Last week, General Hospital offered eagle-eyed viewers a super fun Easter egg when Valentin Cassadine’s fake passport listed his name as Will Cortland. Charlotte’s named her as Melanie Cortland. It was a fun chuckle for All My Children viewers, who remembered James Patrick Stuart as Pine Valley bad boy, Will. (Melanie was his sister, though, not his daughter.) But could it have been more than a blink and you missed it gag? Could it have been a heretofore unrevealed story point?
The Man I Used To Be
Valentin just popped up in Port Charles in 2016, rumored to be a Cassadine so ruthless that even the vicious Helena (Constance Towers) was afraid of him. He also came with a tragic backstory about how he was once a sad hunchback training at the World Security Bureau, moonily in love with an otherwise indifferent Anna (Finola Hughes).
We know Anna was in the WSB prior to her coming to Port Charles in 1985, and she was already an agent seven years earlier when she married Robert (Tristan Rogers). So where was Valentin from 1975 to 1988, when he arrived in Pine Valley (though, for the first year, he looked suspiciously like CBS New York weatherman Lonnie Quinn before morphing into Stuart)?
MORE: Find out what happens on GH this week.
Laying Low
Hunchback cured via surgery, Valentin needed somewhere to hide out while he plotted his triumphant return to defeat Helena—and claim Anna. So why not Pine Valley? We know it’s in the same universe as Port Charles (and Llanview, too) because characters cross over (even when they don’t recognize some obvious resemblances).
The most obvious would be Tracy (Jane Elliot), who lived in NYC for The City, where Jeremy (Jean Leblanc) had previously been a part of the Loving cast after leaving All My Children. So, like we said: Same universe.
Cry Uncle
Palmer (James Mitchell) only met Will as an adult, which means he had no idea if the man in front of him was the real McCoy or what he’d been up to beforehand…which could have included some time in the WSB. Sure, you could say Will was killed on air in 1992, and there was even a huge whodunnit. But would he be the first Cassadine to fake his death in order to pick up a new life elsewhere? But why get rid of the passport….?
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