Liz and Ric Part 1 (2002 - 2004)

If you have been watching General Hospital lately, you have noticed the show planting seeds around Ric Lansing and Elizabeth Webber, leading them back to each other. Before it goes any further, it felt like the right time to go back to where it all started. This is a high-level look at Part One of their story, covering Ric's arrival in Port Charles in late 2002 through their final goodbye in early 2004. For the full breakdown, the details, and all the commentary, listen at GeneralHospitalPodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Arrival and the Romance: Late 2002

Ric arrives as a new boarder above Kelly's Diner and raises red flags almost immediately when Liz discovers he has been keeping a detailed file on Sonny Corinthos. He brushes it off as a business proposal. Their connection builds slowly: a bar encounter, a snowball fight on the docks, Christmas together, and dancing at the speakeasy beneath Kelly's. He brings her a book on famous artwork and walks her home with his arm around her. But Liz is consistently uneasy, and not wrong to be. When she presses him about the loaded gun he carries, his answer involves a stone wall, an electric fence, and killer wolves guarding his path. He refuses to say more. Most people would have walked away. Liz does not. After Ric is shot during a botched assassination attempt on Sonny, they become lovers, though he immediately tells her it was a mistake and that he cannot afford the distraction.

Faith, Carly, and the First Unraveling: 2003

It comes out that Ric had drugged Carly and allowed her to believe they had willingly slept together so he could use it as blackmail. Carly tells Sonny that he raped her. Liz refuses to believe it, lies to Jason about Ric's whereabouts, and confronts Carly directly. She remains unconvinced. The full picture emerges when Ric kidnaps Courtney and forces a confrontation with Sonny at their mother Adela's childhood house on Martha's Vineyard, revealing they are half-brothers. His entire scheme, every bit of it, was rooted in a secret familial obsession he had been carrying for years.

Liz slaps him, accuses him of using her, and walks out. Their separation does not hold. Faith breaks into Liz's studio and releases a venomous snake. Liz lands in the hospital, and in the middle of that conversation, accidentally reveals she is pregnant with Ric's child. He declares his vendetta over on the spot. She changes her mind about the abortion, tells Emily she cannot stop loving him, and accepts his proposal. They elope before a justice of the peace. He surprises her with three rings, including a diamond. Faith paces his empty apartment, throwing things. The honeymoon period is warm and very brief. Before it ends, Faith pushes Liz down a flight of stairs at Sonny's, and Liz miscarries. Ric knows Faith is responsible, but keeps it from Liz because her anger toward Sonny's world is too useful to correct.

The Panic Room

The house Ric buys them has a secret panic room: soundproof, equipped with surveillance monitors covering multiple rooms. At night, when Liz is asleep, he goes there and vows to replace the baby they lost with Sonny and Carly's baby. He kidnaps Carly and holds her in the room beneath their home, intending to present the newborn to Liz as the miracle they have been waiting for.

Carly watches everything that happens upstairs on the surveillance monitors. She pries metal from her mattress frame to work on her shackles, reaches Sonny on his cell before Ric cuts the call, and tries to signal Jason when he breaks in to plant surveillance equipment. Liz defends Ric to everyone who comes asking. She is his most effective shield, and she has no idea. Lorenzo Alcazar inserts himself into the situation, using Carly's captivity as leverage and warning Ric that if Liz becomes too suspicious, Lorenzo will eliminate her. Faith, having lost Ric to the marriage, uses a copy of his keys to poison a pitcher of lemonade. Carly watches it happen on the monitors and tries to warn Ric. He refuses to open the panic room. Liz drinks the lemonade and collapses.

Ric then pays off a doctor to tell Liz she can never have children, so she will stop trying to conceive and accept Carly's baby as the miracle when it comes. Liz sees her regular doctor, Dr. Meadows, who tells her the other doctor was simply wrong. What Carly has pieced together from the monitors: Ric has been crushing birth control pills into Liz's food and drink the entire time.

The Discovery

Liz comes home early, finds a button on the bookshelf panel, and pushes it. The door swings open. Carly is standing in the doorway, chained and screaming. Liz picks up the phone to call 911 and collapses from vertigo before she can complete the call. The birth control pills caused it. She flatlines at the hospital. Tony Jones brings her back. Alone with her, Ric picks up a pillow, holds it over her face, and then puts it back down and weeps. The fact that he considered it at all is the only thing that matters. When she wakes up with no memory of seeing Carly, Ric tells her she had a nightmare. He then goes back to the house, unchains Carly, and lets her call Sonny. His love for Liz, the version of it that stopped him from smothering her, wins out. Lorenzo tells Liz the truth. She calls the police.

The Accounting, the Chapel, and What Comes After

In his hospital room, Ric admits everything: the hired doctor, the crushed birth control pills, the embolism. Liz slaps him, tells him he lost her, and walks out. Jason locks Ric inside the panic room. Liz returns, opens it, tells him he can rot in there, closes the door, and walks out. He watches her leave on the monitor he built to keep track of her. Carly delivers the full accounting to Liz's face: that Ric watched Faith poison the lemonade and chose not to open the door because his plan mattered more than Liz's life. Then she throws Liz out of the penthouse.

Ric is shot during the Alcazar fallout and hovers near death. Liz goes to the hospital chapel and prays for him, then admits quietly that she still loves him in spite of everything. Ric is there. He speaks. She rushes into his arms, kisses him, then pulls back and slaps him hard enough to knock him off his feet. She tells him he has not changed, and she does not want him back. Later she challenges him about representing Stefan Cassadine and asks whether he can try helping people for a change. He removes himself from the case, walks to Scott Baldwin's office, and asks for a job as assistant district attorney. Scott calls him a sleaze, then hires him.

On Halloween night, Liz and Zander Smith, both hurting, end up together. Liz's reasoning: she wants to do something that would make going back to Ric truly impossible. A few weeks later, she takes a pregnancy test. It is positive, and the baby is Zander's. She decides to let Ric believe it is his. They remarry in a church. Immediately after, Ric produces a note he wrote himself stating he is not the baby's father. He needed her to tell him the truth. She does. He accepts it, says he will love the baby as his own, and insists they tell Zander. When they find him, Ric immediately offers money to have him sign away his parental rights, but Zander says no sale. He eventually escalates, demanding Ric use his ADA position to frame Nikolas for a murder he did not commit, or he will not sign. Ric strings him along, then bluffs him entirely with a fabricated murder file on a man named Cody McCall. Zander signs.

The Hotel Fire and the End

A hotel fire throws Port Charles into chaos. A letter arrives at the house with Zander's name on the return address: if she is reading this, he is probably dead, and Ric killed him. The body recovered from the hotel turns out to be a man named Wally, not Zander. The marriage's final collapse comes from a hallway. Ric is arguing with Sonny and, in the heat of it, says he has been preparing for a baby that is not even his and that he will be a better man than Sonny. Liz is in the corridor and hears every word. She walks in, asks if that is the reason he is with her, and when he admits it, she tells him she is done.

The actual ending is quieter than you would expect. At Kelly's, Ric is late because he was building a case against Sonny. Liz points out that the vendetta never ended. He tells her he loves her. She tells him she loves him too. And then Ric finally says the thing neither of them has been able to say: the problem with Sonny will always be there between them. He cannot remove it. It is structural, not circumstantial, built into who he is at a level love has never been able to reach. He tells her he is letting her go. She kisses him goodbye and walks out the door.

So Where Does That Leave Us

In under two years, Liz was pushed down a flight of stairs and miscarried, bitten by a snake, drugged with birth control pills until she had an embolism, poisoned, run over by a car, and temporarily lost her sight. Her husband held a pillow over her face and set it back down. The honest read on their dynamic is what Liz says herself more than once: she did not love who Ric was. She loved who she believed he could become. And when he finally understood that loving her and being who he is could not coexist, he let her go. That is the most self-aware thing he has ever done. According to Fandom, they do not revisit any of this until 2014. There is a reason for that.

Tune in Thursday for Part Two. In the meantime, catch our weekly recaps every Monday at GeneralHospitalPodcast.com.