daytime theatre

unfortunately, i made the mistake of not rewinding my tape for my shows today. archaic, i know. but luckily for me, i got the first of the two; all my children. which leads me to the subject at hand, the satin slayer has finally been exposed. but of all the people in the world for him to be.

ok. for truth, i'm glad that it wasn't greenlee. it would be rather hard for her to live down those murders. part of me knew it couldn't be greenlee but it was fun to scapegoat her. i knew it wasn't going to be the lawyer guy. hell, i don't even remember her dating a lawyer guy before ethan or tad. but i digress. i said before, they wouldn't create a new mystery character to be the murderer, no matter how tempting "ethan's mother" was. it's cheating. in true soap opera form, they brought someone back from the dead to be the murderer; alexander cambias sr.

wow. of all the people in the world, or supposed beyond, alex sr was the killer. i didn't suspect a thing until zack started to ask ryan about the day his father died. for some reason, i found it odd for him to grill ryan like he did, but when i heard alex sr say "don't disappoint me" to ryan on his deathbed, i got the picture. i was sold when zack started clawing at the grave. i just had to see how it would play out. funny thing is, when zack got to the warehouse to meet his father, i half hoped greenlee would be behind the mask..LOL. i wonder, though, if they made this storyline to prove faking a death is common or to give zack a lead in to figuring out his father faked his death.

i'm sure the drama with alexander cambias sr is far from over, since the writers didn't allow him to be killed off. if they really wanted to do that, zach would have thrown him over the ledge of the balcony in poetic justice. maybe they did it this way because we've not had a murder trial in some time. let's just hope that he doesn't find a way to escape his legal debut in the meantime. so in wait for the next trial-of-the-decade, what would we have to look forward to on amc?

of course we'll have to see zack deal with the emotional backlash from the whole ordeal and watch he and kendall rebuild their lives in the psychological aftermath of her near demise, but let's deal with the rest of pine valley for a minute. for starters, there's jr and babes drama. this is going to blow itself up and mainly due to crystal. i only hope she really is ready to let adam go. i think we all can agree, no matter how happy they've become, she's much better off without adam. i just hope she's already got a little nest egg set aside, besides "charlette's" trust that is. and is she going to let the truth come out before she names tad's child after adam's sister?

we'll also have some romance blooming in pine valley. there was a nice little pow wow of the three maidens currently involved in interesting triangles. none of which, i'm happy to say, involves cheating on men...just added complications. ryan and annie's long engagement, di and aiden's blossoming love, and julia and jamie's taboo romance is sure to have summer bursting with love and romance; not to mention jonathan and amanda's hidden love. will they become the only true triangle in the mix when lilly finally admits to herself that she still loves a complicated jonathan?

one thing i would really really like to see...is zarph/zoe's transition. i think it would be groundbreaking daytime television. unfortunately, ugly betty beat them to the punch, but it'd be cool to see (albeit an abreviated version) of the process to transgenderfication. of course we would only really see the emotional trek. they would eventually replace zoe with a female actress after a summer away at some top notch swiss clinic where she gets her nip and tuck. then she'll return to pine valley to seduce bianca, sweeping her back away to paris (unfortunately) to help run cambias industries. i wonder, will bianca wait that long? will they go to paris before the operations? will they be the first gay couple on daytime television to get married and give voice to the injustices to "separate but equal" marriage laws?

only time will tell.

okay... so, slowly but surely both my theories about the murders on amc and oltl are being disproved. until the murderers are revealed, i'm not giving up hope on my theories.

but before i address that...can we pay a little homage to the one and only miss erika kane for her demonstration of "all my children". the grande dame went from house to house in that fabulous outfit setting every one of her children straight. i wanted to die from laughter as she made the rounds. she's been so busy in her own mess that it was about time for her to start meddling again. truth be told, i think she just got that ensemble and wanted a reason to show it to the town!!!

so, on to the satin slayer...
i've not quite given up on greenlee being the satin slayer but it's beginning to seem as though raymond jenkins (formerly known as "r") may have hired the ex-boyfriend/former lawyer to do the killings. or, maybe raymond jenkins isn't involved, since he seems to know that zack's/alex's father actually killed his mother. but the question is still begged to be answered, if the lawyer is doing the killings, then why? what would he have to do with zack???

also, we've been warned that the satin slayer will get one of the remaining fusion girls. what i'm going to say is going to be backwards...but it may just be true. they've set up a lot of things for both babe and kendall to "work through" once the killings are over, and even though it seems (according to wednesday's endings) that babe is actually next, i kinda wish it was kendall.
listen now and slap me latter...

as much as i want kendall to stay because she is the perfect "daughter of erica", that's the same reason i want her to die. kendall (the character) has a bad habit of leaving town, giving up on pine valley and everyone in it. later, because she is a kane (damnit), she comes back as a new person. i would absolutely hate to see anyone else play the role of kendall hart kane slayter...and that includes sara michelle gellar!

of course though, with babe out of the picture, jr is free to ruin crystals life...completely! could you imagine...??!!! with crystal so distraught to the loss of her daughter and her marriage, she free to mourn with tad. let's face it, they were falling in love with each other in a way only he and dixie had previously loved. he didn't even love di this much, truly. plus with adam's involvement, it sorta parallels their romance, don't you think?

also, would it be just a kick if this was all a (rather involved) scheme of jr's to kill off babe to regain sole custody to their son??? something to think about...maybe...

and to the hero of llandview...
i'm not liking what the previews are foreshadowing for this local hero. from the commercials alone, it appears that spencer had some hit-man contract set up in the case of his murder. as the adage goes, an eye for an eye. the hit-man has instructions to kill the spencer's murderer. with that information in endless debate at the police department, this plot twist might play out for a while.

i'm only afraid for rex and michael. rex because he's finally getting his life back. for michael, because this will be the second time this actor has been killed off on this show. but more than anything, i fear for marcy. marcy walsh has been through quite enough trauma to last a lifetime, from her murder mystery book coming to life to losing the love of her life (twice technically). this will be enough to drive poor marcy crazy or evil. consider this...if the hit-man has to kill michael, then the question becomes why? hopefully (for tommy), they will buy the "vengeance for my father" motive. but if not, marcy will lose her husband and her child all before their first anniversary. how devastating that will be!!!!

apparently the seasonal promotions are true. if you thought 2006 was wild...you ain't seen nothing yet!

just maybe. the fat lady hasn't sung yet. but it seems that they are gonna try and have this lawyer, ex-boyfriend to simone be the killer. but still, something about that doesn't seem right to me. and i'm with derick on the matter of "r". as old as zach is, "r" would have to be about 60 - 80 years old. but then there's jigsaw... but i digress.

as i am sticking to my guns (for now) on greenlee, this is actually a post about the other murder...the infamous dr. truman.

i love the way soaps set up the possible murderers and generally the never "set up" the actual murder. i think it's pretty safe to say todd manning did not do this. if he had, i'm sure he would be singing it from the rooftop, discordiant incrimination be damned. todd would be too easy of...well, just too easy. plus, we tend to know that todd is guilty when he did something. did you ever notice that???

as much as i want either of the mcbain boys to be the murderer, especially michael (for some reason), i also do not believe it is either one of them. the way they set michael up was brilliant! "i'll protect my son no matter what i have to do" and "now all i have to do is get out of here unseen!" HILLARIOUS!!! absolutely hillarious. and maybe because he's protecting his son/family is the reason why i want him to be the culprit, but alas...i just don't buy it.

his finding john passed out in the dayroom of the hospital is another reason i don't really buy it. part of me wishes it was a team effort. that the mcbain boys ran into each other on the way to or out of the crime scene. but again, it's something i'm not ready to buy into yet. speaches be damned. something was lacking in their private talks; joy, conviction, ownership...i don't know. but "not [having] to worry about spencer" and "we took care of spencer" are two different statements all together.

here's what i think happened...
john found the killer in the room standing over spencer's bloody carcas and rushed to their aid. maybe he wasn't totally dead yet...but that's beside the point. john, being a cop...a top detective, helped the murderer get away without leaving any evidence or witnesses to the crime. that would explain how a piece of his knit scarf was found on the scene later by his devoted girl friday, natalie. that's when michael came in. maybe he'd also found that spencer was not in his room and immediately went to blair's aid. well, michael never got in the room. he ran into john helping a shocked murderer escape and john told michael to help them clean up and get out. that would explain why "now all [he had] to do is get [himself] out...unseen." at which point we "caught up" with him, watched him find an unconcious john and a subsequent frantic natalie. but who's the killer, you ask...

now we know it wasn't rex that they found in the room. he was found later, looking guilty as a pearl necklace on an alterboy, red handed (literally) with the murder weapon in his hand by none other than the commissioner of lvpd, uncle bo buchanon. no, rex is just the goat (michael is the red herring). the actual murderer was never set up by the writers the way michael, john, todd, and rex. hell, they even tried to set up starr and cole. i really wanted it to be starr when i first saw the commercial for his murder. and i would have believed it because the hand holding the scissors were female. yes, i did say they were female. who does that leave....? the one and only classic victim, dr marty saybrook.

okay...so, without being a writer on the show, one can never know exactly what's next or the "full" truth. apparently, there are so many writers on some of these shows that they don't know what the truth is until it's on record (or on the air). i love the editing process...LOL.

well, for the longest time, i've been terribly upset that the proverbial finger was pointing toward zarph (such a metal name, zharf). anyway, zarf has been playing the red herring for about two or three weeks now and i've decided, since new years at least, that's exactly what he was...a red herring. there were too many coincidences for it to be him. you know the soap rule, who ever is the most obvious, is invariably innocent. so who is the culprit???

baring some unknown individual from zack's past, which is highly unlikely as far as i'm concerned, there's only one person i can imagine as the "satin slayer". how often do the soaps bring in some unknown individual for a mystery this big? as far as my memory serves...never. it's a cheat! this person is someone we already know...someone we would least expect. maybe not least...

we would least expect zack of this crime spree, but lately they writers are scripting the possibility of an alter ego into zack's psyche. these flashbacks and recovered memories are typical to the discovery of an alter ego. his childhood memory of repeating over and over has been distracting me from my resolve that i've discovered who the murderer is. yet, i still don't believe this is the answer. although it's pretty close...

having an alter ego commit these murders would answer some of the why questions i still have about my theory. why would the killer do this to people they know personally? why would the killer go through the fusion women to get at zack? this is why i think that zack (or his mother) is another red herring. as far as my theory goes, zack's mother is another trick of the killer to distract pine valley and the police from the real motive; to destroy fusion and kendal. who do we know who would want to do that?

i submit for your consideration......greenlee. i don't know why she would kill simone who was once her friend and never really did her any wrong...but that's where the alter ego comes in handy. i can't recall how much she knew danni frye, but i can definitely imagine where she could hold a grudge against erin lavery. however, the ultimate goal (again) is to destroy fusion, kendal and zack. i can't wait to see who it is...if it's not greenlee...

Okay...it's not like i don't know it happens. it's not like i've never noticed it before but now i am pissed. maybe it's a little too strong (or more to the point, quite revealing my lack of a life), but this is just egregious.

for all my fellow fans, you will remember not more than 3 years ago, bianca mongomery and arabella (babe) chandler were both pregnant and stranded after a flood. they gave birth to their children (in much more of a dramatic fashion than i'm explaining) stranded and alone in the forrest. flash forward to when babe (arabella) learns that paul cramer (of one life to live) switched their children, and she can no longer keep the secret. there is a big upheaval in the chandler and kane families as miranda is returned to bianca. of course she did not believe her son to be dead and babe subsequently learns that her son is alive in the home of the buchanans.

after a long battle, kelly buchanan decides to give babe her son and babe runs away. needless to say, babe and adam jr have been having trouble since jr learned the truth about miranda. in the course of events, babe, jamie and lil' adam were hiding out with liza colby chandler and colby, adam sr's daughter. at this time colby was 5 or 6...

WHY IS IT NOW...that lil adam is only 3 or 4 and colby chandler is 15...stealing cars...and blackmailing adam jr...and stealing babe's license to get into a club??? hmm??? i get the fact that you need to hype the story with wildcards every now and again...but exactly what dimention do these children live on while they're off screen??? and for that matter, why is miranda walking, and speaking french while lil' adam is still in a crib?! is french wine that good for child development?! she'll probably be in a training bra the next we see her, but will lil' adam leave town by then?

got doggit, this is the thing that makes me understand why people call soaps...well, stupid. this is just like the switch from an asian blair cramer (oltl) to a blonde. i guess i missed a meeting. but maybe i should explain why colby was blackmailing her brother, or at least how.

see remember our story with dr. madden? well all thing came to a hilt and...well, turned to shinola. in a great amalgamation of webs of deceit, too many people found out too many secrets and all of dr. madden's business came back to bite him. his crime of stealing erica's embryo and raising her son. his manipulation of dixie into giving her child up for adoption. dixie and zack slater even found evidance that dr. madden had been using his own sample to empregnate most if not all of the women who came to his office to be a suragate or seek fertility help. well, just in the nick of time, as dr. madden had a drugged-unconscious erica kane on his private jet, someone knocked him out and buried him alive underground. whoever buried him had the coffin wired and stocked with health bars.

the only reason why the town found dr. madden (discovering where he'd been "hiding" all along), is because of a minor earthquake which killed dr. madden and uncovered his shallow grave. the police think that whoever did this to dr. madden was trying to find the location of dixie and tad martins daughter. but without proof, anyone in the town who had a grudge with dr. madden could have done the deed. of course the police don't know everything, but everyone involved pretty much know everyones secrets, so the suspect list looks like this...

dixie martin
zack slater (helping dixie)
tad martin
david hayward (for dixie's love)
adam jr and jamie martin
ryan lavery (because of kendal)
erica kane (with hired help, of course, because of josh)

as a spoiler, those who've been watching knows this has to do with dixie, but the question remains who? it's getting to the point where people are spying on and framing each other. the first to be framed was jr, but of course we're supposed to not be sure. it looks like david may have framed him...but then again, that is so easy to believe. you know what...i'm waiting to find out that janet did it the whole time, hoping to find kate martin, a perfect martin daughter to raise as her own. it has been a while since we heard from janet...wonder which planet she's on today...?

i just cannot. i am speechless. done even. they've killed...KILLED todd manning. okay, he's a bad guy(per se), but this time he was absolutely innocent. 100% guilt free. can this be a lesson from the boy who cried wolf?

todd manning is an illegitimate son of victor lord. victor was a very nefarious man himself. he molested his daughter at an early age causing her to develop dissociative identity disorder (d.i.d.) or...multiple personalities. in total, victoria lord buchanan (matriarch of one life to live) has 6 different personalities including her own birth/host identity. niki smith is her main alter, a polar opposite of victoria buchanan. this is only important now because she is the identity who brought vicki's daughter, jessica (at 8-9?), to a bar. as the writers would have it, jessica got raped (on tape no less) and developed d.i.d. also.

but this isn't about all the things victor did (that i'm not witness to), or vicki and her multiple personalities, or jessica/tess and the baby she has that they don't know who the father is because tess was a loose girl and then fell in love with nash and now wants to be the dominant personality to mother her child. >;-)> tee-hee. this is about todd and his wrongful death.

keeping it simple to start with, todd manning and blair daimler have a star-crossed love. they are both "bad" (opportunistic, greedy, vengeful, spiteful, shady, bitter) characters who finally found love and companionship with one another. they have two children, starr and jack. starr is a star. i hope they keep the same actress for her character...she'd be a great lead! the whole manning family is a great focal family for the show, although it is usually concerning something negative or malicious. in this storyline, however, they are the victim.

during one of the bad patches of their marriage, todd used a young accountant, margaret cochron, to make blair jealous. actually, it wasn't quite that simple. margaret was the accountant for buchanan industries which kevin buchanan was running at the time. kevin was also having a fling with blair, so todd used maggaret to frame kevin for embezzlement. making blair jealous was just a red herring.

well...when all the cards fell, kevin dodged the charges, blair and todd got back together and margaret turned out to be crazy. nutty as a squirrel. crazy as a loon. lost as a dodo bird. margaret got it in her head that todd was in love with her. todd is in love with her and they will be married. so, she hatches the plan to kidnap todd on his wedding day. she shoots him in the leg (twice), drugs him, and ties him to a bed in a remote cabin in the mountains, but he does love her. anyway, when she finally understands that he doesn't love her, she commences to torture his family until he gives her what she wants. her consolation prize to his love is his seed.

by the time todd is rescued (some 6 months later) from the bomb in the cabin, and he rescues blair from the car compactor, margaret had accomplished her goal and left town. of course she hasn't left for good. now carrying todd's son, she returns to landview to torture the manning family. all she wants is for todd to leave blair and the kids, then runaway with her and "todd jr.". after she nearly killed starr manning in her mothers office, todd begrudgingly agreed to meet her by lantano lake. here is where things get hairy....

they get in a boat and row into the center of the lake. todd convinced margaret that he had finally seen the light and would do right by the woman carrying his son. margaret throws the gun in the lake and the truth comes out. now, we don't know "the truth" for some time. but as it goes, todd tells her psych!!! i still hate you, you sick twisted beepity-bloopity bloop. and since you can't swim, i'm gonna rock the boat and kill you that way. well, she just has an ultimate revelation. she's been a fool, a fool for todd and love, and she doesn't deserve to live. she back-drops off the row boat and is never seen from again. todd comes back to shore, hides the evidence as the guilty would and pretends nothing happened. besides...he didn't kill her. but the police don't think so, and when the body turns up (or should i say bodies), it was all the media needed to get the people in an uproar. the menace has to go!

and so, the villagers came to the castle with pitchforks and torches...wait. okay, they didn't, but they really wanted to. life was hell for the whole family. hell, the whole clan. the buchanans and the kramers felt the fires of the people for this crime, too. and so, he came to be put to death for his crimes; more so for the crimes of his past than the murder of margaret cochron and their unborn son. margaret had finally succeded in destroying todd's life, post mortem. a distraught todd had refused his right to an appeal because blair had forsaken him again. she'd lost faith in him again and was flying fast into the arms of another man...again. spencer truman.

as todd's attorney, evangaline williamson (who will most definately receive more blog entries. she's a powerhouse. i'll even likely write about her works off the show, like her appearance in "the color purple".) never gave up on todd. she never doubted his innocence and re-examined the leads and clues until she found new ones. she risked her career, and even her life, to help todd after he escaped prison transport. after surviving a tornado, and the loss of her sight, she continued to fight for todd with new leads pointing toward spencer truman for margaret's murder. unfortunately it was all too late.

they were thirty seconds too late, to be precise. john mcbain was in bangkok looking for david vickers who was looking for margeret's son in thailand. david knew his brother spencer (don't ask) had something to do with todd's case but he was looking for "todd jr.". when john found david with a very live margaret cochron, he immediately arrested them both and b-lined it back to the states to free todd manning. surmounting all the obsticles, john arrives in the viewing room with margaret cochron thirty seconds after the last injection was given to a flatlining todd.

can they pull todd back from a flatline? will they? i doubt it when the only medical help available is the malicious spencer truman. are the fans truely tired of todd's selfish form of justice and blind revenge? god, i hope not. what would we do without todd? is it because they don't want to recast todd again? who cares?!?!! i personally loved todd's character, as misguided as he was. even when he did the despicable, you loved to hate him. part of me just can't deal with the lost of a legendary character. especially under these circumstances. it's as if they let todd get away with everything, every evil he had done, only to pay for the one crime he did not commit. it's a bit beyond ironic. it's a bit beyond cruel. but, eh. such is life, such is art!

...aaliyah - care 4 u - track 12...

i realized, at some point, i would have to explain the statement...the title. erica kane is the matriarch of pine valley. matriarch sounds so matronly, doesn't it. she's more the legacy. she is kane.

erica is a "homegrown star". when the show debuted, erica was 16 years old. she and her mother, mona kane, were the focus of all my children. maybe people focused on them more because mona kane was a single mother. maybe it's because erica proved to be a bit of a bad seed. either way you look at it, a star (and a legacy) was born. it was destiny, and erica knew it.

she has been through so many things i am not a "witness" to, i know i'll never be able to do a good synopsis. at least not one of "blog size". let's see...she's had ten, pardon, eleven marriages. four of them to the same (and current) husband, jackson montgomery. she's been a fashion model, spokesmodel, cosmetic mogel, magazine editor, and a talk show host. so it goes without saying, one ms. erica kane has little trouble in love or money.
...or a lot of trouble, depending on how you look at it.

but of all the up's and down's of her life, i think the struggles with her children are what's most important to her. her youngest daughter, bianca, involved the most...sensible of stress. there was the custody battle (although, she did kidnap her own daughter), helping her daughter through an eating disorder, and even found out she was gay. the most tramatic event concerning bianca was her rape through which she gave birth to miranda mona montgomary...

Unfortunately, this brings me to erica's oldest daughter, kendal. somewhere in 1990, kendal hart came to town as erica's assistant. (she REALLY needs to be more careful when she hires assistants. val was her only good one!) it was recovered that erica was raped at 14 (something set up by her sleazy father eric kane, no less) and kendal was the product of that heinous crime. matron mona kane made erica give her up for adopton and erica has had to pay for that decision a long time...at least after she remembered it happend. >;-D>

what we did see happen in erica's life, was her abortion. oooh, she was punished for that too. she was the first to have an "on screen" abortion in soap history (if not tv history). the "fans" went wild, so in retribution, she lost her husband and something else i don't quite remember - probably something to do with her careeer, i'm sure. some 26 years later, all the suffering proves to be in vain. there's more suffering to overcome. erica kane's new secret turn this into more of a tragedy.

she's recently discovered that the abortion didn't happen. the world renown fertility doctor, Dr. Madden, stole her embryo. he (presumedly) was one of the first doctors to experiment on embryo transplanting, but he did it without erica's knowledge or consent. well, anyone who knows anything about soaps knows that there is always more to the story. the young man she hired as "new beginnings" production manager, who is also trying to steal her job to the extent of drugging her to discredit her sanity, is her son. the reasons why erica hired Dr. Madden's son Josh is it's own long story, and firing him is self explanatory, but explaining why she hasn't pressed charges, even without actual proof of the druggings, is getting harder by the day.

there's an awful lot of drama going on in ms. kane's life, even now some couple of months after i started this entry. will she be able to keep this latest secret? and considering jeff martin, is this even her secret to keep? the time will come when the things kept in the dark will come to light, but we'll have to turn that page (or skip those comercials) when we get there. for now, this is a glimpse into the life of the woman you always wanted to be, until you knew her story.