Stacey was felled by a powder puff, Clay went out with a drug induced heart attack, Curtis drowned, Isabelle and Cabot were killed with an airborne poison, Jeremy suffocated in quick drying plaster, and Gwyneth succumbed to a lethal injection meant for Tess. For a show that technically carried on a new form, spinning off into The City, Loving nevertheless ended with a sense of stark finality and a brutality that seems at odds with its title. Then again, a show set in a town called Corinth was perhaps always destined to end as a Greek tragedy.
As some background, in Greek mythology Corinth is the setting where Medea exacts her revenge on her husband, Jason, by murdering their sons, as well as Jason’s fiancée and her father. In the modern day, the name Medea is a sort of shorthand for an evil mother or crazy woman, but Medea is a more complicated character than that implies and her situation is more complex. Medea is the daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis, the possessor of the Golden Fleece that Jason is tasked with retrieving in the Argonautica. In order to get the Golden Fleece, Jason has to perform three seemingly impossible tasks, all of which he succeeds at because of Medea’s help. Medea then helps him escape by killing her brother in order to cause a distraction to keep Aeetes from chasing Jason. In return for all that she’s done for him, Jason makes a vow to love Medea forever.
Medea flees with Jason and becomes his wife, but she also becomes his dependent in every sense. As a woman, Medea’s rights were few and far between to begin with, but once she severs ties with her family by betraying her father and murdering her brother, she loses the people who might advocate for her should Jason fail to uphold the vows he’s made to her, which becomes a problem for her when they arrive in Corinth. Once there, Jason decides to cast Medea aside in order to marry the daughter of the King of Corinth. Medea has no power of her own, not politically, not socially, and she can’t rely on the power of her family because of what she did to help Jason. The only way that she can avenge herself is by attacking Jason’s house, the bloodline that will carry his name and legend down through generations and keep him alive forever in the pantheon of heroes. To accomplish that, she gives Jason’s fiancée a dress soaked in poison that burns the woman alive when she puts it on, preemptively ending the new line Jason is planning to start, and then she murders her two sons by Jason, ending Jason’s already existing line. It’s a brutal act that harms her as well as Jason, but it’s her only recourse against him.
Whether by coincidence or design, the Medea mythology echoes in Loving‘s last big story. Medea’s use of poison disguised as a gift is reminiscent of the modus operandi of four of the murders (Stacey, Clay, Cabot, Isabelle), but beyond that I see several similarities between Gwyneth and Medea. In some versions of the myth, Medea kills her children not as part of her revenge, but to spare them from being murdered or enslaved by the people of Corinth; they are compassionate killings, just as Gwyneth’s stated motive for most of the killings is to spare people from the pain they’ve been caused.
But the harder motive, the revenge motive, is also in line with what drives Gwyneth, whose rage towards Trisha becomes apparent in her final episode. Jason hurt and disavowed Medea, prompting her to seek revenge. Trisha hurt and disavowed Gwyneth, prompting her to do the same. Just as Medea destroys the family that would carry Jason’s name and memory, so too does Gwyneth destroy the Alden family, killing the people who link Trisha to her past, and ensuring that even if she should ever change her mind about coming back, there would be nothing to return to but ruins. Medea is spared from punishment thanks to a Deus ex machina, flying away in a golden chariot with Helios, while Jason, marked by the dark legacy of what occurred in Corinth, wanders the world alone and unhappy before finally being killed when a rotting beam from the Argo falls and crushes him. Gwyneth is spared from the punishment of being arrested and locked away by Steffi assisting her in suicide, but Trisha ends the series at large in the world, having lost both her life as Trisha Alden and all the people who were in it, as well as the life she created for herself as Crystal Hartman; and now saddled with the burden of knowing that she was the motive for so much death.
You kind of have to hope that she never gets her memory back because I can’t imagine that all of that wouldn’t be followed immediately by a complete mental breakdown.
It’s a harsh and unforgiving ending for the series, one which cuts out the core of Loving so that The City could grow in its place, rooted to the old show, but ultimately a distinctly different animal in terms of style and construction. Doing away with the multi-generational family structure and the suburban setting favored my most soaps, The City followed a group of friends living in the same building in New York, with plenty of location shooting and lots of flash (watch an episode of The City and one of the things you may notice is that every scene transition occurs with about four fast establishing shots from locations around New York). Visually it has more in common with nighttime soaps than its daytime brethren – it was, in other words, not your grandmother’s soap, which is ironic given that Loving itself was originally designed to be a return to form in the midst of the more action packed direction the genre was taking thanks to General Hospital and Days of Our Lives.
The City ultimately failed, lasting little more than a year before being cancelled, and in light of that a part of me wishes that Loving had gotten a more fan servicing ending, one where long gone characters come back for a final visit, couples reunite, and you’re left with a sense of life going on in the town. Not only does Loving not leave us with that sense, but General Hospital’s returns to Corinth over the years rub further salt in the wound by assuring the viewer that the town never recovered from the killings and has become a virtual ghost town, hanging on by an economic thread – which, honestly, I find hard to believe because, if nothing else, I would think some enterprising person would buy up all that cheap real estate and turn Corinth into a destination for true crime tourists.
Personally, while I think the murders story is excellent on a technical/plot level, I find it quite empty emotionally. While there are moments of emotional impact when the actors are actually allowed to explore the depths of their characters’ grief, for the most part the show is so focused on moving things along, getting to that next shocking murder, that it hardly ever pauses to contemplate its losses and make them meaningful, and even during the long denouement that follows, the focus is more on setting up what’s to come (The City) than mourning what’s been lost – a natural consequence, I suppose, of a show ending by spinning off into a new one.
And yet, for as much as the final episodes shifted focus towards The City, the murders storyline is the lasting legacy of the Loving/The City venture and it’s easy to understand why. The Loving Murders was far from the first serial killer story on soaps, but where most serial killer storylines pull their punches by taking out only expendable characters (or, in the case of the Melaswen story, backing down and undoing it all), The Loving Murders had a go for broke, anything can happen and no one is safe sensibility that can only be possible when a show has literally nothing left to lose. That the storyline continues to fascinate nearly 30 years later – and despite the low viewership of the show itself throughout the entirety of its run – is a testament to its boldness. Loving was always a misfit of a show, the runt of the ABC Daytime litter that survived as long as it did because of the debt that the network owed to Agnes Nixon, but the uniqueness of its burn it all down final story elevates the show to a true curiosity.
Loving (1983-1995) 