Easy Targets: GH

With Michael being sentenced to five years in prison, Carly is certainly entitled to be angry. It is even understandable that she would want to lash out at anyone within striking distance and seek revenge on the person responsible for putting him there. In fact given everything that Michael has been through it would be hard to fault Carly for trying to get some sort of justice for him. After all he didn't receive an ounce of it in court, yet I am still having trouble empathizing with Carly enough to support her behavior.

As I said in the last post, there were many people responsible for Michael's predicament. And yes, Dante and Lulu definitely played a part in it, but Carly seems to be focusing an unreasonable amount of anger on these two considering how much blame there is to go around. And I still think it is strange that no one is angry with Lucky for bringing Michael in in the first place. He pointed a gun at Jason to keep him from taking Michael out of the country and no one has even glanced in his direction.







If it's possible for fictional characters to resent each other on subconscious levels it would appear that Jason and Carly's hatred of Dante goes much deeper than anything involving Michael. It's no secret that Jason has been wanting to kill Dante since he infiltrated Sonny's organization, and I think a part of him still wants revenge for that. And let's not forget that for a while Dante was sort of Jason's competition within the organization. Sonny began trusting Dante so much that at times it seemed like Jason's opinions didn't count for much. And then of course there is Carly, who I tend to think resents Dante for the fact that he immediately replaced Michael as Sonny's first child.







The psychosis of fictional characters aside, I think perhaps one of this biggest reasons I'm having trouble supporting Carly's behavior is because I no longer feel invested in Michael. It is not that I dislike Chad Duell playing this role. In fact if Drew Garrett hadn't been playing Michael for the past year, I'm sure my complaints would be few, but I just don't feel like I'm watching Michael anymore. The role was recast at one of the worst possible times, right when viewers were most focused on Michael and what was going to happen to him. In addition, I have always felt that when a show recasts a popular role they should allow the viewers time away from the old portrayer before introducing them to the new one. And not just sporadically like banishing the character to an island and showing them intermittently until a new actor takes over the role. There needs to be real distance between the time one actor leaves and another actor takes over, particularly when the actor that is being replaced is as popular and talented as Drew Garrett.