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Retconning: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly


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Thank you for the added info. I did not recall any real ramifications or long-lasting consequences from that story; no one being punished, going to jail, etc (although GH has so many degenerates who never pay for their heinous crimes). I don't recall it leading anywhere or having any effect on the characters afterwards. It was just foisted on the audience and then...nothing.  What a waste, and such destruction of legacy characters!

 

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I truly wonder what the story they pitched was.  It was Pratt and Guza’s return storyline, Pratt apparently wanted a big story for Laura, and whatever it was going to entail JFP wouldn’t put the story off so she could have the summer off like Tony.  Plus there was the story of Rick working with someone that was going to do a hostile takeover of GH.  All truncated or dropped when Genie and JFP couldn’t come to terms.

 

I wonder if they would have given Lesley actual beats to play if it was revealed Rick had an affair with Bobbie?  Because this isn’t just a story for Laura.

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Agree.

 

True, as a father to Viki and Meredith, Victor was very controlling -- but a pedophile?  IMO, to suggest that he was made idiots of every longtime OLTL fan who had watched during those years and never suspected that about Victor because, well, that part of his character was nonexistent.

 

Over the years, I've really come to hate much of Victor's retconned history.  Not just the stuff about him being a pedo, but also stuff like the secret room and his and Irene's affair.  (And the less I say about how I feel about Eterna, the better.)  For that matter, I don't even like how they rewrote history to say Viki, and not Dorian, was the one responsible for his "death" back in '76.  OLTL monkeyed around too much with Victor and Viki's history, making for something so convoluted that it's downright laughable.

 

And the thing is, the one time where they COULD have gone back into actual, on-screen history to give her a long-lost child -- specifically, when Cathy Craig had kidnapped baby Kevin -- they never touched.  Remember: Cathy suffered from amnesia sometime after abducting Joe and Viki's baby.  Who's to say she didn't forget switching Kevin with another child to prevent him from being found, or that the baby who was brought home to the Rileys was, in fact, their son?  They could have revisited those events w/o creating heretofore unknown parts of Viki's past, like they did with Megan; or building their entire story on the slenderest of footage, like they did with Jessica and Natalie.

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And I recognize my part as loving some of this so I am part of the problem!

 

As a kid, I loved the secret room and Tina finding out she was Victor’s daughter.  I was riveted by the entire 1990’s DID storyline.  From the research into the book, Dorian telling Viki and the other alters.  It was just very compelling to me. 

 

Even as a kid I thought Eterna was ridiculous.  And then we get to things like Todd being related, Victor returning from the dead for what, a week’s worth of scenes?  The retcons just started to go too far.

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In order for her to have conceived Nikolas, Laura would have had to have been knocked up on the very night she disappeared.  Otherwise, there just wasn't enough time for her to have been abducted, to have somehow been handed over to the Cassadines (because, wasn't David Grey her actual abductor?), AND to have been forced to marry Stavros and have his son (whom, by the way, she would never have left behind to be raised by the Cassadines, no way, no how).

 

And even that change made no sense, given how prominent Alan, Rick, Lesley, Monica, Laura and Scotty all were during the time when the events in the attic were supposed to have happened.  

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I would venture to say, however one may feel about it, that the most successful retcon, strictly in terms of what it did for the show, was GH turning Laura's rape into more of a seduction. Realizing that the popularity of the Luke character was growing, plus Asher Brauner, who played Roy, was leaving, they made Roy the doomed mob assassin instead of Luke and began to put a lot of their eggs in the L & L basket.This not only took the show to a hugely popular level but influenced what other soaps did.

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Maryanne Caruthers.  Yep.  It was a terrible retcon AND a total rip-off an earlier story involving Brandon Spaulding, Tom Reardon, H.B. Lewis and Bill Bauer -- which was, in and of itself, a retcon of established history.

 

Even worse, Carrie Caruthers, who was Maryanne's sister and the instigator of the whole mess, was played by Carrie Nye, who had played the nefarious Susan Piper about two decades before in the "Tony and Annabelle in the Cottage of Doom" storyline which, among other things, killed off Hillary Bauer, brought Brandon Spaulding BACK from the dead (before he died again in Barbados) and introduced Alan and Alex's AA half-sister.

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I know the whole angle with Rick's consortium taking over GH was allegedly supposed to be larger. I know there were rumors Zander would turn out to be Rick Jr. But I don't know what they were really committed to. Clearly not much. I certainly don't think either HW gave two shits about Lesley.


I always blamed Pratt for some of the tackier parts of the story, as it ultimately became a ripoff of Alison's molestation story on his Melrose Place - all the crimes committed in her childhood home and IIRC, attic. The Bobbie angle could've been interesting, I guess, but would have been so OOC for both of them. Rick sleeping around I can buy. The rest, no.

 

I know why people feel as they do about the Laura/Nikolas story but I think it was perfectly staged, timed and written. It made sense that it would happen, and it made sense to bring the Cassadines back. Their early menace was beautifully executed, and the scenes where Laura lays the whole tale out for Luke are extremely exacting in detail and brilliantly scripted and performed. I don't know who wrote that - Mulcahey, Guza - but they had stuff down from the '80s era.

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I will say this: For as much as OLTL monkeyed around with history, as a young viewer the only conclusion I could come to when hearing Victor had been mysteriously killed and that Viki had had multiple personalities was that Victor had molested her. That's practically the only thing that causes that kind of (controversial) trauma: Sexual abuse. It was the only story that made sense with her history, IMO; anything else was milksop. But I hadn't been watching since the '60s so I didn't have that investment in Victor. I still think it's the only realistic truth. After 1995, though, it should've been the end of DID and rape on the show. Instead they just did more.

 

Also, by the time they cut to the core of Viki's problems, Victor had already been established as a minor megalomaniac with Citizen Kane-esque obsessions of wealth and power, a background in military intelligence (IIRC, stuff from the Eterna story perhaps - something about the OSS) and a serial philanderer - like many magnates of his time. Incest was no stretch IMO.

 

 

It astonishes me that GL ripped off Charles Straub's Ghost Story (a great book and greater movie) not once but twice, each time wildly retconning their own deep history in ludicrous ways. Twice! Who does that? It's the exact same story with the names changed!

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Agreed.

 

I think they played her intense love for Luke and her intense fear of the Cassadines perfectly.  They killed Lesley when she tried to go back for Nikolas.  I also think the Laura of 1983 absolutely would have lied to Luke to protect him and also herself.  It is written on her face when she tells him the truth.  His not accepting Nikolas is ultimately what destroyed the couple, and she knew it when she was telling him.

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Before that storyline had occurred, though, the only one of Viki's alters whom we had ever witnessed was Niki Smith.  Jean Randolph, Tommy, Tori, etc. never existed.  They TRIED to cover their collective asses by tossing in a line during Clint and Viki's confrontation in the mausoleum (which is still on YT, maybe) about how they'd always been around, but...well, let's just say, I didn't buy it.

 

 

But all those were retcons, created years after the man was dead (or "dead") and gone.  As best as I can tell from my research -- and I dunno, maybe some fans who watched back then could help me -- nothing about Victor when he was alive and regularly on-screen ever suggested he was capable of doing those things.  Nothing.  And even though I will admit that, before the 1990's, OLTL's knowledge or understanding of DID, its' causes and its' victims was negligible at best, I DO believe in playing fair with the audience -- which, in this case, means Victor couldn't have possibly molested Viki, because that isn't what the audience saw for themselves onscreen.

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Victor was always a manipulator. The other stuff came later, yes, but by 1995 what was done was done. And as a child, the story absolutely terrified me - when Viki/Tommy threw Dorian down the stairs I had no idea what was going on.

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