Ah, la Luna la Luna

As the forbidden Thope was busy getting busy, the secret of R.J. shadow designing for Eric got out, which led to Ridge suggesting a good old-fashioned fashion showdown. Meanwhile, eager new intern Luna crushed on R.J. while receiving orders to stay away from the Forresters. Shine a light on this week's happenings with Two Scoops' Mike!

Has your week been bold and beautiful? Did you very easily give away your own secret? Did you not need to be in Philadelphia to get some brotherly love? Did you go from fashion school to being schooled to avoid the Forrester dynasty? These and more situations faced the Forrester-Logan-Spencer-Walton clan this week!

One small step for man, Scoopers! Mike here back with ya, ready to dish the latest that is B&B. Note the Belinda Carlisle reference in the title. Now! It's come to my attention that some of you think I hate our soap because of how thoroughly I bag on it. Let me just clarify things up-front: I don't hate B&B at all. I've been following it since 1988! I just get frustrated and disappointed, since I feel the show could be better but isn't.

The cast is killer. However, the scripts could have more attention to detail and not turn such a blind eye to continuity...even in the opening sequence. Rena Sofer is about to reprise her classic role of Lois on General Hospital, yet Sofer's Quinn is still in the credits a year after her departure! See what I mean? You try not being annoyed. But I will endeavor not to be so merciless in my criticism. Good thing I'm all about this new Eric storyline, and we've got a new character worthy of speculation to speculate about. Y'all ready? Let's Scoop about it!

After Brooke finished worrying about the very dead Lope, and Ridge reminded Logan that his mother liked to do things about other people's love lives (Stephanie reference!), Bridge chatted about R.J. Could his conspicuous absences be attributed to a lady friend? Ridge snarked that girls wanted to take boys' money and drive their cars when they didn't know how. Was that a purposeful mention of Coco?

When R.J. split in 2018, he did so with Coco Spectra, who indeed crashed Ridge's Camaro while taking selfies behind the wheel, but that was the last we heard of her. R.J.'s parents moved on to Eric; Ridge repeatedly insisted all week that he wasn't trying to put his pop out to pasture, except at one point, he yelped, "Retire already!" and even asked Brooke to see if Donna could take Eric away on an extended trip.

Eric had no such plan in mind. In fact, the Forrester living room had exploded in sketches and mannequins and fabrics in a way I hadn't recalled seeing before. Eric guided R.J., telling him he wanted them to learn from each other, which was awesome. I loved Eric's philosophies about designing and how alive he was while imparting them.

Only thing I didn't get was, since when does Eric need to play the piano to draw out his muse? He acted like he'd always done that, but it's the first time it's come up in thirty-six-and-a-half years. Another question: if Eric wanted to keep everything on the downlow, why did he turn his house into a design studio? He had to have known that inevitably someone would show up, and someone did, in the form of Brooke.

For all his adamance that his collabs with R.J. be kept "under the radar," Eric didn't even try to come up with an excuse for what Brooke walked in on. Brooke's first and ninth husband just flat-out informed her that he needed to manifest his legacy line, and only with R.J.'s help, since Ridge had been talking down to him, insulting him, and treating him like a dinosaur.

"Why leave Ridge out of this?" Brooke proceeded to ask. Eric just told you! And then Eric let the whole litter of cats out of his designer bag by instructing Brooke to warn Ridge that Eric was coming for him. Well, so much for that. I was hoping R.J.'s involvement would be a secret until after the collection hit the runway. But Brooke obediently returned to Forrester to pass the news on to Ridge and, later, Carter.

Since when is Carter the president of The Eric Forrester Fan Club? Sir Walton gushed to Thomas, then Katie, then Brooke and R.J. about how awesome Eric was. There's just the little matter of Carter sleeping with Eric's wife, without and with permission, that makes Carter's worship of Eric stand out to me. Is he compensating for taking Quinn to bed? Was an all-Eric-all-the-time stance a stipulation of Carter being allowed back at the company?

Ridge was kind of all over the place this week. He hadn't wanted to team up with Eric on a line, but then suggested to Thomas that maybe he should, after all. Then he wanted to bring Eric, Thomas, and R.J. in on his couture collection. Then he thought Eric should just pension off. Make up your mind, Ridge. The former Speedo King was amazed that Eric had gotten R.J. to design but was ultimately cool with it. Except when he thought that the work would be too much for Eric. My head hurts.

Before the news of Eric's secret line with R.J. became public knowledge, Donna had ordered a slew of design supplies for her Honey Bear and had them delivered to the office. Why? She should have had them sent straight to the house. Indeed, when an intern let herself in shrouded in fabrics, Eric quipped, "Nobody saw her leave Forrester Creations." Donna's not dumb, but that wasn't one of her smarter moves.

We learned soon after that the swathing was for the purpose of introducing said intern, Luna. It was kind of a cool reveal! And hey! I don't remember there being a Luna in the soap world since Susan Batten's Luna on One Life to Live in the '90s! Luna was plenty eager -- and apparently had been following R.J. on social media for years.

But we already have cause to worry. Donna, who again had a pretty good head on her shoulders back in the day, hired Luna without even perusing her rsum or giving her a proper interview; Donna just knew from looking in Luna's eyes that Luna was trustworthy. That better be true, because this newbie intern was allowed access to Eric's private designs and stuck around long after she should have headed back to the shop.

Luna got a moment alone with R.J., who had been nervous about Luna being present as he shadow designed (something else that would never be permitted). R.J. looked her up on a single social media platform and discovered her account was private. "I showed you mine!" R.J. joked. Wow, you went there; you're Ridge Forrester's son, all right. Well, no wonder Luna was swooning; R.J.'s muscly arms were definitely distracting me.

Luna was even allowed to take a personal phone call while on assignment at Casa Forrester. Luna told the caller she couldn't stay on, since she was at work. "In Los Angeles?" the mystery woman wanted to know. Luna was then warned not once, but twice, to stay away from the Forresters! Luna hung up but interspersed her goo-goo-eyed stare at R.J. with an expression of serious worry.

And there we have it! We were told a few weeks ago during the announcement of Lisa Yamada's casting that Luna would arrive with a mystery, and she certainly did. But what mystery, exactly? That's what we enquiring soap minds have been wanting to know. I was of the opinion, perhaps stereotypically, that because Luna is clearly of Asian or Pacific Islander descent that she might be another child of Li's.

Li would certainly want any other offspring to steer clear of the Forresters, since Finn's involvement with them got him shot and left for dead, over and above Finn's girlfriend potentially getting pregnant by her ex. But that wasn't Naomi Matsuda's voice we heard on the phone. I'm not ruling out a connection to Li yet; it's just, who else would want the design school darling to remain Forrester-free?

It must be someone Luna hasn't talked to for a while, otherwise said woman would know that Luna was in L.A. I suppose Luna's school could have been in New York, another major fashion hub, and Luna accepted her admittedly new internship only recently. Maybe Li has a sister who's kept up with the Forresters and has been tasked by Li to keep Luna away? Or maybe Jack Finnegan had yet another illegitimate kid, and the woman is Jack's former mistress?

Unless Luna is completely not connected to someone on the canvas -- which is highly unlikely because that's usually not how soaps roll -- she has to be related to someone, and my guess is, it's a Finnegan. Luna looks like she could be Finn's younger sister! But the secret...I don't have enough clues for that yet to form a workable hypothesis. What do you think Luna is hiding? And do you think that maybe she's crossed paths with R.J. before, after all?

Getting back to Ridge, he had a much more valid argument for nixing Eric's legacy line than simply thinking the elder Forrester should retire, and that was the fact that "Forrester's season is already set." They didn't have room for another line. This is something Eric would have understood completely after several dozen seasons' worth of collections.

Yet this didn't really come up when Ridge went to Eric to convince him to stop designing. And Ridge again wavered on his rationale. The line was set, he had said, but then he offered to fold some of Eric's designs into the current collection. Hell, Ridge offered to get him and Thomas and R.J. to come in on the line! Brooke gets a demerit, too, for saying FC already had a fall lineup; you mean spring, La Logan. Spring collections hit the runway in the fall.

Well, Eric made his case to Ridge, but Ridge never wanted to know exactly why Eric had chosen to work with R.J. Ridge, of all people, knows that Eric is perfectly capable of producing an entire line by himself. Wouldn't Ridge wonder why Eric is suddenly hot to collaborate with someone -- anyone? Also, Eric was said to have typical arthritis, but now he's having intermittent tremors. Wouldn't that hint at something more cognitive than arthritis? Or was that original diagnosis a red herring?

Ridge heard Eric out and then lovingly declared that they would settle their dispute on the runway. Cool! Hey, it's not their first fashion showdown; Eric also instigated one in 2002 after Taylor "died," as a way of motivating Ridge to sketch again. But then something weird happened -- the next episode picked up as if the designers hadn't already remedied their conflict, and they proceeded to present their arguments to each other all over again.

So, I'm not going to backtrack along with them. I will say that it was interesting to watch Ridge and Eric quaff martinis together, since I think that was a first, and, of course, I loved the 1987 music cue as they (for the second time) agreed to hold their fashion challenge. I wonder if Eric and R.J. are going to have to come up with new stuff, though, since Ridge has now already seen what they've created together.

Hope and Thomas had sex. That's all I really have to say about that. If you've read any of my columns this year, you already know how I feel about any Thope pairing because of their parents' involvement and the fact they share a half-brother in R.J. Is this the show's attempt to live up to the "bold" in the title by pushing a forbidden romance? I still think the mostly incestuous connection between Thomas and Hope is a line that shouldn't have been crossed.

Hope has certainly embraced her inner SFTV (Slut from the Valley). She flashed lingerie at Thomas, locked the design office door, and boffed him with her mother right across the hall. Maybe Hope is so turned on because of the scandal aspect? I could abide her being horny over someone besides her husband if that someone wasn't also her sometime stepbrother.

Hope panted that she had discovered something in her that she never knew existed. I think that something is Thomas! Hope likes it, and that adds to my theory that it's the forbidden fruit part that's got her hot. Speaking of hot, yes, the staging of the scene and performances by Annika Noelle and Matthew Atkinson got me a bit toasty under the collar, Matthew especially. It's just too bad their characters' histories can't be ignored!

What are your thoughts on new arrival Luna and this developing fashion showdown between Eric and Ridge? Moonwalk over to the Comments section below or the Soap Central message boards, or simply click here to submit feedback!

That's it for me for another column! I'm ready to see what's up with Luna, and John McCook is fiyah right now, so keep watching, be alert, and most of all, be bold! See you in two weeks, my Scoopnesses!

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