I am finally pulling together the threads of what bothers me about GH and Esme.
First up, I love a villain.
LOVE.
Helena is one of the best characters to ever come out of that show hands down. She was always up to something and we couldn't wait to see what she would do next.
Her forever feud with Emily? Loved it.
Any scene with Alexis? Bring it on.
Her pretending not to know you couldn't bribe a coroner? Chef's kiss.
But Esme wasn't doing soapy, over the top, say hello to my evil identical twin step sister stuff. What she was doing is way too close to real life and insidious at that. The fact the writers either didn't know or didn't care about how they treated one of their few black characters just compounded the trauma for many (if not most) viewers. Any time we tried to speak up about why we hate it, TPTB seemed to double down.
Now you have the great younger actress that I don't want to see on my screen. Between her and Charlotte, we could have had some fun, but the writers don't know how to do it. Peter was a flop. Valentin is better, but he didn't get the job done. Ryan was always great but they treated him like a day player. Heather is hit or miss with how bad they want her to be. Victor was fun while it lasted, so I did have some hope but alas...
This show needs to learn how to make us root for the bad guy again, or they're going to run out of stories to tell.
I'm obsessed with Valentin hallucinating Helena guiding him to hell. Because if you take it literally, of course Helena is reigning in hell and covered in pearls while doing so. And if you view it purely as a product of Valentin's distressed mind, it says a lot about how Valentin views himself.
Despite him trying to fall on the side of good these days, there's a part of him that acknowledges that he may not ever balance the scales when it comes to all the pain he caused in his past. Considering we don't get a lot of pov from Valentin about how he feels about his capacity for redemption, outside of wanting to be good enough for Anna, this Helena hallucination was really interesting.
Even in this moment of great sacrifice that he's made, his mind is still telling him that he's damned to hell. There's also the element of him being abandoned by his absentee father and in a moment of desperation hallucinating his cruel mother, finally embracing him but only so he can join her in hell. Obviously I wanted more Helena than just a hallucination but there were some layers there that I thought were cool.