Twilight

This is an essay I wrote a number of years ago upon the purported demise of GH's "Carly" (as portrayed then by the luminescent Tamara Braun, still my favourite Carly by far!). Sorry if the title misleads some "Twilight" aficionados (I am a fan of that series, also), but this song predates the series by several years, and was the theme for the whole storyline arc discussed, so I felt it was still an appropriate title for this article!

I want to veer a little off-topic today, and talk about GH for a bit---as it relates to PC, of course.
This past week on GH was one of the most wrenching, emotionally draining ones in a very long time. Carly’s car (supposedly) went over a cliff, leaving her presumed dead, and the whole town in mourning. Friends and foes alike stopped what they had been doing to offer a tribute to the character, and will be at the funeral to pay their respects.
The reactions to her putative death were varied, from the barely concealed glee of ex-hubby and nemesis A.J. , to the raw heartbreak and denial of Carly’s mother, Bobbie. The entire emotional spectrum was covered, from the tender regret and restrained sorrow of partner and new-found friend Jax, to the searing anguish and heart-rending remorse of best pal and would-be lover Zander, as well as everything in between. The entire week has been filled with scenes of the people of Port Charles reacting to Carly’s demise, exploring how her life impacted theirs, and how her death will affect them all. An exceptionally moving musical montage aired at the beginning of Wednesday’s episode, in which scenes were played of the various people in Carly’s life reacting to the news of her death, and virtually the entire episode was devoted to the recollections of those who loved her. A most excellent show, one of the very best that GH has offered in ages, featuring stellar performances, fine writing, and wonderful music.
So what has all this to do with PC, you may well ask? I’ll tell you---it hasn’t been that long since our very own beloved heroine Eve supposedly went to meet her maker, and as we all know, she didn’t get nearly as fabulous a send-off as Carly-babes, even though Carly isn’t really dead, and a lot of people didn’t care overly much for her when they knew she was alive and well. Why? One reason---PC has lost its grounding, it’s so busy moving from one freaky occurrence to the next that it completely neglects the single most important element of all good soaps, and that is the emotional component.
Thanks to the generosity and kindness of fellow-cheerleader Lucy, who made me a videotape consisting of Eve’s memorial, as well as C&E’s greatest hits, I was able to take a trip down Memory Lane, and go back to a time before the show wandered so far away from its roots. Now don’t get me wrong, I do like the supernatural bent that the show has taken; what I don’t like, however, is the fact that genuine, heartfelt emotion and the beloved longtime characters who evoke same are being sacrificed in favour of shallow newbies appearing in even more shallow and ridiculous storylines which engender absolutely no feelings whatsoever other than boredom and occasionally disgust.
The way in which PC mishandled Eve’s death is the perfect example of this. For one thing, Carly only appears to have died---word is she’s going to turn up alive and kicking at her own funeral come Monday, much to the delight of many, and the chagrin of some! This should also have been the case with Eve---although she, like Carly, had her fair share of detractors, the fact remains that she was one of the original cast members, and has always played an integral part in the unfolding of the various plots on PC over the years. Therefore, it is beyond stupid for TIW to have killed her off as cavalierly as they did.
For another thing, when Eve died, where was the grief? It’s pretty darned safe to say that TIIC at PC did not devote an entire week to exploring the various permutations of the effect of her death on her circle of friends and acquaintances; heck, they couldn’t even devote an entire episode to that theme. The Memorial episode began with the ongoing catfight that is Ally and Livvie, and ended with Ally running off before she had even properly paid her respects to a woman who turned herself inside out in order to help Ally when she and Jamal were on the run after Cedric’s death. And why did Ally leave so precipitously? Was she overcome with grief, and simply needed a moment to be alone? Heck, no, she just wanted to run off to that old barn so as to commune with Rafe and dear dead great-great-grandma Rebecca. What a bunch of crap!
For that matter, with very few exceptions(Kevin, Karen, and of course, Chris!), the response to Eve’s death was pretty much all crappy---from Lucy pretending like she gave a hoot, to Ian’s phony baloney pontificating on how much he missed his ”sweet wife”, the mourning seemed hollow and forced to me. Just to compare the two, Sonny, who isn’t even married to Carly anymore, is wandering around like a dead man walking, overcome with guilt and remorse because of the fact that Carly caught him in bed with another woman just before she had her car crash---even though he and Carly are divorced, and he technically had every right to move on to a new relationship, he feels awful because he knows that he hurt Carly, and that morally he should have never attempted to move forward, because he had never truly relinquished his claim on Carly’s heart, nor she on his. Compare this with Ian’s scummy response when Eve found out about his adulterous one-nighter with Lucy; he was defiant, and basically blamed Eve for his infidelity, saying that if she’d only trusted him, he would have never strayed. Huh? The logic of that escapes me, I must say. And when he went to visit Eve in the morgue, after she died, did he gather her in his arms and express one iota of grief or remorse for the rotten way he’d treated her? NOT! Contrast this with Zander, who was distraught at the idea that the argument he’d had with Carly the night of the accident may have caused her death; never mind the fact that Carly was clearly at fault in the matter, he was still castigating himself because his actions that night had caused her pain. Zander is still only in his very early twenties, but he already has way more heart, sensitivity, and maturity at his age than oafish Ian could ever hope to attain, should he live to be 100! (Which he probably will, the dirty boor).
No, the only person who truly mourned Eve in the way she deserved was Chris---his performance the day of the Memorial service blew me away, and there’s no doubt in my mind that he misses her every day, dreadfully. As do we, the fans---it’s amazing to me that I could miss a character so much, but whenever I look at PC right now, I find I’m waiting, waiting for Eve to make an appearance, and when she doesn’t, I’m invariably disappointed. There’s a huge, heart-shaped hole in the canvas of PC right now, one which Eve used to fill, and the only way to repair this is to do what GH is doing with Carly, and bring Eve back from the great beyond.
Thing is though, when(and if) she returns, I want her to go back to Chris, not Ian. I would love for it to turn out that the real Eve is alive somewhere, somehow, so that when she does come back she will see everything and everyone in a new and different light, and that she will, having undergone a powerful transformation on a deeply emotional level, realize just how much Chris truly cherishes her.
I’d like to close with the Vanessa Carlton song that was played during the GH montage; I can envision this as being applicable to Eve since it tells of someone who has come back from a very dark place, from the edge of the abyss, and because of the intensity of their experience, this person will never look at life, or themselves, in the same way again.

Twilight


“I was stained, with a role, in a day not my own
But as you walked into my life you showed what needed to be shown
And I always knew, what was right I just didn't know that I might
Peel away and choose to see with such a different sight

And I will never see the sky the same way and
I will learn to say good-bye to yesterday and I
Will never cease to fly if held down and
I will always reach too high cause I've seen, cause I've seen, twilight

Never cared never wanted never sought to see what flaunted
So on purpose so in my face couldn't see beyond my own place
And it was so easy not to behold what I could hold
But you taught me I could change whatever came within these shallow days

And I will never see the sky the same way and
I will learn to say good-bye to yesterday and I
Will never cease to fly if held down and
I will always reach too high cause I've seen, cause I've seen

As the sun shines through it pushes away and pushes ahead
It fills the warmth of blue and leaves a chill instead and
I didn't know that I could be so blind to all that is so real
But as illusion dies I see there is so much to be revealed

And I will never see the sky the same way and
I will learn to say good-bye to yesterday and I
Will never cease to fly if held down and
I will always reach too high cause I've seen, cause I've seen, twilight

I was stained, by a role, in a day not my own
But as you walked into my life you showed what needed to be shown
And I always knew, what was right I just didn't know that I might
Peel away and choose to see with such a different sight

And I will never see the sky the same way and
I will learn to say good-bye to yesterday and I
Will never cease to fly if held down and
I will always reach too high cause I've seen, cause I've seen, twilight.”