It’s week three of the Crane party celebrating Theresa and Ethan’s engagement and finally something resembling plot progression has finally happened.
Thank God too, because it was no fun watching the same episode over and over again with a few minor changes. I swear, practically all the episodes the past couple of weeks have involved the same filler scenes being dragged over entire episodes and revelations being promised at the end of the episodes but never coming.
The party alone basically consisted of the following scenes happening over and over again:
- Ethan and Theresa dance, deliriously happy. Theresa expresses a fear that now that she is perfectly happy and has everything she has ever wanted, her Cinderella fantasy is about to turn into a pumpkin (Theresa has clearly watched soap operas before because she is entirely correct about perfect happiness inevitably being followed by bad shit).
- Rebecca and Gwen watch Theresa glaringly and gloat about their plans. Gwen is impatient and bitchy, Rebecca reassures her by repeating, for the millionth time, her plot for the two of them to become Crane wives.
- The tabloid reporter sneaks about the party, trying not to get caught and show Julian the newspaper. He is occasionally thrown out but always returns because Crane security is a joke.
- Ivy gives Sam meaningful glances while Grace cluelessly refuses to see the truth and Pilar looks worried that the truth will come out. Grace’s Doomed Baby aka the second son Sam always wanted, is mentioned as much as possible.
- Alistair prepares to play the tape of Sheridan’s confession over the phone to Luis. He blackmails Eve who gawps like a guppy and mourns her supposedly dead child.
- Luis and Sheridan dance hornily, all the while telling each other how much they want to blow the party and go back to her place to make hot monkey love.
Thankfully, this is all about to change (I hope) now that Julian was shown the newspaper front cover telling him that Ethan is not the fruit of his loins as much as he is Sam’s cuckoo.
Julian went all raging bull and threatened the tabloid reporter with a gun. Then he went to confront Ivy. In front of all the partygoers he reamed her in a most humiliating and public fashion, calling her all sorts of unsavoury names like “my whore of a wife”.
It was very entertaining. Julian says ‘whore’ with such pizzazz. I really enjoy hearing him say it even if he’s a total hypocritical, skeezy, borderline racist, whore himself.
I find myself comparing his “whore of a wife” to Victor Kiriakis’ “slut of a wife” and noting all the subtle nuances between the two exclamations. Julian’s is very long and drawn out – ‘whooooore’ – and full of indignation and wounded pride. It’s very pompous peacock who’s just found out his peahen is sharing a nest with somebody else.
Victor’s on the other hand is more to the point and concise “slutofawife”. His is more matter-of-fact yet still contemptuous. It’s a dismissive kind of contempt, more condescending somehow. It’s almost saying “You are so beneath me, you don’t even deserve my full anger”.
I know it sounds bizarre to deconstruct their misogynistic insults like this. But it goes to show what good villain actors can do with a single line and how much nuance and life they can insert in something like “whore of a wife”.
More proof of the power of good acting is that I felt a bit of sympathy for Julian when he was forlornly talking to Ethan after he’d realised that he wasn’t his son. It’s been a bad night for him, between finding out that Ethan wasn’t his and being given a dreaded tomato soup cake from Grace.
But Karma does not forgive tomato soup cakes so easily, so Grace is in for a big shock when she learns that her husband fathered another woman’s child. Her doomed baby is aware of its fate too. At one point Grace felt it ‘kick’. That’s not a kick, Grace. It’s a death rattle.
Maybe it wouldn’t be such a sudden shock to her if she wasn’t so dim about everything. All the clues saying that Sam and Ivy were once involved are dancing right in front of her but she remains blind to their hip-swinging moves.
For her dimness alone, I am going to laugh and laugh when tragedy befalls her. Even more annoying than her general dimness is how she is so incredibly judgemental about things. But not even the understandable kind of moral outrage that someone like OJ or Luis might have. It’s a completely over-the-top kind of moralising not often found outside fundamentalist religious sites:
Ivy: Once upon a time there was this rich girl who is in no way me, who fell in love with a poor boy who is in no way Sam. But she was forced to marry a sleazy rich playboy who is in no way Julian instead of her true love. Now she is stuck in an unhappy marriage while the poor boy has moved on and married someone else who is in no way you, Grace.
Grace: That sounds awful for the woman.
Ivy: Yeah, it sucks mightily. Er, or so I’ve heard from her.
Grace: But clearly the rich girl didn’t really love the poor boy or else she wouldn’t have let herself be married to someone else. Because nothing can defeat true love. Nothing at all. Not death, disease, societal pressures, rock, paper or scissors.
Ivy: Hey! I resent that! I loved him dammit! Er…by ‘I’ I mean the rich girl who is in no way me, of course.
Grace: But the person I really feel sorry for is the woman the poor boy married. How could he do something like that and not tell his wife? How could he have loved another woman way before he and his wife ever met, and not have told her all about it? It makes me sick. I don’t think I would ever be able to look a man like that in the face. Ever.
Sam:
Gulp, more punch anyone?
Because that is clearly the worst thing a man can do in a marriage. Not abuse or affairs but not telling his wife about a past love. With an open-minded and understanding attitude like that, it’s a wonder Sam hasn’t told her about his past with Ivy yet.
Incidentally, why are Ivy and Pilar both wearing ugly black dresses with sparkly bits? Why are they ugger co-ordinated? Did they have a convo before they got ready for the party where they chattered about what they were going to wear and Pilar was all “Dios Mio, I love your glittery black dress with the hideous jacket over it, Mrs Crane. I only wish I had a dress as unflattering as that,” and Ivy was all “Oh, Pilar, if you love it so much, I just happen to have another ugly sparkly black dress. It doesn’t have the ugly collared jacket the mine has, but it will make you look like a goth who’s just discovered rhinestones.”
I’m not so good at the descriptions. So I’ll let them speak for themselves:
Pilar: "Mrs Crane, have you looked in the mirror lately? Please do so, I beg of you."
Ivy: "Dear God in heaven, I look awful! This'll teach me to get dressed while hopped up on Valium."
Pilar: "There, there Mrs Crane. I will stay by your side the rest of the night so that both of our ugly dresses will be the talk of the party, not just yuors.."
Back at the Bennett house, Hecuba’s nobles efforts to eliminate Charity seem to have finally succeeded. It looked for a while that Hecuba would be the one eliminated when Reese showed up with some sort of evil-sucking machine he built based on instructions on the Internet. How come I have trouble finding song lyrics on the Internet and Reese is able to find a blow-by-blow site on how to build a vacuum cleaner that can suck up evil beings and soulless people?
When there's something strange / In the Bennett house / Who you gonna call / HellbustersI’d make the obvious Ghostbusters comparison here but Ghostbusters had way better graphics and that came out in 1984. I will say that I’d take Slimer any day over Charity because he may be a green ectoplasmic blob, but he’s a more convincing actor and more identifiable character than she is.
Luckily for Hecuba, Kay saved her from the ghostbusting machine and proceeded to try and get Charity to go to her room to face the horror in her closet (besides her wardrobe I mean). Charity was nervous but finally stepped inside to find…nothing out of the ordinary at all. Phew.
But just as Charity smiled and breathed a sigh of relief, her closet door opened to reveal the portal to hell! Charity was pulled to the closet but avoided being sucked into hell’s gaping maw by holding onto her (suspiciously non-swinging) closet door. As she screeched and shrilled for Kay to save her, Kay merely stared with dead, soulless eyes much like I did.
Then came the least urgent action scenes ever where a couple of
guys in body paint and coloured dishcloths on their heads demons tried to pull Charity as weak and feebly as possible. Kay snapped out of her soulless daze and tried to pull Charity out as weakly and feebly as possible. It was epic, man. As epic as a chappie wrapper and about as urgency-filled as a tampon ad.
Finally Hecuba got as bored of watching this endless and pathetic tug-of-war that she pushed Kay aside and gave Charity a hard push. Or possibly a soft one as it wouldn’t take very much. Charity felt herself fall back into her hell closet and disappeared in a burst of flame.
Hooray! R Kelly move over – this is the kind of Trapped In The Closet shenanigans I like to see.
In other supernatural news, Tabitha and Timmy left Harmony after Timmy Macgyvered some fake passports. In order to avoid the fallout from the book (which Tabitha namedropped the title of at every opportunity and I’m surprised she didn’t add the price or the website where you could buy it) the two of them decided to lay low at a motel in the middle of nowhere.
According to Timmy, this motel is famous for its showers and promises its guests a killer time. Its owners are a parent and child family called Bates. The parent lives in an old house overlooking the hotel and can be seen silhouetted sitting against the window.
Now I know you’re thinking that it sounds unnervingly familiar, but it’s not what you think.
That creepy motel was owned by one Norman Bates and his mother, while this one is owned by
Norma Bates and her father. See? Two completely different things.
Unfortunately for Tabby and Timmy, Norma seems to have a slight quirk about her guests. Namely that she has an urge to chop them up while they’re showering. This is exactly what she did to poor Tabby who was last seen lying in her shower after Norma had at her with an axe as the bloody water slowly circled the drain.
Tabitha: "No, not another cheesy HItchcock ripoff! Aiiiiieeeeeee!!"Nooooo! Not Tabitha! Why’d you have to take a shower, dear Tabby? Why couldn’t you have just had a bath.
Seeing as how Passions loves make Alfred Hitchcock roll over in his grave, I took a look at what’s going to happen on the show in the future and found the following screencap:
Tune in next week to see Miguel and Charity hanging from the top of Mount Rushmore! Only on Alfred Hitchcock Presents...er, I mean Passions.