Bearer Bonds Fiasco Part 2 Aug 16-17 1999 Pocketwatch Soliloquoy

Mon., Aug. 16, 1999 – At Company: Pilar comes in and sees the police. She talks Bill into going to his room. (She wants to get away from the police since she has the barer bonds in her backpack.) They go up and are half dressed and kissing on the bed when Danny comes banging on the door. He tells Pilar there is a family emergency and they need to get home. Outside of Company, Danny berates his sister and asks her if she is trying to ruin her life. He wants to know if she was willing to sleep with Bill in order to hide the bonds. And he tells her that she doesn’t want to live with the lies that he and Carmen have to live with. Bill comes out and asks Pilar to see him again tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL1RWDP95S0&feature=related

Tues., Aug. 17, 1999 -  Pocket Watch Soliloquy Day – Michelle & Danny argue about his involvement in his mother’s business dealings. They make up and make love, but Michelle still wants to settle the cause of the original argument. Danny says he only doesn’t tell her things to protect her and they are only about business. When she protests being cut out saying they are supposed be partners, Danny says this is only temporary, but he needs to protect her while he’s still in the business. Michelle isn’t happy about it, but says she can live with it. They are interrupted by Dietz telling them Carmen wants them to join her for dessert. They reluctantly agree. Michelle goes to take a shower and Danny packs the bearer bonds in a secret compartment of his suitcase as per Carmen’s orders. After dressing himself and waiting for Michelle to finish showering and dressing to go down (it must have been a long shower, he eventually gives up and goes down without her), Danny pulls out a pocket watch his father gave him before he died with the promise he could do anything he wanted. Danny talks to his father’s memory, expressing his frustration about not being about to start a new life with Michelle and his fears that he will have to keep lying to her. He’s afraid it will cause her to eventually hate him, leave him, or worst of all, accept his life as it is and become what his mother has. He vows that he can never let that happen and that he must find a way. When Dietz picks up the luggage, he follows Carmen’s orders to secretly switch the bonds to Michelle’s suitcase where Carmen’s hint to the authorities says to look for them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QViDeN-p7HE&feature=related

My Comments:

Bill, here’s a tip, make sure your girlfriend has re-buttoned her blouse before you let in her “tends to be emotional and could easily kick your butt, AND get you in trouble with your best friend and your boss” big brother in. Really Bill should have known Danny was REALLY upset about something else or he would have reacted more strongly than he does. Glad he does take time to give Bill a warning though. Pilar is starting a long decent into madness, I wish someone would have recognized it. Look at the stuff pre- and post- Carmen’s fake shooting. Pilar really turns into a different person and not a very nice or stable one.

Bill and Danny have a complicated relationship. It definitely has its ups and downs, but it turns a major corner after Bill gets a real shot at Michelle to no avail and he finally faces the fact that it’s just never really going to happen with them and more importantly SHOULDN’T. He and Danny develop a much more permanent understanding at that point instead of the constant renegotiation what their relationship is going to be that they are still going through here.

The tension Danny is feeling and the way he reacts to Pilar’s suggestion that she get more deeply involved with hiding the bonds, it makes me think that maybe he isn’t just dealing with the current stress of the moment. While Carmen’s little speech about helping family had an effect at him and pulled him a little ways backward toward his old way of thinking, hearing Pilar say this is I think instead reinforcing what Michelle has been trying to tell him. I think he’s hearing a little voice telling him that he’d better deal with the source of this danger with Pilar (the ongoing mob association) right now or he’ll hear a similar speech from his own daughter (who of course he doesn’t know yet is Hope) someday. There’s something that crosses his face that looks like a little trickle of fear and I think that’s where it’s coming from.

Danny is only trying to protect Michelle, but he’s got to learn that he can’t do by keeping things from her. Something about their karma as a couple just gets thrown all out of whack that way and even when it would be logical not to tell the other one something, it doesn’t work with them.

 I really don’t like it when Manny fight, but you do have to give them credit. When they do it, they don’t just reach out for anything to hurt the other person (Waves Jeva) and they don’t fall back into self-defeating patterns (Hey Pheth) and they don’t rehash the same exact fight over and over again (How you doing Pharley), they actually dig into what’s wrong, why they are upset, and how it makes them feel and sometimes they even make progress and deal with it.

I love the afterglow scene. Must have been using a different position today to end up there. Carmen suddenly wanting them for dessert is actually part of her insidious plan.

Absolutely love the pocket watch soliloquy. This is an incredibly important scene and it lays out both Danny’s past and Manny’s future. This, I think, is one of the very few true glimpses we get of Miguel as a man who loved his son and wanted more than anything for him to be happy. I think he would have found a way to let Danny out of the business if he were still alive and I think he would have supported Danny and Michelle being together. I hope that I am right, but we’ll never know. It is also this speech that makes me think this whole Mick-Thug, Pilar-Angel, Danny-Smart one nonsense came from Carmen after Miguel died not from Miguel himself. I think Carmen only invoked his name to get what she wanted. It also reminds us that as much as we tend to think of Mick as the creep who attacked Michelle -  as Danny cried in anguish that night on the beach, Mick was Danny’s brother and he loved him. As much guilt as Danny tried to take on himself, it must eat at him that Michelle killed his brother and he’s forgiven her and fallen in love with her. Normally he seems to try to forget Mick ever existed, but there are moments of quiet anguish like this when he brings him up. (Which is why my idea of making Nico Mick’s son and forcing them to deal with the fallout from that would have much better soap than the deep dark amnesia days storyline we actually did have to sit through.)

 

At the same time this soliloquoy also lays out the problems inherent in Manny’s future together. Those reasons that Danny tried to push Michelle away for haven’t disappeared. They will repeatedly resurface and he’s afraid he’s never going to be able to really free himself and he’s scared to death what that means for both himself and Michelle. Also, again Danny reinforces his fear that he’ll never get to live his life with Michelle because he’ll run out of time that he will be killed or that even worse something will happen to her. It’s just a little reminder that Danny is literally dealing with life and death situations daily. It’s just a pivotal scene. It’s right up there with “I am a Man.”

I really think this set up with the bearer bonds is one of the most evil things Carmen does, right up with setting up Michelle for Ben’s murder and letting her children think she was shot in front of them. I don’t know why she doesn’t understand what losing Michelle in a way Danny would perceive as his fault would do to Danny. It would be a thousand times worse than what his walking away during the annulment separation did to him.

Tags: Bill Lewis, Carmen Santos, Danny Santos, GL, Guiding Light, Manny, Michelle Bauer Santos, Pilar Santos, Sam Dietz