General Hospital (GH) spoilers tease that the ABC soap recently made the shocking decision to kill off Franco Baldwin (Roger Howarth), but Roger Howarth will make a comeback following a hiatus from the show.
However, Franco’s death feels awfully final at this point. It almost seemed like GH writers went out of their way to confirm Franco was “dead-dead” for viewers.
Perhaps that was the whole point of Cameron Webber (William Lipton) not buying that Franco was alive and taking that brutal trip to the morgue. It was heartbreaking to see Cam’s face as he accepted Franco’s demise. Cameron couldn’t deny the pale proof right in front of him.
Now General Hospital fans have seen Franco’s corpse repeatedly, so they’re really driving home this point that Franco’s dead and gone. Maybe it’s safe to assume that when Howarth returns to General Hospital, it won’t be as Franco.
With that in mind, we should go ahead and start thinking about who Howarth will play when he comes back to Port Charles. If Howarth isn’t Franco and will remain on the show, then he has to be portraying someone new.
On social media, GH fans are already tossing around suggestions for who Howarth should play moving forward. Some viewers have suggested making Howarth a Drew Cain (last played by Billy Miller) recast since he did a great job of playing Drew during the memory-mapping storyline.
However, that’d be a little weird under the circumstances. GH could pretend Howarth didn’t look like Franco and pretend he had the face Drew’s supposed to have, but it’d be hard to go for that.
General Hospital might be better off making Howarth a recast for a character further in the past – or even some long-lost member of a popular GH family that’s just now being discovered. Could you buy Howarth as a long-lost Quartermaine? What about a Cassadine?
Of course, it’s also possible Howarth could portray someone unrelated to anybody else on canvas, but most new characters tend to get a relative or two eventually. It’d be something for the writers to play around with as they try to establish some new connections.
Howarth could also play a twin that fans never knew about – or at least a Franco lookalike that shocks Elizabeth Baldwin (Rebecca Herbst).
Some viewers would even like to see Howarth play Todd Manning, the One Life to Live character he originally came on the show as in 2012.
The possibilities are endless now that GH is seemingly steering away from Franco and setting up Howarth’s return as someone else.
Who do you think Roger Howarth should play when he returns to the show? We’ll fill you in as other GH news and updates come in. General Hospital spoilers say some fantastic stuff’s brewing no matter what, so keep watching.
CDL will have lots of other General Hospital spoilers, updates and news to check out, so stick with us.
