Location, Location, Location

There's something unsettling about the way Port Charles residents seemingly get zapped from place to place. First, it might help to know where Port Charles is. It is, actually, Rochester, New York. It shares the same area code, 585. When Luke and Laura returned to Port Charles, the cast taped in the Rochester area and Luke drove his pink Cadillac right down Main Street, Rochester, New York.

For those who are as clueless as the GH writers are, Rochester, New York is in upstate New York, fairly close to Buffalo, which in turn is on the Canadian border. So when Lucky and Elizabeth used to hop down to New York, unless they flew - or were beamed - that was a good eight-hour trip.

Then there's that island that Sonny is constantly rushing his family to for safety. Not quite sure where that island would be, with its tropical breezes. It seems to take about five minutes to get there. Ditto Luke's trips to Europe, Courtney and Jason's jet lag-free trip to France, Carly and Sonny's arrival for the wedding and Carly's departure the same day, and that trip to Russia in pursuit of coins.

During the Martha's Vineyard storyline, we had Sonny making a move to kill Rick, then Jason rushing off to Edgartown and arriving just in time to stop Sonny. We are therefore to believe that Sonny held his pose for - what, ten hours? Even if Jason had a plane standing by, he couldn't have gotten to such a remote location in minutes.

Now we have the very confusing John Jacks storyline. It's been somewhat vague from the beginning exactly where Mrs. Jacks took John to recover, but it was at least revealed he was receiving help from a shaman in the wilds of Texas. Well, that's fine, but why did Jax, in a rush to save his father's life, drive there instead of flying to the nearest location and then renting a car? And exactly how did he get into a desert that had a casino while driving from upstate New York to Texas? Seems a somewhat leisurely route - like via Las Vegas. Now that he's in Texas and his father's dead, everyone from Port Charles is popping into the funeral parlor. Okay, that's believable, if you can buy that his father, who lived with his wife in Alaska, is having a funeral in Texas where the mourners have to be imported. And of course, Tracy could have done a five-hour flight with a stopover, landed in Texas and driven to Jax's hotel room, and not bothered to change her red suit jacket before leaving Port Charles.

The point is, whether or not these trips are do-able, the way they're set up, there's nothing believable about them. Nobody changes their clothes, ever. Nobody yawns. Nobody leaves in the morning and arrives at night or the next day. People drive 2,000 miles when they could have flown. Most of the time, the writers barely skip a scene before the characters land in France, Russia or Edgartown, Massachusetts.

People suspend a certain amount of belief when they watch soap operas. We know no one's husband is the true father of the baby, brothers marry the same woman, everyone is related to Sonny Corinthos, pregnancy is every woman's trump card, and no matter how heinous the crime, all will be forgiven. If we as viewers could change these soap opera elements, most of the time, we wouldn't want to. But when something so simple to fix is discarded, it looks sloppy, it's laughable, and it takes away from the story. Jax's grief for his father was real, as was Sam's sorrow and compassion. For Jax to drive through a desert wasn't.