First, there is Helena. While seeing Connstance Towers again is always a reason to tune in, the fact that Helena sits there and nonchalantly states the obvious is both funny and kind of annoying. How did she know about Nikolas and Elizabeth? Oh wait, this is Helena we are talking about. She knows everything. So Helena was supposedly kidnapped alongside Luke by this Valentin cat (yet another convenient bastard child of Mikkos), and no one is, as Luke once put it, wearing garlic, or putting a rush on crucifixes and silver bullets. Like I said, this is Helena. To quote Luke again, these are Cassidines, they have agendas, hello. Helena pleads her case, saying they are all in danger because of Valentin. How do we know that Helena is not behind this whole mess because, frankly, she never bothered to take up another hobby besides making the Spencer family suffer? Needless to say, I'm having a hard time buying Helena's poor-me-I-was-drugged act, because... well, it's Helena.

Then we have Claudia, who is trying to blackmail Dante into sleeping with her so she can get pregnant, because Sonny has vetoed having any more kids. I should've put money on this one. I was proud of Dante when he basically told her, hey. No dice. Claudia doesn't like being told no and issues her threats like she's reading the weather forecast. But her bite left her bark a long time ago, and now her words just sound pathetic. She forced Olivia to dump Johnny and Johnny decided to remove the gloves as far as his sister is concerned. Obviously it never occurred to Claudia that Johnny would actually throw her under a bus if he felt she had gone too far. And Jason and Sam are very quickly closing in on the truth about Michael's shooting. Okay, I admit it. I'm very curious to see what happens.

The problem with red hot Nikolas and Elizabeth is the obvious one: Once again, Lucky draws the short straw. What did the poor guy do to deserve all this? And I'm not just talking about the character of Lucky. I decided a long time ago that I like Greg Vaughan in this role. I adore him, in fact. Over the the past few years, the show hasn't really given him anything to sink his teeth into story wise except for Lucky's drug addiction, which Vaughan played very well. So.... did I think it was a good idea for the show to unceremoniously dump Vaughan and bring back First-Lucky, Jonathan Jackson? No, and it's because of the way they went about it. Vaughan has admitted that he saw this coming but it still doesn't make it right. And apparently Jackson was told a different story than the one that actually happened, so I can't blame him for this travesty. However, when I picture Lucky, I have a hard time conjuring up images of Jackson paired with Kelly Monaco's Sam or even Elizabeth because Jackson still looks very young for his age. He may be able to pull it off, we'll have to see. But once you've had Vaughan's beautifully hot version of Lucky, going back is going to be kind of difficult. Hope the show knows what they are doing because I sure don't.

We had a couple of cute scenes this past week. Carly going to Jake's and buying French fries like they were illegal contraband was pretty funny and I really enjoyed her scenes with Johnny. Carly went into labor and blamed it on the French fries and the look on Jax's face when he walked into the hospital room and saw Carly being coached by Johnny and Coleman made me chuckle. "They're so annoying that they're distracting me," Carly gasped in between contractions. This show has never been known for conventional childbirth, why start now? We also had Molly, who went to Sam's apartment and scuba-dived her hot tub for a school project and interrupted Sam and Jason. "I walked in on Jason and Sam having sex," Molly later chirped to her mother. Molly did a great job of making Jason and Sam squirm by declaring their romance straight out of Wuthering Heights and other classic novels. It was an adorable scene.