Love in a Time of Amnesia, or, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

The soaps are often faced with the problem of their own past. How do you make current stories fit history when history is inconvenient and you weren’t the one who wrote that tripe, anyway? How do you recapture the past when it comes to supercouples who come and go, in and out of fashion, actors moving up, down and out, and nothing ever stays the same?

From my perspective as a viewer, it seems that soap writers frantically shift and juggle and make up whatever they can, because getting fan faves back on the canvas trumps credibility, credulity, time, space and the basic laws of physics.  Did Diva Darling get her head cut off in a terrible sawmill accident? No prob. Bring her back to town with that amazing doctor who does experimental work with sewing heads back on. Did Hunk Hottie get buried under ten tons of molten lava in that volcanic eruption in the Pacific? Tell us the natives dug him out, performed a few exotic rituals to get him breathing again and married him off to their princess to keep him from leaving.

So even though we saw ALL MY CHILDREN’s Maria die in a plane crash (my recollection is that we actually saw her strapped in her seat and unable to get out when the plane fell over a cliff), everybody pretty much knew that if actress Eva LaRue wanted to return someday, the writers would find a way to work her into Pine Valley come hell, high water, or a few outrageous plot twists. What did they do? They pulled an old romance staple out their pockets, and brought Maria back with amnesia.

Quick time-out for a little info on romance clichés (which we prefer to call marketing hooks, thank you very much). Let’s just say, if you were to write a book called “The Amnesiac Cinderella Bride’s Cowboy Christmas Baby,” you could pretty much write your own ticket. I don’t know why amnesia hits the charts as a sure-fire seller to readers, but it certainly is handy when you’re trying to create some suspense or intrigue about somebody’s past. It can also cover up some gaping plot holes. “Why, where have you been, Maria?’ “Why, I don’t know!”  See how handy that is? Until the ALL MY KIDS writing staff had figured out where they wanted to go to explain the missing years, they had a cover story.

In a romance, the amnesia supplies most of the plot arc, as hero and heroine work together to solve the mystery of why the memory is gone, who’s who, and how you can fall in love when you’re having an identity crisis.  But a continuing daytime drama has to apply the amnesia plot a little differently. On ALL MY CHILDREN, Maria’s reappearance has served a whole bunch of purposes. It stopped Edmund and Brooke cold at the altar (another romance staple — the return of the dead ex-spouse. Also known as “The Enoch Arden” plot.) It provided a dandy conflict and stalled any quick reunion between Edmund and Maria. It gave Eva LaRue a chance to play Maria differently, now that she was living life as prickly pear Maureen who really didn’t want to come home or pick up the threads of her old life. It connected Maria to David, a character new to the canvas since she left, since he was tossed in as the doctor who saved her and kept her away all these years. And it created a different dynamic for the Edmund/Maria relationship, since he’s desperate to turn her back into Maria and she doesn’t like it one bit.

All well and good, to have so many levels for your Amnesiac Return from the Dead. But the bottom line is, does it work? Does it re-integrate Eva LaRue into Pine Valley?  Does it offer compelling story, keep us interested in Edmund and Maria as a couple, reignite the supercouple flames, and open up new dramatic possibilities as it unfolds?

Not to sound like Soapboy, but the answers are (in order) “I don’t think so, yes, no, not really, no, and I don’t know yet.” Yes, they’ve changed Edmund and Maria from the kind, boring, sweet couple I remember from before, but what have they become? He’s gotten weird and crazy, what with locking her in her room and sticking memory-sparking drugs in her drink, and she’s turned into St. Maria of the Push-up Bra, dressing a bit trashy, lying and hanging out in cheap motels and haylofts with cute but not terribly bright Aidan, and acting all snippy and mad at people who tell her they remember her back in the day.

Is there a romance here? Well, um, no. You can’t have a romance if Maria doesn’t want to be romanced. And frankly, there isn’t much very attractive about he-man control freak Edmund.

I know you are all thinking the song of the week will be from Edmund’s POV, straight from “The Sound of Music,” about the will-o-the-wisp and all that. But, no! I think this story is being told from Maria’s point-of-view. Which is why this song occurred to me.

Reunited though I don’t know why.

Reunited, but who is this guy?

They think I should know?

I want off this show!

I am so not excited to be reunited, hey, hey...

And I imagine Maria breaking off her song at this point, fixing us with a very annoyed expression, and saying something like... “Okay, just hold up here a sec. They really expect me to fall back in with this pushy guy with the eyebrows? I don’t know him or these kids or this annoying older lady. And when I look in the mirror, I may not know me, but I do know I’m totally hot! I think I should be matched up with the shirtless hunk with the pecs. So screw Mr. Eyebrows...”  Ah, yes. The trials of reuniting supercouples past.

A lot of people have suggested that the Maria/Edmund story is less than appealing this time around because it’s just taking too darned long for her to get her memory back. But I don’t think that’s the problem. I think it’s that they didn’t give us reasonable, heartfelt reasons why Maria (or Maureen) could fall in love with Edmund all over again, whether she regained her memory or not. On the opposite side, it should have been a story of how Edmund fell in love with the new person that Maria had become, rather than trying to force her to be the woman she once was. All fresh! All new! All exciting! I’d think it would be pretty obvious to soap movers and shakers that it’s almost impossible to recreate the past and you’re going to have to make it new to make it work. But maybe not.

Or maybe that was the point all along, to show that a Maria/Edmund reunion just wasn’t in the cards, and they were going to have to move on to other romances. Whatever the reasoning, however, I think it’s clear Maria and Edmund are lukewarm at best. Yes, they have created some sparks and shown us they still have a certain level of physical attraction, but no, the underlying love affair isn’t there.

Sizzle or fizzle? On my thermometer, I’d say Edmund and Maria are hovering at a cool but temperate 55 degrees. Whether a cold front or a warm front moves in next depends on how they develop the new people they’ve become, not how well they resurrect the past.

As for next week, as we bid a fond farewell to an overall rotten January on the soaps, I’m going to offer a shout-out to Christie T., who asked me to take on Jason and Courtney from GENERAL HOSPITAL next week because she thinks they may be gone before I get a chance. Just for you, Christie! We’ll take that Journey together!

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