It's been quite awhile since I've done a wishful storytelling for The Young and the Restless and has been several months since I've done any writing about the soap opera itself, either. The past few months I really didn't have many positive things to say about Y&R, so I figured I'd adopt the six-year-old's life lesson of if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all.
Ever since Chuck Pratt took over as head writer of the top CBS soap earlier this year, the storyline direction of the show is hard to follow. He spent most of his first few months as head writer trying to get viewers emotionally invested in a storyline in which Victor (Eric Braeden) finds a Jack Abbott doppelganger (Peter Bergman) in a Peruvian prison by the name of Marco Annicelli, who turns out to be a largely wanted drug lord who is now posing as Jack Abbott so Victor can gain control of the Abbott family company, Jabot Cosmetics. Doppelgangers and evil twins have pretty much been beaten to death in the soap opera genre, but if Pratt was hell bent on doing one, I could've gotten behind it if it at least was written well, which it wasn't. We're supposed to believe Jack has a doppelganger that's a Peruvian drug lord and never once knew about it? That's a large stretch, even for a daytime soap. Not only that, Marco turned out to be the killer of two youngsters who were murdered in a widely panned Whodunit? storyline that had been going on among the set of younger characters on the show. No thanks.
Anyway, ever since we were given foreshadow that Victor had been in correspondence with someone secret around January and February of this year, I was holding out hope that he had discovered Gabriel Bingham was in fact his presumed dead son Adam (Justin Hartley) who had assumed a new identity. But no, this foreshadow led into the painful Jack/Marco storyline. My theory was that Victor had somehow figured out Gabriel was in fact Adam and not only that; he discovered that Gabriel was in fact alive, too (Adam had major reconstructive surgery to look like Gabriel Bingham after he was killed trying to save Adam from the very car accident that led Genoa City to presume him dead). My hope was that Adam lied about Gabriel being dead because he desperately needed a plan to return to Genoa City to be with son Connor and wife Chelsea (Melissa Claire Egan), and maybe he had been holding the real Gabriel hostage somewhere. But that didn't happen.
I'm still fascinated by the idea of the real Gabriel Bingham being alive, because all we have is the word of Adam and Sage (Kelly Sullivan), who was romantically involved with the real Gabriel and helped Adam return to Genoa City with a new face, that he was killed trying to save Adam from the car wreck. Currently, "Gabriel" was exposed as Adam when he tried to take down Newman Enterprises with the help of evil mastermind Ian Ward. He is now standing trial for the murder of Delia Abbott (Sophie Pollono), who he accidentally struck with his car over two years ago in October 2013. My idea now is that Adam is able to avoid legal custody... because the person going to prison is the real Gabriel Bingham. As soon as he knew he was going to stand trial for Delia's murder, he gets the real Gabriel to be the one who stands trial (Why would Gabriel agree to that? Who knows, maybe he's had him doped up on drugs while he's been held captive. We must not forget that Adam has always been crafty.) Adam is now on the run, waiting for the chance to come back for Chelsea and Connor and send Chelsea into more emotional turmoil, because she can't bring herself to let go of her love for Adam despite what he's done.
It would be a nice twist, in my opinion, but Pratt is probably too busy writing Neil (Kristoff St. John) as a sociopathic psycho who's taken his ex-wife Hilary (Mishael Morgan) hostage. Don't even get me started on that. Watch The Young and the Restless weekdays on CBS.
