Two's company, three's a party

Lulu and Dante were reunited with their son, Liesl met up with her sister in jail, Liz found herself juggling two men, and Maxie returned home with a new guy from Down Under. It's time to have a party with Two Scoops of General Hospital shenanigans.

If I lived in Port Charles, I would want -- no, I would demand -- a paternity and maternity test as soon as I was old enough to ask. Seriously, they should send a courtesy kit home with the newborns.

This week, Ron Carlivati and the General Hospital writing team gave us not one but two major surprises when it was revealed that Liesl Obrecht and Madeline Reeves were sisters and that Liesl had given Magda a secret son to raise. Apparently, Liesl's special gift is to hide children, whether they be her own or someone else's.

James Nathan Reeves is really James Nathan Reeves-West-Westbourne-Obrecht!

I'm pretty sure that Nathan has more names than the prince himself, Nikolas Cassadine, who might very likely turn out to be Nathan's cousin. If I were a betting woman -- I am -- I'd put my money on Victor Cassadine being the proud papa of Liesl Obrecht's son. As one of my Twitter peeps pointed out, if Nathan/James had been Cesar Faison's son, nothing short of an apocalypse would have stopped Liesl from sharing the news with Cesar and handing the baby to him on a silver platter. We know that Liesl and Victor have a past and that Liesl gets as antsy as a cat on a hot tin roof around him, so it stands to reason that a secret baby might be the cause of Liesl's anxiety.

Ladies and gentlemen, the plot thickens.

After months and months of extreme boredom watching Detective Nathan West repeatedly accuse Silas of putting Nina in a coma, I finally find myself curious about the one-note eye candy with the dreamy torso.

Now, the bold move would have been for the writers to pull a Game of Thrones move by having Nathan and Britt hook up before learning that they are siblings, but instead, they played it safe because daytime isn't quite ready for that yet. Although I think it's a little bit of a miracle that it hasn't happened before with secret siblings steadily streaming out of the secret catacombs every couple of years.

The writers took the new twist as far as they could without crossing the line. Nathan and Britt got drunk and then returned to his place. The attraction was there, but before each kiss, something would happen to put a stop to things. I have to say, as much as I despise Britt, she was a pretty funny drunk.

However, even drunk, Britt is still blaming Elizabeth for exposing her secret rather than taking full responsibility for losing Nikolas. It wasn't Elizabeth sharing Britt's letter of confession with Lulu that ended Britt's engagement to Nikolas; it was Britt repeatedly lying -- and stealing his sister's child -- that did it. I think it's why Britt doesn't feel redeemed even though she thought that returning Dante and Lulu's son to them would do the trick.

Before you can be redeemed, you must be responsible for your actions.

I can't muster up any sympathy for Britt until she accepts full responsibility for her wrongs and stops blaming others for her misfortunes. Maybe it's because I'm a mother, but I find the idea of someone stealing an embryo and then having the baby without informing the biological parents abhorrent.

Okay, who else is wondering who those portraits are of that are hanging in the Jerome Gallery? At first I thought perhaps that it was Bryan Craig (Morgan Corinthos) and Maurice Benard (Sonny Corinthos), but then one of my friends said that she had read that it was actually head writer, Ron Carlivati in the dark sunglasses. I chuckled because I thought that it was a cute inside joke, but I then wondered who the other guy was. Some random dude? If so, that's creepy.

Even creepier is to have pictures of two guys staring down at you when you want to get busy on the desk with Julian, which apparently Alexis did.

I have to say, Julexis are sizzling. Smoking hot. They are by far my favorite couple on the show right now, not just because their relationship built over time in a way that totally got me hooked with the very obvious and strong chemistry between the two actors, but also because it makes sense to me why Alexis would once again bend her personal rule about not getting involved with bad boys. I get why she keeps going back for more. Julian is not just positively fine, but he's smooth and has loads of game.

Luke also appears to have game -- con game -- but I have a feeling that it's not going to last much longer because clearly something is not right with that man. His reaction to hearing about his beloved daughter's good fortune and the safe return of a grandson he hadn't known about wasn't just odd, it was downright bizarre and should have had Sonny questioning whether Luke was really Luke or not.

This is why I've come to loathe Sonny. When he should be suspicious and paranoid, he isn't, but when someone he hates bats an eyelash the wrong way Sonny gets an itchy trigger finger and justifies murdering an innocent man.

I'm not sure what the goal was in having Sonny kill A.J. in cold blood. This is not a bell that can be unrung. We know for a fact that Ava, not A.J., killed Connie, and we know for a fact that Sonny shot A.J. because Sonny wanted to, not because Sonny snapped. He said as much to Carly and to Shawn.

Sonny murdering people is not a new concept; after all, he is a mobster, and we've seen him do it before. There was the brutal slaying on the piers of Russian mobster Karpov when Sonny shot Karpov in the head and other various scenes of Sonny ordering the deaths of other rival mobsters as well as one or two of his own men who had turned on him. However, Sonny had never murdered an innocent man in cold blood until A.J.

As Franco pointed out, Sonny broke his own code.

The problem is that Sonny is in a Catch-22. If he tells Michael the truth, Michael will turn his back on Sonny forever, and Sonny will likely end up going to jail. If Sonny keeps quiet, then he will forever fear that Michael will find out the truth. Guilt doesn't factor in here because there isn't an ounce of remorse in Sonny for killing A.J. One reason is that Sonny believes that A.J. murdered Connie, but the larger reason -- the one that I think truly drove Sonny to shoot A.J. -- is that Sonny just hated A.J. with a fiery passion of a thousands suns, and therefore Sonny had wanted to kill A.J. for years.

I don't deny that A.J. did horrible things to Sonny or that Sonny was justified in hating A.J. But that was a two-way street because Sonny did horrible things to A.J., too, yet A.J. got past that. No, Sonny wasn't A.J.'s favorite person, but A.J. had turned his life around, and he had learned to accept that Sonny was a part of Michael's life.

If I didn't know better, I'd say that Maurice Benard was leaving the show, and this is his swan song. The truth is, if Sonny left, Julian is standing in the wings to take his place as leading mobster bad boy.

An antihero doesn't murder innocent people. Sonny did that. Worse, he has been a pompous, self-righteous jerk about it, so I grew to despise him the more he trashed A.J., knowing that A.J. was not guilty of the things that Sonny accused him of with such great certainty. It would have been better if perhaps they had made A.J. guilty of killing Connie or had kept the truth from us about Ava's role in Connie's death until Sonny learned the truth. At least that way, there wouldn't have been months of us knowing just how wrong Sonny has been.

I can't wait until Carly defends her decision to keep Sonny's secret and tells Michael that she would pick Sonny to be Michael's father each time if she had things to do over again. I hope that Michael points out (very sarcastically) that it was so much better to be raised with brightly wrapped gifts containing bombs, emergency trips to the private island without his parents for months on end, and of course being shot in the head and left in a coma for a year than to have a father who -- gasp -- wanted to be a decent father.

I also laughed at the hypocrisy of Carly going on about what a lousy person A.J. was when she hopped into bed with him within weeks of him returning to Port Charles.

Carly did not do herself any favors by choosing Sonny over her own son, which is exactly what she did. Michael is an adult, and she knows, deep down inside that cold little heart of hers, that Michael would want to know the truth about Sonny shooting A.J., so there is no doubt in my mind that she will pay the price right alongside Sonny when the truth comes out. And it will. Stuff like this always comes out.

The cherry on top will be Sonny and Carly learning that it was Ava, not A.J., who murdered Connie.

Meanwhile, Liz is finding out that three is indeed a party. She currently has two scrumpdillyicious men, Nik and Ric, vying for her affections. Although, Nik is a little less obvious about it because it's only been a couple of days since his engagement to Britt went up in smoke. I don't think it's going to take him very long to get over it, though, because right before Nik went to the engagement party, he had a chat with Ghost Emily, who helped to establish that Nik is still very much in love with Liz.

Unfortunately for Nik, he's not going to be able to sit on his laurels for long if he wants a future with Liz because he's got stiff competition from Ric, who has made it abundantly clear to everyone who will listen, including Liz, that his obsession with Liz is still alive and well, and he will do anything to woo her into giving him another chance. Eeny, meeny, miny, moo, what's a lucky girl to do?

If Ghost Emily wasn't so busy being the Julie McCoy of the afterlife, she might have time to pay Nikolas another visit and offer him some tips on how to convince Liz that he really is over that embryonapper and ready to move on with Liz.

I'm a Niz and LiRic fan, so I'm in a win-win situation here.

Dear Readers, I had the world's best mother-in-law. That's a fact, not an exaggeration. She passed away in 2010 from cancer, but there is hardly a day that goes by that I don't get teary-eyed and think of her. She was perfect in every single way, and I was blessed to not only have been her daughter-in-law, but to have been loved by her.

However, no way would Bevy have been waiting for me to arrive home at 2:00 in the morning to welcome her baby grandson home! She would have been there the following morning (late) with a car full of gifts for the baby and me, plus she would have called me first. Why? Because Bevy respected boundaries.

Olivia, not so much. I'm convinced that sleeping with Sonny is leeching the intelligence out of her noggin. She's turned into a bona fide mob moll and is constantly making excuses for Sonny's sullen behavior. My jaw dropped when she told him at the Floating Rib that she felt bad for him because he couldn't even enjoy the good news about their grandson because of all of the terrible things that kept happening to Michael.

The only good thing that Olivia did this week is to suggest that Dante and Lulu consider changing the baby's name. Unfortunately, in less than five seconds, Dante and Lulu decided to go with the name they had jokingly used for the baby that they thought Maxie was carrying. Ben is now Rocco Falconeri.

Dante and Lulu suck at naming children. First Connie (now known as Georgie), and then Rocco. But wait, there could be more. At the end of Friday's show, Liesl revealed that there might be yet another Bambino Falconeri waiting to be found and given a hideous name.

My first thought was that there was a frozen embryo in a tiny cryogenic chamber next to Jason at the Crichton-Clark facility, but that wouldn't be very soapy. Strange, but not soapy.

A soapy-twist would be that somehow Sabrina was implanted with the Falconeri embryo and the baby she's carrying right now is Dante and Lulu's second child. How Liesl could have managed that is a mystery, but I wouldn't put it past her to have found a way.

Cutest scene of the week goes to Nikolas and Spencer when they were hanging out in bed, having a true father and son moment after Nikolas broke the news to Spencer about Britt. It was truly adorable, and little Nicolas Bechtel is a perfect Spencer.

Hottest scene of the week goes to Julian and Alexis sexing it up at the Jerome Gallery.

Most romantic scene was Ric declaring his undying love to Liz at the hospital. Ric might turn out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, but for that kind of attention, I'd consider getting myself shot in the shoulder.

Finally, I'm not sure what to think of Levi. Clearly, he and Maxie are more than friends, judging by the hot kiss that they shared and the fact that he's shacked up with her in the bedroom, but I found him a bit annoying with his unsolicited advice to Nathan. I will give Levi points, though, for having a positive influence on Maxie. I want to like her again, so I hope that the first order of business is for Maxie and Lulu to mend some fences.

A few things that tickled my fancy

Liesl refuses to let Liz free in exchange for Nikolas as a hostageDr. Obrecht: "Oh, enough of this feeblemindedness. I reject your idea of a swap. But, please, join us, Herr Cassadine. Two is company. Three is a party."Nikolas: "That's not the expression."Dr. Obrecht: "It is now. Inside!"

Alexis becomes suspicious when she walks in on Julian and Ric during a private conversationRic: "Well, it looks like you caught us, Alexis. Julian and I were in the middle of a clandestine meeting right here, out in the open, in the gallery that he owns."

Liesl gets tossed into the slammer where she hears a fellow inmate cryingOfficer: "Don't let the bedbugs bite. Baby stealer."Dr. Obrecht: "Dieser tag wird immer schlimmer." [This day becomes increasingly worse]Madeline: [Sobbing]Dr. Obrecht: "Quiet! I detest the sound of self-pity."

Long-probably-not-so-lost sisters meet in jailDr. Obrecht: "Some of us didn't get to transform ourselves. You lost your accent, moved to New York, and suddenly Magda Westbourne became Madeline West. You forgot where you came from."Madeline: "I never forgot where I came from, but, unlike you, I don't consider myself a slave to the circumstances into which I was born. I was ready, willing, and able to go out and make a new life for myself -- a better life."Dr. Obrecht: "Mm. Well, then, brava! And your couture fashions have added a touch of class to our surroundings."Madeline: "Well, at least I'm not blending into the institutional environment as you are."Dr. Obrecht: "Ah, Magda, so superior, and yet here we are together in the same place, in the same position. So, tell me -- how has this "better life" worked out for you?"

Until next time, dear readers, take care. Liz Masters

What are your thoughts on General Hospital? What did you think of this week's Two Scoops? We want to hear from you -- so drop your comments in the Comments section below, tweet about it on Twitter, share it on Facebook, or chat about it on our Message Boards.