Credit: CBS Screenshot (4); Courtesy of the Everett Collection

The week’s biggest news came not from any of the currently airing soaps, but CBS’ announcement of The Gates. In watching this week’s episodes of Bold & Beautiful, I found myself thinking that there’s at least one way in which the new soap should imitate the fashion-based sudser. But there’s an even bigger thing they should avoid doing. Read on and we’ll discuss… 

The Binge Factor

Most weeks, I tend to binge Bold & Beautiful so I can take notes for this column. And honestly, it’s the only soap I do that with, as it’s easy to consume five episodes in one sitting given their short run-time. We are a people are incredibly busy, and there’s a lot fighting for our attention. Which is why I really hope that the execs making decisions about The Gates recognize that it’s time for 30-minute soaps to return.

I say “soaps” because I’m hoping that this is the first step in the genre — which has taken more hits than a punching bag in recent years — seen a rejuvenation. Binging does, however, have one potential drawback, and that became abundantly clear during this week’s episodes of Bold & Beautiful: Repetive, exposition-filled scripts become wildly annoying by the second or third episode of a binge.

We’ve talked about this where Bold & Beautiful is concerned in the past. But man, the writers really act as if during every commercial break, we’re zapped with the memory-erasing neurolyzer from Men In Black. How else to explain that we were reminded Sheila was Finn’s “birth mother” 14 times in five days.

Back To the Future

It’s pretty clear that the show is planning to revisit the Liam/Steffy/Finn triangle, with Hope thrown in for good measure… which should be interesting, given that her current beau, Thomas, sort of exists on the very edge of the dark side. It’s not hard to see this pushing him to take action in order to protect his relationship with Hope.

More: Is Deacon’s ex on her way back? 

Meanwhile, Liam spent the week being his Liam-ist, rushing to Steffy’s side and then making it 100 percent clear to Finn that he was comin’ for her. I have to say that the Liam/Finn scenes were a blast. Yes, I wanted to punch them both, but the dialogue was fun and it was clear that both Tanner Novlan (Finn) and Scott Clifton (Liam) were having a good time. You know what I always say: If actors are having fun, so am I.

That said, Liam having the audacity to suggest that Finn was being “disloyal” might have been the very height of hypocrisy. Someone buy him a mirror!

The Far Side

I know I’m probably alone in this, but I kinda felt sorry for Finn. Yes, Sheila was a monster who did horrible things — including leaving Finn and Steffy in an alley to die. But ever since Sheila crashed their wedding, the show has done a really good job of making it clear that Finn has an inexplicable draw to his (all together now!) birth mother. It makes no sense to anyone on the canvas (or, for that matter, the viewing audience), but it’s been true nonetheless.

So when Finn took offense to everyone essentially singing “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!”, I understood. His conflicted feelings about Sheila didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t that long ago that he was suggesting Steffy give Sheila “a break” after she saved Kelly from drowning.

More: Jacqueline MacInnes Wood on Steffy/Finn’s fate

And we need to take a moment to shout out the fantastic performances of Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, who knocked it out of the park all week. Like with Finn, I got Steffy’s struggle: Yes, she acted in self-defense, but she also took the life of another human being in an incredibly violent way. Often on soaps, death comes in an almost casual way. People fall off cliffs or get washed away in a river. This was not that.

This was Steffy raising a knife and, in self-defense, stabbing another person in the heart. There was blood — and a lot of it. Steffy being rocked by what went down felt incredibly real to me. I also really thought the writers did a good job of portraying how Ridge and Li would handle this news, with him obnoxiously celebrating Sheila’s murder in front of Finn, and Li essentially telling her son to snap out of it. Again, neither saw things from Finn’s perspective, but that felt like how these two would react in this scenario.

By week’s end, Finn’s troubled soul was being haunted by Sheila… a sure sign that he and Steffy have a rough road ahead of them. Especially if, as we’ve been theorizing, the real Sheila is alive and well and lookin’ to reunite with her son!

In Other News

Thursday we got our first glimpse of another storyline… which kicked off with a slew of flashbacks and bad exposition.” I slept with Zende thinking he was R.J.,” wept Luna to her mom, “and now that secret is tearing me apart!” Zende showing up at the beach house to, I don’t know, “confront” his cousin about being in love was just plain weird.

Weirder still was R.J. and Zende then arriving at the Forrester design office at the exact same time. Wait, did Zende drive all the way out to Malibu, then follow R.J. back to Los Angeles so he and Poppy could stand awkwardly around and listen to Luna declare her love? Weirdness all around.

Random Thoughts

• Sean Kanan did some lovely work as Deacon visited Sheila in the morgue. But I know I’m not the only one who was shouting at my screen, “Check her toes, dude!” Also, he lamented that nobody else had swung by to pay their respects. Um, it’s a morgue, not a funeral home.

• I swear, I think Novlan and Clifton were having a literal face-off during their confrontation scenes, and I was 100 percent here for it.

• I love when things go wrong during a scene, but they don’t stop tape. During Finn and Liam’s scenes in the doc’s office, Clifton very clearly knocked the lampshade on the desk. Rather than stop, he took a “the show must go on” approach by simply readjusting the light as the scene continued.

• I’m still waiting for one very big shoe to drop in the Sheila story: What, exactly, did the madwoman have in her pocket that night? Steffy’s been insisting it must have been a gun or a knife, but if it turns out to be something far more innocuous, that’ll just hasten Steffy’s trip to prison. And I assume that’s where we’re heading, right? Steffy being arrested for murder — what with having threatened Sheila and then stabbed her — and Finn/Liam fighting to clear her name?