GH Botches Elizabeth Webber’s Backstory With Nutty Parents And Even Nuttier Plot

For 25 years, General Hospital fans have watched Elizabeth Webber grow from a bitter teen to a grown woman who is an accomplished nurse and a hard-working single mother to three sons. Through all of that time, we wondered where her parents were, why they never visited even once, and why they left her to live with ‘Gram’ Audrey Hardy when she was just 15 years old. Now we know — and we wish we didn’t.

Elizabeth Webber Is Better Off Without Her Parents

Elizabeth’s (Rebecca Herbst) dad, Jeff Webber, as played by Richard Dean Anderson in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was an established character on the soap and for all intents and purposes, a good guy who we could never imagine leaving his children in the care of others to further his career.

We hoped that when GH finally brought Jeff (now played by Falcon Crest’s William Moses) back with his never-before-seen wife, Carolyn Webber (Denise Crosby), we’d understand why he did what he did, but now we are left shaking our heads and wondering how Elizabeth ever came from these two narcissists she confronted in their lovely California home.

From the moment Jeff and Carolyn spotted their daughter in their living room after not seeing her for the last quarter of a century and casually asked her if she wanted refreshments, we knew something was off with them that went beyond child abandonment, and we were not wrong.

They seemed to have absolutely no remorse when Elizabeth railed against them for not being there for her when she was raped in high school, for missing her weddings, the births of her children, and her graduations — and not even reaching out when her husband, Franco Baldwin (Roger Howarth), was brutally murdered last year.

They made excuse after excuse until Liz had enough and walked out. Then, she remembered why she was really there and walked right back in, to promptly ask them what the heck happened in a stairwell with Reiko Finn (Mele Ihara) when they were living on the Mariana Islands as Jeff and Carolyn worked for Doctors Without Borders.

What Was General Hospital Thinking?

We were already disturbed earlier this fall when it looked like Elizabeth’s backstory was somehow going to be tied to Hamilton Finn (Michael Easton), a character Liz has unfortunately been paired with who had to be told by her son to just leave her alone and let her figure out her own life. The pairing is hugely unpopular with most fans, but somehow Elizabeth’s reason for being in Port Charles all these years has to do with a character who didn’t arrive in town until 2016 and barely gave Liz a passing glance until 2021.

If that wasn’t bad enough, GH basically had to hammer a square peg into a round hole to make this all fit and work — and it still doesn’t work. It also makes her parents look even worse than we ever imagined.

A Convoluted Plot For Elizabeth Webber That Makes No Sense

Apparently, Jeff is a serial philanderer who not only had an affair with Naomi Dreyfus, producing Elizabeth’s half-sister Rachel Berlin, AKA Hayden Barnes (Rebecca Budig), who shares a precocious child named Violet (Jophielle Love) with Finn, but he also had an affair with Finn’s late wife, Reiko Finn, when Liz was a teen. It also seems Reiko was just one of many, and Elizabeth knew exactly who her dad was at a very young age.

Back in 2016, Finn arrived in Port Charles as a drug addict suffering from the fictional Blackwoods Disease, something that he and his wife caught when they were working for Doctors Without Borders. Reiko had already died from this ailment, and Finn was trying to find a cure and injecting himself with this experimental drug that contained the narcotic he was addicted to. Finn finally found the cure when Hayden nearly died from Blackwoods, something that was written to take one’s life quickly.

Now we learned that when Liz fought with Reiko in a stairwell, she threatened to tell Reiko’s husband all about her affair with Jeff. The two struggled, Reiko fell down the stairs, her injuries required a blood transfusion, and that is how she contracted Blackwood’s.

Jeff and Carolyn were so freaked out that they took their two daughters and hightailed it off the Mariana Islands as fast as they could. After that, Elizabeth started having nightmares about what happened and sleepwalking. That led Jeff to give her sleeping pills and her mom to “coach” her so she would forget the whole ordeal. When Elizabeth seemed like she was going to throw her own self down a flight of stairs, they decided she was better off without them, left her with some neighbors before Liz took off to Port Charles, and never looked back. Great parenting skills there.

The General Hospital Numbers Don’t Add Up

So, let’s do the math here. Elizabeth showed up on Audrey’s porch in 1997, meaning that Reiko contracted Blackwood’s that year or in late 1996. A full TWENTY YEARS LATER, Finn moved to PC, talking about his wife who died, and revealing that he also suffered from the disease that killed her. So, we are to now believe that Finn had Blackwoods for two whole decades and was injecting himself with a homemade experimental drug for all that time.

Now, let’s do even more math. In order for Finn to have been working with Doctors Without Borders 25 years ago, he had to have been at least 30 years old, if not more, because he would have had to finish his medical residency and be a full-fledged MD. Reiko looked to be at least 35 in flashbacks, yet Finn has digital photos of her on his phone that he can pull up at a moment’s notice when we are to believe he hasn’t seen her since the 1990s. Does this make Finn 60 years old or more? And did he know Elizabeth when she was 15 yet somehow never mentioned it?

The plot holes here are the size of a crater and must be plugged up before this entire long-awaited plot to honor Rebecca Herbst’s 25 years on GH gets any more out of control.

General Hospital airs weekdays on ABC. For an in-depth look at the show’s history, click here.

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