Memorable ‘showdown’ of senior stars

AREVALO. Display of uppity scorn.

The telecast of “Ang Dalawang Mrs. Real” last Tuesday, Sept. 2, was particularly eventful, with a number of surprising and even shocking developments coming hot on the heels of one another.

But, what made the episode especially noteworthy was the fact that it was tantamount to a “showdown” of the drama series’ senior stars, and the show’s other regular players very wisely chose to get out of their line of thespic fire!

Right off, Robert Arevalo (Maricel Soriano’s dad) set the ball rolling by insisting on filing a case in court against Dingdong Dantes and Lovi Poe’s characters, accusing both of them of bigamy! Whereupon his dad and mom, Jaime Fabregas and Coney Reyes, flew to Cebu to beg Robert to drop the case. Coney even literally got down on her knees to piteously plead with Robert, but his heart remained hard as rock. As for Fabregas, he had a heart spasm and had to be taken to the hospital!

In another scene, Coney went down on her knees again to beg for legal surcease for her guilty-as-heck niño bonito. In addition, Maricel herself went to Cebu with Dingdong and their adopted son in tow, to also plead with her father to drop the case he’d filed!

Since it was now his beloved daughter who was doing the pleading, Robert said he would reconsider—but, only if she left Dingdong! Alas, Maricel loved the guilty but handsome guy too much to do that, so the case is still on, at least as of this writing (Sept. 4).

—Those are a lot of high, melodramatic points, you’ll agree! But the telecast had even more shockers and stunners in store for viewers: At the hospital, the two families’ paths “coincidentally” crossed, and Maricel’s mom, Celeste Legaspi, ended up slapping Lovi! —Really hard!

And, in yet another scene, Robert lashed out at Lovi’s dad, Tommy Abuel, and insulted Lovi—and Tommy in turn lashed back at Robert, tit for tat!

That was a really interesting dramatic and linguistic set up: The wealthy Robert used a lot of haughty words to diss Lovi, but Tommy’s relatively less sosyal character surprised everyone by retorting in perfect English—using even longer and haughtier words to effectively trump Robert’s arch display of uppity scorn. —Tit for tat, indeed!