Thank you, The Young and the Restless, because after weeks — months…sometimes it feels like years — of hysterical people making hysterical decisions and having other hysterical people tell them what a great decision it is, thank you for having Michael Baldwin lay it out for Summer: Your plan to help your mother is stupid.
Young and the Restless: Baby Talk
Now, we don’t blame Summer (Allison Lanier) for not being able to think straight. What Phyllis (Michelle Stafford) has done to her is no less than psychological child abuse, it’s gaslighting of the highest order.
What we are having more trouble with is how, in the face of her insanity, no one has shaken her and yelled, a la Cher in Moonlighting, “Snap out of it.” There is treating a mentally ill person with kid gloves, and then there’s enabling. Daniel, Kyle (Michael Mealor), and even Chance (Conner Floyd) have been more or less enabling her.
Michael Baldwin: End of the Young and the Restless Road
Thank goodness – and the Y&R writers – for Michael (Christian Le Blanc). Michael didn’t coddle Summer, he didn’t patronize her, and he didn’t pat her on the head, saying, “There, there. There, there. Don’t worry, your pretty little blonde, rich, head about it.”
Michael forced Summer to face reality. And when she tried to use the same tactics on him she had on all the other men in her life, he, this time more like Watto in The Phantom Menace, told her, “Your Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me.”
Y&R: Keep Going
Michael was the adult Summer has been desperately craving ever since this began. The fact that he’s Phyllis’s friend only drives home how much he cares about Phyllis, how much he cares about Summer, and how stupid her current plan it, if he’s not going to let her do it — or get himself get caught up in it.