Welcome Hoe, Stone Cold!

Oh Spinelli, what has become of you? I really use to love this crazy kid, but the writers have made him very "one note" as of late. When he was still with Maxie, it was all about his inferiority complex. And now that Spixie are no more, it's all about his borderline creepy Stone Cold adoration. Take today for example--the squealing, the giggling, the jumping up and down when he received the news of Stone Cold's "loop hole departure" from Pentonville. Yes, I get that these two are BFFs, but what use to be a very endearing friendship that I very much enjoyed is now just odd and uncomfortable to watch. I joked on Twitter earlier that we may soon see Spinelli cutting up Jason and Sam's photos a la Lisa ... but it wouldn't be much of a stretch if it actually happened. I mean, did I mention the squealing ...

And the jumping ...

Of course, if it hadn't been for Spinelli's outrageous level of excitement over Jason's release from prison, we may have never been treated to the "Welcome Ho e" sign, which amused me straight through til the end of the hour.

I love how the "Ho e" kept showing up behind people's heads in subsequent scenes. OK, so maybe you think I'm a bit juvenile, but it was otherwise a pretty dull episode, and Welcome Hoe was my entertainment port in a snooze-filled storm. And can you really argue with something that made Jason smile wider than he has since he was skinny?

So I say proudly ... welcome hoe, my friend, welcome hoe!

As I said, the rest of the episode did little to inspire me. For some reason, Brenda's return to General Hospital has not equaled her return to Port Charles. She's still holed away in Italy, interacting with people who we don't know and don't have any reason to care about. The latest is her boyfriend, Murphy Sinclair, who has just proposed to her. Shocking because the two act like they just met. There's absolutely no chemistry between these two, and they seem incredibly stiff and awkward in their interactions. I'm finding it downright boring to watch, which really defeats the excitement and anticipation of Brenda being back on the show.

The proposal did give her an opportunity to rehash the three times she was left at the altar and to eventually slip into another Sonny flashback.

Otherwise, the episode all seemed very been there, done that. Michael finds himself involved in yet another cover-up (because the first one worked out so well), as Dante and Lucky try to hide the fact that he was involved in the Johnny drive-by shootout. Johnny is busy devising what should be termed "The Worst Plan Ever" to shoot Sonny and claim self-defense. And Carly has upped Brook Lynn's ante, offering her an extra $10,000 in cash if she's able to get Dante into bed tonight, which causes Brook to resort to slipping drugs into Dante's beer at Jake's.

Thoughts on today's episode? Has Spinelli's behavior grown as odd as I think it has? Are you interested in Brenda and Murphy?