Brace yourselves for a shock. I may be warming up to Damon. Oh, I know. But hell hasn't frozen over and I haven't stopped taking my meds. Actually, now that I mention it, it's the topic of medication that sort of swung my opinion of Tad's long-lost son.

Everyone is so quick to say that Damon is a great kid -- um, hello... he is an adult! -- and that he just needs to take his pills to stay in check. Why is it that everything can be magically fixed by a pill? I feel like we're in Wonderland. Sometimes people are just jerks, whether they take a pill or not. So imagine my surprise when Damon stated that he wanted to try living his life without his ADHD medication.

To me, that seems to show that Damon might just be growing up a bit. He wants to try to be accountable for the stuff that he does... right and wrong. I don't know how I would have been a doctor had my road taken me in a different direction. I hate taking medicine for anything -- but maybe that would have changed had I finished med school.

I was even tickled by Damon and Tad's discussion about online dating. You know, the thing that "dudes over 40" do. Tad seemed completely blown away by the suggestion of going onto the 'net to find love. Damon's subsequent remark probably didn't help. "I know your generation probably didn't go that route. Gosh, you probably didn't have computers back then," he commented. But Tad's muttered reply sealed the deal for me. "No, we were too busy making fire."

Alicia Minshew made her long-overdue return to All My Children last week. I was glad to see her return. Why? Because everyone else on the canvas is pretty much a newcomer. Let's look at some of who is on-screen: Scott, Marissa, Damon, Colby, Asher, Liza, Caleb, Randi, Frankie, JR, Natalia, Jake... It's not that I don't like these characters -- though, granted I do like some more than others. To me, it just seems that the bulk of the characters on-screen have been introduced in the last two or three years. Again, that isn't to say that some of the newer cast members aren't turning it out when they're on-screen.

I am fully aware that there are those viewers who were not looking forward to the return of Kendall. For so long, All My Children had become the "Kendall and Zach" hour, and I know that it turned quite a few people off. I don't like to see anyone on-screen excessively. I'm sure we're all familiar with the expressions "too much of a good thing" and "wearing out one's welcome." The key to good storytelling is definitely balance across the canvas, so that fans don't know who they are going to be seeing on their television sets on a given day. I remember back when I started watching AMC in the early 1990s, just because one storyline was the big cliffhanger one day did not mean that they'd be shown on-screen the next day.

But I digress. Why no marathon for Alicia Minshew's return? Did she get screwed out of one because her return was on a Monday and there was no "day before" on which to air the three episodes? Heck, they could have just done the Kendall marathon and even flashed back to a few episodes when Sarah Michelle Gellar was on the show. I think that would have been a happy pill for a lot of long-time viewers.

Since there's a medicine theme to today's show... One, do hospitals really allow you to fake a medical condition in order to get the goods on someone? It also seems like Angie is putting the hospital at great risk with her medical condition. She couldn't tend to Ryan properly, and I really worry that something bad is going to happen. It's not that this poor woman doesn't have enough to think about. I am not and will never be a mother, so I will never, ever fully understand what it's like to carry life inside me. But I can tell you that my heart breaks for Angie. I cannot begin to fathom how one chooses between losing their sight and having a baby. She can't take medicine to save her sight because it would harm the baby... it's a no-win situation.

Caleb Cooney must have been slipped a chill pill because the ornery mountain man that I know would never have so easily agreed to a makeover. And why is Krystal the one to do it? Wouldn't it have made more sense to have Opal, a former beauty parlor owner, chop his locks? Plus, Opal is sort of Caleb's aunt. I did like his grumbling of, "Mirrors are for girls."

Looping back a bit, we have another new face in Pine Valley. Asher Pike. I think that's the name of a shortcut between Pine Valley and Llanview. Take Route 9 about a mile past the old biker bar and then make a left on Asher Pike. That lost dog thing is the oldest trick in the book. It's only used for two reasons: kidnapping or picking up chicks.

That leaf blower scene between Colby and Damon was ridiculous. It could've been cute, but it came across as contrived and unfunny.

I sure hope Marissa is on birth control pills because I may need to be heavily sedated if she ends up pregnant with Scott's baby. Heavily sedated. We've discussed it before in this column, but who goes around sleeping with a random person because you think your husband/wife/partner is sleeping with someone... or is dead? It doesn't happen. I refuse to believe that it happens. Except for maybe those one or two strange cases that they dig up for Jerry Springer and Maury Povich.

Is it wrong for me to keep wishing that this secret nanotechnology will shrink the entire Chandler Mansion into some bite-sized nano chip. Then we can tuck it into a snow globe and all will be right with the world. We can unshrink them when they agree to play nicely and stop all this incestuous crap.

Of course, all of the idiocy did make for a good Tad moment. It was so nice to finally hear someone tell JR and Annie to grow the hell up. There are kids involved here, and the children are usually the ones that suffer.

And finally, what was the deal with showing the picture of Alexa Havins as Babe? She isn't the last actress to play the character -- and she wasn't even the actress who was playing Babe when Babe was killed off. I kept expecting the camera to spin back, and it would suddenly be a picture of the other Babe, Amanda Baker. But back to my head-scratching: Alexa Havins and her husband, Justin Bruening (ex-Jamie Martin) did just have a baby... so I'm guessing that it's safe to assume that Havins isn't returning to the show anytime soon. Oddly, One Life to Live did something similar last week or the week before where they showed a picture of Roger Howarth, the actor who used to play Todd Manning -- and he hasn't been on the show in years (and there is another actor currently on the show playing Todd).

Is ABC just messing with our heads or has someone at the network forgotten to take their meds? I'll answer that question next week. I just found out that one of my Two Scoops readers also reads CNN.com -- so that means that I have to go sleep with their editor. Or something.

dan

Email the Columnist

Post/Read comments

@soapcentral

Facebook