Young & Restless Brings the Past Crashing Down On the Present, Morphs a Leading Lady Into a Golden Girl and Sets the Stage for One Crazy-Ass Seduction

Credit: Touchstone Television/Courtesy of the Everett Collection, CBS screenshot (4)

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Filling in for Candi, I thought I’d start off this week’s Soapbox with a little insight into how things work behind the scenes at Soaps.com. You may not guess it from how critical our editors can be, but we regularly discuss the importance of seeing the good in our shows, not just the bad. Sometimes, though, they make it impossibly hard to do. Case in point: this week’s episodes of The Young and the Restless. How to put this… hmm. I did not enjoy them. Yeah, that’s a nice way of saying it. I wasn’t concerned about a single character. By and large, they behaved so stupidly, I began to wonder if maybe I was smart. (Spoiler alert: I’m not.) The plot moved so slowly, I considered hitting fast-forward just to get it up to regular speed. And by the time I was done, I was worse than bored, I was sad. How has this once-tremendous soap been reduced to a plodding mess of moneybags who spend more time recapping things that have happened than they do making things happen? How does this estimable cast cope with material that wouldn’t fly on a Saturday-morning cartoon? How do we, the viewers who have for so long loved the show, remedy what Young & Restless has become with what it once was and what it still should be? I don’t know. Guess we’re all just keeping our fingers crossed that a change is coming. (Here’s a big reason to hold on to hope.) Until that change arrives, heaven help us, let’s line up those tequila shots and at least have what fun we can discussing the latest goings-on (and on and on… ).

To ZZZ or Not to ZZZ: We Only *Wish* That Was a Question

To quote the classic Boomtown Rats song from the 1980s, I don’t like Mondays, at least not when they’re as stagnant as this past one. On two different sets, two different groups of characters (Victor, Jack, Kyle, Summer and Chance on one, Nikki, Victoria and Cole on the other) endlessly dickered about how to rescue Harrison even though literally nobody in the audience was worried in the slightest that anything more traumatic than a recast was gonna happen to the kid. In other developments, if we’re gonna be generous enough to call them that, Billy and Lily gave updates on their myriad children that were so snooze-worthy, they could’ve passed for bedtime stories. And Billy, the model of self-awareness that he is, acted as if his ex didn’t have every reason to distrust him both personally and professionally. Doesn’t he have his own family business to tank? ’Cause Lily can sink C-W all on her own, thanks, what with her pink-slipping Daniel and Heather out of spite. At least their salads looked good. Wow… so I can say something nice! (I was starting to wonder.)

Things Can Only Get Better… Uh, Right?

We were hoping that things would pick up on Tuesday. But we are pie-eyed optimists that way. What we got instead of relatable drama — or drama at all — was Nikki leaving such a long message to bait Jordan that we were dying for Claire’s voicemail to beep at her because it ran out of space. We got Victoria fawning over Cole as if he was Sominex on a sleepless night. (Which, let’s face it, he is no matter the time of day.) We got Nate’s return to the C-W board being voted down with less excitement than surrounds the addition of a new kind of chip to our office vending machine. We got Mamie whispering sour nothings in Lily’s ear. And worst of all, we got Victor and all of the Richie Riches browbeating everyman truck driver Dave into confessing that he’d helped Jordan. Tell ya what, that’s the character that we wanted to see more of: Dave. That’s somebody that we know and to whom we relate. An average Joe making bad decisions in hopes of getting by or, better yet, ahead. But, of course, Dave’s not a CEO, so he was just passing through. We did have to laugh, though, when Victor explained why Dave was supposed to trust this roomful of cranky millionaires: “You’re dealing with guys who are men of the world.” Really? OK. Sure, Jan.

Special Guest Star: Blanche Devereaux

Credit where it’s due: Wednesday’s episode was more interesting… even if it was no better. For reasons that we can only assume made sense in the writers’ room, Ashley sprouted a new alter ego who made Rue McClanahan’s Golden Girls character seem tame by comparison. She tried to entice a mute bartender with her salt-licking abilities. She sexually harassed a piano player. She almost certainly won the lead in Genoa City’s next community theater production of Streetcar Named Desire. And by the end of the hour, she made us long for the gritty realism of Gilligan’s Island. Elsewhere on the canvas, we were reminded of what a dingbat Jordan is as she left Harrison unattended (and undrugged and untied up) in a motel room. We learned that Harrison is not smart enough to open a door. And we laughed our asses off as Nikki reassured Jordan that it was safe to come out of hiding because, you know, she said so. Actually, as dumb as Jordan is, had she heard her nemesis, she probably would have fallen for it. But she didn’t show up until later so that Victor (and not one of the many security guards we hear that he has but never see) could chloroform her.

The Black Knight Takes the Evil Queen… to the Wine Cellar?

Thursday’s episode actually contained a real, live plot twist. How it was supposed to work, I have no idea, but at least it was a twist. Victor, apparently assuming that literally no one would ask the invisible police or security team whether they had seen Jordan plunge from a bridge, lied to Nikki and Jack that she had made her last splash. In reality, however, Victor was keeping the nut job in the same basement prison in which he held Michael Scott prisoner decades ago. (Remember that? If not, this story is for you.) It was a good way to let ancient history impact present story. But what Victor would do if any of the also-invisible servants went down there for a bottle of wine was altogether unclear. On second thought, ya know what? It doesn’t matter. It was a twist, and as scarce as those are, I was happy to take it. To ask for it to also make sense would be asking too much. Meanwhile, Victoria remembered just in the nick of time that she’s filthy rich, so she didn’t have to do the dishes. (Her “Whew! That was close!” expression below.)

Harrison seemed mildly traumatized by Jordan’s tall tale that he’d been abandoned by his parents. But if she was really supposed to be such a wicked witch, wouldn’t she have reinforced her brainwashing by reminding him that he’d also been left behind by Tara and suggesting that Ashland had gone so far as to die to get away from him? Maybe not. Wicked and cunning are two very different things, and we already know that Jordan isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. At least her halfwit mind games led to a lovely scene in which Emmy nominee Allison Lanier’s Summer reassured Harrison that she and Kyle had never stopped looking for him. Except maybe when Summer parked herself at Crimson Lights for coffee. Elsewhere, Nick and Phyllis recapped Summer’s life story (when they could have just scrolled through our photo gallery) before the redhead forgot that Lucy existed to say that her daughter becoming an insta-mom to Harrison had made her “a granny… a super hot granny.” Super hot for sure. But ma’am, you had already been a granny for years; check with Daniel on that, he’ll back us up.

Thank God It’s Over… Er, We Mean Friday

The end of the week only served to highlight problems we’ve had with Young & Restless for what seems like ages now. Mariah decided that Tessa should perform at a music festival. Right on cue, the marrieds bumped into a couple of their gazillionaire friends. “Why, I can have Tessa headlining a music festival in an hour,” Devon said. “’Cause like everyone else you know, I’m just that rich.” He didn’t put it quite like that, but… ya know. From there, there was oodles of Devon/Abby business talk, and oh, across the canvas, there was Lily/Billy business talk, too. (When did wit die? And why weren’t we invited to the funeral?) When finally we happened upon Audra and Tucker engaging in frisky business, it only led to… oof. I can’t even type it. Here, I’ll let Friday’s recap say it for me: “After they have sex, he wants more, but she wants to talk about consolidating facilities.” Hot stuff, Young & Restless. Way to earn that TV-MA rating! I at least like that Audra has thumbed her nose at the idea of getting married. I’d like to think that it’s a sign of strength and independence on her part, but just as likely, she realizes that there is no point whatsoever in investing in that relationship of convenience. Finally, Ashley’s alters, not having noticed that Tucker has moved on, bickered about the best way to ensure that he remains out of her life. Suggestions that were not floated: Stop going to the same two restaurants. Block his number. Take off on an around-the-world cruise to spend a few thousand of your millions. Suggestions that were floated: Murder. Seduce someone new. Good luck, Christopher Cousins! You’re gonna need it.

In Closing…

Hey, Young & Restless, it’s your old pal, Soaps.com here. You know we’re pulling for ya, right? Like, at literally every step of the way. But it would help us get behind what you’re doing a lot if you would, like, never, ever again use the same green-screen effect that we have on home movies. Our 7-year-old nephew believed it when we green-screened him into the middle of the ocean, but viewers who are used to soaps having the money to actually step outside or build a bedroom set ain’t gonna buy that crap. • Have you talked lately to your sister soap, Bold & Beautiful? ’Cause it might not be the greatest idea ever to have Nikki popping Certs to cover up her booze breath when just across the hall, a story is unfolding about the diabolical dangers of “special mints.” • How is Nate’s return to the C-W board unearned when Abby has a seat? Asking for a friend… whose name may or may not be Nate. • How did Jill sit through that C-W board meeting without hurling expletives and deciding that what her “team” needed wasn’t corner offices but playpens and a time-out?

Finally, I see why Chance had to be removed from the GCPD. Because the show didn’t need a detective on the canvas, what it needed was its 104th businessman, only one who can call his old friends who are detectives. Yeah, that makes sense. • We get that Summer is attached to Harrison, but at what point did Tara cease to be his mother? Shouldn’t Summer and Kyle have been honor-bound to give Tara regular updates on her son’s kidnapping? Or did they decide that Ashland’s first wife didn’t deserve that because she was such a horribly mishandled vixen when she was on the show? (Or should we say when she was on the show the first time?) • Is there any scene, no matter how blah, that Beth Maitland (Traci) and Michael Graziadei (Daniel) can’t sell? • Why was Phyllis kept out of the search for Harrison? Wouldn’t her computer skills have come in handy to like, say, track Claire’s phone? And if Phyllis couldn’t get the job done, wouldn’t she have just called hacker extraordinaire Kevin?