Together again -- till death do us part

Peter is reunited with Maxie, but for how long? Sonny and Carly are on the brink of divorce, Victor's tarot card was a bust, and Liz had a troubling Valentine's Day. It's time for Two Scoops of love on the rocks.

Did Victor really think Peter would share something that might be useful to him at a later time? Foolish man. Peter would hold on to that little secret until he could wield it. Also rather shortsighted was Liesl's plan to stick a listening device on Victor's lapel. Did she plan on Victor wearing that jacket for a few days?

I was surprised, though, when Victor whipped out that tarot card in front of Sam. It was a dangerous move, and it made me wonder what Victor's next move would have been had the tarot card actually worked. Toss Sam into the harbor? Isn't she a Cassadine, too? What is Drew's mind hiding that Victor is willing to sacrifice a Cassadine for? I'm intrigued.

Now, let's discuss Peter and his top-secret lair hidden in a remote region of the Swiss Alps, the place Peter smugly promised no one knew about because he had secretly bought it under a different name, and it was so off the beaten path that it wasn't even on maps.

Bwahahaha! It took folks about an hour to figure out where Peter took Maxie. First, Felicia on a flight to Switzerland with a map of the mountains open on her phone, recalled loose-lips Peter talking about his favorite place on earth in Versteckte Wiese, Switzerland. He shared everything about the place except an address.

Meanwhile, in Switzerland at WSB headquarters, Anna and the boys (Dante and Drew) were sifting through their copy of Peter's book The Severed Branch, which was essentially a diary of Peter's early life, hopes, and secret hideouts written in code that Anna easily deciphered. At the same time, Liesl recalled that Peter had spent much of his "formattable" years in the Swiss Alps being molded into a chip off the old rotten archvillain block.

Now, it's a matter of who kills Peter first. Will it be Felicia with her map and rental car that she checked into during the flight? Aaah, technology. Since Felicia didn't tell Anna about the flight to Switzerland, it seems unlikely that Felicia will call her friend to let Anna know where to meet her and to bring along a small army of WSB agents. Luckily, Anna, Dante, and Drew will be close behind to save Felicia when Peter takes her hostage, too.

Unfortunately for the Dynamic Trio, one of the WSB agents is in league with Victor, and Victor made it clear that Anna and Dante were expendable. It's almost a certainly that one of them will end up injured, but I don't expect any of them to die. The same can't be said for Victor's lackey, and definitely not Peter. This has to be Peter's last stand because if he gets away again, it will just be flat-out absurd. I don't care if he has an escape plan; it's time for Peter to die or go to jail. Peter is not a criminal mastermind. He's homicidal, obsessive, and mentally unbalanced.

It was Victor who repeatedly saved Peter's bacon, not Peter's keen mind. Without Victor, Peter would have died locked in a freezer deep in the bowels of Helena's abandoned laboratory. I will give Peter credit, though. He is resilient. I'm starting to think that he doesn't actually feel physical pain. Faison was the same way.

As for Victor, I really don't know what to make of his plans. Apparently, Drew has some information locked away in his subconscious that Victor claims is the key to his life's work. It's all tied to the looming threat that Victor has been warning his family about. With the true Ice Princess diamond unaccounted for, and a random heat wave hitting Port Charles in the middle of winter, I'm starting to suspect that someone has the Ice Princess and a weather machine.

Victor's chat with Spencer was quite interesting because I believe it was peppered with little clues. Victor talked about how he wanted to change people's perception of him and wanting what was best for his family because big things were in the wind, and they would need to stick together. Is there an enemy lurking with ill intention that Victor plans to save everyone from, or is it the usual world domination shtick?

Spencer might be the heir apparent, but someone needs to shake some sense into him. Spencer's revisionist history doesn't fly with me.

Don't get me wrong, I love Britt. However, Britt is no saint. She stole Dante and Lulu's embryo, and she passed the baby off as hers. She did that to trap Patrick Drake into a relationship when his heart was clearly with someone else. When that blew up in her face, Britt used Ben/Rocco to trick Nikolas into opening his home -- and his heart -- to her. Britt went on the run with her criminal father because she was complicit in helping Spencer fake a kidnapping.

It was Spencer's actions that led to Britt leaving town, and I don't blame Nikolas in the least for threatening to file charges. Nikolas had every right to be furious. Spencer was a child, and Britt shouldn't have encouraged that kind of behavior.

Also, let's not pretend that Hayden Barnes was without sin, either. Hayden knew that Shawn didn't shoot her, but she decided to let him languish in jail because she had another use for the information. She blackmailed Nikolas with it. Hayden was at best a liar and grifter. I loved her, but she had her issues. She arrived in Port Charles to help Ric Lansing pull a con on Drew for money, not for any altruistic reasons., and she clearly surfaced long enough to contact her mother.

Nikolas drove Hayden out of town, but he didn't keep her there. She surfaced long enough to contact her mother, and Naomi Dreyfus' killer is the reason that Hayden remains missing. It's possible that Victor is behind it, but there has hasn't been any direct confirmation, and Victor sidestepped the question when Nikolas asked. What we do know is that Nikolas is not behind it.

I loved how Laura challenged Spencer by asking how he could possibly see the good in Victor but not in his own father. Nikolas faked his death, but there were extenuating circumstances starting with the fact that Nikolas was in a lot of legal hot water. As the shooting proved, Valentin posed a very real threat to Nikolas' safety, and an argument can easily be made that Nikolas faking his death kept Spencer safe. Valentin wouldn't have stopped hunting for Nikolas if Spencer had suddenly vanished into thin air, not to mention what that would have done to Laura.

Spencer needs to stop punishing Ava, too. Her sin was choosing not to go through the rest of her life as a disfigured monster rather than helping Spencer punish Valentin. Why does Spencer believe his grief was more important than Ava's mental well-being? Spencer is an adult now, and he should start thinking like one. It's time for him to grow up and stop holding on to his childish grudges. Would he be happier if Nikolas had truly died and Ava ended up going mad and possibly ending her life just so he could feel vindicated?

Where is Spencer's family loyalty? He expects everyone to give it to him, but he has none for anyone except an infamous uncle he's known for about five hot minutes. It's a two-way street, buddy. Too bad Laura didn't push back a little harder about Esme. It's just another shining example of Spencer's terrible lack of judgment. All the people that Spencer should trust, he shuns like lepers, while the vipers he hugs close.

Ava, Trina, Josslyn, Cam, Kevin - and the list goes on -- all have Esme's number. She's practically flashing it under a bright neon light between the constant sneers, glares, and biting comments that continually stoke the fires. She not only helped Spencer stalk Ava and set fire to her car, but Esme twisted the knife by using a murdered daughter's memory against a grieving mother. Good and decent people don't do things like that. That's the stuff of twisted and evil people.

That brings me to Carly -- a woman scorned and on the warpath.

Carly has set her sights on Nina, and if I had to hazard a guess, Carly's new attorney will probably accuse Nina of being the cause of Sonny's alienation of affection. Juicy stuff, and I'm down for it. I'd love to see Sonny and Nina try to defend their tawdry behavior to a judge.

I'm Team Carly all the way, and truth be told, I'm not exactly her biggest fan. Most of the time, Carly annoys me. She's a bully, and she was very much a gold digger when she hooked up with Sonny. I still remember the ice bucket filled with cash in the penthouse living room that she used to dip into on a regular basis and how much she relished telling people that she was Mrs. Sonny Corinthos. She was addicted to the money and the power.

Carly also has a history of hooking up with a married man. She arrived in Port Charles with the intention of breaking up her birth mother's marriage by seducing Bobbie's husband Tony Jones to punish Bobbie for giving Carly up for adoption to Frank and Virginia Benson. However, that was decades ago, Bobbie forgave her daughter, and Carly is a different person. Even Lucas, Tony's son, made peace with all of that.

This is now, and right now, Sonny and Nina are both in the wrong. Sonny more than Nina, but Nina most certainly isn't an innocent bystander. She has been low-key stalking Sonny ever since they returned from Nixon Falls, and she has only been listening to the people who tell her what she wants to hear. As Michael said, Nina could have called Sonny to check on him rather than hotfooting it down to the Haunted Star. More importantly, even if Carly hadn't shown up, it hadn't been a green light for Sonny and Nina to hit the sheets.

Nina lied for nearly a year to keep Sonny from his family, and she has been hovering over his marriage since his return. She doesn't get a pass in this because she is actively pursuing him, and she even told Carly that she wouldn't turn Sonny away if he came to her. Nina has been so thirsty for Sonny that she is willing to accept scraps. The desperation is uncomfortable to watch, and I constantly find myself wanting to shout, "Have some self-respect!"

If you ask me, Sonny doesn't love either woman. If you love someone, you don't sleep with another because you literally don't want anyone else. If you're in love, you put that person first, you treat them with respect, and you don't give up at the first sign of trouble. You fight as hard and as long as it takes to make things right. If Sonny loved Carly, he wouldn't have slept with Nina because he would have understood that it was the worst possible way to hurt her, short of killing a loved one. By the same token, if Sonny had loved Nina, he wouldn't have left her bed to chase after Carly.

I don't know what's going on with Sonny, but the kids were right when Michael and Josslyn agreed that Sonny was not the same person. Loyalty meant everything to Sonny, and the old Sonny would have felt betrayed by what Nina had done. He wouldn't have taken her to bed; he would have been out to destroy her.

It really irritates me how Sonny acts like Carly should get past his little bout of infidelity. He doesn't seem to comprehend that it was his months of whispered secrets, unspoken feelings, and protecting Nina on top of sleeping with her that Carly is struggling with. It's the fact that Nina acted out of malice, put Carly -- and her children -- through months of heartache and fear, but she has not paid a price for any of it. Not even a slap on the wrist.

Carly, to her credit, was honest with Sonny about her feelings for Jason and what Sonny had walked in on. Unlike Nina, Jason pulled back, and he gave Sonny and Carly space to reconnect. Carly put Sonny first, but Sonny didn't do the same for his wife. Worse, he made Carly the bad guy by asking her to leave Nina alone. Like I said, the old Sonny would have gone with a scorched earth method of retaliation for the things that Nina did. This Sonny lives in an alternate reality where Nina is the innocent victim and Carly is the cruel perpetrator.

At this point, I want Sonny to end up alone and to focus on his mental health.

Speaking of which, what in the world is going on with Liz?

A wedding ring mysteriously turning up where it shouldn't, a fire at Franco's studio, a torn wedding dress in a donation box, and now a card from "B." Liz has good reason to feel uneasy. My theory is that Heather is rearing her treacherous head, but that macabre greeting card was signed "B" not "H." Is "B" Betsy Frank? Possible, but it seems a bit odd to me that Betsy would only sign her first initial, and even stranger that the envelope was addressed to Elizabeth Webber rather than Elizabeth Baldwin. I could have sworn she took Franco's last name when they got married.

On Twitter, people are speculating that Liz might have dissociative identity disorder, as a result of all the recent trauma starting with Jake's return from the dead, the whole chimera drama with Helena, the homicidal doctor she dated, and Franco getting Drew's memories and then dying just as she and Franco had finally gotten their happily ever after. There's also the fact that she had a very noticeable bad reaction to her father Jeff Webber reaching out to her after some 20 years or so of silence.

Is there a childhood trauma we are unaware of?

When Liz first appeared in Port Charles, she was the rebellious black sheep of the family who was jealous of her accomplished and much-favored older sister. At the time, Liz's parents worked with Doctors Without Borders in war-torn parts of the world, and Liz had run away from home and followed Sarah to Port Charles, where their grandmother Audrey Hardy lived. In time, both Steven Lars and Sarah became doctors, while Liz chose a slightly different path in the field of medicine.

In the beginning, Liz and her sister would hear from their parents occasionally, but only for the first few months. Since then, neither Jeff nor his wife Carolyn ever reached out to Liz. Not when she was viciously raped while still in high school (another trauma associated with Valentine's Day), not when she had several brushes with death, not when she suffered numerous heartbreaks including the death of a child and a couple of miscarriages, and certainly not after the births of their three grandsons.

What kind of parents do that? It's not like Liz grew up to be an axe murderer or anything. She's a respected nurse, loving mother, and Audrey's pride and joy.

DID is certainly a possibility, and one clever viewer suggested that "B" might stand for "Biz," which is the nickname that Terry gave to Liz during their childhood. However, as long as Heather Webber is in the picture -- and given Heather's very long history of terrorizing her victims before punishing them -- it's more likely that Heather is up to her old sadistic tricks. Heather is diabolical, and I can't imagine that she took the news of her precious Franco's death well.

Also, Heather has a very long and sordid obsession with her ex-husband Jeff. Is that why Jeff reached out to Liz? Has he heard from Heather?

Finally, Harmony told Alexis an interesting story about a pregnant woman named Joan who joined the commune, gave birth to a baby girl, and mysteriously vanished one night, leaving her newborn behind. Harmony and Douglas were given the infant to raise, and they named her Willow.

I didn't believe a word of it. I'm more certain than ever that somehow, someway, Willow is going to be revealed to be Nina's daughter. There are signs. Willow reluctantly kept Nina and Sonny's secret; she remains open to Wiley having a relationship with Nina, which has led to some friction with Michael; and the two women keep finding common ground, most recently during their encounter at the hospital when they both opened up to each other about growing up with indifferent mothers who were more concerned about appearances than their daughters' welfare.

There are benefits to making Nina and Willow related, the least of which will be the impact it will have on Wiley. It will keep Nina in his life, which will always be a source of tension in Willow's relationship with Michael. It will also effectively pit Willow and Nina against Michael and Carly. Can Michael and Willow's relationship survive that kind of dynamic?

Family drama is ratings gold for a soap opera, so I really can't see our intrepid scribes passing up the opportunity to explore all the possible ways this could wreak havoc on everyone's lives.

My gut tells me to buckle up, it's going to be quite a bumpy ride.

Those Mattsson parents sure made beautiful daughters. Sofia's sister Helena temporarily stepped in as Sasha Gilmore, and it was a seamless transition in large part because there's a strong family resemblance between the women and they have similar mannerisms. It's a brilliant move, but I wish Sofia a speedy return.

Hey, Portia. I haven't forgotten that you have an earthshattering secret that will rock Curtis and Trina's lives. I guess, we are waiting for Jordan to return, which I expect to be in the very near future. Not only did Mac make a point of reminding Felicia that he's the interim police commissioner, but T.J. announced that Jordan was fit as a fiddle and ready to return home.

While I don't believe the story of Joan, I couldn't help but wonder if Cyrus Renault's newfound relationship with God will lead him straight to "Friends of Peace and Love" and Prophet Josiah. Stay tuned.

I'm no Sonny apologist by any means, but one thing about Sonny's aberrant behavior, that no one seems to be taking into consideration, is the fact that Sonny suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) that caused him to lose his memory, and then he suffered another one in the bar fire, that brought his memories back. Everybody just assumed that Sonny was back to what passes for 'normal" for him, but I think his bipolar disorder, and the fact that he went off his medication, might be masking the symptoms of a more serious problem caused by Sonny's multiple TBIs. -- Scrimmage

There was so much wrong with this transport. I mean They KNOW Peter has People. SO why announce the time and place so clearly. Why not have more cars following or leading too? WHY in the dark so if something does happen it is so easy to slip away? Then the baby napping. I know it could have happened and HAS happened from the Q mansion but Maxie's first thought should have been to warn the people who have her daughter. -- Mary Keeley

This is very odd because Willow (in her attempt to reach Kristina about the evils of DoD) said she had a normal life with a mom and a dad before her mom TOOK HER to the commune. Now the story is she was BORN in the commune and all her records are fake because she was never 'registered' with any governmental agency thru her childhood. -- evave2

I love hearing from readers, so please feel free to leave a comment below or email me.

Take care and happy viewing,

Liz Masters

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