Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related FFQ - Soap Opera Scene

Yeah, I know I'm risking death by disembowelment by mentioning this :p but I have a WIP I'm currently working on that demands Lois turning up the volume on her television while watching Ivory Tower... and I'm stuck on what one character could say to another. Some kind of climax... some sort of typical soap-operaish corny line. I've been wracking my brain for days trying to think of a scenario, but since the height of soap opera over here is "Fair City", I don’t have very good examples to go by, and it's sort of essential to this scene...

So... I guess what I'm asking for is for some brilliant, amazing, incredible person to come up with some random line that I can throw in there - looking for a humorous effect if at all possible. It can be as weird as you guys like but it would be helpful if it made some sort of logical sense. Once I have it, it hopefully won't be too long before I have this done and dusted

Thanks in advance for any replies

Sara.

"What do you mean, it's not my baby, Amy?"
---
"You can live with him, but you can only love me!"
---
"I know we're half brothers, but nothing can stop me from loving you all the same!"
---

Okay, I'm walking on thin ice with the last one, but I couldn't resist.

I can't really think of specific lines, but the things that seemed very popular (okay, I confess, I watched Coronation Street and East Enders while I was in Manchester ) were one character announcing to another that she was pregnant with his baby (and the guy rejecting her because he was about to marry another woman) or someone being progressively uncovered as the murderer of her very rich husband on their honeymoon.

Kaethel

For some reason, trying to remember all these lines I've watched in mexican soap-operas (I used to be a BIG, BIG fan) is making me ROTFLOL. (BTW, Julie, I love your lines.)

Taken from various of the aforementioned mexican soap-operas:

--
Don't shoot, (put name here), he's our son!!
--
You never loved me, (put name here). All you wanted was my money!
--
I can't believe it... The man I hate more than anyone else... the one that took away from me the woman I love... is my son??
--
I love her more than my own life [typical ].
--
She can never love you, she only loves me!
--
You're no good enough for him!
--
Please, forgive me, (put name here).
--
You killed him!!
--

I chose the cliche-iest, Sara

AnnaBtG.

Well, see what you think of these. Most of them are inspired by actual storylines from my Mom's favorite soap (which, I'll admit, I used to watch with her. It's funny. Neither of us was really a soap person. She started watching because she wanted a connection with my aunt, who lived halfway across the country, and I started watching because she watches. I've since given it up, but she still watches. In some strange way, it helps her nap...). Oh, and one of them is from another show entirely...

---

"No, stop! Don't marry him! That's my twin brother!"

(You can add things to this. "He's just pretending to be me!" or "We got mixed up when we both got amnesia!" or "He's just marrying you because he wants to take over my life! He's always been jealous of me for having been born two minutes earlier than him!")

---

"No, darling, I'm not dead. I was kidnapped. When I managed to escape, I was hit by a car. That knock on the head made me think I was a character from a novel I've been secretly writing. But that's all in the past. I'm okay now. We can start our new life together..."

---

"You can't marry him! He's... your brother!"

(Switched at birth, the result of a long-supressed traumatic event which has only now come to light, the result of a deep dark secret... take your pick.)

---

"No! You can't take me to jail! I didn't do it! It was Maria! I know she looks completely innocent, but you've got to believe me! She's got a split personality!"

---

"You've got to help me! My slightly unattractive sister has gone insane with jealousy! She trapped me down a well and, now that I've finally escaped, she's trying to hunt me down like an animal!"

---

"I'm sorry. I can't do this. I'm not who you thought I was. I'm actually a secret agent. I was injured while deep undercover, and I forgot all about that life. Now, a vast criminal conspiracy is after me, and having to defend myself is bringing back the memories of my old life..."

---

"The horse! He remembers you! You are my long-lost husband!"

(Or sister or childhood playmate or whatever else you can think of)

---

"No, I'm not just a stableboy. I'm your bastard half-brother, and our father, in his guilt, left me everything in his will. Now, son of the man who used to beat me without warning or seeming reason, get out of my house!"

---

"No, my dear soon-to-be-ex-husband, the company is no longer yours. I had the board declare you insane! Now Fred is in charge!"

"That small-town hick? The man who stole my third ex-wife? I despise him! How could you?"

"He'll run this company better than you ever could! I know he will! He's my lover!"

---

"The doctor called. Remember those headaches I've been having? They're a sign of... Brazillian Spleen Retrovirus Fever! It must have been from that pet ferret we got. I have three weeks left to live..."

---

"Darling, before I go into surgery tomorrow, I need to tell you something. Manuel is my dear departed first wife's son. Two years before we were married, my arch-rival kidnapped and drugged her, and he's the result. She couldn't bear to raise him, but she loved him anyway. He knows nothing of this, but I promised on my wife's deathbed that I'd always take care of him and his adoptive parents. If I don't make it, look after them for me."

---

Or, putting together the most common elements (with a few random touches)...

"No, don't hurt him! He's not my son! He's the bastard child of my evil twin brother! We all thought he was dead, but he actually had amnesia and thought he was a poor innocent door-to-door salesman. He remembered me when the chemotherapy drugs started to affect his mind. I promised him on his deathbed that I'd raise the child as my own and never tell him of his father's shame."

---

Any of those work for you, Sara?

If not, you can also go to imdb and look up various soap titles ("As The World Turns," "The Young and the Restless," "One Life To Live," "All My Children," "Passions," etc) and click on "memorable quotes." They have all sorts of things you can work with. For example, from the All My Children quotes :

Mary Smythe: You can't be serious? My daughter is marrying a gigolo who's mother is a criminally insane drug trafficker.
Roger Smythe: Well, now, look on the bright side. At least she'll have a real reason to hate her mother-in-law.
Mary Smythe: Shut up Roger.

Paul

I watch way too many soap operas for my own good -had to let go the last year or so because of my work/school schedule, but I can probably tell you every story line that's ever happened on about 4 different soap operas.

Just some one-liners (or maybe two-liners) off the top of my head that go with some ridiculous story lines:

Alec, I love you; I'll always love you. But we can't get married. [Sob] You're my brother.

And like Kaethel suggested, the ever popular oops pregnancy:
Cliff, you can't marry Nina. I'm pregnant with your baby!

Or the all-time favorite back from the dead character:
Felicia, who is this and what is he doing in our bedroom?
Oh, my god, it's my husband, he's not really dead after all.

Hmm...back-from-the-dead-character...why am I having flashes of Lex?!?

One of my favorites:
Just-finished wedding:
"I now pronounce you husband and wife."
Door slams open.
Presumed dead wife - "Am I too late? Cord, this is your son." Hands baby to groom, collapses on floor.
Doesn't work as well for a one-liner, but good soap scene nonetheless. <g>

Hmmm...I've got a tape of daytime soap operas greatest weddings - there's gotta be some good lines in there, might have to research.

Jill

That is NOT my child, Rachel! You've been having an affair!

No, John, I won't marry you! For God sakes, you used to be my sister!

Dammit, Lisa! How could you go off and marry my brother! You're pregnant with my child!

John's. Not. Dead. He faked it so he wouldn't have to last through another waste of day married to YOU!

I stopped watching "General Hospital" years ago after they killed off my favorite character (always melodramatic!).

"Darling, sit down. I have to tell you something. I'm... dying!" [sob] "I only have two weeks left to live!"

I should never have asked this. I think one of my ribs just cracked!!!! <bg> ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm very happy you liked this line, Sara! I had absolutely loved that revelation scene!!

Said by 'Gabriel Aldama' in the soap opera Laberintos de pasión (one that had me crazy from the beginning till the end).

AnnaBtG. (who didn't have the talent to invent lines of her own.)

Okay, so I thought I'd throw this in there just because I'm hanging out with one of my roommates watching Lifetime (I'm a Lifetime junkie), and this bit totally caught our attention mid conversation.

Susan: I think I'm pregnant.
Guy: Uh, Susan, I had a vasectomy.
*Susan's shocked expression*
My roommate and I:

"Paulina, you can't forgive your sister! She's evil! Even though she looks exactly like you because you were separated at birth!"

(Anna, guess where that one's from? )

Julie

I watched it on re-run this winter One of my three all time favorites.

But let's stay in topic...

--
I can't marry you, Edmundo. I'll always love Carlos Daniel.
--

From the same soap-opera

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

I keep forgetting about this, but I suppose I really should give proper credit (if that's the word) to the show that inspired most of the quotes I wrote. (Glad you liked them, btw, Sara. )

Like I said, I used to watch a soap with my mom. The show was All My Children, and most of the quotes there were summaries of some of the kookier AMC storylines.

Going back over things... the first one is fairly generic. The second is from another show entirely. I think we all know which one. The third is also fairly generic, though somewhat less so.

AMC has done the split personality thing more than once. I think I was thinking of Janet at the time, who (sometimes) seemed sweet but had an evil side that would talk to her through the mirror.

Janet was the younger and slightly unattractive sister of Natalie. Janet was horribly jealous of her sister and did all sorts of things to her. Ultimately, she ended up trapping Natalie down a well in an old abandonded mine shaft or something, bringing her food every once in a while when she came to taunt her sister. In the meantime, Janet had put on a wig and disguised herself as her sister, fooling everyone, including Natalie's husband. I don't remember how it all ended, really. I thought the hunting her down line sounded funny, so I just threw that in.

A couple years ago, a star from another soap joined the AMC cast. She'd been a cop on the other show (Port Charles, I think), but her character had been killed off. She came in as a different person on AMC. Or so we thought. Then weird things started to happen, and we found out that Alex had been an superspy who'd gotten too deep undercover. The explosion which had seemingly killed her Port Charles character had, in fact, only given her amnesia, making her adopt one of her other undercover identities. An evil British orginization came after her, trying to kill her, and she gradually remembered her spy skills. After that whole thing was resolved, they brought in a long-lost twin sister. Then Alex was killed. And then Alex's sister was killed, and the actress moved on to... something else, probably.

While Alex was around, however, her love interest, Edmund, got amnesia, and one of the things they tried to do to help cure him was reintroducing him to his horse (which had actually belonged to his half-brother before he died). I thought my way was a more fun twist. Actually, I'm a little fuzzy on this one. I think I also remember Dimitri, having come back from supposed death with a case of amnesia, being reintroduced to the horse. I wasn't really watching closely at the time, so I'm not really sure who it was.

In any case, while we're speaking of Edmund and his half-brother Dimitri... Edmund was first introduced to us as an old resentful stableboy, who had been absued by Dimitri's father. When Dimitri's father died a little while later, his will revealed that Edmund was, in fact, his bastard child. He'd beat the boy because of his shame, but, in his guilt, he'd left everything to him. Edmund kicked Dimitri out of the mansion, but eventually forgave him.

In a completely different storyline, let's talk about Liza, Tad, and Adam. Liza and Tad were an item years back, but then she left the show. She came back, and ended up marrying Adam. She had a child by him and then left him. They've had a sort of love/hate relationship ever since. Adam happens to run a big powerful corperation. Tad happens to be an ex-private investigator with a long and complicated background. Adam and Tad hate each other's guts, and have fought over more than one woman. At one point, Liza had Adam's board declare him insane. For reasons I don't clearly remember, she couldn't take charge herself. So, she somehow managed to get the board to put Tad in charge of the company. She and Tad were sort of having a relationship (they'd become friends, but around that time, they were flirting with other possibilities), but basically, she just wanted to drive Adam up the wall.

I have no idea where I came up with the ferret thing, except that I think it was vaguely inspired by a couple of soap opera parody movies I've seen. Soapdish, with Sally Field, and Delirious, with John Candy. (Soapdish was really fun. Delirious had its moments. At least, IMHO.) Both included storylines about bizzare exotic medical conditions, so I figured, why not?

Moving on... Erica Caine has two daughters. One, we knew since she was born. The older sister, however, was introduced years later. It turns out that Erica's father, a Hollywood bigshot, had thrown his then teenaged daughter a birthday party. Only he'd invited his friends instead of hers, and they got drunk and bad things happened. The result was a baby, whom Erica gave up for adoption. She then proceeded to repress the memories so thoroughly that they didn't come up until the writers decided to RetCon the daughter into the story. The daughter came in to ruin Erica's life, and things happened. She eventually left again, to go back to a relatively happy life with her adoptive parents, but years later came back, and is currently on the show (being played by a different actress). After the original actress left the show, my sister went out to California to work for the summer, and came across a studio sale. They were selling off old cast member clothing and such. So, she decided to buy a shirt for my mom. It was the shirt that Kendall, Erica's older daughter, had worn basically every day. A couple years later, the actress who had played Kendall got another job on another show, and now I think it's even cooler that Mom has one of Sarah Michelle Gellar's old shirts.

In any case, I didn't want to go through the whole thing with Erica and Kendall, because it's not very funny. I did like the idea of the long-lost adopted baby, however, so I tried to think of a funnier way to write it up. Not sure if I succeeded but there it is.

The last one is, as I said, my own combination of generic overused plot points, thrown together in the funniest way I could come up with on the spur of the moment.

So, there you go. Credit where it's due, even if that credit is overdue.

Oh, and one that I didn't quite figure out how to include (although I did sort of try with the first quote) was the Tad/Ted storyline. Tad was originally introduced as a bad guy, but the audience liked the actor (whose name happens to be Michael E. Knight... He aparantly gets a lot of requests for pictures of his car, which he is happy to grant, even if the car in question happens to be a regular 4-door sedan...) so much that they decided to rewrite him as a good guy. He's got a long, complicated history, involving three sets of parents (his birth parents, his adoptive parents, and the people who took him in during the storyline I'm about to try to sum up). The character was killed off years back. He was fighting with a bad guy and fell off a bridge.

Well, after about a decade, they decided to bring Tad back to the show. But how to explain why he wasn't dead and hadn't come back? Amnesia, of course! (Which was also used a couple years later to explain the return of Edmund's wife, Maria, who'd aparantly died in a firey plane crash.) He'd hit his head on the rocks below, and then been swept away by the river. It was simple, really. Too simple. So, they threw in another twist. He'd been taken in by the Orsini family, a couple of wealthy Napa Valley vintners, who had mistaken him for their son, Ted. Ted had disappeared years back, but Tad looked just like him and amensia. So, Tad came back to Pine Valley (where the show takes place) thinking he was Ted. Just as his wife was starting to bring back his old memories, guess who showed up? That's right. Ted. He'd been lost in the wilderness for years. He'd had amnesia, too, but, without anyone to rescue him, he'd been forced to resort to the primitive life of a half-crazed woodsman. Ted and Tad fought, and eventually, Ted overcame Tad and tried to take over his life. But Tad escaped right around the time that Ted was marrying Dixie (the love of Tad's life, who had thought herself to be Tad's widow). Stuff happened, I don't remember exactly, and Ted died. Tad and Dixie were remarried, and lived happily for the next few years until Dixie was killed off. She's still dead.

Speaking of characters who are still dead, I just remembered Jillian. She was the soulmate of Ryan, but she died. And then they decided to keep her around for an extra few weeks. How? As an angel, who came back to try to keep Ryan from going insane with grief. Only Ryan couldn't really see her, and few times when they did connect were driving him more insane. Eventually, she came to see that she couldn't really do any good directly. I think she managed to help him a bit, and then finally ended up leaving Earth forever to take her place in Heavan. Ryan eventually recovered from his grief and, from the bits I've seen while Mom was watching, he's got a couple of new love interests now.

I thought of those 2 storylines, but couldn't figure out how to sum them up briefly enough to be of use.

So, those are the strangest storylines from the show that I can remember offhand (there is some vague memory of a storyline involving an evil voodoo priestess, but I've managed to repress those memories. Or maybe I just have amnesia...). Have fun writing the story, Sara. Looking forward to seeing it.

Paul

I thought they looked familiar!!!

AH, such a good show - and such great storylines...

lol, Jill. That was fun. Thanks. I'd forgotten a lot of that. Although, you did remind me of one of my favorite lines. It's from when Edmund, Dimitri, Erica, and Maria were all living in Wildwind. I don't remember exactly how it started, but it was something like this:

Maria: We've got everything in this mansion. Beautiful furniture, a hundred rooms, hot and cold running Erica...

Maybe it's just me, but I love that bit.

Paul

Ah, yes, nice one, Paul. Most of the great soap lines of our time are uttered either by, or about, our dear miss Erica - quite a character.

Jill