Port Charles, Port Charles, Port Charles... What are we going to do with you? You mess up all your best couples!

Let’s go back to the beginning. When the show launched, the powers behind the scenes at Port Charles transferred Lucy and Kevin over from General Hospital as the new show’s marquee couple, with Scott thrown into the mix as the spoiler. Eve started to emerge from the intern crowd, so then we got Scott/Eve and Kevin/Lucy, who played the Change Partners game. Maybe a few times.

Fast forward. Scott got lost to sister show GH, Eve was stuck with hunky new guy Ian and they had a baby, and Kevin and Lucy forged through all kinds of obstacles and perils with his mystery daughter, evil candles and evil paintings, and Lucy willing Kevin back down to earth through sheer force of will. And then... And then they killed off Eve, made Kevin looney tunes again, and matched up Lucy and Ian. Which made it Ian 2, Kevin 0, when it came to stealing lawfully wedded wives. And now we’re expected to believe they are the big honkin’ super couple of Port Charles?

Uh, I don’t think so. With all due apologies to dear Max who pens such fabulous Musings every week and has gone on the record as liking Lucy and Ian, I must admit that I hate them. I hate them. I hate that Lucy and Kevin trod the super couple path and beat back life and death and evil aromatherapy, and then he gets a tad psycho and she dumps him like yesterday’s stinky garbage and starts steaming up the shower with Dr. Ian the sensitive vampire man. C’mon!  Okay, so the vampire/slayer match is a natural, all full of conflict and sturm und drang. Okay, so they invented some ridiculous thing where Ian feels better and less vampish when and only when he does the horizontal mambo with Lucy.

That’s all well and good and I’m happy someone thinks Ian is so important he deserves to have the show’s #1 heroine and get magic anti-vampirific blood treatments while he makes love. What a deal for him! Of course, that leaves all our other vampires high and dry. Is Lucy going to boink Caleb, Elizabeth, Joshua and Livvie to devamp them, too? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Meanwhile, back in the land of some plot coherence, where is Ian’s baby, you know, the one he and Eve went through such hell to get and keep? What about Lucy’s adopted daughter, the one she went to such incredible lengths to get and keep? And what about Kevin? What about the man who raised a duck with Lucy, who saw her through all those Nurses Balls where she couldn’t keep her clothes on, who forgave again and again and came back for her again and again?

I realize that he has behaving badly. But since when is a little mental illness worse than his being sucked off the planet and held prisoner by a painting? You’ll have to excuse me if I screwed up what exactly it was holding him prisoner. The plots on Port Charles tend to do that to me. They don’t make any sense if you look too closely, so I don’t. Like maybe in between bouts of perjuring herself on behalf of Kevin O’Connell the murderer, or maybe before and after she donned the big red hat and married Alan Quartermaine or carried Dominique’s baby for Scottie?  And then I don’t have the details at my fingertips when I need them. Now I’m probably wrong about the painting and it was just that vapid blonde with the bad hair and the candles who snatched Kevin and the painting — or maybe it was a scroll? — was something else entirely. Or maybe there never was a painting. In Port Charles, anything is possible.

All I’m saying is that whatever it was holding him captive in the Great Beyond, it seemed more important at the time than the minor case of evil currently seeping around the edges of Kevin’s personality. Yes, he’s been horrid to Lucy and more than a little wacked about his evil daughter Livvie. But he’s still our dear Doc inside, the one Lucy couldn’t live without not that long ago. I find it less than charming that she’s so willing to shrug her muscular shoulders and go, “Eh, whatever,” when it comes to Kevin, who I still think is the love of her life.

Once again, Port Charles seem to be using hallucinogenics to come up with plot twists. Which brings me to the song o’ the week. Apologies to Lennon and McCartney and all that. Since their song lyrics were as out of touch with reality as Lucy as been for the past few arc-and-a-half, this one seemed like a natural.

Lucy in the tub with Ian

Lucy on the floor with Ian

Lucy in the buff with Ian

Follow her down to a pool in a cavern

Where vampirish people

Get devamped and thrive

Everyone smiles and exposes their molars

While Lucy decides who should die

Kevin still loves her but he’s lost his mind

Trying to force her back home

Look for the girl with the biceps of steel

But she’s gone...

Lucy in the tub with Ian

Lucy on the floor with Ian

Lucy in the buff with Ian

Again and again and again until all the viewers started to cover their eyes and scream, “No! No more! Put some clothes on, you two!”

I hope you noted the lyric about the biceps of steel. I’m not sure why, but for me, Lucy and Ian are all about biceps. I’m sure people find them both attractive as individuals, but in my eyes, their brawny arms just sort of overpower everything else about them. I watch my telly, and they’re all naked and tangled together, the music is swelling, I’m supposed to be feeling the love and romance, and all I notice is his big, beefy biceps, wrapped around her wiry sinews. I look at them, and I start to think about two wrestlers on a mat, grunting and sweating and wearing those nasty, smelly polyester unitards. Singlets? Whatever they are, they’re ugly. And they do not speak hearts and flowers to me. So the fact that I look at Lucy and Ian and see singlets is not a good thing.

Okay, there is one other thing besides arms that I think about when I see these two in a love scene. Her man-hands. Yes, she has man-hands. I have nothing against that, personally. Women can be strong and sinewy and have man-hands if they want. It’s just it collides with the misty background music and the fragile tossed-about-by-Fate tone when I see Lucy glom her big man-paws onto Ian. Who doesn’t think Lucy could take Fate with one man-paw tied behind her back?

But really, biceps and man-hands are just details when it comes down to it. I suppose I would be willing to overlook the singlet thing and dispel the smell of sweaty gym mats and cross that threshold of disbelief if I weren’t still carrying a grudge about how easily she abandoned Kevin. So call me an old grump and shove me in the pool with the rest of the ne’er-do-wells. Because I don’t like Lucy and Ian, and short of some magical dip in anti-grump water, I’m not going to change my mind.

Oooooh, kiddies, I just realized that next week is General Hospital time again. Which means I may just write about Sonny and Jason and their forbidden love. Will I? Won’t I? Should I? Shouldn’t I? Drop me a line and tell me what you think, as well as what song might be appropriate for the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.