Back at it recently with November/December '91. If you're not tired of lengthy posts about 35+ year old episodes that other people have already discussed, enjoy!
Come late November: The Eber plotline is thankfully over, and not a moment too soon. I was pleased it was briefer than people had claimed in the past (maybe a month or less), but it ended up taking up too much real estate by the end. The somewhat cartoonish finish with Luna, Tina and Jane Eber teaming up to take down Doug was silly but well-intentioned. What matters is it's over! I wasn't too sure about Jane turning up again at Cassie's very swiftly-arranged bachelorette party a week or two later, but I wonder if it's the last we see of her. I didn't spot her at Bo and Cassie's wedding.
Llanfair is already mostly remodeled in late November, with the new foyer, etc. at record speed after being reduced to something out of Threads or The Day After on Halloween night. People are already living in it again while Tina arranges the fastest wedding known to man. It's a little weird seeing the girl klatch of Megan, LB’s Cassie and Tina gabbing it up during this period, but I guess it works. Did Holly Gagnier or Ava Haddad’s visiting Cassie have a friendship with Megan or Tina? In the past I had wondered how this timeline fit together with Tina planning Bo and Cassie's wedding and remodeling the house while Cord was off dying in Jaba, but it's simple enough: Tina doesn't even know about Cord, because Blair doesn't return from Jaba alone until after the wedding crashout and the return of Sarah. I did enjoy Max and Tina reminiscing about their own not-wedding and getting up to mischief with their wayward sons during the wedding prep; James DePaiva and Karen Witter have an easy rapport, you don't see any seams from her recast. But I don't know if they ever shared scenes previously before he left in '90. I also missed the connective tissue of Little Al and C.J. when those characters were gone, as Al was aged to slightly younger than me when I first started watching in '93. It's part of why I hoped they'd bring back C.J., and why I never got over them killing Al when they should've just recast the miscast Nathaniel Marston.
Anyway: Luna asks poor straitlaced Jon Russell out again to try to get over Max. JDP does have major chemistry with Susan Batten from the jump, which again is making me wonder exactly when they settled on a Max/Luna endgame in this period. Malone was still giving interviews about having intended for Max and Blair to end up together post-Todd (probably after Batten left the show) many years later, but I don't think he'd ever have ended Max and Luna while she was alive. You can see them maneuvering quickly with Max/Luna, her unrequited love and their growing friendship as Lee Ann begins to have major doubts (for the 90th time, in fairness) about her fúckfest with Max, who unlike Joey Thrower's very earnest and almost too youngish Kevin still can't say "I love you". Not sure Lee Ann can really blame Max though, given how quickly they actually got together the instant his wife went off to prison. It's kind of insane; I think Yasmine Bleeth only came on in April or May of '91 and by August Nicholas Walker's fey Max Buchanan was howling over her, letting her take care of Al and acting like he wants to put a ring on this much younger woman for life?
Notable too that Kevin and Luna are even shown in the same two-shot together, both watching Max and Lee Ann canoodle at the wedding in early December. The contrast and messaging are crystal clear. I'm not yet to Max and Blair's famous/infamous NYE meeting dance at the very end of the month (which I have seen before) so I wonder when they recalibrated from their plans with Blair and Cord, and how serious they really were about Max/Blair during '92. Because to me this all still looks like a long, long tail to a Max/Luna endgame which we ultimately got. But that's all for down the road.
Speaking of Blair and Cord: Their confessional session and loaded chess game in Jaba City gets pretty hot and heavy in late November. I didn't know they made out quite this much, or how close they came to actually getting it on (very). It's more than a kiss or two and Loprieno and Korf are not lacking in heat. Interesting though that Blair drops a few hints to the soon to be "dead" man about her true purpose: She slips about her mother after claiming her parents are dead, and is very cagey about her true ambitions. I said last time that I can also see Jake and Blair having become a real thing if Joe Lando's career hadn't been ascending to orbit. He's onto her from the moment they meet.
Cord’s big exit (I think the week after Thanksgiving) is quite a serious water stunt, where you see JL underwater in what must be a big tank and Mia Korf diving in after him from above them both. There's the wacky Casablanca dream interlude I mentioned in my last post about this (shout-out @EricMontreal22 ) which seems a bit odd to spend only a small portion of the episode on, but it is capped by Tina's spectral vision of Cord in the storm the night before Bo/Cassie’s speedrun wedding, where he reaches out for her and vanishes. The show made the best of the situation and the crowded plot real estate they had by making sure Tina has these omens and dreams but does not know anything about Cord's fate during the more pressing wedding run-up and drama; Blair is off for several days at least as the lone survivor in Jaba City, shaken and traumatized.
As to Bo and Cassie's very fast courtship and wedding: The reveal of Alex arriving at the wedding, hidden away, is apparently a Friday show, but what surprises me is that the bigger moment - after Bo and Troy find her music box surprise, and Bo rushes back out to the terrace after the ceremony to see Sarah - is saved for the following Monday's ending tag. It would seem more appropriate for that to be the Friday cliffhanger. Maybe the odd fit had to do with a holiday preemption or breaking news prior? Anyway, it's just a quibble.
Elaine Princi's Dorian gets a great Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas moment at the terrace window, watching Bo and Cassie's ceremony. (Though when Cassie sees her and goes out to talk, Malone has Dorian directly reference it being Dickensian, his favorite author, and mock herself about being ‘nose against the glass’) Cassie’s attitude towards Dorian has been awful for weeks, but it’s hard to blame her too much considering what Dorian ends up putting Cassie through during her early marriage to Andrew just a few years from now. Still, their talk on the terrace and reconciliation did get me emotional; Laura and Princi play it very, very well, and the writing is there in that Cassie is just exhausted at being angry with her and wants her mother back. (And in fairness, she does fully apologize to Dorian when Alex arrives and Cassie learns the truth.) Also touching was Dorian’s spike of bravado right after as Cassie invites her inside to the wedding, followed by her admitting to her frazzled nerves and fear of public judgment with Herb. Elaine Princi deserves a lot of credit for channeling the best of Robin Strasser's poignancy in these kind of scenes.
However bizarre this sped-up romance is I did like Viki and Clint's dual advice to Bo and Cassie on the eve of their wedding. It was especially wild seeing Pat Ashley and I think the Medinas in Viki and Tina's respective wedding flashbacks. These days you expect folks to get blurred or cropped out!
Like many of us I’ve seen my share of the big Sarah reveal at this wedding before, from the large clips that have floated around on YT for many years, but it’s different seeing the full context of the show over weeks, days and months. So far I’m still very impressed with Grace Phillips, as I always have been. I’ll admit my feelings are likely colored by a longtime disinterest in Jensen Buchanan, and having only seen certain stretches of her popular OLTL run. There’s no denying Buchanan was an audience favorite and AW made her a star, and we know Phillips had BTS issues with Gottlieb which led to her exit in under a year; IIRC she all but vanishes from the show come summer '92, only returning to get offed in November. I have no idea if the audience ever took to Phillips at all and I know her stories were not well-received. But this introductory clutch of episodes still really impresses me, especially Alex’s last heartbroken look as she delivers Sarah to Bo on the terrace and then flees into the woods amidst the soaring music; it has a kind of serene joy representing Sarah's presence which is a great contrast to everyone involved being either shocked, horrified or well, Alex. I've also always been partial to Sarah's whole flashback narrative about her year in captivity, and her strange, almost romantic relationship with her melancholy jailer Conrad. They really flesh that whole story out in just a few well-done scenes, and Phillips and this dude are very good together. They also provide a very clear and explicit explanation for how they faked her death, which we rarely get today. I know Conrad actually does return somehow in '92 but not yet how; the byzantine Scarecrow, Carlo, Julia, etc. plotline (and why Sarah was taken alive in the first place) are things I have yet to piece together. I actually don't know when Julia Medina or Linda Thorson were last seen; not since July or August '91 at least. Is Julia even still supposed to be in town, and how was she involved with Carlo in the Rauch era? I know they had some involvement in '90 or '91.
For once Laura Bonarrigo's recent histrionics are well-tuned to the moment throughout this stretch of shows. First there's her escalating nerves, juxtaposed along with great, delirious handheld camera work, immediately following the ceremony where Cassie keeps getting waylaid for pictures while trying to follow Bo out to see Alex's "present" at the front door, minutes before Sarah's reappearance. Then there's her big confrontation with Alex upstairs (even if it's implausible that Bo, Cassie, Sarah and Alex keep losing sight of each other around the house) where Tonja Walker is at her most hair-rising and Laura succeeds in being appropriately terrified but not as pathetic and mewling as some of her last outings. I've always liked LB and I still do, and I think she often got saddled with either boring or truly gutwrenching material during her time on the show. I just think she got a particular rough ride in her first year, both before and after the immediate creative turnover. Nonetheless she and Walker go at it here and she fills the role she's given well, not buckling under to Tonja who at her best was always an unstoppable force. I don't know if she was this good on GH in the '80s but boy did they lose something. The end of the December 3rd episode has the bravura finish with Alex's total psychotic break as she's finally perpwalked out of the Llanfair drawing room, believing Andrew to be Bo and begging for his forgiveness, and even after being so scary upstairs she is genuinely kind of heartbreaking here, especially as Andrew (ever noble) kindly humors her despite her unease. Absolutely spine-tingling stuff you should see if you haven't.
All this and Cord's "death" waiting to be revealed to his loved ones is a lot to pile on the audience on top of Megan's recent lupus reveal, but at this point Megan's condition still seems benign and manageable. I know Gottlieb said in spring '92 she had begged Jessica Tuck to stay and I wonder how long that process went on. I think it's the December '91 mags of this period that began claiming Gerald Anthony would soon return as Marco as part of Megan's health crisis, which of course he did not; he only turned up on GH later the following year. Wonder what happened there as well.
One more note: Phil Carey has benefited heavily from the writing change. He is alternately gleeful & genuinely scary at times, dancing a jig down his stairs before coolly and quietly drilling Renee on what she knows re: Wingate Holden’s will. I actually don't know if Max ever sees a payout from this drama and if that leads to Serenity Springs, as I haven't ever seen this period leading to '93 in its whole before. Either way, the show is really picking up big time with the Eber interlude over.
By
Vee ·
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