Sacrifice

One of the great things that has occurred on GL in 2007 has been the resurgence of Vanessa and Matt and the story of their marriage. In a strangely ironic twist, the characters and the actors are more interesting now than they have ever been, but the effort exerted by the show to play their story is meager at best with most of the major events of their lives going on off-screen.

I have never been what you would call a Vanessa/Matt fan, but I must admit to looking back on their past a bit more more fondly now than I did before mainly because Maeve Kinkead and Kurt McKinney are doing such boffo work in the present. That's one of the reasons that I've chosen to present Sacrifice in this, the first entry of the second year of the GLMP blog.

Sacrifice occurs in February of 1999 and covers the events that spill out from Dinah's shooting of Hart and Vanessa's subsequent spiriting of Dinah out of Springfield. Wendy Moniz (still the definitive Dinah for many viewers) gives a blockbuster performance in the early section of this clipset, both in her tearful goodbye with Kinkead's Vanessa and in the montage that recalls Dinah's entire relationship with Hart.

The central event of this set though is the effect of Matt's perceived betrayal of Vanessa when he exposes to the police her complicity in Dinah's escape, an act which lands Vanessa in jail. This sets up a series of emotionally brutal fights that sweeps Beth, Ross, Lillian, and others up into their drama. Beth especially does not come off especially well in this set, being as she was one of the characters that suffered the worst under the barely coherent regime of Barbara Esensten and James Harmon Brown.

One final exciting feature of this clipset is that it features some of the earliest appearances of Orlagh Cassidy as Doris Wolfe. Even in these early scenes, Cassidy displays a glimmer of the potent characterization that she would bring to Doris years later.

Less effective is the hospital drama surrounding Hart's fight for life as he combats the influence an actual Angel of Death (thank you Esensten and Brown!), but Sacrifice remains an interesting look at Vanessa, Matt, Dinah, and the characters that surround them.

Sacrifice--

clip 1 , clip 2 , clip 3 , clip 4 , clip 5 , clip 6

clip 7 , clip 8 , clip 9 , clip 10 , clip 11 , clip 12

clip 13 , clip 14 , clip 15 , clip 16 , clip 17 , clip 18