‘General Hospital’ Original Plot Twist Revealed by Anthony Geary – Fluke was Bill Eckert!

Yesterday on General Hospital‘s big 52nd Anniversary show, we saw the big Fluke reveal. After months of speculation, it came out that Fluke is really Luke. In fact, it’s more like Fluke is “Father of Luke” as in the very worst aspects of Tim Spencer that had percolated in Luke’s mind that was damaged as a teen by the accidental killing of his mother Lena and the very purposeful killing of his father Tim.

Just before teen Luke killed his dad, Tim raged in Luke’s face that he was the same and one day he would look in the mirror and see his face looking back at him. Now whether they in fact looked the same at some point and that’s what cracked Luke’s mind or whether Luke just saw his father metaphorically when he was looking in the mirror is another matter.

But the show runners were quick to say that Luke did not, in fact, have disassociative identity disorder (DID) but just a flat out mental breakdown. What is interesting, though, is that Fluke was not originally imagined to be the product of Luke’s mad mind, but a whole different person altogether – Bill Eckert! We saw in Wednesday’s flashback episode that Bill was a dead ringer for Luke.

And, if you remember, back in the early 90s, Eckert was brought onto the show as an alternate character for Anthony Geary to step into when he got tired of playing Luke. He proved to be an unpopular character in many respects and was “killed of” in late 1993, shot by one of Frank Smith’s thugs. But dead is rarely dead in Port Charles and when they exhumed his grave in January 2015, his bones weren’t there. In fact, Luke had them.

Anthony Geary was told by show runners Frank Valentini and Ron Carlivati that Fluke was Eckert and that he should play Luke and Fluke as if they were two distinct characters. But then when fans figured out where the storyline was pointing to, they decided to reroute. Geary says the producers injected the red herring idea that Fluke might be Faison, Jerry Jacks or someone else in a Luke mask or modified by plastic surgery but that was just to divert fans from figuring out the replacement story line.

This is one case where the devoted fans of General Hospital forced the writers to develop a stronger story line than they had originally envisioned. If Fluke really had been Eckert, that would have been just one more “back from the dead” twist that’s old hat on soap operas. But Luke committing patricide was a much more dramatic vehicle and the black and white revelation was well done.

There’s been some criticism of the introduction of a new heretofore unheard of sibling in Patricia Spencer, but this may turn out to be a boon. It’s likely that Dee Wallace will not be a permanent addition to the cast, but by adding her, it allowed the writers to create a new permanent character – her daughter Valerie Spencer played by the adorable Brytni Sarpy. There are rumors that Valerie will turn out to be a former love interest of Detective Nathan West and she will add new lifeblood into the romantic story line of the Port Charles 20 somethings.

Kudos to General Hospital fans for pushing the writers to make more of Fluke than they originally intended even if it took a painfully long time to bring the story line to fruition. The next question is, where does Luke go from here? There’s been talk of Geary slipping into semi-retirement and if he’s sent away to Europe or some other exotic locale for “treatment” of his mental frailty, that will allow Geary to gracefully depart Port Charles with an option to return without anything so ridiculous as a resurrection from the grave.

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