When General Hospital revealed that Ryan Paevey was returning to the ABC soap after seven years away, the big question on fans’ lips was “Who will he be playing?”

He Couldn’t Be Nathan… Could He?

Since James’ dad, ill-fated PCPD cop Nathan West, was killed, it seemed unlikely that the actor would be reprising his former role — but not impossible. Nathan’s sister Britt Westbourne just crawled out of the grave herself and has been spending time with the also-back-from-the-dead Jason Morgan.

There are a plethora of other options — the scariest of which is that Paevey is somehow playing Nathan’s malevolent father, Faison. Ridiculous? Maybe not. if Days of Our Lives can transfer characters’ essences into other characters, why can’t General Hospital, the show that gave us the Ice Princess, Casey the Space Alien and Franco’s “murder tumor”?

There’s Big-Time Evidence That Paevey *Is* Nathan

A likelier scenario is that Paevey is playing Nathan again. Why is that so probable? Because folks at the hospital recognized him when he was wheeled in. (Read the recap.) So this wasn’t like when Sarah Brown started playing Claudia after playing Carly or when Michael Easton started playing Finn after playing Silas and McBain or when…

You get the idea. In those cases, everyone pretended that Austin wasn’t a dead ringer for Franco who was a dead ringer for Todd. Here, it’s a whole big deal that the patient looks just like Nathan. So somebody, it would appear, is staging a Faison family reunion. Could it be anyone but the villain himself?