to that. I was only 12 at the time so I missed a lot, but watching it now, it seems clear from the outset that she was going to lose that little girl.

I feel bad for her now watching it, knowing how everything would fall apart for Erica, but God she dug herself into a big hole. She never should have remarried Travis, but once she did, she should have kicked his ass to the curb the moment she found out that he slept with Barbara to conceive another child. People seem to give Travis a free pass for that, but 1) they didn't have to have sex to do it and 2) Molly was in remission at the time. She was NOT hanging on by a thread about to die at any moment. She was getting better, and at best, having Sean was an insurance policy in case Molly got sick again.

I "get" Erica, and I totally understand why she had an affair with Jack, but she wasn't doing Bianca any favors by faking a happy family life, and she certainly only managed to make herself look worse to Travis and to the judge. It makes me wonder... since Eric was there at first and then walked out on her again, how different it might have been if he'd never come back to Pine Valley - would Erica have been more likely to just up and leave Travis instead of playing out this covert affair for months? Ironic too that Erica was so worried about Travis abandoning Bianca for his other children when in the end, Erica was the one who lost her child.

[DRW50]

I wonder if they were sort of trying to draw some parallels between Eric and Jack - tall, handsome, emotionally distant, both a big part of Erica's life at the same time.

What type of relationship with Mona and Eric have when he came back? I have only seen them (I'm only a few clips in) sitting on opposite sides of Erica at the Tad/Dixie wedding.

You make a lot of good points about Erica and what she lost - it seems like the show spent a lot of time building up to this and trying to make people understand Erica's point of view, instead of just saying she was a bad mother.

Do you think it was a good story choice to have Bianca taken away, and free Erica up for more stories, or do you think they should have had Erica raise her?

[ellabelle]

I HATE that they wrote Travis and Barbara off the canvas. It would have been SO much more interesting to see Erica trying to cope with Travis having custody but still living in Pine Valley with Barbara and the kids. Erica would have had the opportunity for more visitation, which I think ultimately would have been better for Bianca than being dragged all the way across the country where Travis practically cut her off from her mother. If Bianca had been close by, I think Erica would have been forced to behave herself more instead of doing things like having a fling with Charlie Brent or getting help for her drug addiction sooner or that awful storyline with her kidnapping Maria's baby. Plus as we later discovered, there was SO much drama going on in the Montgomery household that we didn't hear about until after the fact: Sean feeling like he was wanted by Barbara only for body parts for her favorite child, Molly, Barbara and Travis being unable to cope with Bianca as a teenager and thus sending her to stay with Erica for the summer, Barbara cheating on Travis, Barbara cutting off Bianca from Molly when Bianca came out, everything that led up to Bianca's anorexia. I wish we'd been able to see all of that. Plus Travis showing up when Kendall was revealed as Erica's daughter was pretty interesting even though it was a recast, and it would have been interesting to see all of that play out with Travis and Barbara living in Pine Valley.

For better or worse, I think the writers planned for Bianca to go with Travis because there was so much build up there with Erica wanting to protect Bianca but inadvertently doing more harm than good and Bianca pulling away from Erica and leaning more on Travis. What I think was completely unnecessary was Erica lying about the affair and then turning on Jack because he refused to lie for her. We're talking about a child who set the house on fire because she saw Jack and Erica kissing. There was plenty of evidence there that Bianca had a closer relationship with Travis and was not in a position to accept a relationship between her mother and her Uncle Jack, all of which would lean in Travis's favor in court. Having Jack contradict her on the stand like that was to me out of character for Jack and was the beginning of him being Mr. Morally Upright, and it created a huge stumbling block to their relationship. She did forgive him for it the following year, but she did so primarily because she wanted him back and away from Brooke, but she never ever forgot it, and she STILL brought it up repeatedly even after Bianca was grown.

[ellabelle]

I didn't see Jack as being a parallel to Eric at all. Travis was a better parallel. Jack was pretty emotionally connected to Erica at the time. I don't recall much about his interactions with Mona. She'd moved on with her life, and while she didn't seem thrilled he was there, she was polite in the scenes I saw.

I remember reading a SOD article about Erica having Bianca in which Susan said that she asked Agnes early in the pregnancy what kind of mother Erica would be because if she was going to be bad mother, she wanted to start subtly laying the groundwork for that in her performance, and she was relieved when Agnes told her that after much debate, Erica would be a good mother. I never saw Erica as a bad mother where Bianca was concerned - she always had the best of intentions with regard to her daughter, but she usually made the wrong choices for the right reasons. She stayed with Travis to try to do what she thought was best for Bianca but ended up making a huge mess of things by continuing the affair with Jack. To me the Frankie murder trial is a huge example of Erica as a mother: she was literally willing to sacrifice herself, her freedom, her life even to spare her daughter because she thought Bianca had shot Frankie in a jealous rage. It was a horribly misguided thing to do especially since Bianca wasn't the shooter, and Bianca was pissed that Erica thought she'd be willing to kill someone in cold blood, but the fact remains that Erica was willing to give up anything and everything to protect her daughter.

[DRW50]

I never understood why they killed Travis off - by the time they did, they'd already made Bianca about 16 or 17, so it's not like they needed him to be dead for her to live with Erica. There was a lot of drama in him still being alive.

[ellabelle]

I think they killed him off to force Bianca to stay with Erica. Barbara had made it clear that she couldn't handle Bianca, and with Travis gone, Bianca was stuck with Erica. Plus Travis dying forced Bianca, Jack and Erica to deal with Bianca's memories of the affair and the divorce, which was pretty compelling drama. It's kind of ironic how she was so adamant about them NOT being together as a young child and then as an adult was furious with Erica for messing up her marriage to Jack. Judging how Bianca reacted to Erica and David, Erica and Chris, Erica and Jack... I got the impression that Bianca just wanted her to marry someone and freaking stay married already - she ripped Erica a new one for cheating on Chris with Jack, and later for cheating on Jack with Jeff.

[ellabelle]

Is it just me, or does Jack manhandle Erica a lot?

[Cheap21]

Can they merge this thread with the new one that was created. Considering how long this one is and how much content has been posted, Id rather keep this

[Paul Raven]

When Erica met Eric.

[DRW50]

Thanks. I hadn't seen that before.

[Paul Raven]

[DRW50]

This is great. It's also very honest, although they don't seem fond of Taylor Miller.

Who was David?

[EricMontreal22]

I love these--Paul could you say what the date of both issues was?

[Paul Raven]

Thanks Eric. The circus coverage was from Oct 17 1989.I'll have to find the issue with the behind the scenes as I scanned it a while back and returned it to the pile. I really must organize all those old mags...

[DRW50]

8/6/91 Digest