Daytime Soap Opera
Actor Of The Week

Tornado in Fairmont Crest (Beyond The Gates)

There’s nothing entertaining about this week’s real-life tornadoes or any other natural disasters, however, in the fictional world of Beyond The Gates, their tornado brought a welcome change. For six months, BTG’s pretty much only had a cancer storyline, a cotillion, and the death of a guy most viewers weren’t that into, everything else, if you could even call them stories, has been moving along at a slow crawl, so what a relief it was on Thursday to have an episode with zippy pacing and stuff actually happening. We saw medical personal like Shanice and others jumping into action instead of just talking about their love lives at the nurses’ station. Leslie had the rare occurrence of behaving like a human being showing kindness to Anita and concern over her daughter Eva. Bill and Dani were trapped in an elevator, capitalizing on their genuine chemistry. Eva’s life hung in the balance and Kat really cared about her enemy/half-sister. A tree knocked Martin unconscious. The Kyle and Hayley situation I could have done without, but I’ll say this for the Y&R crossover, BTG stayed very true to Y&R by having Abby as usual out of the loop when it comes to her family, dad Victor took off from the event without telling her, so she needlessly fretted that he might be stuck in the rubble. All that and more went on in Thursday’s episode, every scene, every segment, held interest, created story and moved it along, if the BTG writers could figure out how to do this on a regular basis with their everyday storylines, it would be a giant step forward for this show. And I cannot close this out without praising the production staff, this kind of story is challenging enough to depict but when you do so on a soap opera budget, and you do it convincingly with the blown out windows, the roof caved in, the injuries such as Eva coughing up blood, the windy night illuminated by Jacob’s police vehicle, etc., it’s noteworthy and most likely award worthy.