Fear and loathing in Port Charles

Ellie's guilty conscience finally got the best of her and she spilled the secret she swore to keep -- Damien Spinelli has a baby. How did he (and viewers) take the news? Find out in this week's Two Scoops.

Dear Readers, I think it's safe to say we have all seen cautionary tales portrayed on General Hospital -- secrets always come out, and mostly at the most inopportune times. So on Friday's GH, just as Dante and Lulu were fawning over "their" newborn baby -- that is the precise moment when Ellie's conscience could no longer keep in the secret she's been lying about for months. She blurted out the truth -- that the baby they were holding was, in fact, Spinelli's biological child.

The range of emotions he showed yesterday was stellar. He went from absolute pure joy to know he had a beautiful healthy daughter, to rage and disbelief as he realized his lover knew and never said a word.

I have always loved Bradford Anderson as Spinelli; from the first day he appeared on-screen, he's always a joy to behold. But the performance he gave yesterday was powerful and passionate and tore at my heart. It should easily score him an Emmy. Damien Spinelli is an easygoing computer nerd who speaks in riddles most people can't comprehend and attaches goofy nicknames to everyone in town and follows the women he loves around like a puppy. But under that kind and gentle exterior lies a beating heart. He can be hurt. He can get angry. He bleeds. We saw that in vivid color yesterday. As he exploded in pain, our hearts broke with him.

The two women he loves, Ellie and Maxie, betrayed him. I think Spinelli will have more grace with Maxie than he did with Ellie. He would almost expect this kind of stupidity from Maxie. He understands her warped Maxie logic. But with Ellie, he expected more from her and felt they had an honest relationship. It was a blow to the gut to realize not only that he had a child he didn't know about but that the person who was supposed to love him knew and conspired to keep that explosive secret.

Ellie was giving her lame reasons for keeping the secret, and he challenged her to give him a reason he could believe. She finally confessed that she was afraid of losing him, and if he had known Maxie was carrying his baby, he would have left her. Fear ruled her good judgment, and now, the thing she feared will most likely happen anyway. He will leave her for lying to him, so she might as well have told him the truth in the first place.

Dante and Lulu are already in love with No Name Baby (or should we just stop pretending and call her Georgie?), and she will be ripped from their arms after months of watching her grow inside their surrogate and hoping and waiting for her to arrive. I would feel crushed by their loss, but since this is a soap, I think we all have figured out that the baby Britt is carrying around in her womb is Dante and Lulu's real frozen embryo, and they will eventually get a baby boy.

Poor Britt, locked up in handcuffs simply for being the spawn of League of Doom members Faison and Obrecht. We know that she was aiding and abetting a felon, but it appears that Britt may not know the true scope of her mother's evil deeds.

Now to the loathing...Anna Devane now knows that Britt is related to Dr. Obrecht and that Obrecht is the one who hurt Robert and poisoned Duke. Anna isn't above using Britt as bait to lure the evil doctor out of hiding. I wonder -- did Obrecht really get the jump on Holly -- or did Holly cut some deal with her? "Release me now, and I will save Robert." Hard to say. Where did she run off to anyway? Maybe Obrecht is gathering up Faison to take him back to Port Charles for a family reunion...

Luke found Laura tied up in the basement of the La-Booor-a-Torrry in the League of Doom headquarters, and Laura said Jerry Jacks was there and had been the one to tie her up. Also, news has surfaced that Kimberly McCullough is coming back to GH, so hopefully we will finally know the scheme that had every GH villain in history working together to hide Robin and collaborating on their wicked joint agenda. I honestly can't come up with any plausible explanation. And if Helena pops up alive and well, I will not be surprised. I did hear rumors that Stephen Nichols was wandering around ABC, so maybe Stefan is coming back from the dead to avenge Helena's death, too! The more presumed-dead villains, the better!

In other long-kept secrets -- Alexis went under hypnosis to remember Julian Jerome's name, but it seems as soon as Alexis mentioned the name of her prep school and talked about a friend knocking on a steamed-up car window, he remembered the exact same scene all on his own. So, the baby whose life he can save with a bone marrow transplant turns out to be his long-lost grandson. Will he tell anyone? If he does, his cover will be instantly blown, and "Derek Wells" will cease to exist. Since Derek has a scheme to wrestle his family's territory back from Sonny, he may keep quiet a bit longer. But since he and Sonny have both fathered a child with Alexis, maybe they will all decide to share and be one big happy family. NOT.

Now on to the topic that has irritated me most lately -- A.J. and Liz. Dear Elizabeth, everyone is right, A.J. is not worth your time. You didn't break him and you can't fix him. Run. Run very fast. Save yourself.

I never understand why women make choices like this. She has two guys who are interested in her. One of the guys is a prince -- literally! He is kind, he adores her, he loves her kids, he has known her his whole life, he is stable. They were together before and only split because of her guilt over hurting Lucky.

A.J., on the other hand, has been a mess his whole life, a destructive reckless man who, just like Carly, blows his life apart with regularity. He is an alcoholic who is off the wagon as often as he is on, and when he drinks, he gets very mean. Liz thought her love could save him. Clearly, she was wrong, and it's time to cut her losses.

He fell off the wagon and immediately went out about town waving a gun around, and now Connie is lying in a pool of blood in the Crimson offices. Did he kill her? Hard to say, as reformed serial killer Franco is also missing, and who says they actually got the whole brain tumor in that surgery that was supposed to cure him?

I know it's wrong, but I am more sympathetic to Franco than I am to A.J., and I can't really put my finger on why. Maybe it's just because I just love Roger Howarth and can't resist him, which makes me just as stupid as Liz.

Readers, here are two random things that bugged me this week...

1) Luke is dying and has a limited time to find a cure before he dies. But he opts to stop looking for the cure to be there when Lulu's baby (which really isn't) is born, thereby jeopardizing his life. Personally, I would have kept looking for the cure and apologized to Lulu later.

2) Olivia's visions. Stop already. Seriously. Or keep the visions and put Olivia in the room next to Heather at Shadybrook.

And, here are some things I truly loved.

1) A host of incredibly touching scenes... I thoroughly enjoyed heartfelt scenes between Luke and Sonny where Luke asked Sonny to watch over Lulu and the baby if he died.

2) Dante's scenes with Spinelli while they looked at Maxie giving birth from the observation room and talking about learning to be a dad after never having had one.

3) The nod to One Life to Live's Todd/Starr relationship, when Franco learned that Kiki was not his daughter and said, "She must have been mine in another life." I smiled.

4) Mac and Felicia's wedding...except for Richard Simmons. He's funny, sure, but on some level, he scares me. (I typed "scars" me first and corrected it, but seriously, that word could have worked, too.)

5) The scenes with Connie and Tracy lamenting about their failure at relationships and lifetime of bad choices were poignant. I love when characters are self-aware.

6) Maxie and Georgie's otherworldly scenes were sweet and made me mad that they killed off Georgie all over again. I am very glad that Ghost Georgie talked Ghost Maxie into going back into her body to live and raise her baby.

In real-life soap news, in case you haven't heard, Kirsten Storms, who plays Maxie, is pregnant in real life, and the daddy is none other than her new handsome husband, Brandon Barash (a.k.a. Johnny Zachara). I know I speak for all GH fans when I wish them the best of happiness in their new marriage and with their pregnancy!

And there is a reason for the mad chemistry we see between Michael and Kiki (Chad Duell and Kristen Alderson) -- they are a real-life couple, too. Also Britt and Morgan (Kelly Thiebaud and Bryan Craig) are dating off-screen -- but they haven't had any scenes together yet. The halls of GH must have fairy dust and Cupid's arrows floating around.

What will happen tomorrow, dear readers? Will A.J. slur out a confession to Michael just as Carly walks in so she will be compelled to give him sexual healing again? Will Dante and Lulu demand a DNA test or just take Spinelli at his word when they look at baby Georgie and realize she has a nerd vibe? Will Laura get some sort of medal for being so gracious to Holly, who slept with her husband while they were still married and even congratulated her on what a fine young man he was?

Will Dr. Obrecht ever get that Moose and Squirrel? Will Christina come home for Kate/Connie's funeral to spit on her corpse for killing Trey? Will anyone quit drugging Maxie enough to let her explain that the baby really is hers? Will Spinelli move his baby daughter into the Jackal P.I. office, wired with a webcam and a crib? Will Tracy feel slightly guilty for kicking A.J. out of ELQ when she learns she actually did drive him to drink? Will I be able to survive until Monday with all this anticipation to see what happens next?

Only tomorrow knows, dear readers, and I will tune in tomorrow as long as there are tomorrows.

Tamilu