Roger Howarth has been a soap opera mainstay for more than 30 years, with 11 of those years spent on General Hospital playing three different characters. The third character, Austin Gatlin-Holt now seems to have no purpose. Not only is he dead, but it looks like nobody in Port Charles will even care.
What Was The Purpose Of Killing Franco Baldwin?
When Howarth first arrived on the Port Charles scene in 2012, it was to play Todd Manning, the character he created in 1992 on One Life to Live. OLTL had just been canceled and several actors and characters made the move to GH. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before those characters had to be written out when Prospect Park, a company producing online versions of OLTL and All My Children, claimed the rights to them.
A few months later, Howarth was back on GH as Franco Baldwin, a serial-killing artist first played by James Franco. Howarth’s version of Franco needed to be redeemed so the show explained away his murderous ways with a brain tumor that caused him to commit all those heinous acts.
For many fans, it worked and Franco became beloved, especially after entering into a popular pairing with Rebecca Herbst’s Elizabeth Webber. We understand Franco and Liz were not for everyone, but they did have a following and a good portion of the audience mourned the end of Franco and ‘Friz’ when he was shot and killed out of nowhere in 2021.
Shot and killed out of nowhere seems to now be a trend for Howarth GH roles because the same thing happened to Austin after 2.5 years of wasting an actor and a character.
Austin Could Have Been So Much More
We suppose we could be grateful that GH gave us two more years with the talented Emmy-winning Howarth, but those two years were pretty much lackluster because a character with so much potential never really amounted to much. Austin was introduced as the son of Jimmy Lee Holt, meaning he was a long-lost Quartermaine, but about six months or so into his run, the writers seemed to forget he was a Q.
In fact, by the fall of 2023, they had forgotten everything written for Austin at the start. When Chase(Josh Swickard) recently questioned him about Ava’s kidnapping, he acted like he was someone he knew in passing, not his buddy who tipped him off to the fact that Chase’s then-wife Willow was cheating on him with Michael.
He was also Maxie’s love interest for a while and we think they slept together, but they never showed us a love scene, nor did they ever share another scene after their lackluster breakup that didn’t cause either one of them a negative emotion. By the time GH seemed to notice his chemistry with Kelly Thiebaud’s Britt, she was already on her way out and everyone had forgotten Austin was even a Quartermaine.
His ‘romance’ could have amounted to something and we thought we’d finally know the character when he was teased as Cyrus’s son for about a day, but alas, none of it went anywhere and now Austin is gone. He is so gone that he barely has a friend in town, so it could be days until anyone even thinks to pay him a visit and find his body.
What Was It All For?
Yes, Howarth fans got an extra 11 years with the actor on ABC daytime after OLTL left the airwaves, but in the end, his final character seemed to have no point despite so much potential. Will we see the actor on another soap one day? Maybe so, but with only three other daytime dramas left, the choices are limited.
Austin Gatlin-Holt could have been a contender if he had a cohesive backstory and a plot that made sense, but instead, he now lies dead on the floor of his living room and it looks like nobody in PC will even care.
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