Everyone's had an off day that led to some awkwardness with a family member, right? You avoid your ex-stepdaughter at work because you're in an Easter-bunny pink suit, and she's wearing tough-winter leather. You're confused when your great-aunt's boy toy lets your ostracized cousin in the building, but you forgive him because it gives you a new chance to ground her apology into the dirt.
Sometimes, the problem isn't simple. Sometimes it's in the genes, and calling it out leads to family feuds of Mount Tamboric proportions. Some family eruptions have been on a slow simmer, and others exploded out of nowhere, causing lava-sizzling fissures that deeply divide family members.
The top ten surveyed were asked -- when the lava hits the fan, is it better to trust the one who shoved you off a bridge or trust the one who threw you under a bus? For Ivy and Quinn, it's all lava under the bridge, but her relationship with Liam is stuck under the bus. Liam's persona non grata at the beach house, and no one's listening to his warnings that they are at the epicenter of a volcano that's about to explode.
As long as Ivy is loyal to Wyatt and takes her anti-ego pills, Mount Saint Quinn won't explode on her. Wyatt thinks Liam's imagining the shifting earth beneath his feet. Steffy sees nothing on her radar, either, even though Liam cautioned her that with Ivy gone, there's no buffer between them and Quinn.
Steffy knows Quinn tried to kill Liam but presumed that marriage chilled Quinn out. Interesting. In Steffy's view, love can make the violent Quinn trustworthy, but not do the same for Ivy? If we're comparing trust issues, Liam's with Quinn trumps Steffy's with Ivy, so why does Steffy not fire Quinn?
After Liam revealed that he suffers from Quinn PTSD, I expected Steffy to confront Quinn and warn her not to get any ideas about carving Liam up for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, Steffy kept thumbing through her files and talked about her feelings about Ridge and Caroline. Steffy then decided to pick up takeout and wait for Liam to come home for dinner. Doesn't Steffy get that if she doesn't heed his warnings, he might not make it home for dinner -- ever?
It doesn't occur to Steffy to check out the Quinn threat to protect Liam. Isn't defending and protecting each other what couples do? It tickles the panties right off Ivy whenever Wyatt defends her. Liam backs Steffy no matter how he personally feels, but she doesn't seem interested in protecting him. Even Quinn senses that Steffy is out for herself and not Liam.
"You know I can fire you," a nervous Liam told Quinn. Quinn said Steffy wouldn't let him, and Quinn's probably right. Steffy only does things for Liam to get him. He's hers now, so she's not even bothering to cook him a meal, let alone firing Quinn to make him feel secure in the workplace.
Liam knows Quinn's right about Steffy, and he feels like a sitting duck. That is why he raced to the beach house to relay his concerns to Wyatt. As usual, Wyatt denied that his mother's lava is rising again. It was as if Wyatt hadn't heard Quinn declare that there was no end to what she could do for him.
Quinn is calm right now. Her crazy is bound and gagged in a dungeon brain cell somewhere, and so far, she's using reason to get what she wants. Her reasoning isn't always reasonable when it comes to Wyatt, but she's trying. Bill was wrong to stir up her hornet's nest for kicks, but it made her painfully aware that she's a hindrance to Wyatt.
When Bill encountered Quinn at the beach house, he said things nasty enough to warrant a swift swipe across the beard from Quinn. Bill sank to a new level of baby-daddy scum when he disparaged his son to the son's mother, compared his sons to each other, and told the mother that it's her fault her son will never be his successor or rise above his younger brother.
What Bill did would amount to mental spousal abuse if he and Quinn were married; however, Bill declared to Katie that he never would have had a nuclear family with Quinn. Bill ought to be thanking Quinn for raising the boy into a man instead of instinctually eating her young. Deacon ought to rearrange Bill's jaw for playing around with Quinn's feelings like that for the fun of it.
The people surveyed for this "family feud" have to wonder how much of what Bill said is actually how he feels. Bill often leaves his loved ones hurt and quizzically blinking after an exchange of harsh words. Others prefer punching Bill to deciphering him.
Liam recognized the blinking disconcertion with Quinn, and he tried to put her at ease by saying that Bill just liked pulling her chain. The problem is that Quinn's chain can't be un-pulled. Bill's having fun with Quinn now, but will it be funny when he hears "eeeeeerrrrrrrrrr -- wonk-wonk" Pacman music in the background as he finds Liam dead on his doorstep? Bill might have written Liam's death certificate by agitating Quinn, and the more she stews about it, the more she detaches from reality.
Quinn told Deacon that Liam has taken a job that should have been Wyatt's, taken a girl from Wyatt, and let the girl fire Wyatt's new girlfriend. It was never Wyatt's job or girl, and Liam had no say in firing Ivy. Quinn thinks Liam is on a mission to take down Wyatt. It's actually the other way around. Wyatt wants to take down Liam.
Deacon advised his wife not to take parenting critique from a man who liked to tip people out of helicopters. I don't know if she should take advice from a man who ruined his daughter's wedding for a payday, either, but he also urged her to try charm on Liam.
After seeing Liam jump when she reached for his sword necklace, Quinn doubted charm would work. Deacon offered to talk to Bill and Liam, but Quinn is resolved to handle it herself. My advice to Liam is to forget tracking intern phones and start tracking Quinn's phone. He needs to have Charlie set a warning alarm to sound if Quinn's phone gets within five miles of the cliff house.
While the Spencer camp braces for the eruption of Mount Saint Quinn, all hell was breaking loose with inter-family fighting at the Forrester mansion. At the same time, a big B&B mystery was solved but opened up a Pandora's box of other questions.
Since Thomas arrived, we've questioned where he lives. The answer flipped Aly's Ouija board planchette on its side. Thomas is living at the Forrester mansion with Rick, Maya, Ivy -- and presumably Nicole, Zende, and sometimes Eric. Is the mansion a Forrester halfway house now?
Cue the flashbacks of Thomas blowing up Rick's car, setting Rick's house on fire, and tossing Rick out of a window. The men had a deadly rivalry, which brings us to our next family feud segment.
Out of a hundred people surveyed, the top one answer is on the board. Here's the question. Is it a good idea for Thomas to live in the same house with Rick Forrester? The survey says, "Hell to the no!"
Should Thomas live with Zende -- if Zende lives there -- after Thomas kissed Nicole? Is playing strip poker setting a good example for Nicole and Zende? Thomas needs morals and boundaries. It's not a college dorm. Does Stephanie's portrait need to show Maya's portrait how to govern the household?
Who am I kidding? Stephanie covered up attempted murder after Thorne shot Ridge in the head for sneaking into a drunk Caroline senior's room and having sex with her. According to history, Ridge thought it was a joke. Not so funny when Thomas does it to Caroline junior now, is it, Ridge?
This time, no one got shot in the head by a drunk, pill-popping Thorne; however, someone did get socked in the face, and a pill-popping drunk also stars in this latest storyline. I suspect there will be one more thing in common with the plots, and it will be a cover-up. Back then, the cover-up was Stephanie claiming that she'd shot Ridge. This time, the top answer on this family feud's survey says the lie will be the paternity of Caroline's baby.
I'm shocked Thomas wants to live with Rick. I'm sure Thomas hasn't forgotten how Rick "owned Steffy's ass," drove the car that Phoebe died in, and slept with Thomas' mother. Maybe Maya got some rubber-glass windows, fire-retardant walls, and bomb-proof Teslas to ease Rick's mind about Thomas.
Maybe the men buried the hatchet in their shared Ridge hate and childhood abandonment illusions. It's a hard-knock life for these poor boys, having to grow up in mansions, forced to play by the pool, ride horses, and attend private school as Ridge serviced their mothers.
Neither man can blame a bad childhood on Ridge, especially not Thomas. Ridge remained in the household and married to Thomas' mother until she "died." I don't know how old he was when Taylor died, but the actor playing him was between ten and twelve at the time.
Thomas is chucking down leftover berries to think that Ridge's love triangle dominated his childhood. It became an issue upon Taylor's return from the dead when Thomas was about sixteen to eighteen, but those years hardly amount to the vitriol Thomas exploded onto Ridge this week.
Thomas is also swallowing berries to think Ridge was never proud of him. Ridge appointed Thomas as the interim CEO when Ridge went to Paris. When Ridge checked Thomas for being a spoiled brat, the next thing on the screen was a Batman "Pow! " emoji as Thomas punched his father.
How did the fight start? For some reason, Charlie gave the interns GPS-activated phones, and for some reason, he monitored the phones' whereabouts. No one's worried about where the CEO is. No one is aware that Wyatt is working from home -- but a search dog goes out because Charlotte isn't there to sort papers with cool colored paper clips.
Rick, who reamed Wyatt for going on an evening jet ride instead of working all night, was not this controlling. And yet Ridge, who doesn't even know why Ivy was fired and who spends his afternoons counting sperm, suddenly decides to personally track down a missing intern.
When Ridge arrived at the mansion to confront Thomas, Ridge said he'd put two and two together and come up with Thomas causing a scandal like he'd done with "Marissa or Marisa" in Paris. No, we didn't see it on-screen. The writers made it up to justify Ridge chasing down the intern instead of just calling her on the phone, telling her to get back to work, and lecturing her later about ditching work to play strip poker with the boss's son.
I'm with Thomas. I don't get what the big deal is, and Forresters do it all the time. They don't even bother to leave work to do it. They do it right in the office or steam room. Everyone references knocking and locking doors around there.
When Sarah, the model, flirted with Thomas, neither Ridge nor Thomas gave any indication that Thomas had behaved inappropriately in Paris with female employees. In fact, Thomas said it was weird that the models were flirting with him, not Ridge. "The son also rises," Ridge responded.
Thomas is also right that Ridge bedded models in the eighties. Eric had the same addiction. Maybe it's just the naïve -- and possibly money-grubbing -- interns that cause Steffy and Ridge to worry about lawsuits. If you ask me, any woman can file a lawsuit against Thomas. Some viewers want Caroline to have a criminal one against him.
Maybe a culmination of Thomas' sexual recklessness does warrant Ridge stepping in. A father should try to prevent his son from repeating the elder's mistakes. What's good for the goose is not always good for the gander, and it probably wasn't even good for the goose, really.
Thomas is in a freefall, obsessing over Caroline. He didn't even stop to consider the consequences for his family or Forrester if Caroline did wake up the next day after sex and want to be with him. He didn't care how it would look in the press or make Ridge feel. Thomas didn't care how kissing Nicole would affect Zende. As if he's sex-medicating, Thomas then jumps over to Charlotte.
Thomas needs his mommy, who should have diagnosed him with ODD, oppositional defiant disorder, when he was blowing up cars as a kid. Maybe PAS, parental alienation syndrome, is his problem. Or maybe Ridge diagnosed it right when he called Thomas a spoiled, self-centered, entitled brat who thinks he can take anything he wants without consequences.
Maybe Ridge will decide it is time to take something from Thomas -- like this baby. Thomas is worried that Ridge is going to saddle Caroline with a kid and make her a single mother but claims he'd never do what Ridge did to a child. Well, Thomas, you protest too much about what you'd never do -- like you'd never knowingly take advantage of a woman. But you did.
You did it to Nicole. You did it to Charlotte, and you did it Caroline. You disappeared to Paris and didn't even tell viewers about it, so you just might abandon a kid, too. Sorry, Thomas. It's just what the survey says. The preview says it, too, as Ridge hands you a coach ticket to Paris. You can't even use the jet anymore. It's what you get for running your mouth and hitting your father in his mouth.
This baby might be better off with Ridge, who's already learned from "supposedly" screwing Thomas up. Thomas can strip-poker to his heart's content and be a father to the child later, when he's Ridge's age and finally learns that the kid is really his.
Ridge grumbled to Caroline this week about how sorry he was that he couldn't give her a little monkey baby all her own, half him and half her. Little monkey baby? Who's crazier? Patty Williams talking about Sharon's baby for Kitty or Ridge and his monkey baby?
We already knew Ridge had slow sperm the moment the Tay-Tots started walking, talking, and singing the alphabet like, "A, B, C, D, me, me, me. Here's the truth I refuse to see. Mommy is dead and Bridge raises me. We're a happy family...."
In my view, it's wasn't Ridge's love life that affected the Tay-Tots. Those kids were probably damaged by Taylor insisting upon getting her life back after time, when Ridge had moved on. Had she and Stephanie accepted it, it would have saved a lot of heartache, and Darla might be alive.
When Caroline learned of Ridge's diagnosis, instead of insisting upon questioning the doctor about it herself, she ran over and spoiled Thomas' little card game. She probably wanted to tell him about the baby, but seeing a naked Charlotte changed Caroline's mind. It didn't take Caroline but one second to realize that Thomas ain't ready for fatherhood.
Guilt got the better of Caroline when she saw that Thomas had punched Ridge and she listened to Ridge's disappointment in all the notches in Thomas' bedpost. It didn't seem like the best time say, "You can add my notch to it," but Caroline decided that there was no time like the present.
As Ridge listened to the story about the man who'd come to the drunk, pill-popping Caroline's hotel room to misunderstand that she'd allowed him to hold her and nothing more, Ridge decided that the man was not her friend. He asked what kind of man would do something like that.
Well, Ridge, you would do something like that, and so would your slow seed. As mentioned before, Ridge thought it was all in good fun to sneak into the drunk Caroline Senior's bed. Similar to Thomas' situation, Ridge learned -- after bedding Brooke -- that she'd been whacked out on anxiety pills. Taylor gave him anxiety pills before sleeping with him.
It's in Thomas' DNA to do this. He should have been Ridge's first guess. Ridge was unreasonably calm as Caroline revealed what had happened and who it had happened with. "My son," he murmured. On Monday, we'll see where Steffy got her Hulk DNA because I doubt the man who left Brooke over a text message is going to shrug this one off.
Ridge is so worried about scandals lately, and he does love him some Caroline. He also probably refuses to admit that Rick, Brooke, and Thomas were right about his relationship with Caroline. All those things combined lead the survey to say that when Caroline gets around to the baby part, the rash Ridge will decide to take on the paternity, like Thorne had done in hopes of hanging on to to Taylor, who'd been pregnant with Thomas at the time.
If Ridge goes this route and ships Thomas out of town, there's just one hitch to the plan. Brooke. The moment Ridge announces that he and Caroline are expecting a baby, Brooke's gonna squint, drop her jaw, and consult the Internet on how a supposedly sterile man can get his wife pregnant.
Keeping quiet might be the wisest thing. I still think Ridge's doctor doesn't know what he was doing, and in my opinion, they shouldn't say anything to anyone until the baby can be DNA tested. What do you guys think? Can Ridge overlook the baby's paternity to keep the fantasy marriage he's built? Or will Ridge start having Thomas flashbacks of the hotel sex and go mad with jealousy?
Though Steffy has her own scandal issues involving trying to extort a relationship with Liam with a stock vote and later appropriating him from her cousin's bed, she came down on Thomas for fooling around with interns and disrespecting their father. Will she accept Ridge shipping off Thomas because he can't trust Thomas just like she expects everyone to accept Ivy's dismissal?
One person who might not agree with Ivy's dismissal is Ivy's uncle, the marginalized paper-plate Gestapo. Ivy claims to understand why Steffy has trust issues but not enough to refrain from dragging Eric into it. According to spoilers, Ivy appeals to her uncle to let her back into the company, but rumor has it that she might not be comfortable with the position Steffy reassigns her to.
In the final survey questions, what job can Ivy do at Forrester besides making jewelry and being the face of Forrester? Will Thomas hop a plane back to Paris, or will he be headed to Team Wyatt to build Spencer Designs? Is Quinn going crazy again, or is Liam's mind playing tricks on him? Until next week, stay bold and beautiful, baby!
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