Emily and Casey are the most May-December romance I’ve seen on ATWT, as well as the most unappealing. At age 21, Casey is not only half Emily’s age, but he is also her son’s half brother. Emily has slept with everyone in town, including Casey’s father and uncle, and I have this nagging little worry in the back of my brain that someday she will go after Dr. Bob too, just to say she’s had every Hughes. But then her mom fooled around with Bob, so I guess it is all in the family.

I have to question Casey’s motives here; he’s fresh out of jail, enjoying the tons of sex that he and Emily seem to enjoy whenever and wherever they can. Emily, meanwhile, has always enjoyed sex, which seems to feed her tattered libido and boost her ankle-high self-esteem. So maybe it is all about the sex, because I don’t sense much else important in their relationship. They have no real place to live, they don’t do anything else connected with being a couple; every time they are together, it turns into a romp on the desk, table, floor, or even the bedroom Casey grew up in, which is kind of creepy to me. 

Then the evil Dr. Decker threw a monkey wrench in the works by poisoning Emily with the tainted perfume, and since Casey can’t keep his skin off hers, they both got wild and crazy in their relationship, and the subject of marriage came up. They hopped a plane and flew off to make a lifetime commitment. Now for Emily, a lifetime commitment usually lasts about a year or so, if she’s lucky. Casey’s prior love life includes Maddie Coleman, Gwen Munson, and maybe a schoolboy crush here and there that we viewers never actually saw. So these two are not exactly candidates for endless love.

And I had to laugh again at Dr. Decker’s line as he prepared to escape from the hospital, with Allison as a hostage. Emily whined and moaned at him to exchange herself for Allison as a hostage, to which Dr. Decker replied, “Thank you for the offer, Emily, but -- that was very sweet, but I need to take someone that people really care about. You, I don't think so.” How right you are, Dr. D!

The laughter didn’t stop as Emily, before she was released from the hospital, proclaimed to Casey that she wanted to go home and ‘forget about this day.’ But the very next day she was in the office, hair and makeup perfect, scurrying around writing the headline story that only she could write because she ‘lived it.’  I guess nothing gets in the way of your bottom line profits, right?

It’s no secret that I have never been a fan of Emily’s at all; I don’t love to hate her, as TPTB so often try to convince viewers about a character, I just don’t like her. I usually FF whenever she is on. And to be honest, you know I am not a fan of Kelly Menighan-Hensley either. Her habit of mm-mm-mm-moaning whenever her character is in distress grates on my every nerve. Billy Magnussen is still very young and he may well grow as an actor over time, but for now his strength is that he is a cutie.

Casey was elated last week when his parents gave their approval of his marriage; he doesn’t seem to realize that this approval came when they thought he was on death’s door. Finally, Emily pointed out to him that she married him while under the influence of the poison and that she wanted an annulment. After some doubts, Casey decided to accept whatever she wanted as long as they stayed together. Yippee.

I still say that Casey should have gone with his first reaction when he met Ameera for the first time at the college mixer. Emily, meanwhile, should have stayed in the looney bin where she belonged after trying to murder first Dusty and then Paul, and then taking a suicide dive off Oakdale’s shortest cliff. Both these possibilities would have been more entertaining and more interesting, imho.

While Dr. Decker was a fun diversion for the dog days of August, he was here and gone too quickly. His reign of terror ended not when Margo had a chance to shoot him in the hospital room when Aaron came through the ventilation shaft, and not when the 3 apparent police swat members had their assault rifles trained on him in the parking lot when he tried to board the helicopter, but when Chris Hughes knocked him down.  I mean, honestly, why are there even Oakdale cops anyway, when their performance record is so poor.

And speaking of Aaron, could that plot hole possibly be any sillier? He was told the hospital was in lockdown, so he climbed on the back of an ambulance (yeah, like no one would notice that) and managed to sneak in the back way. Then, with his handy pen-sized flashlight to guide him, he crawls to exactly the right room through what had to be an intricate layout of ventilation shafts, a layout that covers the entire hospital. Then, after all that work and expertise, he hangs from the ventilation hole long enough for Dr. Decker to shoot him.  Honestly, Aaron, could you have moved a weensy bit faster so that you wouldn’t have been such an easy monkey-man target?  Sheesh!

Well, thanks to a viewer/reader of Oakdale After Dark, a mystery is solved! A couple weeks ago, I commented that one of my polls about if Liberty and Parker should be together, which included being able to vote for Luke and Noah as a couple who needs more action, received over 1000 votes, most of them for the boys. That’s about 800 or so more votes than my polls usually get! I wondered where all those votes came from, and Amber wrote in to say,
“Just to clear up what you mentioned about the poll results, there was in fact someone, (a very well-known someone among Nuke fans) on youtube who posted a video with a link to your poll, with the simple explanation, 'You know who to vote for.' Hence the large inflow of Luke & Noah fans voting on your poll. And, as much as I hate to admit it, I must agree with you. TPTB will probably not show Luke and Noah in bed. But, just to be positive, since the writer's strike ended and the regular writers are back, they are at least showing the couple kissing more lately. (I came to the conclusion that the fill-in writers simply have no backbone at all.) But that is beside the point. I am one of those who was drawn into the show by the Luke and Noah couple, and I hate that EP Chris Goutman is going by his 'intuition' and not showing the boys more. Odd, I thought I remember reading something from when the couple first appeared, and they said they would treat them just like any other couple. Amazing how they are the furthest thing from 'every other couple.” Thank you for clearing that up!  I would love it if those voters would be regular readers/voters here at Soaptown, but at least now I know where they came from. And even without those voters, Liberty and Parker still got the least number of votes! And Amber, have you noticed how little airtime the Luke and Noah have gotten recently? I have heard from various sources that CBS/ATWT has put off any liaison between the two until November, if even then. 

Another viewer felt that the show should “bring back Dee and Annie Stewart, her husband, and the triplets.” 
Dee, for those of you who don’t know, was Dawn Stewart, daughter of Ellen Lowell and David Stewart. Emily is her niece. Dee would be almost 50 now, since the show aged her to be born in 1962. Annie is Dr. Carol Ann Stewart Ward, Dee’s sister who is a couple years older than Dee. Annie and her husband, Dr. Jeff Ward, had not triplets but quadruplets, back in either 1982 or ’83. Maria, Lowell, Nancy, and Gregory would therefore be around 25 years old now, old enough to get involved in all the sex and intrigue that simmers in Oakdale every day. And FYI, Maria and Gregory were the names of Jeff’s parents, Lowell was Annie’s mother’s maiden name and a big name on ATWT back in the day (Bob Hughes’s father belonged to the law firm of Lowell, Barnes, Lowell, Hughes, and Hughes), and of course Nancy was named after Oakdale’s most prominent woman. The whole Ward family moved to Denver when the quads were about 2 years old, and have been seen in Oakdale only twice since then, when they were babies.

And speaking of Oakdale’s most prominent woman, Helen Wagner’s 90^th birthday is coming up, on September 3! I urge you all to email or snail mail greetings to her! You can do it easily by going to the ATWT Official Fan Club site and sending an email at or you can snail mail your birthday wishes to her at:

As the World Turns
Attention: Helen Wagner
1268 East 14th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11230

And although Ms. Wagner is frail and doesn’t appear very often on the show, let’s hope that all Oakdale turns out to celebrate her birthday and throw her the biggest party the city has ever seen!