I think I’ve just discovered a deeply hidden secret from General Hospital’s sublevel basements.  Ric Lansing is a Cassadine.  And not because he married Alexis.

I have never understood how Alexis and Ric came to be a couple.  I admittedly missed their courtship but the past year has given me no reason to buy their relationship.  It seemed like the writers just didn’t know how to match up either character, and as our writers are incapable of letting characters be single for more than a month, they just picked names out of hat and paired them up. 

After watching Friday’s episode, I think I know why they did it.  Is it too much to hope there may have been meaning behind their motives?  Ric’s scenes with Molly reminded me that he’s a psycho lunatic.  I give the Mobsters, Ltd. crew a hard time when they refuse to give Ric a leg to stand on, but that’s only because he had me under his spell.  Ric is a highly functional crazed man, just like the dearly departed Stavros Cassadine and your own next door serial killer neighbor.  Both Stavros and Ric are able to behave well, even charismatically, for long periods but are just waiting for something inside themselves to snap causing them to kidnap and imprison nearby females.

Yes, yes, I know that Ric’s crazy because of his longstanding brother envy.  But think about it--do normal, non-gothic Greeks, become conniving lunatics just because their mother didn’t keep them?  For example, I present dialogue from one of my favorite movies of all time, Robin Hood:  Prince of Thieves.  Towards the end, there is a big reveal, explaining why Will Scarlett has snarled at Robin Hood oHHoofor the last 90 minutes.  Robin Hood, exasperated, asks, “Why do you hate me so dearly, Will Scarlett?”  The answer, “Because our father loved you more than me!”  Just replace father with mother and this could have been the reveal of Sonny and Ric as siblings.  Of course, Kevin Costner then hugs Christian Slater close and vows to fight side by side until the end of things while Sonny has repeatedly stomped Ric down, but would a normal person have channeled his inner turmoil into chaining a pregnant woman in a cell?  No…but a Cassadine would.  And we don’t really know much about Ric’s father, do we?

Back to watching Ric project his issues onto little Molly.  We’ve seen nothing that shows Alexis favoring Kristina but Ric has decided she does because it just seems natural to him that she would.  His ranting to Molly and hatching plans to protect her was very Cassadine indeed.  Ric’s good intentions of protecting his child are going to be twisted into something dark and sinister.  The monologue struck me in its similarity to how Helena confided to frozen Stavros.  She really believed that the way to show how much she loved him was to bring him back to life and try to hand the world over to him.  Yep, that’s a far stretch for us normal folks, but for a Cassadine, we expect nothing less.

Many fans have been calling for Alexis to act more like a Cassadine for ages.  I believe her deathbed manipulations are proof that she now is.  While repulsive, even to herself, Alexis is pushing Sam and Ric together to form a family for her younger daughters.  Would you or I do it?  No, because we aren’t blinded by our Cassadine psychosis from seeing that Molly and Kristina will be traumatized someday after finding out that their sister and father/stepfather were getting jiggy with it.  If I consider that the icky plan to bring the two together is merely Natasha maneuvering, then I can understand it and even cheer her on with the delicious incestousness of it all.  Especially when I add in my second reason why I believe Ric is a Cassadine--inappropriate Cassadine chemistry.

Yes, that’s right, we love our Cassadines and we also love just how much they really, I mean really, love each other.  For newer viewers who may have missed the Alexis/Stefan/Helena/Stavros interactions, just watch the scenes where Alexis tells Nikolas she has cancer for a prime example of this phenomena.  I cannot explain how much easier I can stomach the Ric and Sam lustmaking when I view it believing they are both Cassadines.  It almost makes sense in that context.  And, disgusted as we, and the actors were by it, it’s really hard to deny the chemistry onscreen.  I would describe it as almost a primal attraction.

At last, I can accept how Alexis and Ric might have gotten together.  They were drawn together by their bloodlines and since Ric is unaware of his, they had no reason not to act on the inappropriate chemistry they must have felt.  It’s really the only way I can come to terms with the marriage ever happening, much less the daughter/husband sex to follow.

Am I deluding myself?  Probably.  But let me tell you how much more interesting this is going to make my General Hospital viewing!  Don’t believe me?  How many of you can actually make it through the boring, interminable Jason and Sonny scenes without shouting at the screen for them to just give in to their passion?  What, no one’s raising their hand?  That’s what I thought. 

By: The Gourmez