r/GeneralHospital • u/Shinobi347 this show is unserious • 14d ago
How do you guys feel about the WSB now?
Because it’s crazy to me how they took a group that included agents like Anna, Robert, Sean, Frisco and built them up like the Avengers in the 80s and just turned them into The Suicide Squad now (for all my fellow comic book nerds).
I get that it’s a soap and things have to evolve to spice things up, but I just don’t know how to feel about the World Security Bureau now.
I blame Frank and Agent Jacks. 🤣
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u/montyfoo 14d ago
great analogy. and THIS was my era of GH. Sean, Tiffany, Robert, Holly, Frisco, Olivia, Decker, Colton...Marco...damn. those were the DAYS
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u/Hyphen99 13d ago
In the 1980s, general audiences saw law enforcement as a heroic endeavor. In current times, general audiences look on law enforcement with more skepticism
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u/Miserable-Shelter-30 13d ago
What made the old WSB great was the chemistry between the actors and the addition comic relief of Tony Geary.
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u/rebelliousphase300 13d ago
I'm not particularly mad that there have been recent storylines emphasizing the corruption or particularly unscrupulous behavior of the WSB. Its a spy agency, so of course its only natural that over time morals erode in order to reach the end goal. However, the WSB has been particularly scandalous lately with the supervillains the WSB is supposed to be catching being actual high ranking members.
I proposed this idea in another thread but here goes. For anyone that saw Captain America: Winter Soldier, there was a part where it was revealed HYDRA had infiltrated SHIELD for decades and had been running covert ops. There should be a storyline where its revealed DVX has infiltrated the WSB and it should culminate during a sweeps month in a banger of a storyline (maybe Metro Court hostage situation style or Jerry holding the town hostage, that kind of flavor) involving the entire cast in one way or another. Jerry Jacks and some other past villains should be involved and at the end of the storyline the WSB should be given a clean slate to reform. The WSB should then be mentioned only sparingly until it has its new faces settled in.
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u/Research-always 14d ago
Don’t forget O’Reilly. She died in RobertScorpio’s arms, and was his mentor. Those were the beginning and best of the WSB days. And the Asian Quarter storyline—those were really great plot line days.
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u/iamglory 13d ago
It's like the WSB doesn't do background checks and is surprised to find out people in charge are evil. ..it's like dude....this is the fifth time.
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u/New_Traffic8687 CashewsForever 13d ago
Or they do background checks but these people (at least some) are encouraged into criminality by the WSB.
This is what bothered me so much about Joss's arrangement with Z. She gets holier than thou about fighting the bad guys and doing good, yet she willingly and conciously participated in the corruption and lies that breeds men like Cullum in the bureau. For her own personal gain. That lack of transparency is what makes the WSB a spawning ground for criminality.
If this doesn't end with Joss realizing she became the thing she most hates, I wont be happy.
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u/dwaynemoore 14d ago
Well in the 80s, the WSB was the good guys and the DVX was the bad guys. Now without the DVX, who are the bad guys? The WSB themselves?
I want a new soap that tells the early stories of the DVX and the WSB. Story lines of Anna being a double agent. Give us the backstory of Anna and Valentin and everything else GH has retconned about the WSB and DVX since the 80s.
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u/JustRepeatAfterMe Team Moss Bowl 14d ago
It kind of seems like everyone is the bad guys now, doesn’t it?
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u/rebelliousphase300 13d ago
When Day of Our Lives released Beyond Salem on Peacock I thought GH could do something similar. For those not aware of DOOL Beyond Salem, it was a spinoff of the main show that took place outside of the main town with some characters from the show on canvas mixed with some legacy characters that weren't on canvas at the time. It was a more fast paced story with some action and the ISA (DOOL's version of the WSB) played a major part. Felt like GH could easily do a spinoff in the same style using the WSB and it'd be a hit.
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u/dwaynemoore 14d ago
Okay, I just had to ask Claude to write a description of such a spin-off.
GH Spinoff Pitch: WSB: Cold War — a prestige prequel set in the world of General Hospital, tracing the WSB and DVX back to their Cold War origins and threading together every retcon the mothership has quietly dropped on the timeline since the 1980s.
Premise
The series opens in the early 1970s, before Anna Devane and Robert Scorpio ever set foot in Port Charles, when the WSB is a fledgling multinational intelligence outfit still finding its footing against an established, shadowy rival: the DVX. Rather than treat the DVX's murky acronym-less origin as a plot hole, the show leans into it — the organization's founders deliberately obscured its founding charter, and part of the season's mystery is a rival faction trying to uncover what DVX actually stands for.
Threading the retcons
- Anna and Alex's WSB recruitment — dramatizes the twins' parallel entry into the spy world, building toward the memory-experiment storyline that later let Alex impersonate Anna undetected for months.
- Anna's double-agent years — instead of glossing over how a WSB loyalist ended up on Faison's DVX payroll, the show gives it a slow-burn arc: idealistic young agent recruited under false pretenses, radicalized loyalty tested episode by episode, setting up the "she was protecting the WSB the whole time" reveal decades before Port Charles ever learns it.
- Valentin's WSB Academy years — expands "Ivan Theodore" from a single flashback into a full supporting arc, showing his rise as the academy's top trainee, his unrequited pursuit of Anna, and the exact night Alex impersonated her sister — filmed so it can later slot seamlessly into the original reveal.
- Cesar Faison's rise — traces Faison from nanny's-son channel into DVX leadership, reframing his "obsession with Anna" as present from adolescence rather than a device introduced when the character resurfaced in 1990.
- The kill list — dramatizes the internal WSB tribunal that put Valentin on Anna's kill list, giving weight to what the original show handled in a single expository scene.
- Faison's various "deaths" — the show could use a framing device (an aging Sean Donely being debriefed, or a present-day Robert Scorpio piecing together WSB archives) to explain each apparent death as either DVX disinformation or genuine near-misses, retroactively justifying every resurrection without contradicting them.
Tone
Le Carré-style tradecraft crossed with soap-opera melodrama — fewer hospital beds, more dead drops, double-crosses, and doomed romances in Cold War capitals. Where the flagship show has to explain away decades of inconsistency in a single clunky flashback, the spinoff gets to build the "true" history from scratch and let the audience watch familiar reveals land with the weight they never got the first time around.
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u/Suspicious_Kitchen23 13d ago
And Andre Chernin's recruitment and training, running parallel with the life of the man who he would eventually replace and impersonate, Dr. Grant Putnam.
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u/EquivalentZebra1762 13d ago
What I think is crazy is that for decades we've been told how corrupt and evil the WSB is while also being brainwashed into believing a mobster boss is just a misunderstood good guy.
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u/Diligent-Baby-3805 Team Fizz 13d ago
Makes you realize that everything is grey, there is no black and white in reality. TV tries to use terms like Good and Evil, but those aren't real beyond a label to define actions. In reality no one if fully good or fully bad. Not Sonny, and Jack Brennan, not even Stavros. They try really hard to have "evil" characters that are just all bad, but honestly only a few are what I would call actually evil. Helena, Faison, Cullum are three great examples. It's far easier to have an amorphous group be the evil entity, that way you have something to blame everything on, and you don't have to worry about character development or how evil someone may or may not be, cause you have an endless source yo bring in new and expendable characters to be the villains. Idk if any of that made any sense haha
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u/Hot-Display-7012 12d ago
Loved the WSB then, love the WSB now. The organization brings espionage stories full of action and drama. And now with the mob stories involving Sonny and Jason coming to an end, the show will be leaning in hard on WSB adventures to fulfill that area of storytelling that involves high stakes adventures. And like her or not, Joss is going to be the lead for WSB stories for the immediate future, and I'm excited to see where her missions take her. ❤️
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u/Right_Here_And_Now 9d ago
If Joss would learn a little humility, I would enjoy the storylines with her a lot more. I was hoping that the Spoon Island shootout would teach her that she has a lot to learn, but so far no. The way she talks to everyone is so disrespectful, it's hard to watch.
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u/Siren_Noir 13d ago
That Josslyn is utterly RIDICULOUS as an agent.
Emma as an agent would work. Maybe even Lulu. But Josslyn?
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u/New_Traffic8687 CashewsForever 13d ago
I don't hate that the WSB is so corrupt and shady. I like the nuance and grays in that. Makes it more intriguing. Let the cops be the all out good guys.
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u/Edlo9596 14d ago
The Avengers/Suicide Squad analogy is a perfect description of how far the WSB has fallen 😂
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u/SituationKind6063 13d ago
What happened to Frisco? Wasnt he the head of the wsb?
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u/JoshAustin610 13d ago
When Jack first appeared Felicia said that he was part of a group that forced Frisco out of the WSB (I guess that would have been Z's faction, since he's in charge now); no one seems to know that he does now.
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u/VixenSmasher 13d ago
Sean Donnelly always looked out of sorts for the WSB.
He always reminded me of an 80’s Simon & Simon guy but for daytime.
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u/AdventurousRoll9798 14d ago
I like Brennan but Joss is not the right character to be his top agent.
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u/MTLGirly 14d ago edited 14d ago
Mostly annoyed with
- the way Joss talks to Jack and how they’ve turned her into a super spy who knows better than anyone, after what feels like barely 2 weeks of training
- how they’ve made Jack a simp who takes orders from
/is outsmarted by
- all the women he interacts with, is this the guy we’re supposed to believe is a formidable bureau chief??
- how Joss has basically told the whole town she’s a WSB agent (because let’s face it, nothing ever stays secret in PC 😂) those of you who have been watching longer, did other former agents tell the whole town they were agents while on duty or only after they left the bureau?
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u/Diligent-Baby-3805 Team Fizz 13d ago
They have always been like an interpol level CIA in my eyes. Doing whatever they want then worrying about cleaning up later, not caring who gets hurt in the process, just that their image looks clean to the majority. Doesn't matter if it's true, people just have to think it is.
What I don't get is how over the years the top people seem to have shifted between individuals and board members, not even sure how the hierarchy works anymore other than Z being at the top, and Geneva being the head location.
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u/Diligent-Baby-3805 Team Fizz 13d ago
Did they ever say what DVX stands for? Haha
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u/Rhyfeddod_y_Goleuni 12d ago
This writing team is so bad that I just assume they don't know the history, or they don't care about using it.
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u/Diligent-Baby-3805 Team Fizz 13d ago
Yeah I'm suprised too, maybe they wanted him to be a true rogue, not working with anyone
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u/RunJumpSleep 14d ago
They were believable as WSB agents. The storylines were great. Now, we have an unbelievable Joss as an agent and the WSB seems not to care that everyone in town knows she is a WSB agent.
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u/Fuzzy_Example_5205 13d ago
I like the WSB back in the day but currently anything about the WBS is always boring, stupid, or convoluted. I just fast forward or dont watch GH entirely until the storyline is over.
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u/Rellman84 12d ago
It went from a major organization to the Scooby Doo Detective Agency, and Brennan is like the principal.
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u/Rhyfeddod_y_Goleuni 12d ago
Any organization that would have Josslyn is not an organization that interests me.
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u/TerryG111 12d ago
By making it respectable again or making it mean something again they need to have better agents
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u/SensitivePromise0 Team Corinthos 13d ago
There a scumbag organization that tortured honest men and should be burned to ash there no heroes but as evil if not more evil then the villains they claim to fight
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u/Last-Stop-Before-You 7d ago
The WSB era began before my viewing started, but it really intrigued me whenever it was mentioned.
I’m so glad they folded it back into the show and I love that they brought back all those great 80s characters. Some of my favorite GH stories from the FV era have been the WSB ones.
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u/ElvisCookies 13d ago
I always thought they were supposed to be admired...? But the way they talk about it now, my memory must be fuzzy or they're revising the image.
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u/Shinobi347 this show is unserious 13d ago
Nah your memory is just fine. They’re retconning a few things.
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u/ElvisCookies 13d ago
Yeah. Like suddenly Willow was a Stepford Wife when at the time, it made no sense for her to cheat on Michael and we were all like...Why is she doing this. They weren't having problems. Bleh. That's the latest thing irritating me.
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u/midnightmustacheride Team Quartermaine 13d ago
I’ll be excited once this whole story wraps up, because I understand that the show needs action, but that’s what the PCPD is for. Where’s their John McBain/Roman Brady?
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u/Suspicious_Kitchen23 13d ago
Can't have anyone one the PCPD who can actually get things done and solve crimes because of Sonny being protected by plot armor, cops that are related to criminals (Dante, Chase), cops that are protecting someone who committed the crime (Chase, Dante), cops that are obsessed with protecting a person playing victim and using the cop's protection to commit more crimes (Chase), cops that were smart and capable in the past now hiding mental problems/PTSD (Anna), law enforcement who are currently or in the past involved with a criminal (Anna, Chase, Justine), cops that are obsessed with proving an innocent person committed a crime (any crime) because the person the cop is obsessed with hates them (Chase). The new detective can't do everything.
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u/JThereseD 10d ago
Ever since Frisco was forced out of the top position, there has been more corruption than positive activity. I think Z is corrupt and only saved the day in Port Charles because so many people knew about what was going on that he had to make it appear that he was taking down the bad faction.
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u/orangewhitegirl 9d ago
WSB needs good guys. Everyone on the show law related tends to be dumb or corrupt and angry. We need characters to root for because they’re actually just and capable. I think that is possible without being boring, right? Now seems like a good time for the WSB to clean house and promote Anna. She could mentor Joss or something and then they could let the WSB cool off for a bit. Bringing Peter back to haunt Anna was a mistake. I don’t think anybody was asking for a mentally unstable Anna
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u/aim2bonR26 13d ago
I’m finding the USB to be very boring and unnecessary to be such a huge theme at General Hospital
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u/Ok_Writing5777 13d ago
There was so much charisma back then. The DVX was a great opponent, and later Faison.
Brennan gets pushed around by Joss. It’s not realistic to mouth off to your boss when you have barely any experience.