An ATV Viewpoint
BOY! DID GH GOOF!
Why the Legend's End Was a Terrible Anticlimax
by Marilyn Henry

In this viewer's opinion, Helena Cassadine did not put that curse on Luke and Laura. The curse on Luke and Laura--on General Hospital, in fact--was put there by the new crop of writers who arrived in the fall of 1981. In the weeks that followed that spectacular wedding, the Luke/Laura storyline went into a slow slide that distorted the characters and wiped out all continuity and suspense.

How damaging it was to the Laura character to have her gazing vainly at herself in mirrors, being thrilled by fans and behaving pretentiously with reporters. Our Laura had a built-in fear of reporters, of flashbulbs and notoriety; she would likely have had to give grave second thoughts to anything having to do with a Miss Star Eyes commercial. And Luke--given what we know of him ("I read, I know what goes on at those screen tests!"), would he be likely to allow Laura to go off to New York alone to deal with agents and photographers?

With their rapid bicker-to-bussing changes of mood and the small-talk dialogue, the characters seemed only to be going through the motions, not the emotions. Each episode closed up at the end, leaving nothing to carry to the net day to create curiosity. The writers compounded these problems by adding enough elements to the one storyline to fill out three others. Cassadine voodoo, Scott's dirty tricks, mobster threats, and a mysterious stranger with hypnotic eyes and a odd ring, were all tossed in with no connecting threads.

Along with an overabundance of plots, there was an overabundance of dangerous threats which no one took seriously. Imagine a Luke Spencer who would listen to his Laura tell about a tall man with piercing eyes following her and then respond with, "Maybe you were dreaming," or a Luke who would fall asleep in the middle of her description of how the tall man seemed to mesmerize her with a sapphire ring. To lay on that much menace and have Luke yawn at it was ridiculous.

It was also ridiculous to have Laura brush aside Luke's story of how a mobster had been threatening him and Robert. This was the girl who used to wade snow just to get to the disco to hear Luke tell her he was in trouble with Mr. Smith's gangsters back in the days when she was married to Scott and had no right to be concerned for him.

While the threats were falling all around, the mobster who issued some of them turned out to be a comic book caricature. The dreaded Mouse, whom other characters had described as "dangerous", really was a mouse, easily intimidated by those bantering boy chums, Luke and Robert. Luke, who had first hand knowledge of the underworld, surely would have been more careful. In fact, it was impossible to suppose that Luke, who was always protective of women, would send Emma and Tiffany (wasn't a movie star a bit too familiar a face for this?) out as decoys, putting them in jeopardy.

Much time was also wasted on the man with the Cassadine curse. His entire mission could have been accomplished in one brief episode. In fact, the night he flew out of Pt. Charles and off the suspect list, the airport in Pt. Charles was socked in by fog and all flights had been canceled--only the writers forgot they had established that fact.

Luke and Laura, who were about the sexiest lovers ever to grace the tube, were scarcely allowed any of those sensuous, insinuating, titillating, mutually urgent love scenes after the honeymoon. They almost forgot how to flirt. Dialogue implied they made love off camera, but little of the mood carried over on camera. This was, perhaps, the biggest disappointment of the post-wedding storyline. These two who were so familiar with each other, so involved and involving, so warm, were cooled down to a couple with career conflicts. Neither Tony Geary nor Genie Francis could get an honest scene out of such stuff because the situations were dishonest, the emotions false and the dialogue superficial. Their last days together had to be a terrible disappointment to fans who had followed this unique love story from the beginning.