They're just rerunning his final episode.

Edited Friday at 11:45 PM1 day by Vee

On 12/20/2025 at 10:50 AM, titan1978 said:

Nikolas is what tore them apart. It laid bare all the times they both chose to ignore something rather than face it. The rape story soon after destroyed the family unit of Luke/Laura/Lucky. Before Nikolas they were mostly in step with sharing the adventure and danger together. Laura got tired of being shot at, but they were still united and that was clearly not going to be the end at that time.

Luke could even later accept Nikolas, but not the betrayal he perceived in her not telling him. And Laura just shut off pain she couldn’t deal with, increasingly making her vulnerable to reality. In my viewing, the betrayal was Luke had pretty much been completely open with Laura, possibly the one person who knew him that well, and she still didn’t do the same with him. And it was with the Cassadines, their greatest enemy.

It's interesting to me as once the rape revisitation happened I felt like the show was saying Luke had always lived a lie with Laura and was never truly happy, which just seemed to spiral through the rest of his run.

2 minutes ago, DRW50 said:

It's interesting to me as once the rape revisitation happened I felt like the show was saying Luke had always lived a lie with Laura and was never truly happy, which just seemed to spiral through the rest of his run.

I don't think they were saying that from '98-on, but it's true the POV got coarser as Luke got darker. I do think they adopted that revisionist mindset and Tony's own changed thinking after about the mid-2000s, which is when his own attitude changed.

14 hours ago, DRW50 said:

It's interesting to me as once the rape revisitation happened I felt like the show was saying Luke had always lived a lie with Laura and was never truly happy, which just seemed to spiral through the rest of his run.

They both played a longing for each other, but it was tinged with a lot of sadness. The one two punches of revisiting the Campus Disco and Lucky dying in the fire were the hardcore breaks. Choosing to follow that up with the Felicia affair and Laura sleeping with Stefan didn’t help.

Guza didn’t do reconstruction, he broke things down then apart and let the sadness fester. So the natural progression when Lucky was revealed to be alive never happened. And Laura was really not given much to do at that point. She was just there, waiting for them to decide to repair their relationship.

There's an episode on YouTube from December 26, 1983, where Luke is wandering around town, saying goodbye to everyone, and a bunch of clips from his first run are played. Interestingly, none of the clips have Laura in it, and she was not in this episode. This is obviously a goodbye to Tony Geary alone.

It's much better than his final episode from 2015 (not too hard an accomplishment). Too bad ABC doesn't rerun this 1983 episode on January 1st, or put it up on Hulu as a tribute.

17 minutes ago, Jdee43 said:

There's an episode on YouTube from December 26, 1983, where Luke is wandering around town, saying goodbye to everyone, and a bunch of clips from his first run are played. Interestingly, none of the clips have Laura in it, and she was not in this episode. This is obviously a goodbye to Tony Geary alone.

The episode where he and Laura leave town together in '83 was also up the other day, and was also very good.

9 hours ago, titan1978 said:

Guza didn’t do reconstruction, he broke things down then apart and let the sadness fester. So the natural progression when Lucky was revealed to be alive never happened. And Laura was really not given much to do at that point. She was just there, waiting for them to decide to repair their relationship.

You could see the moment coming when they were supposed to make it happen - Lucky is revealed to be alive in 2000, Laura turns on Stefan and Luke and Laura go on the road together to find their son. All of this happened, they promo'ed it and as a teen viewer I was excited and more than ready; Luke and Laura had been apart for way too long as it was. And then it just didn't quite come together. I still don't know why. Maybe the BTS turmoil of that year, when both Guza and Riche iced each other out in mutually assured destruction.

I don't think Tony was exactly demanding more of Luke and Felicia, though he did do his part in selling that story and the affair to the press. I think he was mostly just very courteous and fulsomely kind to Kristina Wagner. And I can't see Genie vetoing it either, since she played a reunion arc a little over a year later under a vastly inferior creative regime. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe they thought they were going to string it out for the 20th wedding anniversary?

I do think Guza would've put them back together eventually. I wish he'd been the one to do it in 2001-2, for all his flaws. He never got much of an opportunity to write them fully together (willing or not). I am curious to see how it would've worked.

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by Vee

We know from Jacob Young there was tension around him as Lucky on Genie’s part. He was terribly miscast to me, as was Coltin Scott. I believe this was also a time period where she was isolated on the show because she had a first out schedule and her character was put essentially on hold in grief when Lucky was presumed dead. They just stopped writing for her.

Riche should not have spilt her team and her time doing Port Charles, it did hurt GH, even when Guza returned. And his own mentality had changed, the misery began under his second tenure and was just worse with Jill because she also loves misery.

5 minutes ago, titan1978 said:

We know from Jacob Young there was tension around him as Lucky on Genie’s part. He was terribly miscast to me, as was Coltin Scott.

Ohhh wait, I haven' heard this before - what was the tension - between Young and Francis??

The story I heard was that neither of them wanted Lucky recast but that Genie especially was against it. Jacob was also admittedly terrible in the role.

49 minutes ago, Vee said:

The story I heard was that neither of them wanted Lucky recast but that Genie especially was against it. Jacob was also admittedly terrible in the role.

Ahh interesting - I didn't know that! Did they recast because they didn't like JJ anymore, or did JJ leave on his own? Either way, AMC's gain with Young being JR. I loved Vaughan in the role too, hopefully that recast was better for everyone haha.

Jonathan Jackson was insanely popular at that time and both Tony Geary and Genie adored him. They did not ever want the role recast because of this. He left to pursue movies.

5 minutes ago, alwaysAMC said:

Did they recast because they didn't like JJ anymore, or did JJ leave on his own?

IIRC, JJ left on his own. He had been itching to leave for years in order to try his luck in primetime and films.

I know fans have complained about how Young's Lucky was too angry and Vaughan's Lucky too much like a himbo, but I think that's because Young and Vaughan weren't capable of playing Lucky with the same layers as Jackson.