Forrester patriarch Eric nearly met his maker on The Bold and the Beautiful
And you thought The Bold and the Beautiful anniversary celebration on Soap Central was over! Naw, this final chapter is just a little late. It's now 38 years and two weeks (and a day!) since fans of daytime drama were introduced to the Forresters, Logans, and Spencers, and the repercussions of their early exploits have certainly carried into modern times. Ridge and Brooke have continued to ride the marry-go-round, Genoa City's most unwelcome visitor crossed lines even too red for her, and the O.G. R.I.P. Grandma Logan would be reaching for the oxygen seeing how her great-granddaughter went from public virgin to stepbrother-sexing vamp. Let's wrap up this B&B jubilee by mining the show's most recent history!
2019: Baby come back
Episode 8,000 kicked off with a babymoon gone wrong: on Catalina Island for some vacay, the pregnant Hope went into labor, only to lose her child during delivery. We soon learned there was more to it — skanky gambling doctor, Reese Buckingham, nabbed Hope's living infant and switched it with a dead one so he could sell the babe and pay off debts. The buyer? Unwitting Steffy, who had simply wanted to adopt a sister for Kelly. Meanwhile, the story of newcomer Flo Fulton — Reese's ex — got around, and soon B&B peripherals Xander, Zoe, Emma, and Shauna got clued in to Flo's part in the illegal adoption. Worse, Thomas, who suddenly went psycho, lorded the knowledge over everyone and used Hope's grief to get her to like him, all the while knowing Hope had no reason to grieve. They all might still be stuck in this cycle were it not for cherub Douglas, who overheard Papa Thomas talking about baby Beth being alive and immediately spilled the tea to Liam. It was an eight-month ordeal that started out well and got muddled in the middle, yet offered a slam-bang finale in the form of Liam punching would-be kidnapper Thomas in the face. Not something you'd want to put in the baby album, though.
2020: You great big beautiful doll
There wasn't a single one of us who wasn't affected by the early, pre-vaccine days of the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic. While we were wiping off groceries and holing up in our homes, TV and movie sets went dark, unable to continue production. B&B, however, eventually found a safe workaround: The cast would perform scenes with non-contagious mannequins. There was a certain humor to learning that characters were really getting romantic with bewigged dummies, but it got the soap back on the air with new eps well before other shows followed suit. The real-life MacGyvering even made its way into the story, with a brain-bleeding Thomas tanking Hope's reunion with Liam by kissing on a plastic Hope dupe, thinking she was real; she even gave Thomas orders to kill Liam! Outrageous, fun, and working with what you've got, it was one of the cleverer arcs of our time and one helluva way to make gallons of lemonade out of those particular lemons.
2021: Get that VIN-ny number
Liam has spent the bulk of his 15 years on the show ping-ponging between Steffy and Hope, but it's when Liam gets stories outside of that triangle that he tends to shine. B&B had already struck gold in pairing an amnesiac Liam with Quinn, of all people, five years earlier, but this time, it was a simple joyride that stomped on the storyline pedal. Unable to stop Bill's car in time, Liam hit and killed Vinny Walker, a technician at a hospital. While Liam was out in a cold faint, Bill got rid of the evidence, but the conscientious Spencer scion couldn't live with the secret and turned himself in. Bill's involvement got him thrown in the hoosegow as well, which gave Justin an opening to grab Bill's business for himself. Thomas, who got caught in the corporate crossfire, found himself in cage thanks to Justin, allowing the sometime sociopath to finally do some piper paying. Though the “murder mystery” was neither a murder nor a mystery, the twist came when we learned that Vinny had stepped in front of the car on purpose to frame Liam for his death and clear the way for Hope with best bud Thomas. That's what friends are for?
2022: Kill your darlings
Naughty nurse/baby switcher/beekeeper/kidnapper Sheila Carter had unceremoniously disappeared from B&B's canvas in 2018 after being a suspect in Dollar Bill's shooting. But the Wisconsin transplant came roaring back when Steffy was about to marry her medical savior, Finn – Sheila announced that she was Finn's mother! Ignoring that the claimed biological connection has never been proven, Steffy couldn't ignore Sheila's criminal past, which included making it possible for Taylor to be shot through the heart, so Steffy didn't want Sheila anywhere near Finn. Like the Hulk, however, you won't like Sheila when she's angry – she lured Steffy to an alley, and Finn ended up taking the bullet meant for his wife. Rather than let Steffy call 911 for her precious son, Sheila popped Steffy as well and left the marrieds to die on a bed of Hefty bags. This was so dastardly that even 1990 Sheila would have proclaimed it too much, but Sheila's phoenix-like tendencies led to a delicious arc with Li, then Sheila, caring for a bedridden Finn, the latter essentially holding him hostage. Sheila will never truly be able to come back from shooting her own son...unless an eventual DNA test shows she's not Finn's mama after all.
2023: Rome if you want to
A SORASed Hope first appeared to us in 2010, and soon, she folded her virginity into an entire fashion line. Through all her further exploits, she remained a good girl extraordinaire, largely because she didn't want to be an SFTV like her mother, Brooke. That seemed to change when, out of nowhere, Hope developed the hots for Thomas, her on-and-off stepbro. Lusting over a guy who was part of her extended family was bad enough, but that it also didn't matter to Hope that Thomas was the guy who gaslit her, stalked her, and maintained the lie that her precious Beth had died was anything but an aphrodisiac. Yet none of this stopped Hope from torching her marriage to Liam and flaunting her sexy time with Thomas. Was Hope's switch the result of the trauma Thomas subjected her to? Was it her Sharpe DNA asserting itself? We never found out, and we still don't know, because B&B has yet to provide a reason for Hope's personality transplant. Anything would do. Give us something.
2024: Pour some Sugar on me
Sheila was in one of her weird places where she'd claimed she'd changed, yet was still off-kilter enough to make viewers think she would act up any minute. The monster-in-law got tired of Steffy using her as a punching bag — but when she silently menaced Steffy on a stormy night, Steffy whipped out a Ginsu and flayed her one-time shooter! Cuts through a psychopath and still slices a tomato! Finn strangely mourned his mom (soaking his hand in a bloody carpet like it was Palmolive; eww), but Sheila's boy toy Deacon showed he knew how to count: the body he saw at the morgue had ten toes, not nine, as Sheila had chopped off this little piggie at one point. It took a visiting Lauren Fenmore to help Deacon put the pieces together — it was Sugar, Sheila's former cohort whom Sheila had forced to get plastic surgery to look like her on Y&R in 2005 — that Steffy had killed. In fact, Sugar had been holding Sheila prisoner in a warehouse, hoping to frame Sheila for Steffy's death! Over the top as it was, it was a brilliant callback to a long-forgotten sister show storyline. The question is now, if Lauren didn't shoot Sheila-as-Phyllis or Sugar-as-Phyllis in 2007, who did Lauren shoot?
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You've just Remembered When with this final look at past days of The Bold and the Beautiful! Thankfully the Carter-and-Hope-stole-the-company and Luna's-holed-up-at-Bill's eras are over, and we're going full steam ahead with whatever's wrong with poor Liam, who's been on the backburner for going on two years! But did he have to hit his head, though? That's so 2010. And 2015. And 2016. And 2018...
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