Retconning: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

[titan1978]

And yet Robin Strasser to the end said she played Dorian as if she had killed Victor in her own mind, no matter what the story said.  She felt it was the defining moment for her character.

[Vee]

Eh, Robin and I disagree on that one.

[titan1978]

Retcons were prominent on all the ABC soaps in the 1990’s, but truthfully, it was a new golden age for GH, AMC, and OLTL for a lot of this period.

 

If they hadn’t hired Frons, maybe they would have continued to develop towards a future.  Because that is truthfully what killed them.  Their last round of trying to develop new talent ended in the 1990’s.

[Vee]

Maybe half of the '90s. The latter half wasn't so hot for any show but GH, and that came with qualifiers.

[mikelyons]

Agreed!

After Disney bought ABC in 1995, you can see the marked difference in the ABC soaps. They all suffered creatively from 1995-2000 and they never recovered. 

Raquel, Mateo’s son, and Braeden on AMC

Dorothy, Mel, and all of that nonsense post-Marty’s rape on OLTL

Firing Claire Labine and Wendy Riche from GH and jettisoning them with Pratt and JFP

The ABC soaps were doomed the moment Mickey Mouse took over. 

However, this is a retcon thread...

[titan1978]

Agreed.  AMC  and OLTL had a few good stories from 1995 to about 1998, but the entire show wasn’t as compelling as GH was during that same period, IMO.

[soapfan770]

 

IT was truly mind blowing that after all the crap we'd seen from McTavish, B&B Labine, Lucky Gold etc. and everything that had gone down under Rauch's 1996-2002 that in a single episode there in January 2004 Weston and Conboy destroyed and erased 67 years of GL history and continuity as we knew it. The two really ripped a new one on the show, and IMO are GL's worst EP and worst HW in its history.  It was already bad that Weston, who very mediocre, consistently ignored GL history and continuity before that on a regular basis to create her own version of GL. I remember being completely surprised with the news of Dinah Marler coming back in the midst of Conboy and Weston being fired because I was almost certain that we would never see any pre-2003 characters ever again. 

[juppiter]

GL was so on the upswing with Millee Taggart as HW.... it was tragic when Ellen Weston came and ruined the show.

[SFK]

 

Re: the scene with Pinkerton and Strudwick, she referenced The Little Foxes when Horace has the heart attack and his wife Regina doesn't budge to get his medicine. Sin of omission rather than commission as Dorian never killed him so much as let him expire. Major guilt/shame/ethics issues coming from a wife and physician (with or without her license). I still think Robin could justify Dorian's neuroses tied to the event even if it was Tori who snuck in and finished the job with a pillow.

 

I was absolutely riveted with the Lord of the Banner/DID era, I don't think I'd ever been so into a soap (which is saying a lot having grown up on '80s/'90s AMC). I found the history of the Lords to be so fascinating and loved asking my mother to fill in the blanks on stuff that happened before I was born. At first I didn't even realize that Victor had actually been on the show at some point.

 

I didn't know then what I know now about DID but I certainly knew where they were going when Viki started having those disturbing dreams and Victor kissed her on the mouth. Erika Slezak did quip in her archive interview that Ernest Graves would be rolling in his grave if he knew what the show did to Victor. But if you're going to address a mental health issue, portraying it accurately is the responsible thing to do. And it was well-executed. But I agree with Vee, DID should've ended then and there, the cheap ass sh it show with Jess/Tess/Bess/Wes (Am I forgetting anyone?) and RC's lazy shameless recycling on GH and DOOL should have never happened.

[watson71]

THE BAD: On Another World, in 1996, JFP and Margaret DePriest had Cecile claim that Cass, not Sandy Cory, is Maggie's father. Cecile said she got pregnant after spending a weekend on the French Riviera with a drunken Cass.    Cass was not even a character on AW when the original Who's Maggie's Father story played out.  Originally it was either Jamie Frame or Sandy Cory.   Both of these characters were off the show in 1996, so TPTB threw Cass into the mix. Once Cecile's lie was exposed, she left Bay City never to be heard from again.   A terrible lazily written story - and a waste of a good character like Cecile.

[Soaplovers]

 

I had asked my mom about the early years of OLTL and about Vicki's relationship with her father Victor.  She said she recalled that Vicki had this intense pressure to live up to her father.. that she was named after him (implying he thought he was going to have a son and ended up with a daughter), and leaned on her after his wife (her mother) passed.  So to my mom, it seemed as if the two had an emotional incest type of vibe.. and that he and Vicki were always concerned about sweet Meredith as if her parents.  So when i told her about the sexual abuse, the split personality, and her killing her father... my mom said it kind of made sense based on what the early shows showed.  I think Dorian could have just let Victor die because of what he did to Vicki in the past... that could of worked.

 

[vetsoapfan]

 

The retcon just never worked for me either. So much history had been predicated on Dorian being responsible for Victor's death that I never accepted any story that contradicted that idea. TPTB never seem to understand that viewers have long memories, and when we are THERE, watching events unfold on-screen, later changes to established and witnessed facts are quite grating.

[amybrickwallace]

 

I can just imagine the heads of long-time fans spinning over the many retcons of Victor Lord. Mine is, and I never even saw him when he was on - at any time!! 😨

[vetsoapfan]

 

The WORST was when Victor supposedly turned up alive. I NEVER accepted that tripe. I appreciated, years later, when referring to that god-awful plot, Dorian said, "...if that was really even him." The show at least offered the possibility that the "Victor" we saw resurrected was really an imposter. That idea was dumb too, but not as heinous and stupid as the real Victor Lord still being alive.

[vetsoapfan]

On AW in 1964, Pat Matthews was in a relationship with a cad named Tom Baxter, whom she eventually shot to death during a bout of temporary insanity.

 

Years later, when Pat (now Randolph) killed Greg Bernard, she flashed back to the night she had killed Tom Baxter, but said she had stabbed him with a letter opener.

 

Um, no. She used a gun and shot him. I have episodes from the 1960s confirming this fact. This retcon is probably a case of the writers not having complete storyline details from the show's early years. Harding Lemay later acknowledged that when he took over the reigns of AW, TPTB did not give him much background information about the show's plots or characters. 

 

Also on AW, Alice Frame suffered a miscarriage early in her marriage to Steven Frame, but at the time, her doctors assured her that she would recover well enough to conceive another child. No problem. A few years later, however, Alice suddenly announced she was sterile and could never become pregnant again. There was never any reason given on-screen. No explanation as to why she had gone from fertile to sterile. It would have been so easy for Lemay to justify the character's condition via a medical issue, but...nothing. Jacquie Courtney said that she was grateful her real-life husband was a doctor, because he was able to give her a legitimate reason for Alice's sterility. This helped her play the retconned scenes which she was finding hard to fathom.