The Young and the Restless writers set up a scenario beautifully that allowed Diane Jenkins Abbott, played by Daytime Emmy-winner Susan Walters, to run a gamut of emotions last week as her character went from being deeply concerned for her husband Jack’s (Peter Bergman) welfare to being furiously betrayed after finding him in the sack with his ex-wife!
Upon learning that Jack had been taken hostage (all signs pointed to his captor being Eric Braeden‘s Victor Newman, who else?), Diane enlisted the aid of Kyle (Michael Mealor), her and Jack’s son, and Billy (Jason Thompson), Jack’s brother, to track him down.
Kyle and Billy were pillars of support, enabling Walters to lean into Diane fearing the worst! The last thing she expected to find when she located Jack on a mysterious yacht was him in bed with a scantily clad Patty Williams (Stacy Haiduk), his unbalanced ex-wife.
Perhaps in her head, Diane knew that this was all a big scheme on Victor’s part, but her heart overrode any ability to decipher the situation logically. “What the hell is going on?” Diane queried when she came upon Jack, shirtless, and a half-dressed Patty on “the Love Yacht.”
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“We have been worried sick about you,” Diane blasted Jack, as he buttoned up his shirt. “We thought that Victor had you locked away in some cargo hold, and this lunatic wanted you dead! And here you are in bed with her? Jack, I don’t even know how to process this!”
Diane fumed and shook her head while Billy attempted to get Patty out of the room. Walters had her character fold her arms in an attempt to contain her rage. We saw Diane’s anger simmering. But it wasn’t held down for long. Jack asked to speak to his wife in private, but Diane insisted, “Oh, no, no, I will be doing the talking and you will listen to everything I have to say.”
As a finally (well, mostly) dressed Patty went to leave the room, she remarked, “There. I’m decent.”
“Not possible,” snarked Diane.
The tag on Monday’s episode featured Diane slapping Jack across the face, and our take was that it wasn’t one of those fake TV slaps either with the sound effect added in later (though it could have been).
The action picked up on Tuesday. Jack claimed that he’d been drugged, but Diane cut him off, wanting him to get to the part where he had sex with his ex-wife.
Walters had Diane listen to Jack’s side of the story, playing a mix of Diane feeling incredulous and also not wanting to hear any of the sordid details of her husband’s betrayal.
“Come on. Do you really expect me to believe this? That you lost all ability to think? All ability to reason? That this drug somehow erased your mind?” Diane asked. “And made you forget about me? Made you forget that you’re a married man before you euphorically crawled into bed with her?”
A lesser actress might have played the above speech beginning and ending with anger. But Walters seamlessly shifted from anger to vulnerability, drawing us in as we watched Diane’s life collapse.
While Diane may know that this scenario is textbook Victor Newman, she also can’t fathom what circumstances could exist that would make Jack get back into bed with Patty, given that she’d attempted to do away with him on more than one occasion.
“Oh, shut up about the drug! Ecstasy is not ‘mind control,’” Diane shouted at her husband when he referenced being drugged again. “You could have stopped if you wanted to, but obviously you didn’t want to. What did Patty say to me? ‘The poor man was starved…’”
Again, Jack tried to intervene, but silence might have served him better. “Oh, don’t you tell me what I can and can’t say!” Diane corrected her husband.
Again, Walters showed Diane’s vulnerability, letting Jack know how frantically worried she’d been after learning that Victor had kidnapped him.
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“I kept imagining you in some place horrible in pain, just suffering at the hands of a man who hates you, and then when we found out that she was here, I honestly didn’t know if I was going to find you alive or dead,” a frustrated and devastated Diane pointed out. “Instead, here you are! In the lap of luxury, in bed with Patty Williams, the crazy woman who tried to kill you more than once! What is wrong with you? I can’t even look at you!”
Kudos must also go to Bergman, who played Jack as a husband who was both frustrated and saddened by the fact that his wife was in pain and he couldn’t do anything about it, at least for now. Of all the stunts Victor’s pulled on him over the years, this one has hurt Jack the most.
Last year, Diane and Jack mostly dealt with external forces. They were challenged as a couple, but they met those challenges as a couple.
Now, there’s a wedge between them, and it’ll take some time before that wedge is removed.
Walters has had a lengthy career in primetime (Elvis & Me, The Vampire Diaries, Dear John, and a host of other series regular and guest spot parts), but veteran soap fans recall she began her career as a teenager, playing willful Lorna Forbes on the gone-but-never-forgotten ABC serial Loving.
Fortunately, Walters is back in the soap opera world, a genre that is lucky to have her and in which she shines brighter than ever.
The Young and the Restless, Weekdays, CBS
