Young & Restless Brought Back Diane, Only to Immediately Paint Her Into a Corner — Um… Why?!?
Once again, we just don’t get it.
We’ve discussed — often — our wish for The Young and the Restless to be a smarter, more emotionally resonant and exciting show. You know, like in the good old days. But instead, it keeps making move after move that we’d swear had the single-minded goal of aggravating, infuriating or simply confusing the [bleep] out of us.
Case in point: Diane’s resurrection. Especially on General Hospital star Maura West’s way out of Genoa City, we felt deeply the character’s love for son Kyle. So why on earth would she let him grieve her — for years? Why, when she realized that she wouldn’t be able to abscond with him as planned, did she not abort her plan, take her lumps and announce that rumors of her death had been greatly exaggerated?
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We get that she was a mess and the most non grata of personas. But who does that to a little kid that they love? And what if Keemo hadn’t passed away, thereby putting on the market a house for Diane to buy in order to “give” Allie to Jack? Would Diane have just stayed dead? Would she have shrugged, “Shoot, there’s no real estate I can purchase to freak out Jack’s granddaughter; curses, foiled again!”?
“Wait a minute… Diane Jenkins wouldn’t be caught dead in such a plain sheet!”
Credit: Sean Smith/JPI
What the show has done, in short order, is establish that Diane is the worst mother of this or any year. As wonderful as Susan Walters is in the role, we’ve been told that Diane is so incapable of actual human feelings or responses that we need not care about her. And we’ve been made to face the fact that the villainess touted as “the ultimate bad girl” has lost her knack for scheming.
More: All the ways Young & Restless makes no sense
So, are we excited about the next leg of her journey? Eh, we’d love to be. And we hope that the show will surprise us. But all we can imagine is that we’re going to be fed a whole bunch of scenes in which the returning Michael Mealor is tasked with playing Kyle’s very slow thaw toward his newly defrosted mother.
Frankly, she doesn’t deserve to have him back in her life.
What’s your take on the storyline? Drop it in a comment below. And while you’re here…
Review Diane’s checkered past in the below photo gallery.
