The newest “General Hospital” super couple, Spencer Cassadine (Nicholas Chavez) and Trina Robinson (Tabyana Ali), have been touted as the next Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary) and Laura Collins (Genie Francis). Much like their legendary predecessors, Spencer and Trina helped save the world from a diabolical Cassadine scheme. Ali and Chavez spoke to People about the comparison between the couples, and she stated, “It’s hard to wrap my head around that. Anywhere you go, you say ‘General Hospital’ and people say ‘Luke and Laura.’ Generations of people still think and talk about Luke and Laura.” Since Laura is Spencer’s grandmother, Chavez felt that much of what made Luke and Laura popular is also in Trina and Spencer’s DNA, and is grateful that the show has been overt about the correlation between the couples. “We love it, and we think that it’s super smart. It’s the greatest compliment we could ever get,” he remarked.
Ali further explained, “Every time Spencer and Trina come together, it’s magnetic and powerful. You feel the tension and it’s thick.” While on the surface, Spencer and Trina are nearly as popular as the iconic pairing, and both couples have helped to save the world, but that’s about where the similarities end. Luke and Laura have decades of storylines under their belts, while this newest incarnation has only met in 2021, and didn’t actually kiss until March 2023.
Let’s compare and contrast the couples and see how Spencer and Trina measure up against Luke and Laura.
Spencer and Trina haven’t killed anyone yet
Lingering over Luke and Laura’s heads for several years was their conflicted history. Thinking he was going to die at the hands of the mafia, Luke raped Laura. The show rationalized it as a “seduction,” but Francis has since spoken out about the incident at the 2023 Television Critics Association winter tour, saying, “I think that the story was inappropriate, I don’t condone it, and it’s been a burden that I’ve had to carry to try to justify that story, and so I’m not doing that anymore.” The couple would get past the appalling occurrence, and their subsequent wedding had a record-breaking 30 million viewers.
The worst that’s happened between Spencer and Trina is that he lied about who he was when they first met, and then later pretended he believed she was guilty of a crime she’d been accused of while secretly working to prove her innocence. Luke and Laura thwarted megalomaniac Mikkos Cassadine’s (John Colicos) plot to blackmail the world with a machine that could control the weather. Similarly, Spencer and Trina aided Laura and several others in stopping Mikkos’ brother, Victor Cassadine (Charles Shaughnessy), from decimating the world’s population with a deadly virus.
A con-artist, Luke quickly became an anti-hero, while Spencer had a privileged and entitled upbringing. Luke also killed his own parents after suffering abuse from his father. Laura killed a couple of people in her youth, while Trina has thus far been above reproach.
Spencer and Trina are their own thing
Luke and Laura went on the run for several years while being pursued by the minions of mobster Frank Smith (then Mitchell Ryan). Both characters have also had many love interests over the years, while so far Trina has dated the late police officer Rory Cabrera (Michael Blake Kruse), and Spencer dated the evil Esme Prince (Avery Pohl). While Trina and Spencer wrestled with the idea of putting Esme behind bars with evidence of her crimes posthumously left to him by Victor, they agreed to destroy it. However, Spencer lied once again, and instead is contemplating moving forward with it in an attempt to get rid of Esme. This secret will certainly damage Spencer and Trina’s relationship. On the other hand, Luke owned up to his misdeeds and never really kept anything from Laura.
Times were also different back in 1981, as Luke and Laura captured the audience’s hearts and imaginations. With only a handful of television channels, the odds of people tuning in to “General Hospital” were high. In today’s saturated market of streaming services, the days of having tens of millions of viewers watching one given episode of a show are long gone. That makes it much harder for Spencer and Trina’s story to sweep wider audiences off their feet, as it can get lost in the sea of competition.
“General Hospital” was hoping lightning would strike twice with Spencer and Trina, but this couple are their own unique kind of lightning.
