The newly resurrected Lucky has Elizabeth in emotional distress. Does he still love her? If not, why not? How has he changed? I have to admit up front that for months now (since back in the Jason's motorcycle days, at least), the character of Elizabeth has left me cold, and watching her wring her hands and plead with people to reassure her that Lucky still loves her has not helped matters any. Still, I can see that the fate of the young couple is a front burner story for the summer, and I am hoping that my enthusiasm for Elizabeth is restored as the story unfolds. After all, back when the couple was getting together, I was enchanted by them. I suspect I could be again, given a good reason.

As I was saying, Elizabeth is trying to understand the changes in Lucky. So is the audience. I would contend that we have seen a couple of "small things" that indicate that Lucky is far more nostalgic for his romance with Elizabeth than he lets on. They are tiny clues, to be sure, but I am inclined to believe that they were left deliberately for us, the viewers, to pick up. While his rejection of his parents seems easy enough for him to maintain, his attempt to keep Elizabeth at arm's length is more of a struggle for him.

The first time I thought I noticed a signal that Lucky's mind was on Elizabeth while he was in captivity was when Luke and Laura were on the Haunted Star searching for him. While looking for clues, Laura found a map Lucky had drawn stuck between the pages of a book. Laura had panicked prior to this discovery, fearing that Lucky was not really alive and that Helena was staging an elaborate hoax. When she found the map, her spirits lifted. She recognized Lucky's handwriting and familiar personal landmarks of his in Port Charles, so she finally had proof that her son was alive. However, she and Luke read more into the map than they should have, misreading the second message hidden in it. As they looked at the sign Lucky had left for them to find, she triumphantly exclaimed that Lucky was hanging on to the idea of home, and Luke agreed that he was holding onto them. In that, they misjudged. The map, as Laura described it (we never got to see it), included familiar Lucky touchstones, to be sure, but it did not, apparently, include the Spencer house or Luke's club. That was, I am convinced, as deliberate a message as the map's existence. Lucky excluded his family from his mental map but included the important places from his relationship with Elizabeth. The map seemed to be a representation of the route from Elizabeth's home with Audrey to the boxcar.

A second hint from Lucky builds upon the first, which indicates to me that Guza intended for sharp-eared viewers to pick up on it. Lucky mentioned that route from Liz's place to his former boxcar hangout in a conversation with her. If Elizabeth had thought about his words, she would have realized that, for all his protests to the contrary, he has been reflecting on their past and has retraced old familiar routes. Lucky told Elizabeth that someone had "dared" to build a new house in the middle of the shortcut he once used between her house and the boxcar. Now how would he know that if he had not tried to travel between those two spots since his return?

Of course, being a die-hard Stefan (and Stefan-and-Laura) fan, I like to fantasize that this off-hand remark will be revisited and connected with my favorite man in black. Wouldn't it be lovely if the new house turned out to be that dream home Stefan planned to construct for Laura, the one he wanted to live in with her? Stefan said that when the house was finished, he would propose to Laura. I'd like to dream that despite their current distance, that this relationship will be revisited and revived. After all, Laura has never been one to fall out of love easily. This abrupt change of heart where Stefan is concerned has been just too complete and too pat to stand in the long run. Whatever Laura and Stefan end up being to one another, they, and we viewers, deserve better than this abrupt ending.

But I digress. Suffice to say that Lucky seems unable to get the boxcar and the familiar path from that boxcar to the window of his first love out of his mind. Elizabeth may wonder if he still has romantic feelings for her, but we viewers have reason to believe that he does indeed.

Carly's Miscarriage:

Carly bleeds easily. I appreciated the fact that when Guza and company gave Carly a miscarriage, the medical complication was bleeding that could not be stopped. It fit nicely with Carly's medical history, since she had similar bleeding problems when little Michael was born. Jason was asked to make a decision about her treatment (a nice parallel to Sonny being asked this time), and was told that she was bleeding to death. At that point, doctors wanted to do a hysterectomy but Jason would not agree to the procedure, and they were able to stop the bleeding without such a drastic measure. (This viewer assumes, by the way, that Carly is still able to have children after the loss of Sonny's baby, although that fact has not been directly addressed and so is left hanging tantalizingly.)

Besides the fact that the loss of the baby was medically consistent with Carly's history, I found it well done symbolically as well. I am a big Carly fan, of course, and have cried buckets lately as she suffered this terrible loss. And I found the loss of her child very consistent on a symbolic level with my understanding of Carly, which I readily admit is not everyone's take on Carly. To me, Carly is a needy creature who craves love and affection and feels unworthy of the very things she craves. She needs security, which she derives from connections to other people. Until recently, the only person she felt truly understood her, truly connected with her authentic self, was Jason. The sexual encounter that created this baby disconnected her from Jason in a fundamental way, but created new connections for her, connections to the new baby-to-be and to Sonny. After her fall, the connection between Carly and the baby was, literally, severed. The placenta partially separated, and the only way to save Carly was to take the baby, which would not survive anyway because of the rupture. Now Carly must discover whether her connection to Sonny has also been severed. Without the connection of the baby, what will happen to her relationship with Sonny?

The Jason connection was also in the air during the scenes surrounding the death of Carly's baby. The sexual encounter that created Michael, after all, was a drunken encounter with AJ that occurred because she went looking for Jason and found AJ instead. Michael was created in Jason's bed, and the whole complicated paternity mess ultimately brought her together with Jason, at least in a fashion and at least for a while. The sexual encounter that created the new baby separated her from Jason. It occurred while she was stuck in a loveless marriage to AJ. While the pregnancy created an alliance with Sonny that freed her from the Quartermaines, it was a fight with AJ that led to the end of this pregnancy. While Jason is no longer on the canvas, he is still very much on the mind of all concerned. Even in her pain while in the hospital, Carly was able to sarcastically remark to Tony, who had just told her that her head injury had not lead to any long-term problems, that AJ had apparently failed to give her a new personality, like he gave Jason. "Guess everybody's disappointed about that." Similarly, an angry Mike snarled the suggestion that AJ "go drive into another tree," another reference to the accident with AJ driving that altered Jason's life. Jason was not central to the story, which is very focused on Carly and Sonny and their differing reactions to the death of their son-to-be. Even so, his presence was felt, and appropriately so.

The aftermath of the Corinthos baby-to-be has been excellent so far. One scene in particular stood out for me, not only because it was outstanding in its own right, but because it resonated with other scenes from the GH past. I refer to the scene in the empty nursery, when Carly lashed out at Sonny for having all the baby's things removed so she wouldn't face painful reminders when she got home. Sonny felt he was doing the right thing, taking away the evidence of a young life that would never be. Carly felt betrayed and robbed, however. She implored Sonny to bring back the things that had been intended to welcome home a baby, so that the two of them could grieve for what they had lost surrounded by the evidence of that loss. This contrast between grieving styles, this contrasting reaction to physical reminders, reminded me strongly of Luke and Laura in the wake of Lucky's "death" last year. I remember clearly how angry I was with Luke when he threw all Lucky's things out the window and then dragged them to the dump. His reaction to the loss of his son was to remove all traces of him, but I felt deeply that he was wrong to do that, as Laura would want mementos of her son after the initial pain was over. I can recall that some GHR editors agreed with Luke's move, so it is not simply a matter of male/female reaction to loss. I ached for Carly, as I had earlier ached for Laura, because she had nothing to hang onto while she mourned her dead son. Yes, it would be painful, as Sonny had thought. For Carly, as for me, that is not a completely negative thing. The loss is painful regardless, and Carly wanted to embrace the pain, give herself up to it, not try to pretend it did not exist or could be minimized. Her connection to their child was even deeper, more visceral, than Sonny's, for she was physically connected to the baby. The baby had been a part of her, in a real sense, and that part of her was now gone. This is a deep, shattering pain, and Carly had the instinct to embrace that pain by physically embracing reminders of her loss.

Back to Front Page of Issue

Back to Top