For months we’ve watched Ian and Lucy fight their attraction to each other.  We’ve watched their desire creep into their lives no matter how hard they tried to fight it.  Back and forth, giving in, pulling back, declarations of love expressed, denied, hinted at, maybe yes, maybe no, and so and so on.  With Kevin’s latest refusal to admit his altered personality impossible for Lucy to accept, the path was cleared for that pairing we’ve been endlessly teased with.  Lucy and Ian finally SURRENDER this week to their passion and need for each other. 

Ian and Lucy do make a stunningly compatible combination despite the fact that her “soulmate” (there’s that word again) has always been, and may very well always be, Kevin.  PORT CHARLES has shown with this couple that you can successfully break apart “soulmates”, if not always to the delight of loyal fans. I applaud the decision to follow where the actors’ natural chemistry and understanding of each other leads. It certainly was a risk, but one that offers not only a credible reason for the breakup of soulmates but a fresh, exciting, adult romance with a unique, ironic spin to boot.

The slayer and the vampire - mortal enemies, rules be damned, in love. 

I’ve gone here many times before in my musings, no secret I’ve always been on the Lucy/Ian bandwagon, but never has it been clearer than at this moment.  Lucy and Ian share a connection as kindred spirits that she never shared with Kevin, even after all these years.  He fails to appreciate, time and time again, Lucy’s personality as a whole, squashing her sheer exuberance in her world every chance he gets.  Kevin always loved Lucy despite who she was.  Ian appears to love her because of who she is.  He accepts her every foible, understands her impulsive nature and actions always undertaken with the best of intentions because he recognizes those same foibles and impulsiveness in himself.  Lucy may struggle with it but she always follows her heart. Can you blame her for gravitating to Ian, what choice did she really have after all given the situation(s) thrown at her and their history.

Adding the reluctant vampire element to this dynamic was brilliant, just brilliant.  It heightens every single second of the urgency these two feel and has allowed the build up to drag on (and drag on it has) more successfully and much longer than had Ian not been bitten.  They were on the verge of giving in before he was turned but Lucy couldn’t allow herself to give up on her Doc.  Besides, Ian didn’t really need her, he simply wanted her.  Now he is a man in need. Desperate need. Dire need.  A situation Lucy can’t ignore.  It plays to her real strength – underneath all that self-absorption is a fierce will to protect and defend her loved ones no matter the personal cost.

Lucy has a cause once more.  Ian’s salvation. 

Lynn Herring and Thorsten Kaye are two such talented, consummate pros who play so effortlessly off each other as actors. It’s wonderful to watch their commitment to the work and to the characters.  Kudos to Thorsten Kaye, definitely performer of the week in my book, for giving us such an entertaining, layered and deeply emotional portrayal of the tortured soul Ian has become. 

Finally a story line to showcase his acting chops, pun intended. And Thorsten Kaye never disappoints. Always so good at playing pain, after all Ian Thornhart is the quintessential soap hero wrestling with a not so perfect past and awash in regret, his unfettered poetic romanticism that much more poignant as he struggles with his desires, his repulsion at what he’s become, his physical and spiritual discomfort and his inability to perform his life’s work.  Making matters even worse he fears for the woman he loves, that the dark nature he is struggling to suppress will force him to unintentionally hurt her if he gets too close. 

But in the end Ian’s Irish sensitivities and Lucy’s tenacity (along with what seemed like a little heavenly intervention in the guise of broken telephones and cars that won’t start) bring them together.  Wearing his heart on his sleeve as always, trying to be at once the stoic, gallant gentleman he can’t escape the fact that Lucy is his salvation.  While he can’t and won’t accept his new reality; how can a healer, a protector accept the darkness that has invaded his soul and threatens to overtake it, he knows Lucy is keeping what little sanity he has left intact.  He must reach out to her love to save himself, and reach out he does. 

Familiar theme for PORT CHARLES, salvation and forbidden love, we seem to go round and round the same bend with different couples, same couples, same story.  Chapter one of SURRENDER ended with Ian and Lucy following the only logical path laid out for them.  Regardless of how they got there, why they got there or where they may be going in the future, if anywhere at all, there is no doubt, that at this moment in time they are right where they are supposed to be.