Gimme a B! Gimme an R! Gimme a C! Gimme an A!: Beyond the Gates Two Scoops for the week of January 5, 2026

Let the good times roll on Beyond the Gates

Are y'all ready to go Beyond the Gates? A new year swept in with revised credits to go along with it (Joey's in! Derek's out! Ashley and Naomi got refreshed images! Kat's portrayer switched to her married name!). Then there was poor Samantha's innocent clinic idea landing on the desk of Joey thanks to Leslie, Ms. Thomas wanting her cake but sampling other cakes, and a probable reason why Ashley sucks at relationships. And while Tyrell's anti-cotillion views were edged out, Anita bumped up Mardi Gras to celebrate her last night of “freedom” and the BRCA gene mutation came for one of the Dupree sisters! Let's fill up those Two Scoops and find out what happened inside and outside the gates of Fairmont Crest!

PRODUCT PLACEMENT PLACARD:

TIDE: 1

Formation

I have yet to understand why we've gone in this direction. Samantha, based on the health care June didn't get while living on the streets, came up with the idea to create a free clinic; after her congressman dad said that the proposal would end up stuck in red tape if he ran with it, Sam went to Auntie Eva, hoping Leslie could float some of those Articulettes Benjamins her way. So far, so good.

At least until Leslie took the whole thing over and slapped her name on it. Does Leslie have to be involved in absolutely everything? I loves me some Dana/Sherry/Lulu/Anna, but until she gets her butt put in a jail cell for a while, I can't groove on her upward mobility. Soap villains tend to get away with figurative and literal murder, I know; it's just bad form in this day and age for even a soap character to be this lawless.

And Joey's not wrong – she doesn't care about providing medical help to the underprivileged; Leslie just wants the prestige and to take the credit. Sound like anyone we unfortunately know? At any rate, with some pushing from Vanessa, Joey decided okay fine – I'll fund this friggin' thing. Leslie was all ready for hugs, but Joey put up a hand and commanded, “Don't touch me!”

I know it's obscure, but all I could think of was the 30th anniversary celebration of Star Trek, where comic dork Dilbert reached for his Seven of Nine alarm clock and she said, “Do not touch me!” Same effect with Joey piloting the starship. His only caveat was – again after a big nudge by Vanessa – was that the clinic had to be named after Doug. Leslie came down to earth a little bit then, didn't she!

Strangely, the show never showed Joey and Leslie coming to a resolution. She only said she'd think about devoting a room to the dearly departed surgeon, and Joey let her walk out the door, scoffing at the Leslie Thomas Outreach Project PDF she had sent him. So which one is it? Interesting though, that Doug came up again when Marcel noted that Vanessa had no idea that Joey had turned her into a widow!

This came after Marcel advised his boss to find “more peaceful solutions” to his problems; Marcel didn't want anything Joey might order him to do to interfere with his retirement. I do think it's only a matter of time before Vanessa finds out that Joey had Doug killed. And isn't she going to feel like a fool afterwards! I will have no sympathy for her; she only sold out her kids so she could get summa dat Joey D.

Getting back to the clinic, why are we making this so complicated by bringing Joey and Leslie into it? I can only hope that, somehow, it's going to help Leslie reach her downfall; we already had Marcel asking if her bagged donut was “illegal goods” or “stolen evidence.” I would still think Marcel is working an angle to get Leslie convicted, but he seems more interested in her angles these days.

1 thot, 2 thot, red thot, blue thot

I'm all for someone owning their sexuality, but what is it lately with Leslie thinking every man wanna do her? I could understand her seeing herself as sexual kryptonite where Ted is concerned; he did fall into bed with her not that long ago, even if it took him being three sheets to the wind to find himself in bedsheets. But Joey? She actually thought her naughty bits were what Mr. Armstrong wanted in return for his financial contributions to the clinic!

She tried to play it off, saying he was too late in that she'd already started something up with someone. Which brings us to Malone the Bone. TED-dee who? Leslie again got up in Shanice's face for even perceivedly daydreaming about Ted (love that Shanice continues to hold her ground with Lulu!), but then she turned right around and threw every sexual innuendo she could think of at Marcel.

What, she's just keeping herself busy until Ted finally comes to his senses? Surely by now she knows Ted ain't gonna bite again; he wouldn't even get near her to run a clinic. I can almost understand her needing to get her affection somewhere...but what's Marcel's excuse? He's supposed to be setting traps for Leslie so she gives away her guilt in trying to kill Laura, not personally checking to see what size panties Leslie wears.

If I hadn't also heard Joey mentioning Marcel's wife, I'd have thought that Marcel had made his battle axe up just so he could get Leslie to feel sorry for him. But it all makes one wonder just how Detective Malone solves cases. At the rate he's going, he'll catch feelings for a criminal rather than actually catching a criminal. Or is he just that good at his subterfuge? Let me know what you think. Will Marcel be able to send Leslie up the river?

Black parade

Though we all know what the main focuses on the show are right now, we did touch on some other details here and there this week. For instance, we got the story of just how Mona and Nicole met: little Kat had bolted from the park she was at with her mother and ran up to Mona, deeming the woman nice enough to play with! This just happened to be the day that Mona found out her best friend had perished in a car crash.

Lucking into the cherub's mom being a shrink, Mona got some much needed guidance on a painful day – and when Mona went to thank her, it just so happened Nicole needed a house manager and hired Mona on the spot, despite Mona not having any experience. It's always nice to get an origin story, and Mona's a cool enough character that she was deserving of one.

Elsewhere, Martin had a town hall coming up, so Vernon decided to play constituent to get the up-for-re-election congressman ready, and boy, was it a hoot. Papa D cast himself as a skeptical, down home curmudgeon who took Martin to task for his pivoting and implied Martin only had his seat because of nepotism! LOL! Isn't that just what Martin would face in public? And Clifton Davis seemed to be having a blast playing the short role-within-a-role.

I really like Izaiah for Eva, yet I feel like their growing love story is getting a little convoluted. They spend a lot of time together, they bump a lot of uglies – but Eva needs him to back off. Until she falls right into bed with him again. Then he hints that she's his girlfriend, and she gets all weirded out. Izaiah promises to slow his roll at her request, then goes right back to full speed.

Hey – it's refreshingly normal that a soap is showing a new couple sending each other mixed messages and doing one thing after saying they'd do another. I just think these guys need to get more on the same page. They might have taken a step toward that, with Eva admitting her self-esteem had been damaged by growing up thinking her father didn't want her, and Izaiah conceding that he had taken his own hit from Yolanda dumping him.

They agreed to trust each other's vulnerabilities, which to me was a nice touch. I hope that's a signal toward them developing together as a couple. At least the show stopped rushing it; y'all know I've been worried about a double rebound here. It's a wonder that Eva hasn't made sure Kat knows she's moved on with Izzy Iz. Yeah, Eva still slept with Tomás, but maybe Kat would chill knowing that her BF's off Eva's radar now.

Ashley dropped an interesting tidbit. Apparently mama Jan, who went on a Love Boat cruise over the holidays, met a dude on the ship and has been seeing him since. Only thing is, Jan is being all intense and Ash is concerned that the whole romance is going to blow up in Jan's face. Gee...who does that sound like? I think we now know where Ashley got her own insecurity and extraness from when it comes to relationships!

Ash's ears got another bit of news, but boy did she have to work for it. She saw Shanice, playing it cool as hell, conversing amiably with Ted, who was clearly into her. And the I've-been-single-for-two-minutes (try ten years, honey!) wanted deets! Shanice said she only liked sipping others' tea, but she finally confided that things were getting interesting with the plastic surgeon.

Shanice didn't want to get too excited about it, though, not with Nicole needing Ted's support at the moment. Ashley couldn't get her head around that, but Shanice wasn't going to give it up. Instead, she had a confused Ash look into blood test results for two of her patients...patients who happened to be Dani and Nicole. Ah, having Ashley get to work so she could find out the condition of the Dupree sisters without Shanice violating the HIPAA confidentiality act. Brilliant!

Q.U.E.E.N.

I have to say it. And maybe it's because I didn't come from money and have historically not had enough...and all right, maybe it's because I'm a pasty white guy. But this whole cotillion thing? Not doing it for me. Not that it needs to; I just am having trouble seeing it addressed on the show because it does feel elitist to me. So when Jessica popped off with similar sentiments, I was listening.

Granted, Miss J shouldn't have come up in here with words like the one good takeaway of Anita having cancer was that she didn't have to deal with Samantha prepping for the ball! Ouch! Yeah, that was just wrong. There's bristling because the whole debutante culture may or may not feel like a pastime of the rich, and then there's becoming a reverse snob and using someone's illness to make your point!

It may be a while before I'm Team Jyrell (Tyressica?) again after that. Jessica further put her foot in it by adding to her opinion that the galas were “performative trappings of wealth” with her diss toward the Duprees. People only wanted to be around them to amplify their own statuses! I can see the point of that, but since when is Jessica this much of a hippie? I half expected her to go braless under fatigues and put sunflowers in her hair.

We got rather an amusing moment where Eva and Izaiah didn't know where to look while Jessica basically ran Tyrell down for having rich parents; Ty did get in that (the fictitious) Banneker University's undergrads were as real as the students Jessica wanted to be around at UCLA. And that was Tyrell's real worry. Jessica still wants to go to college in Cali and he doesn't.

Nicole swung by the Richardson-Smiths to start getting into all the prep Samantha was going to have to do for her own coming out ball, with Martin co-signing everything – only poor Smitty struggled to understand what the whole thing was about. But Tyrell finally stood up and yelped, “Gimme a break!” And he wasn't referring to the 1981-1987 sitcom starring Nell Carter, neither.

By the time Tyrell had called Nicole out for not knowing that regular people didn't care about cotillions because she had a house manager and lived behind the gates, Martin was on his feet demanding his son apologize to his grandmother – and I feel like this is where this particular arc went wrong. Martin just proved himself to be as much of a snob as Kat, and Smitty barely said word one in Tyrell's defense.

Samantha didn't want Tyrell expressing her opinions for her – and of course she was going to be all in on the debutante doings. Only Nicole heard Tyrell out a bit, explaining what cotillion culture meant to the Black community and how it represented that part of the population coming up after being held down for centuries. I personally loved getting that explanation. Ya know, as the pasty white guy.

But further than that, everyone except an unusually wishy-washy Smitty sided against Tyrell – and all on the premise that Tyrell had gotten his objections to this practice from Jessica. The boy may or may not have been parroting his GF, but it was like they all told him, “Go kick rocks, you wannabe Gandhi!” No wonder Jessica was worried about Tyrell becoming a stuffed shirt; she can probably see that his fam is entitled beyond entitled!

Sit yuhself down

With Anita's first chemo treatment approaching, Tracy popped by for a visit – though the pop-in rather left me scratching my head. Anita was in a fairly giddy mood, wanting to quaff tea and devour desserts with her friend. Did Tracy go for that? Nope. Anita didn't want to talk about cancer, but Tracy kept bringing it up. In fact, Tracy virtually harped on the subject, demanding to know why her fellow Articulette didn't want to be articulate about her mortality and sense of guilt in possibly passing the BRCA gene mutation to her daughters!

The hell, Tracy? I didn't blame Anita for starting to see Tracy as the enemy instead of her tumor. But how dare Anita keep acting like she was in control! Tracy retorted. La Dupree needed to feel the full weight of her predicament so she'd know how to fight it and stop personifying this “notion of forced strength!” Tracy had Miss Nita so worked up that she finally chucked her tea cup and cried that she still wanted it all!

“Skankarooni!” Now we know where Dani gets her cup-chucking coping mechanisms from, which she hilariously taught to Nicole last summer. As for Tracy, she felt satisfied that Anita wasn't repressing her emotions – she just “needed to see my Cabrini-Green girl peek through.” Okay, so Dani made a similar plea to her dad about not bottling up his feelings the week prior. And both Tracy and Dani made good points.

But the difference was, Dani gave Vernon the opportunity to express his emotions if he wanted to! She didn't use some reverse psychology BS on him to get him to blurt out whatever he happened to be feeling! I mean, for real – who made it Tracy's mission to make Anita feel something different than what she was feeling in the moment? The woman just wanted to have tea and dessert and some kind of normalcy before intentionally poisoning herself to save her life! And Tracy had to go ruin it because she needed to get a certain reaction out of her. What the actual F.

Not to mention, that seemed more like a Sharon move than a Tracy move. If I were Anita, I'd make sure Tracy was performing shows in some far off place like Kiribati for a while so she wouldn't be here crushing my groove. I'm going to guess that's why neither Tracy nor Sharon were invited to Anita's impromptu early Mardi Gras party, which I thought was a really fun bit of jubilation.

Anita knew everything was going to be different once the first drop of chemotherapy drugs made it into her body, so she wanted to spend the night before whooping it up and celebrating everything she'd been blessed with – including her family. Despite initially feeling like Vernon would try to talk her out of the wingding, he quickly went along with it and made sure everyone was supplied with the requisite beads, plus the necessary parasol or hat.

Before long DJ Vern had everyone up and dancing to a trumpety bit of Creoleness, and Anita led a makeshift parade, directing everyone to the kitchen for gumbo. This did give Anita a moment alone to breathe and realize the “weight” of her situation – a nice bit of contrast amongst all the merriment. Closest I've ever been to a Mardi Gras parade was when I was on a Greyhound bus once that happened to pass through Nawlins during one.

So I liked that the show once again took the opportunity to underscore the cultural significance of the shindig for the Black community. (My own research notes that the first organized Mardi Gras was held in 1703, and apparently it's at its height where debutants are presented at balls, so I'm guessing Samantha's going to have her moment on or around February 17!)

Spin that wheel

Of course, the big story of the week was the BRCA gene, and whether or not Dani and/or Nicole had inherited it from Anita, a now-known carrier. I feel, in my attempts to understand exactly what this genetic anomaly is, that I've incorrectly explained it in this past week's recaps. Part of that may be in the show not doing quite enough of a deep dive about it itself. So I'll attempt to clarify:

It's not having the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene or genes in and of themselves that are problematic, which had been my understanding. Either of these variants are actually tumor suppressors. It's having a mutation of this gene that causes a woman to be more susceptible to breast or ovarian cancer; in men it's prostate or pancreatic cancer. And it's catching this mutation early that can help a person stave off or at least lessen the impact of cancer that might develop.

Whether or not Nicole or Dani had the mutation that allowed cancer to potentially run wild was the driving force of the show this week, and the Dupree sisters immediately and willingly went in to get screened. If either or both of them were carriers, they'd be be able to start learning how they could keep cancer at bay – and it would mean that Chelsea and Naomi, and/or Kat and Martin would have to be tested as well.

I've seen an unusually high amount of folks on soap Facebook groups this week complaining about how the cancer/BRCA arc is taking up too much screen time, and how they don't want to watch something depressing like Anita having cancer. Dude – I think we've all gotten our buttons pushed by a soap's happenings at some point. But to wish this storyline away is to miss what a soap is about in the first place.

They ain't all triangles and evil twins and who's gonna end up in bed with who. Since All My Children creator Agnes Nixon started making it a thing in the '60s, soaps have been at their best when they've tackled social issues, and also realistic health issues. I've been reading about a lot of women who have gotten tested for the BRCA mutation because of GATES' work, and that pleases me very much. (Hell, I'm considering getting tested; true, the variant is more common in Black people, which I now know because of the show, but I've had cancer on both sides of my family, plus a spot of melanoma removed from my neck in 2018.)

Soaps can be a helluva lot of fun. But they're not meant to always be feel-good TV. They're called “daytime dramas” for a reason, and it's in the real drama where they excel. In the case of GATES, right now that's Anita's cancer and how its repercussions are trickling down through the generations of her family. Kids and grandkids and great-grandkids have all had a reaction, and not all of those reactions are the same.

Case in point: our Kat brat. Leave it to her to march to a different drummer in a time of crisis. While Naomi and Chelsea and Martin were all ready to get screened for the BRCA mutation should one of their mothers test positive for it (and the show smartly made sure to remind us more than once that Martin needed to get his blood drawn as well; it didn't matter that he was a guy), Kat naturally had other ideas.

LALALALALALA no testing for me I don't wanna know! And nothing Nicole, Martin, Ted, or even Chelsea could say would convince her to change her mind. (As for Tomás, I think you can stick a fork in that relationship; he had to process-of-elimination his way into finding out about BRCA and Kat wanted to be alone rather than let him comfort her.) It's not like knowing about the gene variant could change it!

Furthermore, Kat said, she didn't want to spend the next 30 years worrying that every unexplained ache might be cancer. Finally, she got down to the even realer reason and admitted that she just wasn't as strong as Anita and wasn't going to be able to handle the news. And you know what? I was not one of those viewers saying how selfish and immature Kat was. I got it!

I certainly knew of people during the height of the AIDS crisis who didn't want to get tested for HIV because they simply “didn't want to know.” I'm not saying Kat wasn't selfish. I'm not saying she wasn't immature. But she was scared. And there ain't a one of us who hasn't stuck our head in the sand out of fear at one time or another. Kat just did it in her big, loud, bratty way.

A lot of you were upset when she very purposely avoided Anita's party, even after finding out it was a party. She explained it herself the next day: she'd been certain that she'd be walking into an ambush of well-meaning people trying to talk her into having the screen. It's not that she didn't care about Anita or the rest of her family. It's that she was in pure self-preservation mode. That's something I can understand.

Again, there was lots of talk of what would happen depending on who turned up positive for the BRCA variant. And finally, on Friday, after a deliciously dramatic week of not knowing, we got results along with the Dupree sisters: Nicole tested negative...but Dani didn't. And then there were those who were upset that either sister was shown to be a carrier at all. Where would the drama be if both their screens were clean?

I guess Kat got her wish: she doesn't have to test. I was almost hoping she would, just for the sheer karma of it all. But Dani has the BRCA mutation, and Naomi and Chelsea will have to go in for blood work. The reminder of where we're at in this story? None of these women are going to develop cancer tomorrow. Or at all. But they do have a chance to be more vigilant...and what is it they say about knowledge being power? That's what GATES is trying to show us.

This brings us to the end of another Two Scoops, D.C. Edition. And how 'bout that – we're learnin' somethin' right now! Heaven forfend. As always, I want to know what your thoughts are about the show, so put all the letters in the comments below. Until next we meet, Scoopers, live your life beyond!

(Purchase Adam-Michael James' ”Bewitched” books on Amazon.)

(Listen to isletunes, AMJ's podcast featuring nothing but music from the artists of Prince Edward Island, Canada.)