|
 Whereas
we ignored until then his existence, Paul Whitney appears, in summer
1986, as a partner and a faithful friend of police detective Cruz
Castillo's. Adopting a modern look and an attitude closer to street
gangsters than to a police detective, Paul turns out to be an effective
and respected policeman.
This
is while
helping Dr. Rawlings to find patients escaped from his asylum that he
meets one of them, Alice Jackson. Very fast, he becomes fond of the
young woman, shy and secret, and is one of the first ones to succeed in
making her get out of her dumbness. Once Alice released from the asylum,
Paul can finally ask her to go out with him to the restaurant or to
spend more time with her without constraints. But the memories of the
aggression which Alice underwent from a policeman several years ago make
complicated the relation between Alice and Paul : at every vision of
Paul's
police badge, Alice panics and dives back into her dumbness.
We
can find this relation a little surprising, not to say more : Paul is
about ten years more than Alice (who is only 18 years old), and Alice
suffers from handicaps which make her look more like a lost girl who
naively discovers the world than to a woman capable of decisions and
sexually mature. This feeling is illustrated in particular when Paul
refuses to see Alice playing the fashion models for her friend Nick
Hartley. To see her becoming emancipated and gaining self-assurance
seems to pall him.
At
the arrival in Santa Barbara of Brian Bradford, Paul is as forgotten by
Alice, outshined by her old friend and secret lover. He then stops
dating her, not appearing on screen any more than for some police
interventions. Paul disappears without more explanation after the
inauguration of the bar Johnny's
Place, at the very beginning of 1987. Not enough defined, his character
had stayed too long in the background so that he can hope to survive
more in the middle of the heroes of the show...
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