‘General Hospital’ News: Performer Of The Week – Bryan Craig

The choice is so easy! In amongst a lot of great performances this week, the one person that had me completely captivated was Bryan Craig! There’s a sentence I thought I would never have occasion to write.

Morgan Corinthos. Here’s a character I have always considered annoying at best. Trotting through the last couple of years being little more than a monumental screw-up, he’s not been so much interesting, as rather… pathetic. From his days as a gambler to his odd, barely legal relationship with Ava Jerome, Morgan felt like “filler” to me. The kind of character you use your bathroom breaks on. Certainly not the kind that keeps you riveted to your seat!

Turns out that Craig can genuinely, believably, act! Manic Morgan is the catalyst for all the misery on the canvas this week; not the root of it, but the reason why the following things happened;

-Kiki and Nathan got shot.
-Lulu was thrown in the river and nearly drowned.
-Julian and Alexis ended up with a “red wedding”.
-Sonny was forced to reveal his mobility scam.
-Carly’s feelings of hurt, anger, and betrayal because of Sonny’s lies, not to mention her terror over Morgan’s plight.
-We were forced to listen to Obrecht and Ava sing. (Nina: “I still don’t understand German.” Amusing.)

Those are just the big things!

Morgan has been an edgy character in the past, doing impulsive things in an effort to prove to his father that he is the one who rightfully deserves to be the Godfather’s number one. In the course of trying to prove himself, he’s screwed up time after time and on some level he knows it. His bi-polar condition now being a factor, and with no meds to balance the shifts, he’s gone to extremes to prove to everyone that he is capable, fearless, and every bit the force that his father is.

Except he’s not.

Medicated Morgan would have seen the downside of stealing Sonny’s gun and trying to single-handedly stop an arms deal, and of threatening to take down a clearly stupid arms dealer like Dixon. Manic Morgan didn’t see through his impulsive and childish need to prove that he’s a man, and has now created this disaster! He knows he screwed up. It took Sonny threatening to jump off the roof with him to make him see that he has truly bottomed out.

Bryan Craig has done a stellar job of bringing the extreme highs and lows of an untreated bi-polar condition to life. With Maurice Benard as a coach, this has become the most riveting PSA that GH has seen in a long while. I’d love to see Craig get a Daytime Emmy for his performances this week. He was THAT good!

Kudos to all the actors involved, and to the writers for bringing it all together in one action-packed, highly emotional week. Big thanks to Bryan Craig for taking Morgan to a whole new level! It’s been a wild ride!

Until next week…