Well, as it turned out, there wasn't a great deal of Nuke action over the past two weeks on As the World Turns. The guys only had one episode together, though Luke was on without Noah a few times. Mason, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen at all.
Let's get right to it. Luke went to see Holden to ask him if it was okay if he went along on the horse buying trip to Kentucky after all, since the business trip with Damian had fallen through. Not surprisingly, Holden was very happy with this turn of events and was more than pleased to have Luke come along.
At the same time, Lily was sharing an illicit make out session with Damian and unbeknownst to either of them her daughter Faith saw the kiss. Oh, I'd so love it if this was Faith's Sami Brady moment! (If you don't know, Sami Brady is a character on Days of Our Lives who, at age 15, saw her mother having sex on a conference table with a man who was not her father. The immediate result was bulimia as she kept the secret, but the long term result was years of scheming and plotting which made her the most interesting character on the show.)
A guilt stricken Lily decided to recommit to her family by suggesting that they all go along on the trip to Kentucky and make it a family holiday (minus youngest daughter Natalie, who's away at camp, which is where soap kids are kept in the summer after a long winter of being 'upstairs' or 'at a sleepover'). Holden and Luke were pleased with the idea, but Faith was in the middle of a mini breakdown over seeing the kiss, so Lily decided that the guys should go on ahead and she, Faith, and little Ethan would meet them the next day, after their business was done and she'd figured out what was wrong with Faith.
Luke tried to talk to his sister, since they're usually pretty close, but she just spouted some stuff about Lily being a hypocrite and then ran off. Luke decided that he'd better stay behind and help Lily deal with Faith, leaving Holden to handle business in Kentucky alone before they all met up for the vacation.
Once in Kentucky, Holden picked up a guy dressed as a cop (in a good Samaritan sort of a way, not in a closet case on a business trip way!) and was soon driving along at gunpoint, since soap characters never pick up strangers alongside the road without dire consequences.
Holden's truck went over the side of a cliff with Holden and his captor both inside and naturally it exploded on impact. The footage they used looked like it was something left over from the 1970's, by the way. I know they're on a budget, but it was pretty laughable.
Luke was with Lily getting ready for the vacation when they got the call from the Kentucky day player police officers that Holden's truck had been in an accident. The two of them hopped on Lucinda's jet and got to Kentucky in three seconds flat. Seriously, they were there so fast that the wreckage was still too hot for the police to investigate and all they'd managed to get was the licence plate, which had fallen off halfway down the cliff.
Lily wanted to jump off the cliff or something in an effort to save Holden just in case he was lying somewhere in need of help, but Luke and Damian (who'd arrived in Kentucky in less than five minutes after Luke called him) held her back until the police were finally able to find Holden's watch near the wreckage and confirm their worst fears.
Of course, there's only one badly burned corpse to be found and we all know that it's not really Holden. The only question is how long he'll be 'dead' before he's found alive and if Damian and Lily will just be doing it at that point, or have actually married each other.
The one Nuke episode we did have was a pretty strong one for Van Hansis. He was very good struggling to hold in his grief and fear right after Lily got the call about Holden and again while he was calling Damian to tell him the news, and then when he was at the cliff with Lily he seemed more numb than anything else, which I think was a very natural response, especially since Lily was already sobbing and you can't have two people in the scene falling apart at once.
But the scenes with Noah were so good that they were almost hard to watch, since Van made Luke's grief seem all too real. I've been wracking my brain, trying to remember if we've seen Van grieve onscreen before this, and I really don't think we have. It probably sounds silly, but he cries very well. Some actors seem to have a problem connecting with those emotions and crying on camera, but Van isn't one of them.
After getting back from Kentucky, Luke went straight to Java to see Noah. He got his boyfriend's attention from outside, as if he couldn't face going in and being around a bunch of people, which I thought was a nice touch.
Noah was surprised to see Luke since he was supposed to be in Kentucky, but one look at Luke's face, with his eyes welling with tears, told him that something was wrong. Luke told Noah what had happened to Holden and that it was all Luke's fault.
The police thought that Holden must have fallen asleep at the wheel and Luke explained to Noah that if he'd just gone to Kentucky like they'd planned, he could have shared the driving with Holden and kept him company and this never would have happened.
Noah told him that it wasn't his fault and that for all they know, Luke might be dead too if he'd been there. Luke then began to do what every grieving person does: worry that the person they lost didn't know how much they loved him. In Luke's case, he focused on the past few months when he'd chosen to get closer to Damian, feeling guilty for trying to cancel the Kentucky trip to go to New York, and piling more guilt on top of that for going to work at Grimaldi Shipping instead of WorldWide. He worried that Holden must have felt like he was choosing Damian over him.
Noah told him that Holden wouldn't have thought that for a second, that family is what counts, not biology, and Holden knew that he was Luke's family.
Luke reverted to blaming himself for not being in Kentucky when the accident happened and then said that he had to go be with his family. Noah said that he'd come along, but Luke stopped him, saying that right now seeing Noah reminds him of how he should have listened to Noah and never cancelled the Kentucky trip to begin with.
We're not going that route again, are we? We've already seen one "My dad is 'dead' and seeing you just reminds me of how it didn't have to happen!" story with these same two characters!
Luke went home and cried on Damian's shoulder before Noah showed up, saying that that he'd thought about what Luke said about it being hard to see him, but he'd decided that Luke needed him, and that he himself needed to be with Luke.
Damian left them alone as Noah reminded Luke that when Colonel Mayer 'died', Luke had just been there and held him and he was going to do the same for him now. It was really a very moving moment between the two of them.
That, in a nutshell, was all that happened with Nuke over the last two weeks.
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