Sonny Wore A Wire On General Hospital…This Should Have Ended There!

For longtime General Hospital, Maurice Benard, and Sonny Corinthos fans, there’s one turning point early in the character’s run that nearly defined and decided everything else that has happened to him up till now.

No, it’s not the pulling of the trigger when he was just a boy. It was the night back in 1995 when Sonny learned Brenda Barrett (Vanessa Marcil), his live-in girlfriend and to some, the love of his life, wore a wire just to get to the truth.

Many of us never believed Brenda wanted to bring Sonny down. She just wanted to know what he was really up to after he swore he’d left the mob, but she’d been shot at in the shower weeks earlier.

When Sonny found the wire, his reaction was visceral. He became violent with Brenda, something he witnessed his stepfather do with his mother too many times to count. And Sonny and Brenda never really managed to get it together after that, even after marrying briefly years later.

When this writer and others spotted Sonny with that wire on his chest last week so Margaux could get to the truth about what happened to her father, it gave us chills. Brenda wearing a wire changed everything. Would Sonny ever really do that?

Well, he really did, at least in his soap world, and to us, going back to that known history and everything that came after would have been the right way to honor Benard’s 25 years as this larger-than-life character.

Instead, we were treated to a different type of ‘what if’ story based on a retconned plot that was even retconned along the way. And, of course, this all happened thanks to a brand-new character nobody has grown attached to as of yet.

We didn’t like when the buried body in Croton story took over the compelling Alzheimer’s story, giving us plot points that made no sense. Mike (Max Gail) was watching Sonny from afar for years? Really? That didn’t jive with the Mike backstory we learned in the 90s.

At least when …continue reading on the next page —>

Continue reading on the next page…

At least when the story started, Sonny never pulled the trigger. He just drove a car and buried a dead body. Of course, as of today, it looks like he was 13 when he did this, which is an amazing feat for a 13-year-old. Huh?

And, of course, the story was changed along the way. With no explanation, it suddenly became a story of Sonny shooting the man, not just burying him. And that is where Sonny’s dream started.

What if he never pulled the trigger he never pulled in the original telling of this story six months ago?

It seems Sonny would have gone in the completely opposite direction and become a cop because there’s no in between. He still would have gotten Olivia (Lisa LoCicero) pregnant, but he also would have married her, raised Dante, and other children, as well.

But, even being a cop would not have stopped Dante (Dominic Zamprogna) from becoming a mobster himself and marrying Sam in a sleepy upstate town known as Port Charles.

But wait, if Sonny never carried out that Scully order, he wouldn’t have become a criminal philanthropist who created an AIDS wing at GH, hence keeping Robin alive.

In a way, that does get to the crux of Sonny. Always justifying his criminality. Even in his dream, he decided if he never became a killer, Robin (Kimberly McCullough) would have died. Way to glamorize being a criminal once again, GH.

Mobsters, villains, criminals…they are all a part of soaps and we accept Sonny as one of these. They are still complex characters we can love.

But, let’s not sugarcoat what they do. And when we pay tribute to these characters, hand us the rich history we have seen ON screen, not a convoluted story created in the last six months.

General Hospital (GH) airs weekdays on ABC. Check your local listings for airtimes.