The Mermaid Gets Laid

Time for a brand spankin’ new Passions recap, and it’s only been a week since my last one. Now you all can finally get a sense of how little actually happens on this show when the characters aren’t gallivanting around Rome. Remember, a week of Passions is five entire hours of television – yet this amount of action could probably have been crammed into twenty minutes. Here goes.

We open in completely random fashion, with Paloma standing on the dock talking to some Mexican nerd. Seriously, with his dorky parted hair and striped shirt, I almost expect him to start spouting theorems while spraying saliva and pushing his glasses up his nose. We quickly learn that his name is Roberto and he knows Paloma from, well, Mexico, where she spent most of her life. Apparently, she’s been telling him how bored she is in Harmony, especially after all the excitement she lived through in Rome. I feel you, sister. Roberto has a great idea for a solution: He gets down on one knee and proposes to Paloma. He wants to take her back to Mexico. I guess she is getting a hasty write-off due to those Passions budget cuts we’ve heard so much about. I can’t say that any storylines will suffer as a result. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Paloma.

I want to marry you, Paloma, I must say. Say yes or I’ll go totally mental.

Cut to Siren, who is admiring herself in the mirror. Now, Siren had a productive week. Specifically, she finally got Fox to have sex with her (by enchanting him with her Siren Song), which means that he is now under the Mermaid’s Curse and can never have sex with a mortal woman again. Bummer. And his timing is really awful, too, because the very same night that Fox did the deed with Siren, Kay just happened to get her memory back. Actually, Endora made her get it back with some kind of spell, of which I didn’t catch the details. Anyway, Kay snapped out of it and was freaked out to find herself in bed with Miguel. She put on some clothes and went storming down the hall to the other bedroom, where she found Fox enjoying a tasty post-coital cigarette with Siren. Okay, I made up the part about the cigarette, but the rest of it really happened.

Fox was really groggy and confused and couldn’t quite figure out what he was doing in bed with Siren. Kay’s brain was all fuzzy too, at first, but then she started to remember everything, and Miguel and Fox explained the rest. She was sort of mad that they all lied to her and played along with her pseudo-amnesia, and she was even madder at Miguel for having sex with her in that condition, but pretty soon she forgot about all of her other reasons for being mad when she realized that Fox had just cheated on her. Oh yeah, and she wanted to kill Siren.

Right now, Siren is alone in her bedroom and she is gloating (out loud, of course) about how great Fox was in bed, and how getting laid is really good for a girl, and she hasn’t had that much fun since that naughty weekend with Shamu. Uh, gross? She giggles to herself about how Fox feels so guilty about cheating on Kay, because he doesn’t understand that he was bewitched into doing it. Fox has told Siren to get the hell out of his bedroom and his life, but she doesn’t care; she’s lost interest in him already and is currently planning to sleep with Miguel next. Oh wow, I hope Siren gets pregnant with a half-human baby and there’s a whole paternity storyline with Fox and Miguel, since she’s planning on doing them both in the same night. That would be the best.

Mermaids LOVE doing two guys in one night. I wonder how this information got left out of the Disney movie?

Miguel is walking around down by the docks feeling bad about his life. He has finally figured out that he’s in love with Kay, but now that she’s remembered being engaged to Fox, he doesn’t have a chance with her. Ah, Miguel, just wait until you find out about the curse Fox is under. This is another storyline I’m looking forward to – Fox repeatedly tries to have sex with his fiancée Kay, but he can’t get it up because of the Mermaid’s Curse. Yeah, that has potential. No pun intended.

Kay is sitting in the kitchen talking to Tabitha and Endora. Now, remember, Endora is the one who caused all of this when she conjured Siren up from the deep. Endora did that in order to get Miguel a girlfriend, so he wouldn’t end up breaking up Fox and Kay. Obviously, her plan has seriously backfired. This is what happens when you let toddlers do magic. By the way, in the last couple of weeks I have suddenly remembered a plot point that had totally evaporated from my brain, which is that the whole reason Endora cares so much about Fox’s happiness is that they’re brother and sister. Granted, Fox doesn’t know it, but Endora apparently does know that she and Fox are both Julian’s spawn, and this is why she’s always trying to look out for her big brother. That’s kind of cute, although I suspect he wouldn’t be too pleased with his baby sister’s meddling if he ever figured out that she was to blame for him being impotent with mortal women for the rest of his life.

Kay is appalled that Fox slept with Siren. Tabby points out that Kay also cheated with Miguel, but Kay says that’s not the same thing, because she wasn’t in her right mind. You know, a VERY high percentage of the sex acts on soap operas are performed by people who are somehow non compos mentis, as a result of either potions, spells, amnesia, intentional drugging, accidental drugging, disguises, brainwashing, hypnosis, mind control, identity confusion, or smoke inhalation. And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Now, people tend to be quite fair and forgiving with their partners when they cheat due to any of these highly understandable reasons, but the pesky thing is that being mentally absent during sex does not protect you from getting pregnant. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – probably 90 percent of these involuntary sex acts lead to pregnancies. Another reason to be glad you don’t live in Harmony.

God, I HATE it when I get amnesia and accidentally sleep with my babydaddy, and then in the meantime, my boyfriend gets seduced by a mermaid. That is so freaking ANNOYING.

Kay continues to rant about Fox sleeping with Siren. She is a little slow on the uptake – she just can’t figure out why Fox would do such a thing. Finally Tabitha is like, listen, you moron, Siren is a mermaid, remember? She used her Siren Song, duh. Kay is delighted to hear it; she knew Fox would never cheat on her intentionally. She still hasn’t figured out that this means that her little relationship problem is a lot worse than she thought. This is pretty weak, because Kay spent weeks trying to cock-block Miguel and Siren, because she didn’t want Miguel to fall under the Mermaid’s Curse. But now she’s completely forgotten about the Curse when it comes to Fox. Well, I guess maybe the effects of her amnesia are still wearing off. (Jeez, I can’t believe I’m trying to impose some sort of logical framework on this.)

Kay says that she’s going to kill Siren for tricking Fox, and just then, Siren walks in. Kay slams her against the wall and starts strangling her. Endora looks delighted and yells out something that I can’t understand, so it’s probably just something that the actress was babbling incoherently. She is adorable, but I have to wonder how much longer she can keep this role. First of all, she yells stuff out at random. Second, she is always in the room when Tabitha and Kay are having endless conversations about people having sex with people, and I have to wonder how much longer before the actress starts absorbing this. It’s jarring enough that the character of Endora participates (via thought bubbles) in all of these racy conversations. It’s actually one of the things that I find most amusing about the show. But it wouldn’t quite play if the actress were, say, six, instead of three or whatever she is now.

Theresa is making out with her new boyfriend Jared. Actually, he’s just planted their very first kiss, right after their first date, which was the lobster dinner that he owed her from the baseball game. Right, so when she got hit in the head with that baseball last week, she really wasn’t hurt (duh), and of course the women won the game, and so Jared and Chad took Theresa and Whitney out to the Lobster Shack. Jared still doesn’t know that Theresa is the Crane CEO – he thinks she’s a struggling working-class single mom who makes her own clothes. There was a running gag this week about him thinking that she made her own dress because it was so ugly, when it was really some couture piece she bought in Paris or something. And it really was ugly – it was a gold lamé caftan, so Theresa deserved what she got in all matters relating to everyone’s assessment of that dress.

Now, Theresa hasn’t been doing much to disabuse Jared of his belief that she is poor. In fact, she’s been downright encouraging it by telling him all about how her one brother is a cop, her other brother works on a fishing boat, her sister is a student who works part-time at the Book Café, and both her parents used to work for the Cranes until they were fired. Oh, and her mother worked for the Cranes as a housekeeper, which is sort of the clincher in terms of Jared thinking that Theresa is one of the little people. All of this has led Jared to unload at some length about how evil the Cranes are. This is such a lame “conflict” to set up between these two, considering that Theresa has always hated most of the Cranes herself, and still does. Anyway, Theresa gets a little awkward and tentative about Jared kissing her. He asks if she’s over Ethan and she admits that she isn’t.

Memo to Jared: When she makes this face after you kiss her, it’s a bad sign.

In front of Sheridan and Chris’s house, FauxSheridan is leaning over an unconscious Chris. This is the one truly action-oriented storyline that we have left. The show has cruelly taken away all the rest of our drama and intrigue, but we’re still left with the fact that Chris has been secretly working for Alistair and is a member of his Evil Omega Society. Remember, Chris tried to burn all of the documents that would link him to Alistair, but there is at least one Evil Document still lying on the floor inside Chris and Sheridan’s house, just waiting for someone to discover it.

It turns out that there’s another loose end, too. Earlier in the week, Spike confronted Chris and told him that he knows all about Chris working for Alistair, and if Chris doesn’t want Spike to spill the beans, he’s going to have to start doing Spike’s bidding. Chris refused and the two of them had a fight, which resulted in Chris getting shot and Spike running away. Yay, Spike! Spike is my new favorite character – he’s the only decent villain we have right now. Chris is so milquetoast, and Spike is so not. Every show should have a stereotypical ’70s pimp who just happens to be married to the teenage daughter of the chief of police.

So now Sheridan has found Chris bleeding on the ground, and Luis is off in the bushes looking for the shooter. It seems that Chris is only shot in the leg, so he’s not going to die. Bummer. Sheridan runs into the house to check on her little stepson James. Luis comes back over to Chris and starts to call for help, but Chris wakes up and asks him not to call anyone.

Theresa gives Jared the whole “It’s not you, it’s me” speech. He has the very solid instinct that if Theresa is still hung up on another guy, he should make a hasty exit from this relationship. Unfortunately, Jared doesn’t listen to that little voice telling him to run far, far away; instead, he has an emotional bonding session with Theresa on the couch. Apparently Jared is in unrequited love with someone too, so he understands how she feels.

Chris and Luis have moved inside to the couch and are tending to the nasty bullet wound in Chris’s leg. Chris claims that he has no idea who shot him; it was just some unseen assailant who ran into the woods. Luis lets Chris talk him out of calling a doctor. And then we witness the absolute worst police work in the history of mankind, as Chris also talks Luis out of calling the POLICE. Mind you, Luis is in uniform and is currently in the process of trying to get reinstated as a detective, and now he’s not going to file a report about a mystery attacker who shoots people in the leg at random as they stand in their own front yards in what is presumably a very safe neighborhood. And what is the earth-shattering argument that wins Luis over to this idiotic course of action, or inaction? Why, it’s Chris’s theory that if the media find out that he’s been shot, that will be very rough on Sheridan.

Welcome to Chris ‘n’ Sheridan’s Full-Service Living Room & Gunshot-Wound-Repair Emporium!

Okay, let me get this straight. Sheridan’s husband is telling Luis that he was just minding his own business in his and Sheridan’s front yard when some psycho ran by, tagged him in the leg, and vanished into the woods. Luis, after putting up a very minor fuss, has now agreed to just let this go as though it had never happened. Don’t you think that Luis ought to be just a tiny bit worried about the fact that there’s a guy out in Sheridan’s yard with a gun, just waiting to pick off the residents of the house? Or, you know, shouldn’t he be worried about the fact that he’s a cop and they’re supposed to report shootings, with the explicit purpose of PROTECTING THE COMMUNITY from people who go around shooting other people for no apparent reason? I feel like marching right into my TV and demanding Luis’s badge and gun.

Chris has one pretty funny line during the discussion, when he tells Luis that if the press hear about this shooting, they’ll have Dominick Dunne camped outside their gate. Luis mutters, “Yeah, I know what that’s like.” Because I guess Dominick Dunne has staked out Luis’s house before too? That’s an awesome visual. I had no idea that Dominick Dunne was famous enough to get shouted out on Passions. I also don’t think he really goes to crime scenes himself, considering he’s at least 80 years old.

Does this like a person who would be lurking in Sheridan’s yard with a camera?

Paloma turns down that guy Roberto’s marriage proposal. Yawn. She says that she has too many family problems right now to go running off to Mexico. She asks him to stay in Harmony with her, and he says he can’t because of his visa. Ooh, topical! She kisses him and says, “Adios, Roberto.” He leaves, but he tells her that he’s keeping the marriage proposal open. Paloma talks to herself for a second and then runs into Miguel. She recaps the proposal and her reason for saying no. Miguel tells her that she shouldn’t stay in Harmony just because the rest of her family can’t get their act together; she should leave, if she loves the guy. Paloma tells Miguel about how alive she felt in Rome, and how boring everything is in Harmony. WORD.

Cut to Kay strangling Siren in Tabby’s kitchen. They have a huge fight, which, in the ultimate act of Passions lameness, occurs almost entirely off-camera. All we get are sound effects and Tabitha recapping the action to Endora. Oh, come ON. The actresses and the set are already there; they can’t give us one teeny little girlfight scene? In the end, Endora uses some purple lightning to zap Kay and Siren apart, so that Kay can’t fight herself right into jail. Kay and Siren yell at each other some more, and Kay says that she’s going to make love to Fox over and over and over and over again, to “make him forget all about the horror of mating with a fish.” Gah, maybe I’m just overly sensitive, but if my boyfriend “mat[ed] with a fish,” it would be at least a few days before I’d start to think about hopping back into the sack with him myself.

That’s a pretty stingy little splatter of purple lightning, if you ask me.

When Kay starts talking about all the sex that she and Fox are about to have, Siren bursts out laughing. It seems that Kay’s memory is, indeed, still spotty. “Aren’t you forgetting,” Siren asks, “about a little thing called the Mermaid’s Curse?” Kay finally figures the whole thing out, and she reels like she’s been punched.

Jared tells Theresa his tale of woe. He met this woman “in Provence on holiday.” Her name was, get this, Arabella. Theresa says, incorrectly, that that is a beautiful name. (My apologies if that happens to be your name. It always just makes me think of the Arable family in Charlotte’s Web.) Jared says that he and Arabella lived in Paris together, stayed in bed all the time, and ate a lot of dark chocolate. Wow, these little details just make the whole thing seem so unbelievably real, don’t they? Theresa is completely rude; she hijacks the story and makes it all about her and Ethan and how they should have had a life like that too.

Sheridan comes back from her extremely lengthy checking on James and is horrified to learn that Chris doesn’t want Luis to call a doctor or the police station. Chris explains his whole theory about how reporting this shooting is going to bring the press down upon them like a pack of hungry jackals. They all agree that Chris will go to bed and Luis will go renegade and investigate the shooting on his own. Nice job getting the short end of that stick, Luis.

Miguel tells Paloma not to let Roberto get away if she really loves him. He admits that when he thinks of his own lost love, he now thinks of Kay, not Charity. He was wrong to leave Kay and Maria to go looking for Charity in the first place. Paloma says that Miguel should tell Kay how he feels, but he says it won’t do any good because Kay is in love with Fox. Paloma pushes him and finally sells him on the idea.

Kay is losing her shit a little bit, yelling at Siren that once she’s in bed with Fox, he won’t be able to resist her. Tabitha for some reason decides that now is the moment to cover Endora’s ears. Oh, suddenly now the subject matter is too adult for Endora? But for the last several months, when they’ve been talking about the Mermaid’s Curse, and how mermaids are such whores, and Kay giving Miguel a lust potion – that was all fine for Endora to listen to. Whatever. Siren tells Kay to go right ahead and hop into bed with Fox, but she’d better bring a good book, because she’s going to be awfully bored. Tabitha confirms that Siren is telling the truth about the Curse.

Notice how they keep Endora quiet during her scenes nowadays!

Jared tells Theresa that he “lost” Arabella, but he doesn’t say how. Theresa makes it all about her again and assumes that he lost her the same way that she lost Ethan. She tells Jared that she believes in true love, and she’s going to find Arabella for him. He tells her that that’s impossible. Theresa gets all hyped up and out of control about her great idea, and Jared takes about a zillion years to drop the obvious bombshell that Arabella is dead. When he says this, we get scary music, which makes me think that her death (or “death”) is going to be a major plot point eventually.

Luis tells Sheridan that he just called Crane Security, and they have no record of any intruders on her property tonight. She says that’s typical, because Crane Security sucks, but Luis says that they have a “new system.” There are electronic sensors everywhere and there’s no way for anyone to enter or leave without it being recorded. Now, I don’t understand what’s going on here – isn’t Spike an intruder who would have triggered the security system? Chris didn’t let him in; we saw what happened, and Chris was quite displeased to see Spike on his doorstep. So maybe Chris is paying off Crane Security to say that no one was there?

Luis says that he thinks it’s weird that Chris doesn’t want this reported, and he asks Sheridan what she really knows about Chris, anyway. She gets a little huffy, but not really as much as she should, given the question. She tells him that Chris is from South Africa, lived in Chicago, and was married to a woman named Maureen. Chris and Maureen separated; Maureen moved to Harmony with James, and then Maureen was tragically killed in the Harmony tsunami. Yes, I said the Harmony tsunami. What?

I’m not sure why FauxSheridan is dressed as Donna Reed today. But note the ever-present living-room crystal liquor decanters in the foreground.

So, there you have it – I guess Sheridan just proved that she really does know absolutely everything there is to know about her husband’s background. I mean, knowing what country he’s from, that really indicates a deep level of intimacy and trust. Suddenly, Chris wakes up upstairs, and announces (to himself) that he left “the Omega clue” outside where Sheridan or Luis might find it. He starts to drag his injured, bleeding self out of bed to go outside and look for it. No, I don’t know what clue he’s talking about, but rest assured that it has the Omega symbol on it, and that’s all that matters.

Kay stomps off to try to seduce Fox. Again I must echo how gross this is, in light of the fact that he just got done screwing Siren. Siren tells Tabitha that Kay is wasting her time, and meanwhile, Siren’s going to go after Miguel. Incidentally, Siren is wearing this top that makes her even more racktastic than usual. I guess it makes sense that a mermaid would be shockingly well-endowed, given that they normally don’t have any legs.

Bummer about mermaids having to keep their tops on on daytime television.

That pretty much sums up Friday. Now, let’s see: Did anything else happen this week? Nothing important, that’s for sure. Gwen continued to shoot Theresa dirty looks, while Ethan continued to shoot Theresa longing looks. Julian drank alone in the Blue Note because Eve was off tending to T.C. Julian told Theresa that he wants more time with Little Ethan, and she almost dropped the bomb that he’s not the father, but then thought better of it and just vowed to fight him on the visitation.

Oh, and there was one storyline that was so barf-worthy that I almost can’t make myself recap it. Luis hauled Fancy down to the police station because of her unpaid tickets or whatever. She pretended that her lawyers were on their way, but she never actually called them, because she wanted to hang with Luis. Then she convinced him to let her help him study for his detective’s exam, and she convinced him that it should be STRIP studying. She cheated, and they both ended up in their underwear, and then they kissed on a bed in the jail cell – EW. Finally he came to his senses and released her from jail, against her will. Gee, I wonder if maybe he remembered that his son just died – nah. So between that storyline and the way that Luis acted today with Chris, this show is really driving home its apparent message that police officers are complete boobs with no ethics, professionalism, or common sense whatsoever.

Previews: Chad tells Ethan that he needs to choose between Gwen and Theresa. Theresa and Jared kiss some more. Sheridan points Luis to some scraps of paper out in the yard with the Omega symbol on them.