Credit: Image: Paul Skipper, Sean Smith/JPI; ABC screenshot
Bonus Entry: Eterna, One Life to Live
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection
Don’t you look at us like that! We can most definitely include storylines on this list that we both laughed at and loved! And the one about the city underneath Llanview that had once housed an experimental community definitely falls into that category! Just look at those rad, Star Trek-y uniforms — come on! And on the plus side, the trippy plot furthered longterm story, by revealing to Viki Buchanan — and all of us — that her alternate personality had given birth to her nemesis, Megan Gordon. #themoreyouknow
10. Zombie Charity, Passions
Image Credit: Jesse Grant/JPI
Speaking of storylines that we both laughed at and loved… Honestly, there weren’t many plots on NBC’s too-zany-for-its-own-good 1999-2007 soap that didn’t fit that bill. But our favorite and by far the most ludicrous was the one in which scheming Kay Bennett imprisoned romantic rival Charity Standish in a block of ice and replaced her with a zombified version of herself. Only later — and need we say too late? — did Kay discover that the creature she’d unleashed was actually a succubus intent on bedding her crush, Miguel Lopez-Fitzgerald, thereby killing him! Hey, at least he’d have died happy?
9. Fluke, General Hospital
Image Credit: Howard Wise/JPI
Luke Spencer was never exactly an altar boy, but when he started to make the Cassadines look like the Cleavers, it raised eyebrows. For months, the audience assumed that he’d been replaced by a doppelganger or a bona-fide villain in a mask — hey, it happens, and in Port Charles, a freakin’ lot! But it turned out that a trauma suffered decades earlier had left Luke with a case dissociative-identity disorder that didn’t require him to don a red wig like One Life to Live’s Niki Smith or be any fun whatsoever.
8. The Chipmunk Bandit, The Young and the Restless
Image Credit: Aaron Montgomery/JPI
Good Lord, no wonder Kevin Fisher drank even wine that looked like a headache in a bottle! Emotionally tortured by memories of the abuse he’d suffered at the hand of his appropriately-named father, Terrible Tom, Amber Moore’s pal was forced by bad guy Clint Radison to rob banks. Sorry, did we say that he was forced to rob banks? We meant that he was forced to do so while wearing a ginormous chipmunk head. Thankfully, Kevin’s big brother, Michael Baldwin, eventually arranged for him to get psychological help. And, presumably, all the acorns he could eat.
7. Melaswen, Days of our Lives
Image Credit: Paul Skipper/JPI
The NBC soap milked this blood-soaked storyline for all the shock value that it could — and there was a lot, considering that it rubbed out half of Salem, even Alice freakin’ Horton! (You might as well smash the hourglass at that point!) But after we found out that the mass murderer who’d decimated her town’s population was Marlena Evans, the show pulled its punch, revealing that all of the dear departed were alive and well and being held prisoner in Melaswen (New Salem spelled backwards) by Andre DiMera. Talk about much ado about nothing!
6. Death by Volcano, The Young and the Restless
Image Credit: Sean Smith/JPI
When faking one’s death, rule No. 1 is “Don’t get spotted by people who know you.” That’s Soap Vixen 101, and we’d have thought that Skye Lockhart, Adam Newman’s mercenary wife of convenience, would have known it, even back in 2010. (It’s not a new rule.) And rule No. 2? There really isn’t one, but apparently, for Skye’s sake, it should have been “Don’t hang out on volcanoes, you twit!” That’s where she got busted by Sharon before taking a tumble into the lava and doing a way better impression of a deep-fried corpse than she had been.
5. Swamp Girl, Days of our Lives
Image Credit: Aaron Montgomery/JPI
Upon finding out her true identity in the late 1990s, the young woman who seemed to be perpetually rocking an all-over mud mask declared, “That’s Princess Swamp Girl to you!” But as Gina’s heir, Greta Von Amberg wasn’t just handed a loofa and a scepter. On the contrary, she was obliged to venture into a Virtual Garden of Eden, where she and a fig-leaf-clad Austin Reed were tasked with battling all manner of demons (who just happened to resemble characters back in Salem). In the end, about the best that could be said of this storyline was that the Wardrobe Department issued Austin a fig leaf.
4. Clone Reva, Guiding Light
Image Credit: CBS/Courtesy of the Everett Collection
Joshua Lewis learned the hard way what we all could’ve told him: Some people are — and should remain! — one of a kind. After wife Reva’s late-1990s “death” — she was very prone to dying in quotation marks, you’ll recall — he had her replicated and rapidly-aged into Dolly, a doppelganger for his lost love. (How the clone managed to completely and totally avoid this spectacular hair-metal ’do as she grew up, we’ll never understand!) In the end, Reva, as she was wont to do, rose from the grave, and Dolly, realizing that she was a redundancy at that point, overdosed on aging serum and died in… well, her own arms.
3. Ridge and Bridget, The Bold and the Beautiful
Image Credit: Aaron Montgomery/JPI
Ick! Sorry, we mean… ick, ick, ick, ick and also, to be sure we haven’t been unclear, ick! That was in a nutshell the audience’s reaction when the CBS soap flirted with the idea of pairing up these two. Technically, there was no reason that they couldn’t hook up — he was the son of Stephanie and Massimo; she, the daughter of Eric and Brooke. But because Ridge (then Ronn Moss) had originally thought that he was Bridget’s father, then her uncle, the “Ew!” factor was just way too high. Thankfully, the plot never went any further than a coupla kisses that left fans retching.
2. Alicia Montenegro, General Hospital
Image Credit: ABC
We didn’t blame the ABC soap for wanting to capitalize on Kelly Monaco’s sky-high profile following her victory in Season 1 of Dancing With the Stars. But we definitely have held against the show the facepalm-inspiring storyline with which they tried to do that. Follow along — if you can. A rich woman named Allegra Montenegro, in order to keep living in the lavish style to which she’d become accustomed, kidnapped Monaco’s Sam — a dead ringer for her daughter, Alicia — in order to have her convince one Andrew Olsen that she was the real McCoy. Via ballroom dancing. We know — it was atrocious. When all was said and done, Andrew was dead, Sam was arrested, Allegra was revealed to be the real killer, and everyone did their best to forget that this mess had ever happened.
1. The Reliquary, The Young and the Restless
Image Credit: Aaron Montgomery/JPI
Chances are, when you read the words above, you instinctively groaned. The cast, on the other hand, just laughed their asses off while they were playing out this whackadoo 2006 storyline, which involved hidden treasure, Nazis and Brad Carlton breaking a villain’s neck with his thighs. With! His! Thighs! As hard as it is to believe, things apparently got even sillier backstage than they did on the air. “One day, Josh [Morrow, Nick] decided we should make our own reliquary,” Amelia Heinle (Victoria) told Soap Opera Digest in 2010, so he “ended up making one out of tinfoil and Jolly Ranchers… You had to be there.”
