| "Reflections by Jill" - A Weekly Commentary on OLTL | |
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REFLECTIONS
BY JILL…..
This
week’s column is going to be a rant that has been brewing inside me for a
couple of years now. It’s been
brewing in me from the day I laid eyes on this character and I get more
infuriated with this person every time she graces my screen.
OK, I’ve just given you a big hint…it’s a “she.”
So now you’ve figured out that I’m leaving my Asa rant for another
day, LOL! She actually drives me
crazier than Asa does…if that’s at all possible.
I
shall now ask all of you who have not yet figured out who she is, to turn in
your OLTL fan badges. NOW…everyone
who is left…you are stuck listening to my rant about
THE
DASTARDLY LINDSAY RAPPAPORT!!!!! For
those fans that love Lindsay (and you are the ones I will never turn my back on
while there’s a drink in front of me, or
spend time with in a dark alley, LOL), let me just say that as always, my gripe
is with the character and NOT the actress.
I find Catherine Hickland to be a very talented actress.
This is proven by the fact that she makes me despise Lindsay so much.
I found that I liked Catherine even more, when during our online chat
with Darlene Vogel a while back, Darlene informed us that even Catherine hates
Lindsay sometimes….LOL. Personally,
I think Catherine should have been a shoe-in for that Best Supporting Actress
Emmy…maybe next year!
The
question of the day is….Is there a more self-centered, whiny, obnoxious, mean,
sorry, pathetic character in all of TV Land than Lindsay Rappaport?
I think not! Believe me, I
have tried to compare her to other villains, male and female, on other shows and
it’s very hard to find even one who is as “all around bad” as Lindsay.
The thing that sets Lindsay apart from most of the others, is that in my
humble opinion, she doesn’t have any redeeming qualities…not even one.
I know…I know…. some of you are now saying that she does have one
redeeming quality…she loves her children.
I say POPPYCOCK! Now you
know I didn’t want to say “poppycock”, but the rules are “no bad
language” and I totally respect that…so just use your imaginations.
Lindsay may love her kids in her own way, but it’s not my way, and
it’s not in a normal motherly way. I
will get to her kids in due time.
From
the moment Lindsay set foot in Llanview, she has made it her life’s goal to
make others miserable so that she can be happy.
She has no conscience (well, she does have Nora popping in and out of her
imagination to remind her that she’s a “bad girl”).
Whatever horrible scheme she comes up with is justified in her own little
mind, because she deserves whatever she’s after…. it’s coming to
her….whoever gets hurt…Too Bad! The
first evidence of this occurred when she changed the results of Bo’s fertility
test to make it look like he could no longer father children.
That’s when I first knew she was heartless, because she never
worshipped anyone like she worshipped Bo and until she stole Nora’s life, Bo
was the person she hurt most. She
couldn’t even give herself an alibi for Jessie’s hit and run because she
didn’t want it known that she was in cahoots with Jeff Barnes to alter
Matthew’s DNA test. Honestly, I
thought doing that made her a horrible person…but little did I know that
altering DNA tests was small potatoes for Lindsay.
I
think we need to discuss Lindsay’s background for a minute because I can hear
a lot of people saying that Lindsay is just a poor, misunderstood little girl
and everything she does is a result of Daddy not loving her.
I say that is the most abused and overused excuse for Lindsay’s
behavior that I’ve ever heard. All
we have to do is take a little hike over to Llanfair and see what kind of a
human being Victoria Lord turned into after having the most damaging daddy in
creation. Lindsay is weak and uses
her childhood to justify everything. I
don’t buy that in the real world, and I sure don’t buy it on TV.
Every
time I hear Lindsay say, “I’ve changed,” I die laughing.
It is true that she’s changed. She’s
gotten worse than she ever was before. I
become more shocked with every scheme. She
will stop at nothing to get what she wants and to cover her butt.
One thing I have to say…she should work for the circus…she’s the
best juggler I’ve ever seen. I am
thoroughly amazed at how she juggles all her lies and schemes and has an answer
for everything. Every time she gets
caught, she’s got an explanation….of course, all the people she hands these
explanations to are total fools to believe her, but somehow she slips by. It is getting to the point though, where no on believes her
any more and her excuses and lies just sound pathetic. She reminds me so much of those guys who spin plates in
variety shows. You know, they start
at one end of a long line and spin one plate on a stick, then when that one gets
going they spin the next one, and the next one, and they have to keep going back
to the beginning to keep them all spinning.
That, to me, is Lindsay Rappaport’s main job in life…her lies are
like those plates and she has to work very, very hard to keep them all
going….If plate spinning were an Olympic sport, Lindsay would be wearing the
Gold Medal! God, how Ed Sullivan
would have loved her!
I
will concede this much. There was
one moment…and I do mean one moment only…when I did have some sympathy for
Lindsay. It was the one moment I
can remember in all her time on the show that I truly felt sorry for her and it
was when Will was being taken away to Statesville and she was totally
devastated. In those scenes, she
was simply a mother dying inside because she could do nothing to help her son
and she couldn’t bear to see him taken away to prison.
That was the one day that her emotions were pure, in my opinion.
I actually shed tears for the pain she went through that day when she had
to say good-bye to Will and couldn’t let go.
I totally felt for her when she packed all those clothes for him that, of
course, he wouldn’t need in prison…there was nothing else she could do.
I also completely understood her asking Ben to get Will out of the
country. I can’t remember another
time that I felt sorry for Lindsay, or understood how she could do the things
she does…and I haven’t felt that way for her since that one time. I guess I could also say I felt bad when she had her
miscarriage, but she used that as a weapon so many times to make Bo feel guilty
and take her back, that I couldn’t even feel sorry for her after a while.
One
thing is for sure. The day of that
train wreck was the day that changed Lindsay’s life forever.
It was that day that changed Lindsay from a scheming thorn in
everyone’s side, to a criminal with as much conscience as the Boston
Strangler. The day she made the
decision to keep it a secret that Nora was, in fact, alive, was the day that her
whole life would begin to center around doing anything and everything….to
anyone….to cover her butt and keep Colin from blowing her out of the water.
And that’s when she became very dangerous.
She even had Colin believing at the beginning that she’d help him get
Lanie back…hah…as if Lanie would want that bed-hopper back!
It
began on a small scale, for Lindsay anyway.
At first it was just a matter of her getting money any way she could, to
keep Colin from implicating her in Nora’s kidnapping.
Even Colin wasn’t so terrible until he got in over his head and then
some bad gambling debts were the least of his worries.
It’s amazing that Lindsay honestly believed that if she just had a few
more days of Nora being “dead,” that she could get Bo to come around and
want her back. Self-delusion is
Lindsay’s specialty. And like I
said, she will hurt anyone to get what she wants.
I felt terrible for Sam when Lindsay went to Asa and planted that seed in
his head about Bo possibly being Matthew’s father.
She hurt Sam terribly, and all because she really believed that with Nora
“dead,” she could get Bo back and they could raise Matthew together.
She didn’t care that Sam had lost his sister less than a year
before…that he had just watched his son leave for prison….and that he was
devastated by the loss of Nora. Losing
Matthew would leave him with nothing, and she didn’t care a bit.
And to top it off, I could have slapped her myself when she went to
Sam’s house and tried to get Matthew’s fingernail clippings to test his DNA
against Bo’s. How totally disgusting was that?
I cheered when Bo busted her and she tried to tell him that she was just
trying to help him prove that Matthew was his son. Thank goodness he didn’t fall for that lame excuse.
I loved it when he reminded her that even if he was Matthew’s father,
she wasn’t his mother.
I
guess we better talk about Lindsay and her kids.
Yes, she claims to love them, and yes, she claims to be ready to do
anything for them, but they are just pawns to her.
She uses them whenever she needs to say, “I’m a good mother”, to
minimize something horrid that she’s done.
I can’t count how many times she has said, “I love my children.
They are everything to me.” Hey
Lindsay, if they’re so important to you, then why do you put your needs ahead
of theirs every chance you get? Why
did you blackmail Asa for hundreds of thousands of dollars on more than one
occasion, telling Bo the money was for Will, give the money to Colin, and then
tell Will you needed the money to bail out your gallery?
Blackmailing someone to pay a blackmailer…now that makes you Mother Of
The Year in my book! Oh, and
Lindsay, how can you say you love your kids when you constantly put them in the
position of being ashamed of the things you do?
And my biggest question is….Why is it that when your kids finally do
find out some disgusting thing you’ve done, you’re only concern is whether
or not they’re going to tell anyone about it and turn you in?
These are the reasons I challenge anyone to tell me that Lindsay is a
good mother who loves her children. It
didn’t seem to bother her too much that Jen wouldn’t come home from Europe
for so long…and once Jen did come home and started forming a nice relationship
with Cristian, Lindsay’s only objective was to keep Jen away from him because
it meant she was losing control over Jen to someone honorable who could hurt
HER…not Jen. In her own sick way
she might love Will and Jen, but in Lindsay’s dark world, they never come
first when her dirty deeds are at risk of being exposed.
Can
we just take a minute to discuss a few of the things she’s done that would
have earned anyone a ride on the express train to Statesville?
I’m just going to touch on her most recent crimes, which are her worst.
We’ve already covered kidnapping and blackmail.
The fact that she could keep Nora from her grieving family and little
boy, and still sleep at night, sickened me.
How DOES Lindsay sleep at night? The
day she asked RJ to get her that memory drug, I figured she was serious about
wanting to keep Nora from remembering her involvement in her kidnapping, but
even I had trouble believing she’d really use the drug.
When Colin refused to do it, I didn’t think even Lindsay could go that
far, but when she actually injected Nora, that was the step over the line of
sanity. She knew full well that she
could not only have erased Nora’s recent memory, but her entire sanity, and
she knew she could even kill her. She
didn’t let those facts live in her conscious mind…or more likely she
didn’t care. Later on when Colin
got out of control and Lindsay needed to get her hands on those incriminating
letters, she became a mad woman to find them.
So…here
is the BIGGIE…the question as old as time…WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO LOCK THIS
WOMAN UP???? Let’s
see….tampering with lab tests, blackmail, kidnapping, don’t forget breaking
into Colin’s safe deposit box disguised as Melanie.
Then we have drugging….oh wait…I missed breaking and
entering…remember when she waltzed into Rae’s house when Nora was under
hypnosis and tried her own brand of psychotherapy on Nora?
Did anyone but me die laughing the other day when Lindsay wanted Bo to
arrest Cristian at her gallery when she asked Bo, “Am I wrong, or isn’t
trespassing a crime in the state of Pennsylvania?”
How about her most recent foray into the criminal world…when she
finally had no choice but to give a hair sample after Colin’s body was found
and she actually had the audacity to try and switch the hair samples right there
on Bo’s desk? Gee Lindsay, that
was stupid, even for you…almost as stupid as burning those letters in
Andrew’s office. AND…we don’t
even know yet if she’s innocent of killing Colin.
She sure did protest too much about giving her hair sample.
It is totally incredible that she has been caught red-handed so many
times and never spends a day in the slammer, when every other “trouble
maker” in town has at least spent one night there…Todd, Blair, Max, …Bo
even threw his dear Big Daddy in the tank when it was finally proven that he set
up Will. Boy, was that fun seeing
the old coot behind bars! The only
time Lindsay was in jail was when she was accused of the hit and run on Jessica,
and that was her own fault anyway, because her alibi would have gotten her in
more trouble than the car accident.
I
have to turn to the writers to lay blame. Letting
Lindsay get away with so much…so much of the time…is way beyond acceptable.
I’m not saying that they should send her to the “chair,” but would
a few months in jail (and out of our hair, LOL) be so bad?
Some people say that Nora’s self-righteousness and need for the truth
is sickening. I say, GO NORA…If
the police won’t bust Lindsay, you’re just the woman for the job!
This woman needs to spend some time on bread and water, and I think
giving her a nice, sweet, roommate named “Big Bertha” would suit me just
fine.
I
must admit that I have gotten some good laughs at Lindsay’s expense.
Did anyone feel even the least bit sorry for Lindsay when she went to Asa
and “offered” him a new Buchanan heir, letting him think that Bo was
Matthew’s father…and Asa turned around and jammed her vulnerability down her
throat? When he convinced her that
the governor would pardon Will if she provided him with a new baby to ruin, some
people might have felt sorry for her when she found out it was all a hoax
perpetuated by Asa. When Asa duped
her, I thought she had it coming and I applauded.
When Bo and Nora busted in on her burning Colin’s letter, I laughed at
what a fool she looked like. My
best laugh was last year when she and Bo got engaged and she ran into Ben and
Viki at The Palace, celebrating their own engagement (FINALLY!).
When Lindsay went up to their table and told them she was engaged, held
out her hand and asked, “Isn’t this the most beautiful engagement ring
you’ve ever seen?”….Viki held out her hand, flaunting her own new
engagement ring, and said, “No, this is.”
I nearly choked on my laughter, right along with Ben.
That’s tellin’ her Viki!
Gee,
I could go on forever about Lindsay and I’m sure you all have plenty to say on
the subject, too. I can only hope
that she did have some involvement in Colin’s murder and that poor Lanie not
only doesn’t have to serve any time, but that Lanie gets to slam the jail cell
shut when Lindsay is escorted in. The
fact that Lindsay is Hell-bent on hanging Melanie, her own sister, and went to
North Carolina to drape the noose over the tree limb for Melanie, is more than
disgusting. Now Lindsay is using
her old trusty tool, blackmail, to get Lanie to leave town.
Could she possibly be sick enough to think this is another chance to get
Bo back, now that Lanie has given him back the ring? Lindsay’s behavior towards her sister is just plain vile.
I now feel totally cleansed, freed by having vented all this hostility. May we all meet at one of Lindsay’s trials and for all of us who are sick of her getting away with everything, may we have the pleasure of hearing the sweet click of closing handcuffs very soon!
See ya next week…..Jill
FAN FEEDBACK
AND QUESTIONS ON LAST WEEK’S COLUMN
______________________
Christopher
writes: “Hey Jill. Like
most of your readers, I do enjoy your column. Ben and Viki are my favorite
couple. I am pleased that the writers chose to have Ben so devoted to
Viki, and I do not cringe when Ben and Viki kiss, unlike another fan of the
show. I am totally glued to this storyline of Viki, Ben and Gina.
Erika Slezak is my all time favorite actress. She brings depth and
humility, and believability to the role of Viki. I think each of us
probably knows someone just like Viki. Your comments about Viki's wardrobe
are to die for, and other cast members’ wardrobes and set changes are all
on point.”
___________
Samuel
writes: “Don't you think a new intro
& new opening music are long overdue for this show? I do. They should take a
look at how some of the other soaps have spiced up their intros & opening
music, and get some ideas for change. It seems like the current intro &
opening music (which I never liked) have been on forever. That should be the
first step in giving this show a much-needed facelift. Your comments?”
___________
Jmagnavite
(Joan) writes: “Hi Jill...I totally agree with your critique on the
OLTL clothes, but you omitted Nora. Now for heaven's sake, why would a grown
woman wear such short slit skirts? She is a professional mature type. Then there
is Roseanne working in the police station with her belly showing...how tacky.
Linda Dano ought to have the Wardrobe Watch and keep them all in line. Vicky's
short skirts have to go. I don't mind the gams but why sooooo short on all the
female characters?”
___________
