When Jack Abbott found Nikki Newman drunk in a Genoa City Athletic Club hotel room, he knew he had to do something drastic to get her to see she needed more help than the occasional A.A. meeting could give her. What he didn't know was what he would end up doing to scare his troubled ex-wife sober.
That meeting between Jack and Nikki produced an emotional two-person episode that had fans drawn in from beginning to end. Jack ended up showing Nikki what it felt like to be powerless in the face of a loved one's self-destruction. Jack, who had his own history of addiction to pills, drank with Nikki then called his drug dealer. To prove his point, he took opioids in a last-ditch effort to get her to see the light.
Peter Bergman didn't even know what was coming until a crew member mentioned it to him a week before the powerful episode was filmed.
"I found out about this episode, strangely enough, when one of the audio guys said to me, 'Hey, I heard about your show next week with Melody?'" Bergman told Michael Fairman TV. "I go. 'What show is that?' And the sound guy said to me, 'They were talking in the booth yesterday. It's like an episode with only the two of you in it.' I thought he had to have heard that wrong. We've never, ever done that. Turns out, he was right."
Although Jack's move was risky and put his life on the line, Bergman understood why he did it.
"Jack kept appealing to the goodness in her," he said. "It was covered by all of this addiction and alcohol. And the best way he could find her kindness, her goodness, was by putting himself in jeopardy and watching her come alive."
Jack ended up passing out, leading Nikki to call the paramedics and agree to go to rehab, but that doesn't mean there won't be consequences to Jack's actions -- especially from his wife, Diane. She never wanted him to be Nikki's sponsor, to begin with.
"I'm really fascinated to see how Jack and Diane survive this," Bergman admitted. "I hope we have established enough of a real relationship between these two that we can dig deep. I love those types of scenes, and that's what I look forward to. If I can do those digging-deep scenes with Susan Walters, I'd be thrilled."
Jack also has to make sure this one move doesn't send him on a downward spiral the way Jordan plying Nikki with intravenous vodka did.
"I think Jack has convinced himself this is a one-off," Bergman said. "This happened once, and it went way too far, and it's not going to happen again. And, you know how dangerous that talk is."
Were you stunned by the special two-person episode? Was Jack right to pull his pill stunt? We want to hear from you -- so drop your comments in the Comments section below, tweet about it on Twitter, share it on Facebook, or chat about it on our Message Boards.
