One Woman Show, GENERAL HOSPITAL

GH’s excellent, Alexisfocused episode was a gift to longtime fans, highlighting the rich history and relationships she’s enjoyed since Nancy Lee Grahn’s 1996 debut while illuminating the buried childhood trauma subconsciously driving the character’s notoriously questionable life choices, romantic and otherwise.

Set on the eve of a dreaded moment in Alexis’s life reporting to Pentonville to begin a three-year sentence for stabbing Dante (she’d been aiming for Franco while off the wagon and inebriated) the hour explored the character’s past and present with great insight and intelligence, employing a flexible timeline to chronicle Alexis’s efforts to come to terms with the state of her life before becoming a ward of the state.

Alexis sat on her couch, lost in thought with her late mother, Kristin, on the brain, listening to Kristin’s recording of “Dido’s Lament”, holding the broken watch that had once belonged to her. Her reverie of watching a man and woman dancing together was interrupted by Sam. To her firstborn, Alexis compared the watch’s status (“frozen in time”) to her own for the next three years, and she acknowledged that she needed to talk to someone.

That someone was Kevin, who had been both her client and her therapist, who pressed her about how she’d spent her last day of freedom. Cut to Alexis earlier in the day at Kelly’s, sharing a meal and conversation and even some chuckles with various men who are important to her (Finn, Jax, Ned, Valentin); they expressed their admiration for her and raised their coffee cups to the fine example she was setting by taking responsibility for her actions.