Finally, a long-awaited (by someone, I’m sure, even if I can’t think of anyone at the moment) update on the happenings of Harmony. When I last write about this show…well, needless to say it was a really long time ago. In fact, it’s been so long as many as three whole days may have passed in Harmony.
I kid, I kid! Stuff’s actually happened in the months that have passed. A surprisingly lot of stuff considering the pacing of this show: Weddings (three of them aborted), funerals, pregnancies, secrets, lies, magic, and people getting turned to ice while their zombie doubles walk around. A typical weekend in Harmony in other words:
Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here (Comings)David: This p
oorly-conceived obstacle to Grace and Sam’s love fully-fleshed out character has come out of the blue claiming to be Grace’s missing husband from the first twenty years of her life of which she has no memory. Oh I just hate it when that happens, don’t you? He seems to know far too much about Grace to be faking but was in fact hired by Ivy to break Sam and Grace apart. He is more transparent than Patrick Lockhart only he has an accent and isn’t shirtless as often.
Brian/Antonio: This
poorly-conceived obstacle to Luis and Sheridan’s love fully-fleshed out character is a fisherman from the Bermudan triangle (exactly where has never been stated so I will say a tiny island off Bahaituba). He has a love of chesty blondes, something which he shares with his brother Luis. Yes, that’s right, Brian is really Antonio, the long-lost Lopez-Fitzgerald brother. Mysteriously, he has a Southern accent despite growing up in Harmony, New England and now residing in Bahaituba.
Liz: She is Brian’s best friend and employer upon the tiny island in which they reside. Since the island has a total inhabitancy of three, she’s pretty much his only friend, not counting the crazy doctor. She keeps asking him about his past but seems to have a past of her own she doesn’t want to reveal. Any guesses on whose long-lost mother/daughter/sibling/lover/dance instructor she is?
Doc: I’m not sure what his actual name is so I will dub him Doctor Crazypants. The small island’s only doctor has a love of insane conspiracy theories involving the Bermuda triangle and aliens from another world. This isn’t all that strange considering the closet to hell and zombies walking around that characterise Harmony. He is certifiably nuts. Still a better doctor than Eve though.
The Foetus of Doom: Theresa is pregnant with a baby that will apparently bring pain and destruction upon Harmony, according to Charity’s premonitions. This may or may not be considered a Very Bad Thing.
At Last! Freedom! (Goings)No-one has escaped this show as of late.
Bad Actor In, Bad Actor Out (Recasts)Even more unusual, no-one has been recast. Sure, there was Kay’s temporary recast of a panther which I named Bubbles, but otherwise every character looks the exact same as they did before.
Onto the show:
At Least The Church Looked Pretty (Wedding 1)Theresa and Ethan, and Luis and Sheridan were supposed to get married in a big double wedding. But Julian had other plans – Alistair had ordered him to kill Sheridan so that Luis wouldn’t find out the secrets the Crane mansion helped. Not to nitpick this brilliant plan but wouldn’t it be smarter just to kill Luis then?
Meanwhile Theresa and Ethan had SINFUL premarital sex on the beach. This would be punished in due course.
As the wedding was taking place, Ivy was led to believe that Theresa had been the one responsible for the tabloid reveal of Ethan’s paternity, and drove her car through the church wall like some deranged taxi driver to stop the wedding. God is so going to get you for that. The wedding was ruined, Sheridan’s finger was un-ringed, and Theresa ran out in a swirl of white lace and bad crying.
Shockingly Ethan was not angry and forgave Theresa for lying to him about having his paternity secrets on his computer. But fool Theresa used this as an excuse to go to Bermuda and try and convince Julian (who went off to get a quickie divorce there) to take Ethan back as his son. Word of advice: Nothing says forgiveness like flowers and make-up sex.
At Least They Got A Nice Suntan (Wedding 2 and 3)Luis and Sheridan also went off to Bermuda to get married. Julian decided this would be the perfect time to kill them and had two hardened assassins sneak a bomb onto their boat. Sheridan discovered the bomb seconds before it was about to blow and stared for a minute at the strange plastic dynamite-looking thing with wires and a countdown timer attached to it wondering what it could be. Duh, it’s a kitten, Sheridan.
Finally she clicked and screamed just as the boat blew to tiny pieces. Luis managed to escape with nothing more serious than a missing shirt but Sheridan was lost at sea! But with those floatation devices of hers, was it possible she had survived?
Meanwhile Julian got Theresa drunk on champagne. She woke up with the worst hangover ever – Julian hanging onto to her and drooling over her in bed. Yes, Theresa had screwed Julian and probably contracted about seventy STDs in the process. Worse, she had gotten married to the old geezer.
The Winds Of ChangeTheresa’s scream of “NOOOOOO!!!!” was so mighty that it spontaneously caused a hurricane to come into being and lash the islands. Luis, Ethan and a newly-arrived Chad decided to brave the hurricane to try and find Sheridan. The boys risked loss of life but the only thing they lost was their shirts which they tore off dramatically as they were buffeted by wind and rain.
They didn’t find Sheridan. An unidentified woman’s body was found and determined to be Sheridan’s but in reality, Sheridan was being rescued by a fishing trawler captained by a villain I shall call Hook. Hook wanted to throw her back into the ocean so he didn’t lose any fishing income (why? Was she attracting them by floating around in the ocean? Were they nibbling on her breasts?) but Brian beat up the captain and saved her life.
He was instantly taken by the beautiful Sheridan, not least because his only sexual contact in the last even months had been with two burly seamen and an amorous walrus. Even before she was conscious, he was already in love and planning how many kids they’d be having and what they’d be called. Sheridan woke up with no memory of who she was and named herself Diana (after her good friend, the late Princess of Wales).
Some sepia-toned flashbacks revealed that even in their past lives, Sheridan and Luis had been separated from each other by some plot contrivance. Take their trip on the Titanic which was ever-so-slightly reminiscent of a little known film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. A certain witch and her doll cursed the two of them (Sheridan and Luis, not Leo and Kate) to be pulled apart. Just as they fell in love, an iceberg put paid to their romance.
Sheridan and Luis found themselves floating in the icy water, clinging desperately to a headboard. Just as in the little known movie which may or may not have inspired this, despite the fact that the headboard was big enough to support both their weights if they got on opposite sides, Luis made Sheridan get on it while he stayed in the water. Sheridan was rescued but Luis was lost to the ocean (where he no doubt washed up on a desert island and awoke with amnesia).
"I promise you, I'll never let g...aw *bleep!*, your frozen arm just broke off in my hand."Memories Out The Corner Of My Mind:Just when Sam and Grace looked to have patched things up over her ridiculous irrational anger at him for not telling her he’d dated Ivy once upon a time a billion years ago, a wooden Pom with scary eyes called David Hastings came to Harmony claiming to be her husband. He tried to prove he was the real thing by telling her things about herself an outsider couldn’t possibly know (“You have a scar on your foot. You get strange premonitions. You have really crap taste in décor and love those kitschy angel statues.”) and asking her “But Grace, it’s me. Don’t you remember?” eighteen times per episode.
Finally she began to believe him. She said she was now in love with her equally wooden second husband and gave him the task of rebuilding her house as a consolation prize. Gee, thanks, Grace. Sam was suspicious and rightfully so because it was later revealed that he was hired/blackmailed by Ivy to break them apart.
Ivy decided to get her money’s worth and pursued Sam while David kept Grace busy. But God wasn’t going to forgive her for driving a freakin’ car through a church and sent a bolt of lightning down upon her just as she was helping Sam set up a relay tower during a thunderstorm.
Ivy was rushed to hospital where the world’s greatest doctor Eve said there was nothing she could do and the only thing that could save Ivy was for Sam to pretend to be her husband as she lay in a coma. No-one does medical quackery like Eve Russell, that’s for sure. This did lead to Ivy’s miraculous recovery which resulted in Harmony hospital’s mortality rate falling to an all-time low of 85 percent.
Becky’s Got A Gun (Wedding 4)After a funeral attended by Sheridan’s family and friends (and Rebecca in a wedding dress), the cast returned to Harmony where Rebecca set about threatening Julian with an elephant gun if she didn’t marry him immediately. She also remodelled the Crane mansion in tasteful brothel red and kicked wheelchair-bound Ivy out of the house. But Ivy will not be kept out by mere doors and windows and used her new wheels to smash through the windows. As trademark moves go, it’s a pretty cool one to have.
Never let disabilities get in the way of a good catfightTheresa and Julian struggled to get an annulment before Rebecca’s interpretation of a shotgun wedding, but before they could get it, Ivy discovered their secret. She confronted Theresa to gloat about what she knew but before she could get out of there and tell Ethan, Theresa was stricken by a flash of Lopez-Fitzgerald hotbloodedness (ie batshit craziness) and smashed Ivy’s motorised wheelchair to bits. Ivy nevertheless managed to lizard her way out of the room and fell down the stairs trying to get to Ethan, interrupting Julian’s and Rebecca’s wedding.
Ivy was rushed to hospital where she lay unconscious as Theresa tried to get the incriminating fax of her and Julian’s marriage license that was tightly pried in Ivy’s hands. Julian offered her a lighter to burn Ivy’s hand a bit so she would let it go but his true purpose was for her to light the oxygen in the room and blow herself and Ivy up. Noooo! What a cruel thing to do to the world, rid it of Theresa’s glorious hair. Julian also sent Rebecca down to the room, hoping to kill three birds with one lighter. The room went kablooey.
The blast was so devastating that the three women were left with slight smudges on their cheeks and foreheads. I think a single hair may have slipped out of place on Theresa’s head even. Julian was busted when Ivy woke up and the truth came out about his marriage to Theresa.
Eve and Pilar reacted by beating the *bleep!* out of him. It was fun. Rebecca reacted by surprisingly not shooting his balls off with her shotgun. Perhaps she remembered she’d get more money if she did it after they were married. Ethan reacted by getting angry for approximately five seconds and then forgiving Theresa as long as she wasn’t hiding any more secrets from him. Theresa reacted by fainting because she was pregnant with a brand new secret.
Like Mother
Like Daugter
Don’t Kill An Innocent Plot Device!Next up was a big anti-abortion spiel masquerading as a plotline. After examining her and telling her she was pregnant, Eve found out that the baby had to be Julian’s because she hadn’t used birth control while in Bermuda but had used it with Ethan. Hey, Eve, maybe if you’d explained to her how to use the damn Pill properly, the silly little twerp might not have screwed it up quite so badly.
Theresa was convinced the only way of keeping Ethan is to have an abortion but the Catholic coalition around her are pelting her with lectures about how she can’t kill an innocent baby because it’s against her beliefs. Pilar found out and she of course overreacted like crazy (which is awesome because I love Pilar’s melodramatic overreactions) and is now giving Theresa the Catholic Look of Extreme Guilt to try and get her to back down.
Ethan has suddenly gotten conveniently broody and is happily talking about the hundreds of fat children he and Theresa will have and how he can’t wait until she starts squirting out babies. Theresa meanwhile gives him sickly smiles and looks nauseous as he does things like give her creepy talking teddybears and setting an infestation of orphans loose upon her house.
Near Misses GaloreBeth’s boat got stolen by pirates for a joyride and Luis offered to go get it back for her in Bahaituba. There he almost ran into Sheridan about a hundred thousand times but just missed her every time. I think Fate’s trying to tell them something.
After all of this, Luis and Sheridan did not find each other and Luis buggered off to Harmony with Beth’s boat, seemingly Sheridan-less forever. But Sheridan remembered the name Harmony and that it was a town from her past so now she’s convinced Brian to take her there. Now they are sailing back to Harmony, against a beautiful night backdrop of painted-on stars. It’s all very romantic.
Make Like A Tree And LeaveOn the magical side of things, the teens took a trip to Warlock Island along with Tabitha and Timmy. Their boat also carried deranged daddy’s girl Norma Bates, who had come to Harmony to take revenge on Tabby. After the boat caught fire, Charity had a horrible premonition of a beach full of plastic skeletons wearing the teens’ clothes.
Norma ran around chasing Tabby and Timmy with her axe while Charity was lured into a magical cave by long-dead warlocks. These warlocks tried to get Charity to help them get revenge on Tabitha by telling her “You will help us...AND DIE!”. You’d think they’d offer her something more persuasive than instant death. Perhaps “You will help us…AND GET ICE CREAM!”?
The warlocks were defeated by Norma who came in and knocked their warlocky heads together. The teens tried to escape only for the dam to break (a dam on an uninhabited island?) and a flood to wash away everyone but Charity. Luckily Charity was able to turn to a helpful talking tree for advice. The tree told her that the only way of saving her friends was to give up Miguel forever. Charity believed it because it was a better actor than half the people on this show and she was able to use her powers to make the flood disappear.
The teens returned to Harmony amazed at what had happened. Norma was carted off to the psychiatric ward of Harmony Hospital when they found her talking to her father’s skull. Charity nursed a fear of leaves for some time thereafter but when she tried to very reasonably explain how the tree had told her she was going to lose Miguel, her family and friends scoffed at her. Closets to hell, fine. But a talking tree is just ridiculous. They did not send her to join Norma at the loony bin however.
Aren't there laws against sexual harassment from trees?Become A Bastard, Embrace WitchcraftAfter she’d recovered her soul, Kay had resolved to be good. When she found out that Grace was still technically married to David and she was in fact a bastard child, the shame led her to renounce her promise. “With God as my witness,” she Scarlett O’Hara-ed as lightning struck around her, “I will never be good again!”. As long as you don’t do anything dramatic.
Kay found a book of spells in Tabitha’s attic and decided to read them out and see if any of them could help her get Miguel. The first turned her into Charity but this didn’t work out because she forgot to heed what she’d learned the last time she was transformed into looking like Charity, and locking the damn door before she jumped Miguel’s bones.
The second spell she read turned her into a panther. At that precise moment, a real panther just happened to escape from the zoo so Kay was forced to run away from pursuing zookeepers. She got onto a high platform but just as her paws were changing back into hands, they shot her with a tranq dart. A hilariously fake-looking panther dummy with plastic hands attached to the feet fell to the ground. God, I love the special effects on this show. You know you’re watching something special when it makes Ed Wood look like Peter Jackson.
"Aw crap, my agent booked me on Passions? I thought I was going to be on National Geographic!"The latest spell is the best of all. It turned Charity into an icicle and replaced her with an exact lookalike. The lookalike is a zombie servant dedicated only to serving Kay’s commands, and I love her.
I don’t know what it is but I adore the evil varieties of Charity as much as I hate the normal good version. Is it because she’s so campy when she’s evil? Is it because she always looks so bored when she’s with Miguel? Is it because Zombie Charity is a total slut who not only takes great pleasure in shoving her tongue down Hank’s throat when he’s unawares but also huskily saying things like “I want to do anything you ask, Kay” in a tone I can only describe as a screamingly lesbionic sex slave voice?
Who knows, maybe if this whole seducing Miguel thing doesn’t work out, Kay can get together with Zombie Charity. I mean, it’s not like she’s really her cousin after all.
All I Want For Christmas Is A HeartIt’s nearing Christmastime in Harmony, and Timmy is trying to wipe away the image of Zombie Charity dragging Real Charity’s good name through the mud by praying for a heart so he can become a real boy. Awww, sweet. Tabitha keeps telling him that his Xmas wish is never going to happen but Timmy has somehow managed to finagle himself onto the national donor list.
A phonecall from Haromony
Slaughterhouse Hospital got him all excited as he was convinced it was his new heart. Turned out to be an invitation from the hospital to watch their annual Christmas talent show as performed by the residents of the psychiatric ward. One performer in particular dedicated her song to them. She walked out dressed in little girl’s clothing and sang a touching song about killing someone with an axe in order to please the skull of her father. She then whipped off her wig and make-up to reveal Norma, ready to kill them once more.
Didn’t we just get rid of her? Why is she back? I’ll admit I laughed at her song but even for this show, Norma’s one-note.