General Hospital February Sweeps

This is the third and final blog entry on my take of February sweeps. I saved General Hospital for last because of two things. The first is that I think it was the most spectacular sweeps of all the ABC soaps. The second is that this one will probably get me the most comments, since GH seems to be the most popular ABC soap.

General Hospital decided to do a different kind of storytelling for February, in that it was 24-style story. Each episode reflected an hour in real time (or at least as real as you can get with commercial breaks and such). As different as this was, it still felt like a soap opera, instead of a primetime show.

The main story going on was the hostage crisis at Metro Court. This is also the same site that held the Port Charles Hotel before it burned up. So, clearly, this site has some bad karma attached to it.

The whole reason for the hostage crisis was that Alcazar had put some delicate shipment in the extremely secure vault that Jax had installed in Metro Court. The person that was supposed to receive the shipment, the now-infamous Mr. Craig, became impatient and stormed the lobby during a fundraiser (because this is a soap and you have to have a lot of people someplace when something big happens) to get the briefcase. Naturally, things went wrong. Sam pushed the silent alarm which trapped Maxie and one of Craig's team in the vault for 12 hours.

During that 12 hours, Mr. Craig was very sadistic to the hostages in the lobby, which including Lulu, Alan, Liz, Sam, Emily, Nikolas, Sonny, Carly, Mateo, Max, Robin, and others. (I may be missing some, but I got the main players.) Craig ended up shooting Robin, which led Patrick to lead Emily and Carly through surgery over the phone. This led to one of the best one-liners from Carly. She told Robin, "Wake up you sanctimonious little twit. You aren't going to die on me and let it be my fault."

Of course, because just having hostages isn't enough, Mr. Craig wired the entire lobby with explosives, and rotated the device that set the explosives off among all his crew, so no one would know who had the device.

In the midst of all of this, Alan had a heart attack, which eventually led to his death. He did get to escape the hostage situation, though, and made it through emergency surgery.

Meanwhile, outside of the hotel, everyone in town was worried, because everyone had at least one family member in the lobby being held hostage.

It was all very dramatic, and one of the best stories I've seen on soaps in a long time.

The thing I loved most about this sweeps period is that just about every cast member was used to some extent at some point during the month. Sure, there were some cast members that could have been used more, Bobbie for example. And Jax was off saving his brother from the Russian mob, so he wasn't in town either.

Of course, the thing I hated most was that Alan was killed off. I absolutely hate the way ABC, in general, treats the characters that have been on the show for decades. While there is really no reason for them to kill Alan off, at least it propelled story a bit (unlike AMC's Dixie, but I've written about that already). Especially moving was the fact that Jason didn't have a chance to say goodbye to Alan before Alan died. This is going to cause Jason some turmoil for years to come, especially now that he knows that he is the father of Liz's baby.

Speaking of which, as in Amber's blog, I was thrilled that that secret finally came out. It was a long time coming, and it makes sense that it would come out when they're trapped in an elevator thinking that they might die. People say and do things differently in the face of death, or so I've heard. I don't have personal experience on that myself.

Less thrilling is the fact that only Liz and Jason know right now. That's supposed to be changing in the coming weeks, but it can't happen soon enough. We all know, though, that Lucky will be the last to find out.

The explosion of the Metro Court lobby is one of the most incredible things I've seen. There were some really great effects going on there. And the aftermath was amazing. It was just some incredible stuff.

Overall, this was a very thrilling sweeps, and the fallout for this story will propel other story for months to come. And that is how it should be.

What do you all think? What were your favorite parts? What didn't you like? Would you have changed anything about the story? I look forward to comments about this. Again, I love talking about my soaps, so feel free to chat away!