Color Us Intrigued: Young & Restless Launches a New Mystery Around Claire
We gripe a lot about The Young and the Restless, we know. About plots that start and then never go anywhere. About schemes that amount to nothing. About characters whose motivations seem to be, eh, whatevs. But the soap really has us hooked on the new mystery with which it has surrounded Claire.
We’d been noticing for a while that something weird was going on with Victoria and Cole’s daughter. There are sacks of sugar that aren’t as sweet as Claire.
Mother Theresa looks at her and thinks, “Man, I really need to up my game.” Angels consider not bothering to wait until Harrison’s nanny someday dies to issue her a halo and a harp, she’s so saintly.
But then came the June 19 episode, in which Claire wore a top straight outta Little House On the Prairie. That was when it hit us like a ton of bricks: Headwriter Josh Griffith is up to something.
OG Claire was business-savvy and stylish. Reformed Claire dresses like a plainclothes nun and comes off so completely and totally innocent that we want her to hold a grownup’s hand when she crosses the street.
“Yeah, but does Claire have a covered wagon? Hmm?”
So what’s going on here? The way we see it, two things are possible. One is that Claire’s years of having her mind shaped like malevolent Play-Dough by Crazy Aunt Jordan have caused her to snap and, like Ashley, she is suffering from dissociative identity disorder.
The Claire that we’re now seeing day to day is actually an alter modeled after Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The real Claire is holed up in some all-white brain space.
Would Griffith really play one split-personality storyline after another? What do you think? He did take Young & Restless straight from one psycho plot (Cameron’s reign of terror) to another (Jordan’s).
The other option is that Claire is actually duping Victoria and everyone else. She’s not loco like Jordan, but she does like the sound of a bank account with so many zeroes to it that her balance doesn’t fit on a single page. So she’s playing nice — super nice, to the point that she regularly tests her mouth to ensure that butter wouldn’t melt in it and has adopted the wardrobe of someone who has never seen, much less read, a fashion magazine.
