Friday, September 25, 2015

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: UNEARNED SOAP REDEMPTIONS

Believe it or not, I wrote this post the day before Yom Kippur, and didn't see the connection until the next day... duh....

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Last week on General Hospital, Sonny got shot. A common occupational hazard with mobsters, even ones who’ve somehow become the town’s moral center and most-beloved citizen. Sonny was shot while trying to rescue TJ, who’d been kidnapped due to his association with Sonny. When TJ’s mom, the police commissioner, tried to point this out, TJ got huffy and reminded his mother that Sonny was the greatest person who ever lived – end of discussion.

Meanwhile, over at the hospital (before it was all about mobsters, General Hospital used to be about a… hospital), Carly, the woman Sonny was about to marry for the fifth time (see: Couples Who Can’t StayTogether… or Apart), was holding bedside vigil alongside Sonny’s three sons.

Said sons included:

  • Dante, whom Sonny once shot in the chest for the crime of being a cop carrying out his duties and trying to serve Sonny with an arrest warrant (but this was before Sonny knew Dante was his son, so the shooting was totally justified, just as long as the cop was somebody else’s child)
  • Michael, whom Sonny adopted after hanging Michael’s biological father, AJ, on a meat-hook and forcing him to sign the papers then, years later, killed AJ in cold blood
  • Morgan, whose girlfriend, Ava, Sonny slept with and fathered a child by, then accused Morgan of murdering the man who was about to reveal Morgan’s affair with Denise, whom Morgan thought was Ava’s twin sister but was, in fact, Ava herself.
Prior to Sonny’s latest shooting, Morgan was spitting mad at his dad about the whole, he thinks I’m a killer thing, while Michael had gone so far as to sue Sonny for custody of his and Ava’s daughter, Avery, because of the danger Sonny’s lifestyle posed to a little girl. (Michael should know, being Sonny’s child got him a bullet to the head and a coma that turned himfrom red-headed pre-teen to blond, broody young adult.)

But then, Sonny’s life was in danger, and, in the blink of an eye, it was time to let bygones be bygones! Both Michael and Morgan were, all of a sudden, pledging their devotion to Sonny, with Morgan swearing to avenge him. This is just like when Darth Vader, after a lifetime of killing Tusken Raiders and younglings and rebels, saves Luke’s life that one time, and now he’s got a free pass to shimmery, Ewok party afterlife alongside Obi-Wan and Yoda! It’s not like Sonny even did anything to redeem himself to his sons. He just stepped in front of a bullet! By accident! Even Darth Vader flung the Emperor into a bottomless pit!

Read the entire post, including examples from Y&R, B&B, DOOL and more at: http://community.ew.com/2015/09/22/soap-opera-deathbed-redemptions/

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