Space issues on my Tivo finally forced me to watch the final Kish episodes of One Life to Live during this past week. I hadn't watched a single episode since just before they announced that Scott Evans and Brett Claywell had been let go, so nearly 30 shows had piled up.
Catching up with that many episodes would have been incredibly daunting in the past, since OLTL was the only American soap that I refrained from fast forwarding. I watched every story on the show. How could I not when they were so perfectly interconnected? It wasn't like the other soaps, with their isolated storyline bubbles.
I'd already decided that I wouldn't be watching the show anymore after I'd seen the end of Kish, though, so I just skipped everything that wasn't connected to them or to their story.
When I'd last written about the guys Kyle had done a sneaky DNA test on Fish and baby Sierra Rose and Oliver had blown his top and stormed out. At the end of that episode, though, he'd returned and stopped Kyle from destroying the unopened results.
As it turned out, Fish still wasn't ready to know the truth, but he asked Kyle to keep the results until he was. Meanwhile, a custody battle raged between Gigi and Schuyler over the baby. Kim and new husband Clint were contenders, too, for awhile, but that didn't really go anywhere. In fact, it seems like the show decided to drop several characters in this story at once- Kim, Kyle, Fish, and Schuyler- so everything wrapped up a bit quicker that I'd expected.
The catalyst for bringing about the conclusion of this whole story turned out to be Mitch Lawrence's number one disciple and all around lunatic, Allison Perkins. Perkins has come and gone over the years, most recently showing up a few years back to stir up trouble before she wound up in a coma.
Allison woke up just in time to try and help The Messenger get out of prison. Her plan involved kidnapping baby Sierra Rose from Schuyler and then holding her and Roxy hostage, first at the hair salon Roxy owns and then in Kyle's room at the Angel Square Hotel.
Allison ordered Schuyler to volunteer for medical duty at the prison so he could break Mitch out in exchange for Sierra Rose's safe return. Kyle happened to be the volunteer on duty that Schuyler replaced, though, so he ended up returning home early and walking in on a bound and gagged Roxy and loony Allison, who tied him up as well.
In the end, Schuyler turned the tables on Mitch and Allison by giving The Messenger a drug that would kill him unless Allison brought Sierra Rose to him in the prison in exchange for Mitch getting the antidote he needed.
After Allison left with Sierra Rose, Fish showed up and saved Roxy and Kyle, who told him that Allison had the baby. I loved the way that Scott Evans played Fish's reaction to this news, it just seemed very believable, the way he stopped trying to untie Kyle and moved to the window (through which Allison had departed), in a sort of quiet panic.
Before leaving for the prison to try and save Sierra, Oliver stopped to open the envelope containing the DNA results and learned that he was, in fact, Sierra Rose's father. At the prison, he told Bo and Brody that he wanted to lead the team that was going in to get Sierra and that he was her father. Bo congratulated him on his fatherhood but had him step aside so that someone emotionally uninvolved could do the job.
Meanwhile, Schuyler's world had fallen apart as Allison revealed that he, and not Rex, was Mitch and Roxy's son. Allison, who has made baby switching her specialty, had switched Roxy's sickly baby (Schuyler) with a healthy, abandoned baby (Rex) the night of his birth, and had then given Schuyler to her sister to raise.
Schuyler still refused to save his newly found father until Allison had handed over his daughter. Once he had Sierra Rose he tried to head home with her, but Oliver stopped him and showed him the DNA results. Schuyler realized that he'd lost everything, which naturally lead to him holding Gigi at gunpoint and trying to shoot Rex, but we won't go into that.
Oliver was finally reunited with his child, and the look on his face was something like awe, love, and hint of fear, just like any new parent would have. Fish and Kyle took Sierra to the hospital to be checked out (her heart surgery had gone well, by the way) and then took her back to Fish's apartment and shared the happy news with Layla and Cristian.
The guys were so cute as they realized how much stuff they needed to buy. Just seeing the two of them interact with the baby made me completely love where the story had taken them and and also really made me sad that we wouldn't get to see them actually raising Sierra together.
Once Gigi had been rescued from Schuyler she headed for Fish's apartment to see the baby. After a visit with the new little family, Gigi was clearly torn about whether or not to continue her custody suit, but in the end she decided to move forward with it.
The final Kish scenes all took place in and around the courtroom the next day. Oliver had a great scene where he stood up and declared himself Sierra's biological father and told the judge that he was ready to raise her but that he hadn't been able to hire a lawyer yet because he'd been too busy buying all the stuff they needed for her.
The Judge asked if Oliver was married and he told her that he was gay but that he that he was committed to his partner, Kyle, and that they were ready to be the baby's parents. The Judge had a few more questions and raised the point that Kyle was a med student and Oliver a full time cop, which wasn't going to make raising a baby easy, but the guys said that they were going to make it work. I thought Scott Evans, especially, did a great job in these scenes. I'd have given Oliver and Kyle my own child to raise, if I had one!
Gigi's lawyer tried to use the fact that they both had busy work schedules to discredit the guys' ability to parent Sierra, and pointed out that his client was already successfully raising a child, but Gigi interrupted with a speech about how her own child hadn't been planned (she was a teenage mother) and that she'd had to work full time while being a single parent, and she was ending her fight for custody because Oliver and Kyle were going to be loving parents to her niece.
It would have been a great little scene, I think, except that Farah Fath (who plays Gigi) was just phoning it in. It was like Gigi was announcing that she'd decided to have pizza for dinner, there was no emotional weight to the scene at all.
At any rate, the Judge then declared that Oliver and Kyle had full custody of Sierra Rose. Gigi asked if she could hold her niece to say goodbye but Oliver told her that there was no need because he wanted his daughter to have her Aunt Gigi, Uncle Rex, and her cousin Shane in her life.
That was pretty much it for the guys. I was hoping we'd get a final scene where they returned to Kyle's place with the baby and had a really nice final moment together onscreen, but the last we saw of Kish was the two of them walking out of the courtroom hallway while Gig and Rex yammered on about their own storyline. Kyle did pop up one final time a few days later to have a few scenes at the hospital with Gigi and Rex, but we've now seen the last of both guys.
There's so much I'm going to miss, even beyond just the amazing Kish pairing itself. For instance, Kyle and Roxy's friendship! I loved that so much and thanks to the whole Rex/Schuyler thing Roxy is in a place where she needs a friend now more than ever. There's also Fish's working relationships with John McBain and Bo, his sort of hero worship of the two of them, which I always enjoyed seeing, not to mention my dashed hopes at seeing him and Brody as partners on the force!
I won't even go into the now forever unresolved relationship between Fish and his parents or the chance to ever see Nick Chavez again.
I'm so sad about the missed opportunity to feature two gay men raising a child together on daytime TV! There would have been so much important story to tell there!
Still, however it ended, One Life to Live did deliver the most incredible love scene between two men ever show on network TV, and that's certainly something. They also just told an incredibly well written and acted gay love story. I wouldn't trade that for anything, no matter how abruptly it ended.
I'll always look back on the past few years of One Life to Live, the Ron Carlivati era, as a final golden age in daytime soaps. That's not to say that the show was perfect (no show ever has been!), but this was truly soap writing at its best: interconnected, well told, socially relevant, character based stories.
With Kish gone and Passanante on her way in to sound the death knell for the whole show, that era has come to an end. I'm glad that daytime soaps got to have one final period of greatness before the inevitable conclusion of the genre (at least as it currently exists on network TV) arrives.
I'm now a lifelong fan of Scott Evans and Brett Claywell. I can't wait to see what they do next! Whatever it is, I'll be tuning in.
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